Get things done! 7 Tips to save time

Today we are busier than ever, our to-do-lists are growing, everything struggles for our attention and everything is, of course, super important (what else?!). There are many time management methods, and time is a critical factor, and you know that. You look at your to-do list and have the choice of either working a late shift or continuing the list tomorrow. It’s time to change that.

Maintainable CSS architecture in the Gutenberg era

Writing maintainable and scalable CSS is one of the biggest aspects of front-end work. Sami will show how CSS methodologies such as ITCSS and BEM can help achieve that and, at the same time, maximise the WYSIWYG experience in Gutenberg editor without rewriting the CSS that much.

Customer support: Turning your nightmare into a growth engine

“Oh no! Not another one!” If this is your gut reaction to incoming support requests for your product, service or plugin, Valentina will guide you from terror in the face of unreasonable customers to a state of bliss from the critically important information they share with you. Instead of hypnosis and therapy, she will give a framework to engage with your customers, explaining when and where it makes sense and putting boundaries and resources in place that allow you to offer excellent service when it matters most, without putting you at risk of burnout.

For the love of code: Modernising WordPress, plugins, and themes

Now that WordPress has committed to a minimum requirement of PHP 7 by the end of 2019, we can all start looking at modernising the code we maintain. Removing hacks to support old versions is easy, but how can code be improved when it just works on PHP 7? Namespaces, generators, Intl are just a few of the features introduced since PHP 5.2, not to mention scalar type declarations and all the other awesomeness that came with PHP 7. But what does it all mean, and how can you take advantage of these goodies? Join Juliette to learn to identify where to make quick fixes, when to look into refactoring, and how to make your code faster, better and more secure by using modern PHP.

Advanced database management for plugins

For nearly a decade, developers have been encouraged to use custom post types and taxonomies for all of their needs, and life was good. Good enough, anyway. For the next decade of advanced computing, machine intelligence will require, at the very least, custom database tables. John will break down what a database really is and what WordPress got right and wrong, and share several solutions that plugin developers can use right now to interface with complex custom data structures inside of WordPress.

Working a world apart: Navigating remote working professional relationships

In this global workplace, teams often only have rare occasions to meet in person. How do you make genuine connections when your only practical connection is via WiFi? How do you build trust when you are ships that pass in the night? How do you best communicate when things get tense and you need to translate intent from text and/or video communication? When your team comes from different cultures, how can you find yourselves on the same page with the fewest ‘lost in translation’ moments? Dee and Petya are from opposite ends of the globe and believe their story can help others better work together, apart.

Special characters and where to find them

There are 23 official languages within the European Union and many, if not all, of them have special characters. In German, for example, there are Umlauts (“üöä”) and the “ß”; and in other languages, there are more. Many characters exist in a pre-composed version and as a combination of two characters. Using the two-character version can lead to a broken search, broken spell check, broken transliteration for the slug, and broken images if this happens in a filename in combination with some server configuration and browsers.

The promise of structured data and blocks

The web as we know it is a collection of poorly structured documents. We need to rely heavily on context to determine what’s on a page, whether it’s a job, a recipe, or another object. Structured data adds structure to web content and links objects. However, like any metadata, it adds abstraction and overhead that isn’t intuitive for end users. Blocks, as abstract units for organising and composing content, turn out to be an ideal UX in this regard. They give us a way to structure content and derive structured data from it. Omar will explain how we will transform an Internet of pages to an Internet of objects, which unlocks countless possibilities. Let’s look at the future!