January 2018 ***Not Beginner*** Meetup

LoopConf talk previews! Not just one, but two of our meetup members are speaking at LoopConf (https://loopconf.com/) in February and are going to preview their talks for us.

While this is a meetup in our “***Not Beginner***” series, anyone at any experience level is welcome to attend, but there will be an assumption in the presentations and discussion that attendees have prior knowledge of WordPress.

1) Developing on The Front-End: Chrome Developer Tools
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Are you debugging your JavaScript by writing console.log statements – the front-end equivalent of using “echo” or “var_dump” in PHP?

Being primarily a back-end developer, I was accustomed to using XDEBUG as part of my workflow, but often fell back on rudimentary debugging skills when it came to debugging JavaScript or diagnosing performance issues from the front-end.

Enter Chrome Developer Tools. It seems that every time I look, this little window in Chrome gets more and more features that save me time and headaches debugging, testing and optimizing my web pages. Whether I’m stepping through JavaScript, Debugging CSS, Testing REST API calls, or auditing page performance, Chrome’s Developer Tools are there to help. In this session, I’ll share with you some of the features that have made this tool an essential part of my toolbox. I’ll show you how how to diagnose a page’s performance issues, audit a page for accessibility, review page security,inspect calls made to the REST API, and more.

Presented by: Shawn Hooper. Shawn has been a web developer since the mid 1990s, watching the web grow from simple and tags to the complex mix of markup and languages it is today. He is now the Director of IT at learning and development startup Actionable.co, as well as being a freelance WordPress developer in his “spare time”. Shawn has a few contributions to WordPress Core under his belt, and will be taking on the role of Lead Organizer for WordCamp Ottawa in 2018.

2) Refactoring the Disaster No One Is Talking About: How We’re Handling JavaScript Tech Debt in WP Migrate DB Pro
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An issue a lot of WordPress teams are facing (including the current Gutenberg discussions) is how do you implement new and shiny JavaScript into an existing WordPress application?

JavaScript technical debt can be a disaster, but working with legacy code doesn’t have to be all doom and gloom. WP Migrate DB Pro has a *lot* of JavaScript tech debt in our existing codebase but how much time should our team be devoting to it versus adding new features?

In this talk, Peter (the WP Migrate DB Pro team lead), will talk through how to balance solving new problems while refactoring an old codebase.

Some of the questions Peter will address include:
– How to update your build tooling from Grunt to Webpack/npm scripts
– How to avoid rewriting your jQuery soup but still use the latest shiny JavaScript
– Switching to ES2015 syntax and modules

Very much a show-and-tell, you should walk away from this talk knowing some of the pitfalls to avoid (don’t make the same mistakes as us!) and some tricks you can implement today to help you balance this in your own JavaScript development.

Presented by: Peter Tasker. Peter is a PHP and JavaScript developer from Ottawa, Ontario, Canada. He currently works on refactoring all the code on the WP Migrate DB Pro team at Delicious Brains. In a previous life, he worked for marketing and public relations agencies. Loves WordPress, dislikes FTP.

Meeting Details:
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This is a meetup in our “***Not Beginner***” series. This series of talks is for WordPress (or related) presentations that are not at a beginner level.

Anyone at any experience level is welcome to attend, but there will be an assumption in the presentations and discussion that attendees have some knowledge of WordPress.

Senate Room, 6th Floor – Robertson Hall (http://carleton.ca/campus/map/#RO), Carleton University, 1125 Colonel By Drive.

Parking on campus requires payment, but all of the lots, including the garage just to the north of Roberson Hall, cap at $8 for the evening after 5pm. http://www5.carleton.ca/parking/visitors/parking-rates/

Agenda
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7:00 – General announcements
7:05 – Presentations
8:30 – Wrap-up