Hi, I’m Dara, an independent web designer and front-end developer from Toronto. I’ve worked at a number of places from large organizations to small agencies, and now I run my own small (as in, one person) business. I’ve been creating websites professionally for many years, and well over 3/4 of them are in WordPress! When I’m not designing and coding client sites you can sometimes find me leading Ladies Learning Code workshops, mentoring at HackerYou, or showing up at various meetups around the city.

Aside from my day-to-day work, I’m sometimes also a instructor/mentor at HackerYou and Ladies Learning Code. I haven’t yet spoken at a conference but I’ve had practice talking in front of people by being a Ladies Learning Code lead instructor so I think I’d do just fine!

I’m @daraskolnick on pretty much every social media platform so feel free to stalk away.

Speaking session

Levelling up your development workflow in the Developer track

About Dara’s presentation

My presentation is all about helping WordPress theme developers make their development workflow faster, more efficient, and generally more awesome. I’ll be talking about tools like starter themes, version control, task runners, and CSS preprocessors.

What do you want people to learn from your presentation?

I want people to learn how to develop themes more efficiently. Simply put, time is everyone’s most valuable resource, and a more efficient development workflow can definitely help you save time!

Why did you decide to speak?

WordPress, both the software and the community, has helped me so much in my career that speaking about a topic that’ll help other developers is the least I can do to give back. I’ve learned so much from other people generously sharing their knowledge, and I’m happy to do the same!

What attracted you to WordPress in the first place?

I started developing for WordPress back in the mid-2000s when it was much more simple and blog-centric. Even though it was much more limited in functionality back then, I could see that static, CMS-less websites were becoming a thing of the past, and WordPress felt like the most user- and developer- friendly option. Once WordPress introduced custom post types and taxonomies a few years ago, I got really excited about its potential and knew that I’d be sticking with it for a long time to come!

What is your favourite plugin or theme, and why?

Advanced Custom Fields is by far my favourite plugin. It’s a total game changer because it makes creating beautiful, foolproof admin interfaces for clients a breeze. Before ACF I used to hand-code custom fields and meta boxes in the theme’s functions.php file, and I really don’t miss that process at all.

What are you most looking forward to at WordCamp Toronto?

I’m really looking forward to attending some of the talks on accessibility – I’m glad that accessibility as a topic is finally receiving some long overdue attention! Aside from that, I’m mostly looking forward to meeting awesome people.