Talks I want to give

Talks I want to give

I'm always working on new talks that I think would be great at conferences, meetups and elsewhere. This is the most up-to-date version of that list! If you're interested in previous versions, you can take a look at talks I wanted to give in 2018 and even 2016 (some of which even made it onto a stage somewhere!) And feel free to get in touch if you'd like to see one of these at your event.

Block Editor and Full Site Editing Crash Course for Freelancers and Agencies

Full Site Editing and the new block-based tools are beginning to significantly impact how freelancers and agencies build websites for clients, and will only continue to do so in the next few years. But much of the information on Gutenberg mainly speaks to those releasing themes to the general public, instead of addressing concerns of those creating bespoke themes for clients.

In this talk, we'll look at how you can integrate concepts like theme.json, Block Variations and Block Styles into your current work for clients who require and deserve more flexible customizations. We’ll even take a quick zip forward and see how a brand new theme specifically designed for FSE could be built, speeding up your workflow along the way.

From FTP to CI/CD: How to Deploy WordPress Code

Once you've written your code, you need to ship it out and sometimes that's easier said than done. In this talk, we'll take a look at everything from the for-emergencies-only way of writing code directly in the WordPress Theme Editor, to using FTP, all the way to having an automated CI/CD pipeline deploy your code for you. As an added bonus: we'll even learn what all those acronyms and buzzwords mean along the way!

Introduction to Version Control and Automated Deployments

If you're tired of the things that plague beginner WordPress developers like losing code revisions in FTP or fighting to manage CSS through the Customizer, just to name a few, then this talk is for you. Tools like version control (Git) and auto-deployment do wonders to transform your development workflow.

In this session, we'll explore these tools, and explain how to start using each of them—even if you don't know the command line. You'll learn what version control is, how to get started, how to make worrying about deployments a thing of the past, and level up as a developer.

Buy then Build: Acquiring Two Businesses in Six Months

We often hear about businesses starting from nothing, but there are many people trying to navigate the idea of scaling something that's already working. With the rise of "micro acquisitions" and SaaS M&A, it's become easier than ever to buy a running SaaS business to take to the next level.

In this talk, I'll discuss how to find promising small to mid-size SaaS businesses of note that are for sale, the different ways you can finance the acquisition of a SaaS business, and the most important things you'll need to know once you hit the ground running.

How to be the Mentor Your Coworkers Need

Each of us has had to start somewhere in the tech industry, and each of us knows that we wouldn’t achieve the many career milestones we’ve had without some help along the way. Every industry needs mentors, but especially one as fast-paced as tech.

This talk examines my journey from intern to lead developer, the voices and stable influences that have helped me grow both in skill and in ambition, and how we can all be more helpful and available resources to our junior coworkers.

Untangling Legacy Code

We’ve all been brought into a project where the code is more tangled than a bowl of spaghetti, to the point where making any changes might mean breaking a whole new host of things we don’t know how to fix. The good news is that you’re not alone and there’s always a tech-forward way out.

In this talk, we’ll look at what developer tools can help you untangle old code, how to use version control to ensure you don’t break anything, and how to refactor legacy code to make all future jobs a little bit easier.