Session Spotlight: Immaculate Consternation with Alex Vasquez

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Join Alex Vasquez in the Trabuco Trail room at 4:30 PM on Saturday, June 6 to discuss the immaculate consternation.

While everyone is talking about raising our rates; negotiating bigger gigs and releasing amazing products and “owning” their lives something gets overlooked: our personal well-being, physically and emotionally. Alex will speak on something that is overlooked; namely, how we deal with stress, feelings of inadequacy and more. Alex burned out last year and would say he’s still recovering a bit from it; it’s not easy doing the freelance thing, but he’s happy to do it and would like to talk about how one gets into the valley of doubt and depression to come out on the other side wiser, happier a better business person/freelancer overall.

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.