Over the past 5 years, I’ve given talks and workshops at national and international tech conferences as well as local and virtual user group meetups. I love sharing what I’ve learned along the way!
Below is a list of talks I’ve given. See my Joind.in profile for some talk reviews and Sessionize for other talks I’ve given.
Enjoy the resources! ☺️
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It’s not you, it’s… just time: How to break up well with Advanced Custom Fields
This talk covered how you can start building custom blocks instead of using ACF for custom fields. In this talk, I go over: Link to UW IT Professional Conference Slides here
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How to build custom blocks for the new UW Theme 2.0
At talk Andrea Roenning and I gave about building custom block for our UW Theme 2.0. In this session, we covered: Link to UW IT Professionals Conference Slides here
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How WiscWeb and StratComm combined forces to bring us the UW Theme 2.0
This was a talk our combined teams gave about our experience working together to build the new UW Theme 2.0 theme and suite of plugins. See more below at the link, but we talked about: See more at the UW IT Professionals Conference Slides here
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Thinking in Decades: Career longevity for IT/Developers
My current job at UW–Madison is not one I plan on leaving. Or at least, I don’t plan on leaving the organization. This is pretty counter to the “job hop” advice most tech workers get, change jobs every 2-3 years (or sooner) so you can: Of course I would like to make more money, but…
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Decoupling your CMS with NextJS
We explored how to decouple a traditional content management system (CMS) using Next.js to build a modern, lightning-fast front-end application. We will dive into the technical implementations of: PHP/JSTek Site Slides here
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Make confident changes across your application with Playwright
Also known as “How NOT to blow up your legacy app!… with Playwright! We explored how end-to-end testing can give developers the safety net they need to refactor, redesign, or update features without fear of breaking things. You’ll see practical examples of how to write stable, maintainable Playwright tests, integrate them into your CI pipeline,…
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Building custom blocks for a branded WordPress theme
Andrea Roenning and I gave this talk online for the 2026 DigiCol Dev Summit. We talked about: Slides here
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Serverless Services for Serverful CMSes
As static and headless WordPress sites become more common and mainstream, it’s important to know how to build solutions for dynamic actions these sites make. Common examples are form submissions, site search, real-time updates, etc. How can you build dynamic solutions for static sites? Enter serverless functions and services! If you’ve built custom plugins or…
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A Hike Through the WordPress Database
Have you ever wondered where the content on your WordPress lives? What about the settings of your WordPress. Or have you ever wondered how taxonomies related to posts? Or… maybe you’ve never wondered any of this… 😂 🤓
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Wait, wuuut? Where did my CMS go?!
Static, headless, decoupled, Jamstack, serverless (geez, are there any more names for this stuff?!) sites have already made their way into the mainstream of WordPress and other CMS development. While these sites offer speed, scalability, and security, there are also inherent pitfalls and “gotchas” to be aware of when building in this ways for WordPress…
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An Ideal WordPress Workflow Development & Deployment Workflow
I know the title is a mouthful, but, this was a lot of fun to put together 🤓… This talk was for Certified Fresh Events (CFE.dev), and this was the abstract: At over 40% of the web, WordPress maintains a massive footprint on the Internet. While this platform, with its 20+ years of code, can…
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Using WordPress as an API
Wait, what’s an API and why would I use WordPress as an API? What the heck is a BYOFE, and what does it have to do with WP? Why are there so many acronyms?!?! 😉
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WP101 for Developers
This is a 3 hour workshop for the YWeb cohort. It’s a developer-focused introduction to WordPress. We cover the following with hands-on activities:
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WordPress and Laravel: The Hows, Whys, and Intersections
Do you work with WordPress and wonder if there are other tools and frameworks where you could leverage your PHP or JS knowledge? Should you be using WordPress for all your projects? Do you work with Laravel and wonder why some developers still choose (and love) to work on WordPress? Come along on the journey…
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Less Snark, More Spark
How can you be the developer people want to hire, work with, and promote? Good question! Abstract: Even the most introverted, self-sufficient developer interacts with other people. Sometimes these folks are a joy to work with, sometimes not. Sometimes as a developer, you might be the difficult one to work with (we’ve all been that…
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Building and Deconstructing a Gutenberg Block
This presentation walks through the new Block Editor in WordPress, covering: what comes out of the box from WordPress Core plugins that will add blocks to your site importing demo content styling blocks with CSS creating your own blocks with Advanced Custom Fields and ES5 to ESNext.
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Templating in PHP with REST APIs
Here are the slides for the presentation I gave at Madison Area Technical College’s Advanced PHP class in the spring of 2019 semester. The main objective is to learn some templating principles and see how partial templates can be managed in a larger project, and how templates can work with data, specifically received from REST…
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More Secure API Requests with WordPress Helper Functions
Making API requests with JavaScript is something web developers do everyday. API services often require you to keep API keys out of the browser or route your requests through a server to secure the request.
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Customizing WordPress
Everyone wants a unique web presence. WordPress makes this easy by allowing us to customize our website to our heart’s content.
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Talk: Getting Started with WP-CLI
Do you work with or maintain WordPress sites and wonder if there’s an easier way to keep things updated? Are you looking for a way to automate a site setup, turning a five minute install into a 5 second install? (Well, at least less than 5 minutes) Are you bogged down by repetitive tasks that…
