January 21, 2021 — Russell Heimlich has been wrangling the interwebz since the dawn of the century. By day he is a Senior Interactive Developer at nclud, a provocative creative agency. By night he is a small human co-wrangler of two daughters with the help from his partner in crime, Kristina. True to his name, he is capable of life-saving choking maneuvers for the greater human good. Milkshakes make him smile.

June 2, 2019 — WordPress has been around for over 15 years. During that time the thinking about templating and themes has evolved as WordPress has grown. This talk will cover the various approaches around getting data from WordPress to rendering a beautifully structured webpage. From templating tags to templating engines like Twig, what are the pros and cons of these different approaches? My thinking on templating has certainly changed over the years and this talk hopes to open your eyes to new possibilities to templating and WordPress.

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August 23, 2018 — Handling media at scale is a challenge. A seemingly small design tweak could result in days and days of recrunching media. There is also the performance implications out of respect for our audience. This talk will cover how we made our dumb static assets smarter with dynamic capabilities that gives us more creative freedom while also making our sites more performant for our visitors. We’re also open sourcing our work so any publisher can eliminate the need to recrunch media.

October 19, 2017 — Scalable Vector Graphics are an ideal format for our multiscreen world with a dizzying array of resolutions. How can we work with SVGs in WordPress? What are the workflows and pitfalls of getting SVGs online? This talk will give you all the how and why of working with SVGs in WordPress.

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November 22, 2016 — Don’t you just hate it when a large traffic spike comes your way and your website goes down? Is your server set-up shakier than an all-night Red Bull + espresso bender at Starbucks? Is your web host holding you back from running your website of your dreams? Then setting up on top of Amazon’s cloud is definitely for you! There is a lot of information about how to set-up a server and running a basic WordPress site on Amazon Web Services. But there isn’t a lot of information on building a highly-available, scalable, enterprise-grade, infrastructure to power WordPress. This talk will cover the nuts and bolts of a highly-scalable cloud hosting set-up specifically for WordPress through my own experience re-architecting BillyPenn.com.

August 19, 2016 — WordPress’ built-in search functionality leaves a lot to be desired. A LOT! Why is the default search so bad? What are the options for making search on your site better? In this talk I’ll cover a range of solutions for improving the search results of your site and integrating with WordPress.

Take aways:

How WordPress’ default search works under the hood.
What are some ways to make WordPress Search better.
What are key features when evaluating different search technologies.

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August 21, 2014 — Speaker Russell Heimlich describes how he went about developing a new site design for the Pew Research site.

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