August 18, 2026 — Daily Kos isn’t just a media publisher, it’s a 20-year-old community where readers write, organize, and show up every single day. When it was time to migrate 1.5 million posts, 2.7 million users, and 88 million comments off a custom-built CMS, the technical challenge was only half the problem. The real risk was losing the trust of the people who fund 90% of the platform. In this session, the CTO of Daily Kos, and the staff engineer walk through what it took to migrate a community-first platform: The scale: 1.5M posts, 2.7M users, 88M comments, and two decades of technical debt The decisions that mattered: architecture choices made around user psychology, not just infrastructure What we learned and what we’d do differently How we ran a fully public beta with 500+ vocal community members, and what we learned

February 2, 2019 — The wp_options database table is the center of all WordPress websites. It stores critical site data and is used on nearly every page in WordPress. However, it’s also very easy for the wp_options table to slow your site to a grinding halt. This talk will review best practices for keeping your wp_options table in check to keep your site performant.

July 12, 2018 — The wp_options database table is the center of all WordPress websites. It stores critical site data and is used on nearly every page in WordPress. However, it’s also very easy for the wp_options table to slow your site to a grinding halt. This talk will review best practices for keeping your wp_options table in check to keep your site performant.

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