April 9, 2024 — The web has brought a wide range of free services and capabilities to users such as email, social media, online shopping, streaming video, and many others. These services rely on an economic model that depends on tracking users and identifying audiences for targeted advertising.

Today, increasing concerns about user privacy, data breaches, and the misuse of personal information have led to a growing demand for enhanced privacy protections. Such demands have prompted significant changes in how the web operates, including the imminent deprecation of Third-Party Cookies (3PC).

With major web browsers phasing out support for third-party cookies, businesses, developers, and marketers face the need to reimagine their strategies. In this talk, I will delve into the impact of the impending 3PC deprecation for the and explore practical strategies for preparing and adapting to this transformative shift.

The talk will consist of two parts. The first part will have four brief sections. (1) We will begin with a brief overview of Cookies as a State Management mechanism, understanding the properties of cookies which makes them vulnerable to misuse, and understanding what exactly will change when 3P Cookies are deprecated; (2) we will then discuss how existing and new Web Platform capabilities can be used to refactor implementation that rely on 3P cookies today; (3) next we will review the tools and resources available to help developers navigate the transition to a web platform without 3P cookies; (4) we will give the audience a scripted approach they can follow to prepare and get ready for the deprecation of 3P cookies.

The second part of the talk will explore the importance of embracing privacy-centric technologies which offer a privacy-first approach to ad targeting and measurement, allowing businesses to reach their target audiences without sacrificing user privacy.

The countdown to the 3PC deprecation has already begun, and it is essential to be proactive in our approach. This talk seeks to equip attendees with the knowledge and tools needed to be at the forefront of embracing change and safeguarding user privacy while ensuring business continuity.

September 10, 2023 — The Internet has evolved leaps and bounds since its early inception in the research and academic domain, and on top of it a huge and vibrant open web ecosystem flourished. In just 30 years the web ecosystem has reached levels that were not imagined at the time of its inception. WordPress emerged as part of this evolution with an initial focus on the blogosphere, and it has itself evolved considerably and played a seminal role in the open web across time for almost 20 years. The web of today is vastly different from the past, and we are now in the midst of a web economic “boom” fueled by modern creators and formats fulfilling the needs and desires of new generations of content consumers. In this talk we will distill a brief history of the Internet, the Web, and the Creator Economy, and why and how WordPress is very well positioned to continue its evolution journey and also play a seminal role in the success of modern content creators.

October 17, 2019 — Succeeding as a WordPress publisher entails many elements, including timely and engaging content, knowing your audience, outstanding SEO, listening to your users, amplifying your content, and others. In this talk, we cover the notion of Progressive WordPress which Google has been heavily involved in for the past 3 years. That is, bringing modern open web solutions to WordPress.

Presentation Slides »

July 8, 2018 — In this talk we will provide context of the evolution of the web as related to the support of progressive technologies by the platform and describe how such progressive technologies can be integrated with WordPress themes. We will also showcase a beautiful and highly- performant progressive WordPress theme, demonstrating important aspects of the team such as: (1) Gutenberg integration; (2) Adoption of coding and performance best practices; (3) theme scoring on the Tide “scale”; (4) AMP compatibility; and others.