All posts by sarahwnyc

About sarahwnyc

Sarah Wefald is a senior product manager, focusing on end-to-end B2B SaaS solutions for state & local government, finance, and education industries. She is also the founder and principal of Mother Blackbird, a digital solutions agency. Sarah has led a number of sessions on topics like WordPress development, as well as product and project management. Additionally, Sarah volunteers for Orange County WordPress, sharing knowledge, guidance and opportunities to those exploring careers in tech. Sarah attended Mount Holyoke College, where she earned a Bachelor of Arts degree in English.

Session Spotlight: Business Workshop with Mendel Kurland, Chris Lema, Karim Marucchi, Cory Miller, and Jeff Turner

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Don’t miss the business workshop in the Crystal Cove Trail room at 10 AM on Sunday, June 6 with Mendel Kurland, Chris Lema, Karim Marucchi, and Cory Miller, hosted by Jeff Turner.

The WordCamp OC Business Track is going to be epic! We have gathered four of the best business masterminds in our industry and they will individually sit down for a conversation with Jeff Turner.

The speakers will be Mendel Kurland (GoDaddy), Cory Miller (iThemes), Dre Armeda and Karim Marucchi (Crowd Favorite). Jeff did an outstanding job interviewing the speakers at WordCamp LA 2014 and these sessions will be nothing short of amazing. Don’t miss it!

Session Spotlight: Duty Now for the Future with Jason Cosper

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See Jason Cosper in the Salt Creek Trail room at 4:30 PM on Saturday, June 6 for his talk Duty Now for the Future.

WordPress developers have been refining their development workflows and toolkits for almost 12 years now. As game -hanging server technologies like Facebook’s HHVM start to creep into the WordPress hosting space — WP Engine, Pagely & Kinsta all offer HHVM-ready plans — those workflows need to be expanded.

I’ll be introducing you to a new Vagrant-based WordPress development environment (HGV) that includes debugging and profiling tools and allows you to test your code in both PHP & HHVM environments.

If you’re interested in attending this talk, a passing familiarity with the command line helps, but isn’t a hard requirement.

Session Spotlight: Should it Go Into a Theme or Plugin with Russell Aaron

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Join Russell Aaron in the Trabuco Trail track at 3:40 PM on Saturday, June 6 to discuss whether certain features should go into a theme or plugin.

In this presentation, scenarios will be discussed along with whether the feature in question should go into the theme or into a plugin. Many times, many developers might say most features should go into a plugin – but most would be surprised why a plugin can be a bad idea.

Session Spotlight: Selling a Million Dollars in Design with Jennifer Bourn

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Join Jennifer Bourn in the Salt Creek Trail track at 3:40 PM on Saturday, June 6 for her presentation Selling a Million Dollars in Design.

Development is clear cut. It works or it doesn’t. The code is well-written or it’s a mess. Design on the other hand, is subjective, with the success of a project often based on the client’s ideas, perceptions, opinions, and personal experiences of what good design is.

As a freelancer, Jennifer has sold well over a million dollars in design services alone, and the journey has been good, bad, and at times, ugly as she learned along the way.

In this session, Jennifer will share with you the mistakes made, lessons learned, and contract changes implemented. You’ll walk away with a deeper understanding of the role design plays in business, how to sell design, and how to navigate the sales process with clients.

If you’re a designer who rocks at design but feels a little less confident selling your services, you’re a business or agency owner who now find themselves selling design, or you’re a developer who wants to better understand pitching design to clients, this talk is for you.

Session Spotlight: A Tale of Two Test Suites with Eric Mann

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Join Eric Mann at 10 AM on Sunday, June 7 in the Salt Creek Trail room for his talk A Tale of Two Test Suites.

WordPress powers over 20% of the Internet and comes with a fully-fleshed out unit testing framework covering the core library. For testing plugins and themes (extensions to WordPress), Josh developed WP_Mock, a comprehensive mocking framework for WordPress. WP_Mock allows developers to test their code in complete isolation from WordPress itself.

He’ll walk attendees through both test frameworks, covering the pros/cons of each and examples of their use. Attendees will gain a further understanding of PHPUnit, unit testing in general, process isolation, and code modularization.

Session Spotlight: The Value of Logos with Andrew Bergeron

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Come to the Trabuco Trail track on Saturday, June 6 at 2:50 PM for Andrew Bergeron’s presentation on the value of logos.

A logo should not cost the same as a cup of coffee (read: fiverr.com) – as WordPress designer/developer “unicorn” we often get stuck with a client who wants “just a simple logo.” The problem is that logos are not simple, and they’re very important – not to mention, they’re on every page of your website. This talk will offer guidelines on how to tell a good logo from a bad logo, and offer some inspiration/steps for others to follow to create their own brilliant logos.