Lucas is a full-time high school student, a job which is sometimes more demanding than the freelance gig he pulls during evenings and weekends. He believes that humans are people, too, and that we move so quickly we forget that nowadays. Public speaking is one of his favourite activities. You can follow Lucas on Twitter.

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Presentation: Designing Creativity

Design doesn’t have to be something that requires special talent, nor is it something limited to so-called “creative” people. Design is a skill, to be learnt and practiced like any other.

We’ll learn how to apply the principles of problem solving to a real design project to remove the necessity of a “creative” mind, and gain some tips for good design thinking along the way.

“I’m a Senior Web Engineer at 10up, the lead developer of the Pods Framework, a father/husband, a musicophile, and enjoy playing my Ukulele. I’m a developer who loves to make awesome things for people to do awesome things.”

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Presentation: The new Metadata Registration API

We will be going over the new Metadata UI / API project (http://github.com/wordpress-metadata/metadata-ui-api) and the far reaching impacts it will have once it reaches adoption into WP core in 4.2+.

“I work with small and medium-sized businesses to create amazing web experiences, usually with WordPress. I’ve been working with WordPress for as long as I can remember and I absolutely love traveling to WordCamps around the US and Canada to share what I’ve learned!”

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Presentation: WordPress Project Management 101

“I’ll be focusing on how you can manage a WordPress development project from start to finish: writing great proposals, working with project management software, learning to communicate with clients, and more.”

“I’m a freelance web application developer, and have been building web applications for the federal government and private sector for almost 20 years now.”

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Presentation: Save Time By Managing WordPress from the Command Line

WP-CLI is a set of tools that allow you to manage your WordPress installation from the command line. Many of the features of WP-CLI are huge timesavers. I’ll demonstrate the installation of WP-CLI and explain many the features that come with it. I recommend this presentation for anyone designing or developing in WordPress.

Billy Gregory is a Sr. Accessibility Engineer with The Paciello Group. Having spent many years as a front-end developer, Billy can relate to many of the challenges and the apprehension faced by developers who are new to accessibility.

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Presentation: Use ARIA Now!

In this session we will jump right in and use ARIA and HTML5 to create modern, accessible web applications. Starting with the basics, and working up to some more advanced examples, attendees will learn how to start using ARIA right away.

David’s career in digital products began while he was a production and product manager at the Financial Post and then at Canada NewsWire where his work focused on the publication of financial information products for the professional investor markets.

More recently, he has focused on improving project results through the building of high-performance teams.

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Presentation: Intro to Agile Practices

The session is intended for people new to Agile concepts and so will the key points of the Agile Manifesto as well as an intro exercise intended to introduce a number of the key practices of Scrum to participants.

Rick Radko is the founder and lead developer/designer of R-Cubed Design Forge and co-founder of LumosTech Training. He began building web sites and applications in 1996, and has been creating websites with WordPress since 2008.

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Presentation: Multisite for Multilingual

This talk is about creating a multilingual WordPress site using WordPress multisite. The talk will cover: the basics of setting up multisite, some plugins to make it easier to create a multilingual site, pros & cons of using multisite for multilingual sites, and some tips and tricks to help with your sites.

“Web Designer, Developer, Blogger and Mentor for the past 15 years. My loyalty shifted from HTML pages to CMS like WordPress and Joomla as I developed 5 of my own and more than 2 dozen WordPress primarily installations. With the intro of WordPress 3.0 I began to work exclusively with it for Web designs requiring a CMS.”

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Presentation: WP Front-End Editors

In the past 3-5 years WordPress has seen the emergence of frontend Visual Theme Designers that can be applied to both posts and pages. Headway Themes, Pagelines DMS, Ultimatum and Bakery’s Visual Composer are among these tools.

This presentation will examine the question – is there a rock solid WordPress Visual Designer?

Janis has over 10 years of professional experience as a multi-disciplinary Digital Designer. She has worked at Rogers Digital Media and Metroland Media advocating web and usability standards. In the latter, she had a key role as a self-made accessibility specialist. She currently works at Influitive as a User Experience Designer.

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Presentation: How to Perform an Accessibility Audit

“In my experience, I worked as a self-made accessibility advocate when AODA came down the pipe early this year. With limited time, and resources, I had to develop a strategy on my own as to how to perform this audit and work with developers to implement the changes.

As the field is so new, and there were no local leaders I could turn to as a mentor, I waded through much of this on my own. This is my chance to pass along these lessons as things I wish I knew when I started out.”

“I have been designing, building and running intranets and other web stuff since 1997. Currently I head the team responsible for OPSpedia, the Government of Ontario’s WordPress-based, employee-facing professional networking platform and intranet hosting solution.”

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Presentation: 1000 sites: MultiSite as an intranet hosting platform

Case study of OPSpedia, which uses WordPress MultiSite as a hosting platform for numerous Ministry and enterprise intranets, as well as a blogging platform and professional networking site for Government of Ontario employees.