January 10, 2019 — Code review: You know you should be doing it. Or maybe you don’t. The benefits of code review are enormous, and if you’re contributing to WordPress or another open source project, it’s required. What should contributors expect during code review? How do we balance the code review workflow without slowing good ideas down, and manage these reviews around deadlines and launch dates? What can we as contributors do during review to ensure new contributors are comfortable and given the right resources to learn and onboard to our codebase?

In this talk we’ll show you how we answered these questions at Boston University and went from years of committing directly to master to all designers and developers opening pull requests in a matter of months. Whether you lead, contribute, or both, you’ll leave with inspiration to guide your own process and goals for code review and tools to give helpful and empathetic feedback to the people around you.

August 14, 2016 — You don’t know it yet, but documentation is actually AMAZING. Channel your inner educator and get inspired! We’ll talk about the different ways developers and end users try to solve problems, where they look to find information, and how you can get ahead of those needs by putting your recommendations in those places. Documentation is an amazing and complex problem that doesn’t end at a wiki full of pages—so let’s talk about how we can use our UI, different ways of phrasing and explaining, and the features we have available in WordPress to be the best teachers we can be.

Presentation Slides »

August 14, 2016 — WordPress in Higher Education panel discussion.