Onboarding New Developers – Git Workflows

Speaker: Micah Wood

Whether working alone or with a team of people, understanding Git workflows and how they can improve your development process is imperative.

While most developers are familiar with Git, it is one of those tools that everyone uses in a different way. When onboarding, getting everyone on the same page is often a challenge. Very few organizations have written documentation on how their team(s) use Git.

This session is designed to teach developers best practices when using Git, to introduce some common Git workflows and to help developers learn what should be documented to make sure their team is collaborating and reviewing code effectively.

Intro to ADA Development

Intended Audience: Developers

Speaker: Rory Michael Heaney

Best way to be ADA compliant, or to show a level of compliance? Do it from the start. If you’re trying to be compliant after the fact, you could be in for a world of hurt.

In this discussion, we’ll go through a framework, active development, and how many things you could easily be doing during workflow from the start to make your website more accessible!

This doesn’t have to be hard! We are an open-source community, so let’s get everyone up to speed on how we can make our sites even more accessible.

My favorite design tool … is a browser.

Intended Audience: Designers / Developers

Speaker: Mary Baum

I don’t want to say I’m old, but this was the most amazing tech going when I was in design school.

So I’ve tried all the new design tools! (Mostly). I’m a big fan of thumbnail sketches.

And I’ll do some sample layouts in Photoshop or XD or Affinity.

But as soon as I can, I head for the browser.

For a reality check? Sure.

But there’s also a heap of serendipity in them dev tools!

— For my vet, I stumbled on great typography just by hitting the Up and Down keys and seeing where they take me.
—Gutenberg and some new options in the Genesis Framework are making it easier than ever to build without thinking much about templates (the php kind).
— And you can hook your code editor right up to Chrome and see your changes (Local changes, of course!) come to life in real time!

So come take a look! If you love CSS like I love CSS, you’ll love designing elements and posts and pages — even entire sites — right in the browser!

We are the gatekeepers – compassion in web development

Intended Audience: Developers

Speaker: Lisa Linn Allen

A mother with a wailing baby in her arms – maybe the baby has an ear infection. A trainer at the rec center who is overwhelmed with requests for team building exercises. A gifted data scientist who just. needs. to. focus. An executive with the future of a three billion dollar company on his shoulders.

These are all people who use the intranet web site my team builds. The code we write affects their daily lives, their work, their health, and the company we all work for.

The developer to end user relationship is very direct. We are in the perfect position to advocate for site users, and ensure that the site we build is compassionate in its design, because we write the code. We are the gatekeepers, and we have a both a responsibility and an opportunity to help, and not harm, the users of our site.

Web Accessibility for WordPress

Intended Audience: Developers

Speaker: Joseph LoPreste

Topic Description: We cover a few different things that have to do with web accessibility.
1. Why web accessibility is important for WordPress developers to understand.
2. What WCAG 2.1 and Section 508 are.
3. Then we offer our simple steps that we can take as WordPress developers to help our sites be in compliance.

Creating better APIs with WPDB and API Middleware

Intended Audience: Developers

Speaker: Jordan Cauley

At Mediavine we created a custom class to make interfacing with WPDB much simpler and easier to manage, paired with our middleware utilities our plugins behave more like an MVC than a traditional WordPress plugin. Add modern APIs and data storage to your next project

Lightning Fast Performance with a Headless Home Page

Intended Audience: Developers

Speaker: Sarah Ovenall

The ability to customize with ease is one of WordPress’ best features. But customization often impacts performance. Add too many bells and whistles and you may end up with a site that’s sluggish and painful to use.

Decoupling, or using WordPress on the backend only, is an effective if somewhat drastic way to improve site performance. In this session we’ll learn a limited version of decoupling WordPress: a headless home page. Decoupling the home page gives you a functional, fast home page that displays WordPress content without invoking  WordPress (and without the load time!). We’ll cover different approaches to serving WordPress content outside WordPress, how to seamlessly integrate a headless home page into the rest of the site, and challenges to look out for.

Block-wards Compatibility

Intended Audience: Developers

Speaker: Ethan Butler

Gutenberg is here! If you’re a plugin developer, you’ve maybe already taken steps to ensure that your plugin is ready. And if you’ve done so, you know how much a step forward the new block-based editor is.

Unfortunately, with over 1 million installs, the Classic Editor is going to be a reality that you’ll have to deal with for a long time to come. Fragmentation between user bases is a difficult problem to solve, because it can mean maintaining two entirely separate user interfaces for different editors. Choosing to support one editor or another limits the potential reach of whatever awesome thing you’re building, while choosing to support both can lead to serious headaches.

Thankfully, with a few abstractions, it can be possible to build React applications that can just as easily target Gutenberg or TinyMCE, or another context altogether. This talk will provide a basic outline for building interfaces that can handle different contexts with maximum reuse.

Let’s learn Git. No more excuses.

Intended Audience: Developers

Speaker: Dwayne McDaniel

Whether it is for re-using the same code, experimenting with your code quickly and efficiently, or just for better document management, one of the most important leaps any site builder will ever take in their path towards becoming a developer is learning a version control system, or VCS. Since Git is the standard VCS over 80% of developers, lets roll up our sleeves and dive in. The benefits far outweigh the efforts needed to learn this tooling. Once you start, you will wonder why it took you so long to unleash the power of this awesome tech.

This talk will briefly explore the need for git, the history and use cases. Then we will jump into how to get started and the basic organizational concepts. We will also examine Github, the web based Git hosting service. Bring your laptops to play along at home and get started before you leave the room.

Onboarding New Developers – Debugging

Speaker: Micah Wood

One of the most important skills that a developer can have is that of debugging. The ability to quickly track down issues and resolve them is a skill that is highly desirable.

Even in the absence of a bug, knowing how to interactively step through the code line by line with a debugger can be the difference between really understanding a code base and treating it like a black box.

This session is designed to teach developers how to improve their troubleshooting skills, to use an interactive code debugger, and to train others on your team to improve this skill set.

Onboarding New Developers – Coding Standards

Speaker: Micah Wood

Every developer makes mistakes and writes code a bit differently. While coding standards make it possible to have consistent formatting and easy-to-read code, they can also help developers avoid common mistakes.

All too often, development teams add new hires to their ranks without providing any guidelines around code formatting, what PHP version they should code against, when to use escaping functions, how to document the code, general coding best practices, etc. A failure to define a set of coding standards for your team means that you will spend more time reading code, troubleshooting avoidable bugs, and correcting security issues.

This session is designed to teach developers how to set up coding standards for their projects, how to configure auto-formatting, and how to get buy-in from new developers when onboarding.

Onboarding New Developers – Local Development

Speaker: Micah Wood

A local development environment allows you to set up a web server on your own computer so that you can test your customizations on a local copy of your website without breaking your live site.

Setting up a local development environment is also the first onboarding task that a new developer must tackle. It is important to have a low-friction, reliable, and replicable approach to local development.

This session is designed to teach developers how to set up a local development environment as well as best practices when onboarding developers.

Introduction to WordPress Privacy

Intended Audience: Developers

Speaker: Brian DeConinck

When your website collects personal information, it’s essential that you be a good steward of your users’ data. How you manage that data is under increasing scrutiny. With GDPR in Europe, CCPA in California, and anticipated privacy legislation at the federal level, it’s time to start working on that privacy statement you’ve been putting off.

In this session, we will focus on how to make the plugins you build work with the privacy features added to WordPress core in 2018. Along the way, we will examine key concepts from the “Privacy by Design” framework and discuss easy best practices to keep in mind as you write your code.

The session will have a technical focus rather than a legal focus. It will feature practical examples in which we will build a plugin that supports personal data export and erasure. Code examples will be simple, but will assume some baseline knowledge of PHP.