January 14, 2020 — WordCamp Kota Kinabalu 2019 Part 7 – The Future Is Now The Importance Of Upgrading to PHP 7 By Matt Jaworski. In this talk I explain the lifetime of PHP versions and how the recent major events (the end of life of PHP 5.x.x and 7.0.x) are impacting the industry.

It’s a very relevant and important topic nowadays, as PHP is going through major shifts this year (PHP 5.6 and 7.0 lost the official support). Unsupported PHP versions will pose a security risk for all websites still stuck on old systems.

Presentation Slides »

December 8, 2017 — In the summer of 2016, I upgraded the WordPress.org support forums
from bbPress 1 to bbPress 2.x. This talk will be done as an interview
conducted by Mika Epstein.

It will cover the following topics:
– Getting the lay of the land; figure out storage, destination,
sandbox, meta environment.
– Formulating goals: Minimize downtime, clean import, remove spam/dead
topics when possible.
– MVP in terms of forum functionality.
– Native bbPress importer versus direct SQL script.
– Community support and notification.
– Staging and testing on live sites.
– 10x rule for new problems: memory leaks, multibyte language character count
truncation, different slug lengths between schemas, saturated postmeta queries.
– Planned downtime.
– WSOD disaster two days before the scheduled changeover at 95% data load.