June 18, 2020 — During this talk I will break down the actions we take to handle the firehose of information that flows through Slack and other mediums, and the lessons we learned along the way.

Presentation Slides »

September 5, 2019 — Utilising Docker can be extremely helpful for matching production environments closely, as well as streamlining testing and deployment processes. Maura will go over the basics of setting up a local WordPress development environment using Docker and some of the benefits of containerised development.

June 6, 2019 — We’ll go over the basics of setting up a local WordPress development environment using Docker and some of the benefits of containerized development. Utilizing docker can be extremely helpful for matching production environments closely as well as streamlining testing and deployment processes.

Presentation Slides »

July 9, 2018 — Utilizing caching mechanisms in a WordPress product is a balancing act: what remote calls are cacheable, what queries are slow and only occasionally needed, and how will it all impact the end user? In some cases we can set up our environment for a base level of performance, and in others we’ll need to balance data storage (like autoloaded options) and other background processes so they take the overall environment into consideration. I’ll be including my own experiences as a web developer working on a large-scale WordPress multisite as well as sharing the perspective from a hosting company’s point of view.

Presentation Slides »

October 19, 2017 — Using WordPress to Grow our Network – Maura Teal (Fansided)
Customizer-centric Workflows – Jonathan Wold (XWP)
Tune Up Democracy – Ernesto Aguilar (National Federation of Community Broadcasters)
How a drumming magazine leapt into digital subscriptions with resounding success – Peter Ericson (Zeen 101)
How to design branded content – Katya Bazilevskaya (Setka.io)
A Biased Guide to Managing Bias – Jake Spurlock (Wired)

April 29, 2017 — We’ll look at why, even when writing proprietary plugins or themes, it’s important to consider simple enhancements that will influence future code structure and decision-making points. Whether you are working on in-house or client-specific projects, or building a commercial plugin to be sold the world over, as the engineer you should be considering the small steps you can take to make your life easier in the future.

November 17, 2015 — An introduction to Sass for beginning developers or power users who already have a basic understanding of CSS. This talk will go over getting started with Sass in WordPress theme development, including: Sass vs CSS, setup options (theme file structure or use of a CSS plugin), understanding variables, nesting, mixins, extends, and libraries like Compass and Susy.

Additionally, this talk can cover use cases for integrating the Sass version of frameworks like Bootstrap or Foundation without having to clutter your theme’s markup. With that you get the best of both worlds (bespoke and human-readable classes and the springboard for development and design that frameworks provide).