June 19, 2020 — After spending enough time working with WordPress, you end up developing a sixth sense of what works and what doesn’t work. For example, experience allows us to distinguish good ideas from bad ones, or a professional web design from a poor quality one.
However, if you want to build a profitable WordPress site, why rely solely on your instincts when you could rely on objective measures implementing an A/B test? In this talk Ruth will present why A/B tests are important and the types of tests you might want to do on your own websites. She will spend some time reviewing an A/B checklist to discover what things to test and will provide some implemented test examples and their results.

June 5, 2019 — In 2012, Matt Mullenweg stated his concern about how we get more women involved here in the WordPress Community. And during the last six years, attempts have been made to balance the number of men and women working on WordPress, but the reality is far from this ideal.

We know that this is not a unique problem in the context of WordPress but of the tech world in general. Therefore, in this talk, I will summarize what I’ve found in research articles on the numbers of women involved in technology. I will also summarize the evidence shown in a large-scale study of gender bias, comparing the acceptance rates of men’s and women’s contributions in an open source software community. Finally, I will also provide similar figures in the context of the WordPress Community.

This issue is too complex to provide easy solutions. So this talk is only meant to give a vision that can serve as a starting point for us to feel more comfortable discussing and working on finding solutions to something that interests us all.