Featured Speaker: Taylor Lovett

Taylor is a core contributor, plugin contributor, and plugin author. He works for 10up as a Senior Strategic Engineer. He has a BS in Computer Science. He builds really cool stuff on the web with WordPress!

Presentation: What You Missed in Computer Science

Computer Science is a big part of web development and WordPress whether you know it or not! This talk will explain what Computer Science actually entails. You will see WordPress through the lens of someone with a Computer Science degree.

We will talk about ways to describe code performance using Big-Oh notation comparing different post meta and taxonomy queries. We will also discuss concurrency as it applies to WordPress, specifically data races and how they can occur while counting post views.

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Featured Speaker: Jennifer Johannesen

Jennifer Johannesen runs Low to the Ground, the Toronto-based WordPress development and training company she founded in 2008. Jennifer has almost 20 years of experience developing websites for clients and digital agencies, and for the past five years has worked exclusively with WordPress. At last count she has built just over 200 custom WP sites for a wide range of clients.

Jennifer thinks of WordPress as the Great Enabler – helping individuals to realize their dreams and organizations to achieve their goals. Because she doesn’t get out much, she’s especially excited about coming to Toronto WordCamp and meeting fellow WP enthusiasts!

Jennifer is also an author and active blogger with a particular interest in bioethics and patient advocacy.

Presentation: WordPress for your Small (but Mighty!) Business

Using real-life examples and helpful dos and don’ts, we will look at how WordPress can be implemented to accomplish your business goals.

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Featured Speaker: Lucas Cherkewski

Lucas is a passionate advocate of web publishing, and he’s worked with WordPress for 3 years. He designs and develops websites for clients of all sizes, finding the web publishing solution that works for them. He lives in the outskirts of Waterloo, ON, where he can be frequently found walking around or experimenting with his other passion, cooking. You can follow him on Twitter at @lchski.

Presentation: Be the Perfect Client: A Guide for Hiring a Developer

Moving all the way from finding a good developer to how to work with them effectively, we’ll cover the whole process. We’ll learn how a good developer can save you money, and what you should do to be the perfect client that makes the whole process as smooth as possible.

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Featured Speaker: Avery Swartz

Avery Swartz is a Toronto-based award-winning web designer, consultant, speaker, and tech skills instructor. A self-described design geek, she helps to demystify the web for small business owners, charities, and arts organizations. In addition to her web design work, Avery is the founder and lead instructor of Camp Tech, offering practical, professional tech skills training in a fun and friendly environment.

Avery has been an active participant in Toronto’s WordPress community for a number of years, and as one of our illustrious Sunday panelists, she’s bringing her tech and business chops to WordCamp Toronto 2013.

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Sunday Schedule Now Available

The Sunday schedule for WordCamp Toronto 2013 is now available.

This is the most ambitious Sunday we’ve ever done, with a full day of workshops and panels plus a second day of catered lunch! There are four tracks:

1.) D.I.Y WordPress gets you working with WordPress at a novice development level. The goal here is to give you the skillset to customize your site.

2.) Making a Living with WordPress is for all of the freelancers, contractors, and agencies who work with WordPress on a day-to-day basis. This track talks less about the code and more about the business: handling clients, managing projects, providing training, and so on.

3.) WordPress Development is all tech. ‘Nuff said.

4.) Community Code kicks off with WordPress project demos from local shops before diving into a panel discussion and wrapping up with a hackathon tackling Trac.

With just a little over two weeks to go, now’s the time to register!

Note for panelists: We’ve rearranged some of the panel names and groupings, but content is the same. We’ll be contacting you shortly with updated details about the discussion panels. Thanks!

Bluehost WordPress Hosting

Sponsor Showcase: Bluehost

Bluehost has been providing quality web hosting solutions to businesses and individuals since 1996. Our goal is to provide outstanding services for the best possible price. To achieve these goals we are constantly innovating and upgrading our services at no additional cost to our customers. Come and join the millions of other website owners that have already chosen Bluehost and see how we can help you with your site.

From the business owner to the individual who desires full functionality on a small budget, Bluehost provides your complete web hosting solution.

Please visit Bluehost.com for more information.

Featured Speaker: Mo Jangda

Mo Jangda wrangles code and VIPs at WordPress.com. He enjoys ice cream and other sugary things. Follow Mo on Twitter.

Presentation: Caching; for fun and profit

Simple caching patterns and ways to better handle caching at a code-level in your WordPress sites, themes, and plugins.

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Schedule Now Available

The tentative Saturday schedule for WordCamp Toronto 2013 is now available!

Key points:

  • Registration kicks off earlier this year at 8:00am.
  • Rather than gathering everyone in a common area for opening remarks, we have something special in mind for the welcome message at 8:45am. Details TBA!
  • Thanks to the earlier start, we’ve managed to fit in an additional hour of sessions.
  • The Sunday schedule is still being developed.
  • Sessions that are not linked in the schedule still need to be added to the site.
  • This is a tentative schedule. Session times and tracks may change.

A big thanks to co-organizers Ed and Terri Caissie for all their hard work in assembling the schedule this year. At a grand total of 28 sessions, it’s a whopping ten sessions bigger than what we did for Saturday in 2011 and 2012. (Woo!)

If you have any questions about the schedule, shoot us a message.

Sponsoring? Speaking? Volunteering? Attending? We’ve got web badges for ya!

Our last few WordCamps lacked web badges. 🙁

Thanks to Meetup group member and in-kind sponsor Patrice Atwell of Atwell Design, we’ve finally cleared that hurdle this year!

We’ve got a lovely batch of web badges for you to add to your WordPress website or blog.

Head on over to our new Web Badges page to take a look for yourself! You can also find your way to the page under Get Involved > Web Badges in our navigation menu.

wcto2013-attending-badge

Dreamhost Sponsor Spotlight

Sponsor Showcase: DreamHost

DreamHost is a global Web hosting and cloud services provider with over 350,000 customers and 1.2 million blogs, websites and apps hosted. The company offers a wide spectrum of Web hosting and cloud services including Shared Hosting, Virtual Private Servers (VPS), Dedicated Server Hosting, Domain Name Registration, the cloud storage service, DreamObjects, and the cloud computing service DreamCompute.

Please visit DreamHost.com for more information.

As a personal aside: I’ve been a happy DreamHost customer since April 2006. They’re my go-to provider for domain name registration, in part because of their free domain WHOIS privacy service.

A big thanks to DreamHost for their support of WordCamp Toronto 2013!