December 11, 2016 — One of the bigger take aways from my WCEU talk is the reminder that your representation in the WordPress community is not your code but you. This talk will address the issues when we have to represent something bigger than ourselves, be it the company we work for or the community in general. How do you handle the days when people hate you for nothing more than enforcing rules? How does it feel to have your reputation shattered when you know you did right? When DO you fight back if you do at all? How do you do it without causing more harm than good? After 14 years working for a bank and 4 for a webhost, with 6 in the middle helping the .org community in support and plugins, I have a unique set of experiences to call from when it comes to remembering the biggest thing. I am not my code. And I am not the haters.

December 9, 2016 — Code quality truly matters! This talk is about understanding why investing in quality development is key, from a business point of view as well as a for technical reasons.

November 21, 2016 — I was a writer and executive assistant with a solid liberal arts education when I first encountered WordPress in 2009. Since then, I’ve gone from knowing only very small bits of HTML to working full time as a developer. In this session I’ll talk about how I transitioned to a career in web development while working full time. We’ll also cover suggestions on what to learn first, strategies on how to learn technical subjects, resources I’ve found helpful both offline and around the web, how to get experience with real projects, and perhaps most importantly, how the WordPress community can be an amazing resource to help guide you along the way.

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October 28, 2016 — WordPress, JS, API, SPA, REST, JSON, Angular, React are the terms and abbreviations that are being mentioned and handled to try to explain that WordPress can be a platform as another.

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October 28, 2016 — Everyone knows that you need to write reusable code to be able to grow as a developer, right?

However, most developers struggle to understand how to split up their code to make it truly reusable, so they end up copy-pasting parts of code and modifying as needed, instead of effectively reusing the code that was already written, without a single change.

This session explains the concept of Config files and how they allow you to cleanly separate reusable code from project-specific code.

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October 17, 2016 — A story about punk, passion and pirates, musings of a two decades building free software.

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October 5, 2016 — In this talk, I explore how customisable WordPress is by design, and show, with examples, how easy it is for non-developers to dive into WordPress coding.

July 28, 2016 — In this talk I will go over all the past, present and future debugging techniques. The talk start by giving an overview on PHP’s (ancient) standard features for debugging, additional (userland) libraries and functionality in frameworks.

After the introductions we move on to the meatier stuff and I will talk about live-action debuggers, such as Xdebug and PHP Storm.

For the future, I will be talking about a project that allows you to “step back” while debugging as well; introspect what your script’s or application’s exact execution paths was; and trace variable modifications.

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July 4, 2016 — PHP 7 was released in December, with a hefty speed boost and new features to improve the quality of your code. I’ll be giving an overview of the key features and how you can take advantage of them in WordPress, and closing with some insights into what might be in PHP 7.1.

June 30, 2016 — During a decade spent as a professional musician, I discovered web development and then WordPress, and made a primary career switch. While on the surface they sound incongruous, I believe that skills I learned and honed as a classical pianist have translated directly to becoming a leader in open source software development. Join me as I take a look at those skills and celebrate alternative paths into WordPress.

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