A Collection of My Talks

Last updated February 2019.

Here’s a list of the various talks (mostly WordPress) that I’ve given in the past, along with the video recordings and slides when they’re available.

Zen Mode: Developing While You’re Offline

Those of us who work in the web industry find that we’re online a huge amount of the time. Going offline can make us feel disconnected. But what about going offline while we’re working? Right at the time when we think we’re most likely to need an internet connection: to get our job done.

Working offline can be highly productive, and is often calming and focused. Whether we choose to go offline, or whether our surroundings make it necessary — such as while we’re traveling — having the right tools, environment, and frame of mind allows you to make working offline a joy.

In this talk, I cover the tools and approaches that I use to develop while I’m in zen mode and not connected to the internet.

Investigating Regressions Quickly using Git Bisect

In this talk I introduce you to Git Bisect and show you real-world use cases. I cover using it to identify the cause of regressions, how it can save you time, and how to hook it up to automated testing.

WP CLI: An Intro and Interesting Use Cases

WP-CLI is the command line interface for WordPress. In this talk, I introduce the core concepts of WP-CLI, talk about how to use it to manage your websites, and cover a few interesting use cases for it.

If you’ve never heard of WP-CLI, or you’re an experienced user, hopefully there will be something of interest for you in this talk.

A Deep Dive into the User Roles and Capabilities API

The user roles and capabilities API is one of the most powerful APIs in WordPress. With it you can giveth, and with it you can taketh away. In this presentation I talk through the basics of roles and capabilities, and go on to explain some of the more advanced and interesting use cases of working with this API.

An Explanation of HTTPS for the Inexperienced

What is HTTPS? Why should I care? That little green padlock next to a website address is very important. It indicates that your communication with that website is using HTTPS, a communication protocol that secures everything that you do online.

If you’re an end user, a developer, a business person, or indeed anybody who uses the Internet, this talk will introduce you to HTTPS from the very basics such as how computers communicate over the Internet, to how it affects your business, your clients, and your personal life.

The A to Z of WordPress Multisite

WordPress Multisite is a very powerful piece of functionality built into WordPress which is often under-utilised. In this presentation I introduce you to Multisite and cover a host of information including setup, differences between a single site installation, management of sites, users, plugins, and themes, and advanced usage.

Unfortunately there’s no video of this talk available yet.

Moving Forward with a Mature Platform

WordPress is over twelve years old. How does the software and the project as a whole continue to move forward, maintain relevance, push boundaries, and assert influence when it has to compete with much leaner, cooler, and more modern alternatives?

An Introduction to Character Encoding

As a developer, understanding character encoding adds a lot of clarity to your work, especially when you’re dealing with text that contains characters beyond A-Z. If you’ve ever migrated a database from one site to another and ended up with jumbled characters in your content, this talk is for you. I’ll also explain why emoji in WordPress is the public relations face of something much more important.

Open Source Outside the Realm of Software

A lightning talk where I discuss how the philosophies behind open source software apply to many other areas of life too, particularly sports, health, and science.

Internationalisation for WordPress Developers

In this workshop-style presentation I cover the concepts and terminology of internationalisation, the three core steps needed to internationalise your WordPress plugin or theme, some best practices, and advanced considerations to make the lives of your translators easier.

Debugging as a Key Skill

My talk about why, as a developer, you should treat debugging as a key skill that you should practice and become proficient at. I talk about some tools and processes for modern and efficient debugging of the front end and the back end, and how processes such as testing and version control can aid your debugging.

Older Talks

You can see a bunch of my older talks on my WordPress.tv speaker page, although some of them aren’t so great.