September 24, 2019 — CSS can be a source of deep frustration for developers, both new and experienced. Over time, this has resulted in a portion of the web community with a fundamental misunderstanding of CSS – not only of how to write it well, but of what CSS is in the first place: a domain-specific, declarative programming language.

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January 2, 2019 — We know you have questions about Gutenberg. We all do! This session aims to answer those we can in an informal discussion meant for all levels of expertise. Together we will determine answers or explain how to get them answered.

December 30, 2018 — Over the past 10 years, CSS has transformed from a descriptive language for presentation into a Turing-complete, domain-specific, declarative programming language for layout on the web.

Okay…but how does one go from describing presentation to programming in CSS? And what on earth is a “CSS Algorithm”?

This entertaining and personable talk will answer these questions and more, before delving into practical steps for creating CSS algorithms of your own to bridge the gap between design and development.

August 7, 2018 — With the introduction of Gutenberg in WordPress 5.0, the themes and plugins of the future will revolve around this notion of ‘blocks’. But what is a block? Maybe you’ve heard you can create your own blocks…but where and how does one actually do that? Are blocks written in PHP? Are they JavaScript? Both? Do you need to know React to create a block?

In this workshop, we will take a deep-dive into the anatomy of a block, answering the aforementioned questions and more. After a high-level discussion of blocks and how they function, we will get hands-on, creating blocks of our own within a set of demo files that can function as a starting point for your own projects.

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October 6, 2016 — A slow website has serious business impacts. Period. 40% of mobile users abandon a page that takes more than three seconds to load (1). Many “Creative Responsive Multi-Purpose” themes are beautiful and flashy with their demo content, but have speed indexes of more than 50 times what is recommended (2). Are free themes any good? How can you tell good premium themes from bad ones without buying them? Never fear! There are several ways to vet a theme before shelling out the cash.

In this talk, we’ll cover strategies for evaluating themes’ code quality and performance, and creating healthy, content-oriented websites. In many ways, this is a call to action to the WordPress end user community: let’s shift our values from flashy effects to rock-solid content and fast websites. Scroll-jacking and parallax are over!

1) http://bit.ly/1LB87ve
2) http://bit.ly/1g8GH44

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December 22, 2015 — A slow website has serious business impacts. Period. 40% of mobile users abandon a page that takes more than three seconds to load. Many “Creative Responsive Multi-Purpose” themes are beautiful and flashy with their demo content, but have speed indexes of more than 50 times* what is recommended. How can you tell good themes from bad ones without buying them? Never fear! There are several ways to vet a theme before shelling out the cash.
In this talk, we’ll cover strategies for evaluating themes’ code quality and performance, and creating healthy, content-oriented websites. In many ways, this is a call to action to the WordPress end user community: let’s shift our values from flashy effects to rock-solid content and fast websites. Scroll-jacking and parallax are over!

June 28, 2015 — You’ve been meaning to start using Sass in your projects, right? But it looks hard…is it really worth figuring out? Yes, yes it is! Sass is “CSS with superpowers” and a wonderful entry point into larger development concepts and best practices. We’ll talk about what Sass is, how to get started, and identify some key features you can apply to your own work.

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May 30, 2015 — You’ve been meaning to start using Sass in your projects, right? But it looks hard…is it really worth figuring out? Yes, yes it is! In this talk, we will cover Sass basics like structuring projects, mixins and variables, and using extensions. We will then go over how to start using Sass in your own themes as well as touch on a few Sass-ready starter themes. Afterwards, Lara will be available at the Happiness Bar for demos and to help you get set up!

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