As an outdoor enthusiast, Mendel loves backpacking, camping, hiking, and tuning his outdoor survival skills. His technology interests include machine insights, data patterns, structured data, and scaled database infrastructure. After learning Pascal in high school, Mendel went on to work in various roles programming in Python, Perl, C++, ASP .NET, and PHP. When he’s not working, you can find Mendel at a local Austin eatery, sipping on gourmet coffee, and/or prototyping new web apps.

From scrappy beginnings as an entrepreneur and Web consultant for local businesses in Iowa, he found his way to corporate America as a developer, marketer, and inventor. These days, Mendel works as the head GoDaddy Evangelist and spends his time hanging out with developers, designers, entrepreneurs, and web pros around the world and making sure their opinions and suggestions are heard. His job is to bring actionable feedback to the GoDaddy organization to help inform innovation within products, services, documentation, and procedures within the company.

As a WordCamp veteran, Mendel has attended twelve WordCamps on two continents and is responsible for creating the “Pretty Pre” plugin. He’s spoken in numerous places including Tippe Strategic Innovation Academy, National SBDC Conference, and WordCamp Toronto just to name a few.

Summary of Session

Get ready for an engaging and interactive presentation where you’ll learn the value of structured data and how it impacts the appearance of your search results. ‘Making sense of structured data’, will teach you the fundamentals of structured data, show multiple use-cases for its use, and leave you with a clear actionable strategy on how to implement structured data on your own WordPress website.

Google and other search engines use schema.org formatted structured data to power rich snippets in search results, and data crawlers use standardized data to build machine learning muscle. These rich snippets make a search listing stand out, and effect the way someone might interactive with your website based on the listing. This talk focuses on understanding what a schema and markup is, and how you can use the PODS framework to easily add schema.org structured data information to your WordPress content to improve the Google search listing for your content.

Specifically, you’ll take away:

• An understanding of the value of structured data, and how it can increase or decrease the search traffic to your website.
• A solid conceptual knowledge of structured data, and how it relates to other real-world systems.
• The fundamentals of how to use structured data schema entities, and how to implement them on your WordPress site.
• How to leverage PODS framework to easily create re-usable structured data widgets for specific post categories.

Dave Jesch is the Principal and CTO at SpectrOM Technologies, a web application development firm specializing in systems integration, custom plugins and eCommerce solutions.

Dave had his first paying gig with a CPA at the age of 16. In his 20’s, he developed and packaged his first software product, Win:Probe. This new technology quickly gained popularity among developers and became a huge success.

Backed by 35+ years of experience in software development, Dave has consulted and worked with many large companies such as Disney, IBM and Symantec, specializing in architecting and prototyping 1.0 products.

As a full stack developer with a passion in object-oriented programming, he pushes WordPress to the limit bridging traditional architectural techniques with innovative creative strategies.

Having a great cup of coffee in the morning while putting 0’s and 1’s in various formats is priceless in his eyes. He will geek out between sessions for a donut!

WCSD Session: Object Oriented Programming and WordPress

Scalability and stability is a MUST in today’s plugin development world. A solid architecture promotes healthy expandable code. Objected Oriented Programming can take your code into new realms of possibilities.

For beginners, the benefits of Object Oriented Programming will be shared in comparison to Procedural code, along with basic principles and techniques.

For intermediate developers, step by step how-to’s will be presented in this session if you are looking to make a smooth transition into Objected Oriented Programming.

For experienced WordPress Developers wanting to take their code to the next level, practical tips and examples will be provided for immediate implementation. Yes! There will be code.

Roy was born and raised in San Francisco and witnessed the growth of the internet and the companies built on it first hand. He picked up coding at a very young age, and has been a developer in some way for the majority of his life. Sivan has been using WordPress for a long time, he first built on WordPress version 0.7 and has been a user or developer in some capacity since. Today he likes to focus more on what he can build with WordPress that pushes the boundaries of what people think WordPress can do. Roy also likes taking other technologies and finding a way to use them in WordPress.

I also love the community that WordPress has, and am building plugins and web applications which I hope work as tools to help bring the community together. Through ARC(CTRL) we have had the chance to build some great plugins that, as well as web applications like CodingOfficeHours which help people connect and get help from other people in the community.

Roy’s Talk at WCSD 15′

Most people would say WordPress has been evolving since the beginning, but really took a big evolutionary step when Custom Post Types was released in version 3. The WP-API is the next big step in WordPress’s evolution.

A few years ago I wanted to learn AngularJS, but the best way to learn an advanced front end too like Angular is to have a good backend to get data from, I could make static data JSON files, but that wouldn’t be much fun! I decided to build it on WordPress since I knew it so well. Originally I had 1 AngularJS theme that had a huge functions file as I was calling on WP-AJAX and hooking into functions I made to pull data. Ugly, but it worked. I then stumbled on a guy named Ryan who had released a snippet of code which he was using in his Google Summer of Code (GSoC) project, and it was a RESTful API with CRUD endpoints, exactly what I needed.
The WP-API has allowed people to build some really advanced applications and websites already, whether it is allowing their users to connect and get data from the site, or to interact with another technology.

My talk will teach you how to build a single page web application using AngularJS. Client Side technologies, like AngularJS, don’t use the server to render or parse HTML, making them less load on the server, and with a single page application, you are viewing a whole website (or application) from 1 single WordPress page.

Nikhil Vimal is a 15 year-old WordPress developer with a knack for building cool things with WordPress. He’s been heavily involved with the WordPress community for about 2 years. He has contributed to multiple projects including WordPress core and numerous plugins. He can be found tweeting @TechVoltz and blogging at nik.techvoltz.com.

Nikhil will be speaking on “The Magic of Enqueuing”.

What is wp_enqueue_script? What is wp_enqueue_style? Well, if you’re asking these questions, this is the session for you! Nikhil will be answering these questions and helping YOU become a better theme or plugin developer. Developing the right way is not always easy, but with a bit of help, you’ll be adding scripts and styles in WordPress the right way in no time.

Alicia St Rose began her adventure with WordPress when a UX friend offhandedly suggested using the CMS for a mutual friend’s website. That was nearly six years ago and the adventure has turned into a torrid love affair. Now she is a freelance developer, exclusively powered by WordPress, and has yet to find a limitation in this magical piece of software.

She is owner, principal designer and developer at Intrepid Realist Design, a small agency that employs one. In addition to creating for WordPress, she offers WordPress coaching to WP users who are just starting to flutter their wings.

She currently lives in Santa Barbara, California with her two rambunctious cats, Oscar and Milo. She divides her time between that seaside town and Black Rock City, Nevada.

Oh, and her favorite color is red.

Her talk at WCSD 2015 will be on “Functional Design” (design development).

Perhaps you’ve heard of the this mythical creature called the Unicorn? Not the one that dispenses rainbows, but the techie one, the one who designs AND develops for the web. A one-person agency, so to speak. As a front end designer, you may shudder at the thought of mucking through code and regard it as something akin to Alchemy. Alicia is going to demonstrate that learning a bit of code and where to put it can not only empower you but also give you more freedom and control over your designs. Imagine a magical place where you can cast a spell and get the exact results you were looking for on your front end and back end of your WordPress theme. That place of wonder is located in the functions.php file. Go on a short journey where she will show you why the functions file includes the word “fun”!