December 11, 2016 — When companies are in search of new developers, they look for people who fall into one of three categories: Front-End, Back-End, and Full-Stack. I feel that these categories can be limiting, and tend to be geared toward proficiency in specific programming languages. If we take a moment to consider how we think about how we use the labels we use in hiring , we may not only end up hiring more qualified people, I put forward that we might create teams more well-suited to build a wide variety of websites and applications. In this talk, I introduce a new way of thinking of the stack, and how we hire the people who build it.’

October 18, 2016 — How to optimize your stack for better scalability?
WordPress isn’t just used for your average blog that has 10 visitors per day. The tech industry has realized that the WordPress platform can be leveraged as the foundation for all kinds of content-driven websites. But when your website gets increasingly popular and your WordPress installation is under heavy load, that’s when things get more complicated.
WordPress is built on top of PHP & MySQL and in this presentations I will show you how to optimize your stack for better scalability. We’ll be talking about software like Varnish, Nginx, Redis & PHP-FPM. We will also cover topics like loadbalancing, session distribution, static file hosting, SSL termination & aggressive page caching.
Just enough infrastructure talk to make your WordPress bullet proof. But don’t worry, we’ll start from the beginning.
WordPress isn’t just used for your average blog that has 10 visitors per day. The tech industry has realized that the WordPress platform can be leveraged as the foundation for all kinds of content-driven websites. But when your website gets increasingly popular and your WordPress installation is under heavy load, that’s when things get more complicated.

Presentation Slides »

December 18, 2015 — WordPress doesn’t live in isolation but’s sits as part of a stack. From the operating system, to the web server each aspect of the stack should be carefully chosen. In addition WordPress can be enhanced by using other application in tandem. Tim takes a look at the eco-system that WordPress lives in, to help people create a very modern WordPress stack.

December 9, 2015 — For many years, the stack that WordPress sites have been built on has remained rather stagnant. PHP hasn’t released a new major version since 2004. The HTTP/1.1 spec was first released in 1997. Browsers have continued to evolve, yet much of the JavaScript and CSS written fails to take advantage of these evolutions. This is all changing and at a very rapid pace. 2015 marks major updates to multiple underlying technologies for WordPress and the web in general. This talk will explore PHP7, HTTP/2, HTTPS, ECMAScript 2015, and CSS4. We will look at what you need to do to prepare your code and help you get excited about taking advantage of new technologies today. The web is moving forward, if you don’t move with it, you will be left behind.