Category: 15 min. Lightning Session

Thinking and working collaboratively sometimes needs a little spark. Working remotely sometimes seems a hurdle to traditional team games; it doesn’t have to be. From easy retrospectives to planning, you’ll get a few tried and tested options to ignite thinking in a remote team.

Chris Ford, a project manager at Reaktiv Studios, likes to think of the process she’s been developing at Reaktiv Studios as “Practical Project Management”. Most of Chris’ project management experience was learned in the School of Hard Knocks, using trial and error to learn what works (and more importantly what doesn’t) through 13 years of running a freelance design business.

In this 10 minute lightning talk she’s going share 10 practical project management tips you can put into action as soon as you get back to work.

Imagine if a single framework could be leverages for your stage presentations, sales letters, landing pages, and blog posts? Imagine if you could learn it in ten minutes and apply it for a lifetime. The good news is hundreds of others have already learned it and use it successfully today. And all I need to do is tell you a story.

Frontend Developers are trained to work with JavaScript, and to use it to create interactivity on sites. But there are plenty of cool things that you can do with standard HTML and CSS. Whether it’s fitting images into boxes, fitting boxes onto screens, or filling screens with beautifully animated user interactions, CSS can have you covered!

If you, like me, have ever thought “I’m not a developer, how could I realistically contribute to WordPress?”, then think again. Anyone can contribute to WordPress. And yes, that includes you! In this lightning talk I’ll walk you through a couple examples like coordinating component teams, gardening bugs in Trac, and getting videos submitted to WordPress.tv.

WordPress is an often overlooked gem in the web designer world, but it’s a powerful platform that can really help organize and streamline website development. Multisite can be an unwieldy beast if not tamed with the right tools and processes.

In this talk I’ll be covering:

• Plugins that can help you manage your network better
• Workflow for keeping your network updated, secured, and backed up

Many web developers must balance many competing priorities. There are always new requests for more functionality, fresh redesigns, and bug fixing. A small web team can feel like they are torn in different directions when they know they need to increase conversions while often struggling just to keep a site up and running.

Organizing competing priorities gets easier when viewing them as building on one another. Maslow’s hierarchy of needs is a helpful metaphor for seeing how a developers can leverage a stable foundation to achieve goals now and in the future.

This session emphasizes ways web teams can rely on automation and standardization at one level of the hierarchy in order to move their focus to a higher level.

Design has been synonymous with “making things pretty”, more artificial than functional, but the popularity of UX and design thinking has done a lot to break that stereotype in the last few years. One of the ways to evangelize a better user experience to your product owners and managers is to assign money value to your design improvements.

In this talk I’ll show you a few easy examples of how to do that.

Securing WordPress can sometimes feel like a moving target. With 0-day vulnerabilities popping up even in reputed plugins and themes, you can’t always ‘beat the hackers to the draw’.

While exploits target specific versions, strategies used by hackers to attack at scale remain the same. In this talk, We will review common approches used by hackers to hack WordPress sites and learn how to block them.

We will also look at actionable steps site owners can take to secure WordPress sites without degrading user experience.

Do you want to learn how to troubleshoot technical problems on your website faster? Fixing plugin conflicts, theme conflicts, and server problems is not magic (even when it seems like it). With a clearer understanding of how your site works at a technical level, you will be able to resolve issues, isolate bugs, and get back to the business of running your WordPress website more smoothly.

In this talk, I’ll cover the basics of how to get to the bottom of technical issues, and to set up a workflow that prevents your site visitors’ experiences from being disrupted. 

You will walk away armed with the tools you need to confidently click “Update” every time, without fear of bringing your site down. 

As an added bonus, you will have an antidote for that voice in your head that says silly things like “but I’m not technical” or “I’m not a coder” as a way of avoiding leveling up.