August 11, 2024 — There are many ways to create Gutenberg blocks. Advanced Custom Fields is widely used plugin to create custom blocks and it offers an easy learning curve for developers used to work with ACF. On the other hand WordPress offers a native approach for developing custom blocks without any plugins. There’s lot of benefits of native approach and learning how to write blocks with React and other native tools is a valuable skill in any developers toolbox. This talk will cover reasons why everyone should create native blocks instead of using third party plugins.

June 14, 2019 — Data centers in the U.S. use more than 90 billion kilowatt-hours of electricity a year. That requires roughly 34 giant coal-powered plants. What can a single developer do to make more energy efficient code? I will go through a series of not-so-serious experiments showing how various implementations made with Raspberry PI web server and power meter affect power consumption. How much energy does enabling WordPress caching save? What about optimizing queries? I will tell.

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June 29, 2017 — Evermade was founded in 2011 by four guys. Today we are group of 20 people – half of whom are developers. In the beginning we did everything from photography to USB-drivers. In 2012 we agreed that WordPress is basically useless and we decided to focus on ExpressionEngine. After a year – and some pain – we changed our minds and decided to focus on WordPress.

We lost a few developers during this hassle but but soon after our shift of focus to WordPress we started to grow. With new developers coming in we had to abandon our current way of working and really rethink how should we work together as a team.

In my presentation, I will talk about the pain of growing and the challenges we faced when doing so.

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