Recent Talks
PhillyJS, July 2026: Fast Fonts for a Global Web
In this talk, I’ll cover about how to pick fonts that support multiple languages, and the impact that has on file size and performance. Then I’ll go over how to use those fonts without your site suffering: covering unicode ranges, font subsetting (and why it gets complicated fast), how browsers decide which font files to load, and a few build tools that can help.
CTRL+ALT Philly, Oct 2025: Beyond Chatbots: Building Structured AI Tools with the AI SDK
Most AI talks focus on chatbots, but you don’t need a chatbot to use AI. In this talk, I’ll show how the AI SDK lets you quickly build focused AI tools with structured outputs and existing providers—no model training or complex setup required. I’ll walk through a Korean grammar analyzer I built as a real example.
Past talks, by topic
From around 2012-2015, I spoke at various meetups and conferences in the Northeast US. I don’t have pages dedicated to those, but the topics ranged from creating WordPress plugins and themes, user experience basics for developers, using WordPress on the command line and importing content with WP-CLI. Following are some of the talks I do have specifics for.
Themes, blocks, & plugins
WordCamp Montclair 2022: The Building Blocks of Building Blocks
Learn how to create a block! In this talk, we’ll go over the basics of building a block: from getting started using
@wordpress/create-block, exploring different ways of saving your content & when to use them, to using existing components and tools to avoid reinventing the wheel. We’ll also learn about the Block Directory and how to submit blocks for other people to use.
JavaScript for WP, July 2019: Breaking Apart Block Data
When building an interactive block, it can be hard to know how to handle the data involved. What exactly are attributes? Why would you want to use InnerBlocks? How do these work when you have a PHP rendered block? This talk will help you get started in block development by thinking about how to break down your data into the best ways to store it.
Find out what I’ve learned over the course of building blocks for WooCommerce and other projects.
A Day of REST, 2017: React-ing to WordPress
React’s been taking the tech world by storm. WordPress developers have been tasked with “Learning JavaScript deeply” — and React is a great JavaScript tool to know. With the WordPress REST API in development, combining React and WordPress is becoming easier. In this talk we’ll review React and some related tools, talk about who’s already using it, and explore how you can use React in WordPress (and why you may or may not want to).
This talk I gave at two conferences (both WordCamps), Jetpack for Theme Developers — WordCamp Minneapolis 2015 & WordCamp Montreal 2015
Jetpack has a lot of features for users, but did you know that it can make your life as a developer easier, too? With infinite scroll, featured content, and various custom post types, Jetpack can save you time in creating commonly requested features. Use a CSS preprocessor for easy-to-use customization options. In this talk, I’ll explore all the secret developer features in Jetpack that can give you a head start on your next site, and how to use them in only a few lines of code.
Accessibility
I’ve given less-formal talks about why accessibility matters, different ways people can use assistive tech and how that impacts using our products, and ways to test and fix issues — but those have been internal to teams and divisions.
WordCamp Europe, 2017: Event Accessibility
As organizers, we want our events to best reflect the local WordPress community. However (just like websites), sometimes real-life events are not accessible for everyone. In this talk, I’ll cover a number of ways you can make your events more welcoming for people with disabilities and by extension, everyone else.