Shaimoom Newaz is an art, code and bass enthusiast.

As a kid, copying Frank Miller and Jae Lee figures, he discovered an ability to transcribe what his creative core was yearning to express. After years of ink and acrylic renderings of his imagination, he reluctantly embraced the digital landscape. However, he thrived with his fellow creatives at the UCLA Design | Media Arts Program. With time, learning, practice and mentorship, he found myself loving the new possibilities with the digital world.

Shaimoom embraced code like the new girlfriend of his best friend: knowing he should be nice and get to know her, but reluctant to understand her for fear of her disturbing a familiar relationship. It turned out that front-end development was another exciting medium for his creativity. As his aesthetic was changing to more minimalist, color-heavy design, learning CSS and JavaSctipt allowed him to make magic with lines and grids in browsers. Today, he is a designer/developer evangelist who trains young unicorns how to fly.

Bass (as in music, not fish) has been a part of Shaimoom since the teen years. He has DJed for almost 2 decades, so music has always been a part of the equation. Even though he loves songs across the music genre spectrum, bass music affects his core and allows him to find energy when he needs it most, harmony when he’s feeling disjointed and a smile on his face in traffic while everyone else is road raging.

Shaimoom will be hosting the Design Track Panel titled, “What’s Your Workflow?”

The panel will be a Q and A style session with questions coming from both Shaimoom and the audience. Some topics will likely cover:

• Inspiration: In web design, where does it come from? Where do the experts look ti find it?
• Creation: What do we use to create? For both the designer and developer, there are new tools constantly coming out…what are people using?
• Materialization: I have created. Now what? Take your creation and give it value: there are plenty of tools to help facilitate materialization of our creative ideas all the way to bank!
• Contribution: Giving back. Contribution takes many forms: Forums, bug fixes, hacker challenges, meetups, WordCamps, etc. Where can you contribute?

Marty is a freelance WordPress developer based in Los Angeles. He has been working with WordPress for over 8 years now and from the start has been drawn to pushing the boundaries of what is possible with WordPress. Starting with hacking around on Kubrick, growing to plugin and theme development, Marty finally took the leap of using MultiSite to build PhotographyBlogSites.com, a Website-as-a-Service for photographers.

Marty will be speaking about Integrating WordPress with External APIs.

External APIs open the doors to a lot of possibilities and potential problems. Fortunately WordPress provides many tools to make life easier. Marty will look at some of the ways to make use of external APIs, including using the WordPress HTTP API to connect and pull in data and using transients, options and post meta to store it.

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Konstantin is a WordPress developer, and Core contributor based in Southern California. After contributing to Twenty Twelve, he was the backup lead and main developer for Twenty Thirteen and Twenty Fourteen, the most recent default themes. At Automattic he’s is part of a team that contributes back to WordPress full time. He enjoys craft beers and good food — sometimes so much that he blogs about it.

Panel Participant: Writing Code for Other Developers

If you ask a WordPress developer what they spend their time doing, they’ll tell you that they spend most of their time writing code. However, if you actually observe what they spend their time doing, you’ll find that they spend most of their time trying to understand code. How can WordPress developers write code that’s more readable, scalable and adopted?

Pippin Williamson is an avid WordPress plugin developer from Hutchinson, Kansas and the lead developer for several large WordPress plugins, including AffiliateWP, Easy Digital Downloads, and Restrict Content Pro.

Beyond the world of WordPress, Pippin is a devoted father and husband. He thoroughly enjoys brewing coffee varieties from around the world, indulging in craft beers, and riding his bicycle from point A to point B whenever possible.

WCSD Session Preview: Best Practices in Plugin Development

This session will cover some of the general best practices that all plugin developers should be following while also looking at some of the more advanced development techniques that can help propel you from a good plugin developer to a great one.

Tabby works at the University of California in Irvine as an Academic Applications Developer where she has the joy of working with WordPress for the School of Biological Science’s website. She has worked with WordPress since WordPress 1.5 was a shiny play-thing, developing both plugins and themes; Tabby is always chasing after the latest and greatest standards and best practices. She spends her free time, often, creating complex applications and websites using WordPress. And when she’s not doing that, she desperately trying to catch up on all the things she’s missed out on like “TV” and “Books” and “Friends”.

WCSD 15′ Session: What You Can do with the Heartbeat API

In a world of waterfalls made of your data and information, sometimes it’s a little challenging finding creative ways to capture and display this data from your own perspective. Or perhaps you want to find ways of updating yourself on the latest happenings on your blog while kicking back with your beer hat, without having to deal with hitting refresh all the time. Whatever problem you encounter that requires real-time information, Heartbeat API just might be the solution for you. A beautiful silent conversation between your client and your server can result in some of the most useful and or beautiful work you’ve pretty much ever created. This session is a developer session designed to introduce the beginning to mid-level developer to the concept of the “Heartbeat” and give a working example of how it can be applied in a useful context, as well as some things to think about regarding server performance as you ‘tick’ away on your site.