July 3, 2022 — Have you ever wondered what it’s like to work for different types of WordPress companies? What if you choose your own adventure? Which path will suit you best? This talk offers a view of some of those paths from someone who has walked them.

I’ve worked for a multinational corporation, a global news network and a boutique agency.

As a freelancer, I have worked directly for clients, via employment and design agencies, via freelancer platforms Codeable and Codementor and, currently, for a global distributed agency, XWP. In addition, I co-created and co-own a thriving niche pro plugin.

Based on my diverse WordPress experience spanning more than 17 years, together with contributions from WordPress colleagues who have walked these paths (to content and possibly even on stage), I will offer my perspective on what it is like to work in these different environments and the pros and cons of each.

I’ll talk about organizational structure, practices and methods, workflow, and necessary competencies in addition to development skills, and touch on pay and benefits and how to get hired.

October 5, 2017 — There are a number of ways to add custom meta boxes to WordPress admin, from coding against core functions through code API frameworks to GUI interfaces. All of these have a place, but which is the right one for your project, code style and coding level? In this talk I will provide code examples and illustrations of the code techniques for each of the methods.

Presentation Slides »

June 18, 2015 — How to set up a Vagrant development system.

Presentation Slides »

July 17, 2013 — This presentation talks about how to safely tweak your child theme while still getting updates from the parent theme.

Presentation Slides »

July 7, 2013 — This presentation shows fragments of code that was used to create the slider as well how I extended the tinyMCE editor to provide the boxy layout used on the hirshhorn.si.edu site.

Presentation Slides »

January 25, 2012