June 2, 2019 — All too often, we let our eyes get too big for our stomachs — technologically. We over buy, over plan, over work, and then things fall apart. In this talk, you’ll understand the advantages to starting small, growing slowly, and how this can better prime you for success.

December 12, 2017 — In this talk, we’ll look at how we can use the Arduino software to create our own wifi-connected devices (often for under $10!) that leverage the WordPress REST API to perform tasks from updating live weather readings on a WordPress site, to providing real-world displays of how many WooCommerce orders are waiting to be shipped out.

June 29, 2017 — By this point, we’ve likely all heard of the “Internet of Things” — everything from thermostats to toasters can now be online for greater connectivity and access from our smartphones. In this talk, we’ll look at how we can build and program our own wifi-connected devices that leverage the WordPress REST API to do anything from updating live weather readings on our WordPress sites, to providing real-world indicators of the number of pending orders in WooCommerce.

Presentation Slides »

April 20, 2016 — Security is hard. Over the last few months there have been a number of high-profile plugin security vulnerabilities, but there is surprisingly little familiarity in the developer community when it comes to properly evaluating and remedying issues when they are discovered.

In this talk, we’ll be explaining in basic terms how several types of vulnerabilities work (including Cross-Site Scripting (XSS), SQL Injection (SQLI), Cross-Site Request Forgeries (CSRF), and Clickjacking, see what can be done to defend against them, and what to do when you have a vulnerability reported to you.

Please Note: This is a development-oriented talk, but will not get too deep into code.

Presentation Slides »

August 3, 2015 — In this session we discuss some of the history of open source software, look at how subdivisions take hold, how we can all be better about working toward the common interests of all, and the all-important nature of treating one another with kindness and not leaping to conclusions.

March 10, 2015 — Look at the free Jetpack plugin for WordPress and see how best to leverage it in various projects. Look at some of the additional functionality Jetpack makes available and how it can help you grow and retain your audience, improve page load times, and simplify site administration — while also making it more secure and reliable.

August 2, 2014 — The Jetpack team migrated their primary development from the WordPress.org plugins repository to GitHub. This talk looks at why they made the change and how it’s affected their workflow.

August 15, 2013 — This presentation covers some of the more common and problematic errors made by commercial theme developers, and how to fix them. It analyzes what constitutes best practices in each instance, and the problems brought about by doing things the lazy way. Some of the topics included in this talk are …

* Why shouldn’t I just use Google Hosted Libraries like jQuery? CDNs are awesome and save on bandwidth!
* Why shouldn’t I just hardcode links to my theme’s CSS and JS files?
* Stylesheet Directory and Template Directory? Those are the same thing, right?
* Trust my users? They bought my theme! Why wouldn’t I trust them?

Presentation Slides »

August 15, 2012