August 18, 2026 — LLMs are here and they’ve already disrupted software development at every level. Revolutions are messy, fraught with challenges, risks and disruption as the status quo evolves to make room for new ideas. Large language models can dramatically improve productivity, but they also confidently output plausible garbage. This session is about getting the speed without surrendering responsibility. I will be live demoing Claude Code in a terminal by interrogating a real WordPress plugin codebase and working backwards into the workflow that helps make it trustworthy: having Claude itself maintain a CLAUDE.md “project contract”, requiring a plan for major feature development and using a verification loop where changes aren’t pushed unless validation checks pass. We’ll dig into common points of failure that matter in real projects—hallucinated assumptions, approval fatigue, and the licensing/attribution questions raised when AI tools ingest open source—and how to work in a way that treats the model as untrusted by default.

November 13, 2019 — Everyone in the WordPress community is talking about the new editing experience in WordPress. Wherever you fall in defense of or against the new editor, it changes how we interact with WordPress from a content editing and a development perspective.

In this talk, Chris Reynolds explores some of the ways Gutenberg changes how we build things as well as the types of things we can build to enhance and improve the WordPress editing experience.

October 5, 2016 — WordPress is growing at an accelerating pace. With this growth, the ubiquity of WordPress is gaining the attention of enterprise-level companies who want an easy and maintainable way to manage their content. That’s great for developers and agencies, right? But what does that mean when you’re actually working for a client named Microsoft or Uber or the United States Government(!)? How do the rules change and how can you shift your brain from “I build WordPress sites for small businesses and non-profits and myself” to “I build enterprise-level WordPress-powered sites for Fortune 500 companies”? This talk will cover specific tools and best practices used by the development teams at WebDevStudios that have been applied to projects for clients like Microsoft, the National Park Service, Campbell’s Soup, the Discovery Channel and more, as well as some tips for dealing with the inevitable imposter syndrome associated with working for brands you use in your home or with team members you know from books you’ve read or podcasts you listen to.

Presentation Slides »

January 16, 2015 — We like to focus on the things we know really well, and things we don’t deal with as often can be seen as “hard”. Search is one of those things that gets written off a lot, few devs I know will deal with it (voluntarily), and almost everyone will tell you “WordPress search sucks.” In this presentation you will learn that not only do you know more about how search works than you thought you did, but maybe give you a better understanding of how WordPress works as a whole, as well as showing you some cool tricks that you can do with WordPress search.

Presentation Slides »

November 19, 2011