This talk will highlight the many different ways to give back to WordPress Core. At a high level I will go over the Core TRAC Ticketing system and how to work within tickets. I will even be diving into Vagrant and show how to set up a development environment and create a patch. This talk will take some of the ambiguity out of contributing to Core and focus mainly on teaching how to do the little things that lead to bigger impacts.

Have you ever installed a plugin or theme, only to discover that your page loads are suddenly taking several seconds longer? Maybe you’re the author of that plugin, and your users are complaining about the effects on their sites? Do you have a client that wants the site you built to load more quickly? Before you blame the host or tell your customers to buy faster hardware, it’s time to take a humble look at your code and figure out where you can do things better. This presentation will look at techniques and tools you can use to identify performance bottlenecks in your code and explore options for optimizing and caching the problems away.

So you know how to write a theme, but do you know how to organize one? Let’s look at some techniques you can use to keep your code separated into logical groups, make it more reusable, and help you sleep better at night. This will not only help you to better maintain your projects, but it will also help with collaboration and the general speed of your work. Whether you are just starting to write themes and plugins, or have been doing it for years, these practices will add to your development chops.

Link to Slides