June 5, 2020 — This lightning talk was on identifying opportunities to return to advertising aimed at audiences based on context, that don’t require 3rd party data, tracking users across the web, or sharing first party data out to others.

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January 19, 2019 — What does the future hold for WordPress, as a platform and as a community?

Will we see continued growth, from ~24% of the web to 50%? Will the REST API enable a whole new generation of powerful interfaces to content stored and managed by WordPress? Will Skynet become self-aware as a side effect of the introduction of Emoji? Will the customizer lead to a totalitarian state? Will we all join hands and sing “I’d like to teach the world to sing, in perfect harmony”?

Through the lens of various 19th, 20th, and 21st century utopias and dystopias, we’ll look at what the future has in store for WordPress, and what you can do to make it happen (or stop it).

October 14, 2018 — Content Strategists like Karen McGrane make a distinction between CMS implementations that store content in large, unstructured “blobs” and those which store finely grained, structured “chunks.” WordPress is often accused of being on #teamblob but with appropriate use of custom post types, post meta, taxonomies, and term meta, can be an excellent example of #teamchunk.

Now enter project Gutenberg, with inline block creation, block templates, block types, shared blocks and dynamic blocks.

Is this a return to #teamblob? If you create a block for, as an example, staff profiles, will you end up with hardcoded staff phone numbers in different blocks on different pages? Will you have to rewrite the staff directory to be a dynamic block? What’s all this about storing the content as html comments?

This talk will not be a deep dive into the code of Gutenberg, but will explain how Gutenberg’s approach fits into the debate about structured content versus unstructured content, and how you can best leverage the new WordPress editor without going all blobby.

February 14, 2018 — In this talk I’ll cover what personalization and content targeting are and multiple ways of achieving both using WordPress as the underlying CMS. We’ll also cover some of the dangers of personalization projects and ways they can go wrong.

August 13, 2017 — BUT WHY? USE CASES FOR THE REST API

December 23, 2016 — The WordPress community is wonderful, but working with and in it can be a very frustrating experience. You can come to feel that no good deed goes unpunished, that no one listens to your opinions, or that all the hard work you’ve done just gets ignored. This is true whether you’re a multi-year core contributor, a business owner, or just a passionate user trying to make your site do things which feel like they ought to be simple, but turn out to be unexpectedly complex or confusing.

Often in such situations we fall into bad patterns of miscommunication and misunderstanding, faulting others in the community for ignorance, rudeness, or outright hostility.

The Four Agreements, a self-help book published to great acclaim nearly 20 years ago, actually offers a surprisingly helpful and accurate set of tools for helping you navigate your way through these waters. Matt Mullenweg himself recently called it “an excellent book” and said he had “enjoyed it.”

We’ll review the four agreements:

1. Be Impeccable With Your Word.
2. Don’t Take Anything Personally.
3. Don’t Make Assumptions.
4. Always Do Your Best.

We’ll also cover how to operationalize these in the context of working with an open source community.

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October 7, 2016 — Agencies and freelancers exist in order to serve clients: without clients, there’d be no work. Despite – or maybe because of- this fact, we often find those same clients frustrating.
In this talk I’ll share 10 lessons learned for managing clients: during the new business phase, while projects are ongoing, and as projects complete.
Managed properly, client relationships can be tremendously rewarding and fulfilling, even if they do occasionally make you want to bang your head against a wall.

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December 20, 2015 — The Enterprise market still sees (in large part) WordPress as a “blogging platform” or only sees WP as an option for “simple” use cases.
This talk focuses on how we can better address that market and show the true power of WordPress’ focus on simplicity (of experience) even in contexts where complexity (of implementation) is required.

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November 2, 2015 — Getting outside the WordPress bubble – by participating meaningfully in other conferences, conversations, and communities – helps bring new ideas into our community and also helps us bring WordPress into new contexts.
I cover what some of those other communities are (in my experience) and also some examples of what we can learn from them.

September 30, 2015 — “Content precedes design. Design in the absence of content is not design, it’s decoration.” – Jeffrey Zeldman We’ve all heard that content is king, yet when it comes to designing web experiences we’re still stuck with lorem ipsum and placeholder images, as though the real content didn’t matter. We’re still designing web experiences from the top down, starting with the desktop view of the homepage, even though they’re more likely to be experienced from the bottom up – starting with a content detail page on a mobile device. Designing from the content out means starting with atomic elements of content, and building a system of components and layouts based on the real structure of content.

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