March 16, 2017 — If you’re an Entrepreneur, chances are that you’ve had to work with Engineers. Best case scenario, they’ve created something that met your specifications in a semi-timely manner. Worst case scenario, they’ve kept you up all night stressing over a deadline, causing premature hair-loss.

If you’re an Engineer, chances are that you’ve had to work with Entrepreneurs. Best case scenario, they’ve given you well-written specifications and you can finish the project without a lot of back and forth. Worse case scenario, they keep making “simple” changes and call every fifteen minutes for status updates.

What if I told you that the tension between these opposites is the secret to a project’s success? Whether you partner with your opposite or simply work with them on a project, managing this tension is the difference between good and great. Join James and Kevin as they share how they’ve learned to appreciate each other’s personalities, create decent products, and become better at their respective roles in the process.

April 20, 2016 — In this session, I’ll share my experiences in converting a popular WordPress plugin, Ninja Forms, from a PHP/HTML plugin to a mostly JS application. We’ll talk about the tools and technologies that we’ve used to avoid the dreaded pasta of bad code, along with how we overcame some WordPress-specific challenges. We’ll cover how we to plan and build a data-driven user interaction, rather than a reactive, snippet-driven mess.

August 29, 2014 — We’ve all heard the same talks: a very calm, hip developer talks about working on or releasing some cool project. They’re bold, confident, and appear to have everything under control. If you’re like me, you don’t feel that way at all. You’re terrified of letting anyone else see what you’re working on. You assume that everyone is smarter than you, and that you have no business trying to start a business. Let’s strip away the false pretenses and talk frank about how we really feel. Releasing a plugin to the public can be a very scary prospect. Charging people for the privilege of using your code is even scarier. When do you release? How often do you update? Will you make any money? If your plugin is open source, how do you get people to commit to your project?