Energize 2018

I Cured My Imposter Syndrome Using This One Weird Trick

Described as “feelings of incompleteness or being not good enough,” Imposter Syndrome is commonly found in developers and tech workers everywhere. We’re encouraged to change our mindsets around our work, ask questions, or generally pull ourselves up by our bootstraps in order to overcome bouts of this, but as with all syndromes, nobody talks about a cure. If pulling psychological tricks on ourselves isn’t delivering the goods, we’re encouraged to keep trying (and failing,) and thus stacking just one more thing we can’t do on that depressing list. I have cured my crippling Imposter Syndrome, without setting out to do so. I’ll show you a surprising way I discovered its root and worked with little effort to positively affect my mindset at work and elsewhere, without the additional adoption of religion, therapy, or other alternative thinking. I’ll take you through some of the discoveries I made about my condition that, in solely acknowledging, improved my experience at work almost immediately and set me up for a deeper understanding of where my condition originated.

Bio

Caroline Blaker
Principal, Petroglyph Creative

Caroline C. Blaker founded Petroglyph Creative in 2010 and has been “living the dream,” ever since. A typical day involves coding, design, and demystifying the odd world of the internet for her clients. She is driven by problem solving, data visualization, and really bright colors (too bright, sometimes.) While not at work, she enjoys gardening, self-care, making blueberry desserts, and spending time with her family.

Let Go and Let the User: Giving Your Client the Control They Deserve

We all do it - hardcode solutions because it’s too time consuming giving our clients the ability to edit certain types of data. This talk will cover the ExpressionEngine setup and development of multiple real-world cases showing how we can give clients more control over their content leveraging both native and various third-party add-ons.

Bio

Jason Boothman
Front-End Architect, Reusser Design

Jason works at Reusser Design, located in Roanoke, Indiana. From design to development, he has been building websites since High School and has been an avid user of ExpressionEngine for the last 6 years. When not working, Jason enjoys spending time with his wife and three kids, reading books, watching sports, and playing video games.

How to sell ExpressionEngine in a competitive situation

Have you ever been asked to build a Drupal site? How about WordPress? Your client/prospect is pushing for the CMS they think they want, what do you do? This presentation will discuss how to frame the conversation and tactics and strategies that have worked for our firm to help our clients select the CMS that is right for them.

Bio

Lydia Chiu
Partner, Jub Jub

Lydia is a partner at Jub Jub Interactive with over 15 years of programming and web development expertise. Prior to joining Jub Jub, Lydia was a Solutions Architect at Vignette Corporation, an enterprise content management software company, where she served as the technical team leader for several years. During her tenure, she served clients in a variety of industries including travel, automotive, software, and financial. Her client list included enterprise accounts such as American Express, Honda, Nissan, and Hewlett Packard, and start-up clients such as Orbitz.com and Shopping.com. Lydia’s expertise includes a deep understanding of content management (CMS) systems and enterprise application development.

Her current interests include mobile application development, mojitos, and tumblr.

Using Docker for ExpressionEngine Development

You’ve probably heard about Docker, but what is it? How does it work? Kevin is co-presenting with Nick Johnson from Reusser Design, and they’ll cover all the basics and show you how you can stop fighting your development environment and have one that just works.

Bio

Kevin Cupp
Senior Software Engineer, EllisLab

Kevin Cupp is a software writer from Blacksburg, Virginia. Since learning HTML in 5th grade, Kevin has gone on to making websites and iOS apps for clients, and now has been making ExpressionEngine for the past 7 years. He also works on products like Throttle and Mail Pilot to help people with their email.

When not writing software, you can find Kevin spending time with his wife and newborn baby, playing guitar, doing freelance videography, collecting movie props, attending Phish shows, and going to Docker meetups.

Run your project like a Project Manager

In the session, we will talk about how PMs handle complex digital projects, and the tips and tricks we use to keep projects on track. I’ll discuss how to handle scope creep by firmly establishing scopes upfront (and how to reinforce scope throughout the project), how to recognize risk (and give examples of typical risks that people may not think of), and how to handle client issues like delays and indecision (and how to do so without damaging the client relationship). Participants will leave the session with actionable, helpful tools that they can put into practice immediately to keep their projects in scope, on time, and within budget, all with proven PM practices.

Bio

Patrice Embry
Freelance Digital Project Manager

Patrice started managing digital projects 20 years ago, starting with a pioneering ecommerce music company during the .com boom in the 90s.  Since then, she’s managed projects big and small for companies, agencies, and now as a freelance project manager - projects ranging from mobile apps to large scale CMS-driven websites, and even print projects on occasion.  An active member and writer for the larger Digital Project Management community, she’s bringing her PM skills to EEConf to share!

Demystifying EE Services

While the service layer for EE was introduced in version 3, many developers have overlooked or underused this powerful design pattern for creating well-organized, easy to use addons. This talk will go through EE service basics as well as take a deeper dive into use cases and methods of implementation. Additionally, we will cover using services from other addons and EE core services. Attendees will leave this talk ready to build and use services in their own addon development.

Bio

Julian Fann
Technical Lead, Vector Media Group

Julian is a full-stack developer with a focus on modular, scalable systems that abstract complexity in favor of simple interfaces. Starting with ExpressionEngine version 1.6, he has developed sites and created custom addon solutions for industry leaders Solspace and Vector Media Group. Julian works remotely from Northern Virginia where he lives with his wife and a very tiny dog.

Marketing Workshop For Freelance Dev’s

Looking to work with agencies or development teams as a freelancer?  Sit down with current agency owners and development team leads to review your personal marketing strategy and messaging with the people that actually make these decisions.

Bio

Ben Fjare
Owner, Digital Development Director, Prime Incorporated

The resident bald guy in the Prime office, Ben is the guy for all things digital at Prime. From leading the team to a great new user interface to creating outstanding experiences on the web.

Born and raised in the small town of Big Timber, MT (pop: 1,600). Ben attended Montana State University majoring in Graphic Design while playing football for the Bobcats. After graduation Ben received the Bronze Pencil Award for excellence in Graphic Design.

Ben enjoys traveling in his freetime, riding motorcycles, a fine italian meal, and a glass of quality scotch, and yelling at a TV during Green Bay Packer games.

Heavily involved in the Bozeman community Ben has his hands in a little of everything. A former board member for the local Big Brothers Big Sisters chapter, coaching youth football for over a decade, putting on the local PRCA rodeo, and volunteering his time for many non-profits, giving back is a huge priority for him.

Fun with 3rd Party Services in EE

Third party integrations can supercharge any application. In this talk we’ll walk through EE third party service integration best practices, how to test locally, and how everything functions together. Real world examples will be shown with integration with Elasticsearch, SQS, and a throttling library all on one project. We’ll talk about how to keep these integrations isolated and lessons learned all the way.

Bio

Khaliq Gant
Vector Media Group

Khaliq currently resides in Paris, France, where he lives with his wife. He has a passion for music and building things on the web. Khaliq studied computer science at Columbia University  after doing an undergraduate at Cornell University. He currently works for Vector Media Group and has been busy building a presence for Vector Media Group in Europe.

A Docker-based Development Environment Even I Can Understand

For years, I used MAMP and later Vagrant to run my local development environment. With MAMP I constantly was cluttering my computer with additional dependencies and living in fear of what would happen when my code went live on staging and production servers wildly different than my local setup. Vagrant was a slight improvement, but the virtual machines were monolithic and hard to build. Like many, my first few attempts at Docker failed miserably and left me with more questions than I had going in and very few answers. Through much research and the guiding voices of my colleagues, I’ve finally managed to wrangle the beast that is Docker into a development environment that is more flexible than ever before and yet easy to use. In this session I will walk attendees through the basics of Docker, the components of my Docker development environment and help guide them around some of the pitfalls I came across while I set it up.

Bio

Jeremy Gimbel
Web Services Manager, Vector Media Group

Jeremy has been building websites since middle school and somehow managed to turn that into a career. He lives in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania and works for Vector Media Group. He has been working with ExpressionEngine since 2010 and is known in the community for his artisanal snark. In his spare time he enjoys cooking and baking and occasional antics out on the town.

ExpressionEngine Templating Strategy & Architecture for Highly Efficient Sites

Use ExpressionEngine’s powerful templating features to develop highly efficient, and maintainable ExpressionEngine websites. Create a strategy to stay DRY, and enable new features to be added to the website without making major changes to the existing codebase. The session will cover best practices for delivering the same content to different platforms—from regular Web Pages to Structured Data, and AMP (Accelerated Mobile Pages).

Bio

Pedro Guimaraes
Owner, Willow Light Studio

Pedro has been doing web work in one form or another since the mid 1990s. Over the years, he has gained great appreciation for beautifully designed products — from what the eye can see to the code that drives the product. His passion for well crafted ‘products’ goes beyond the web, and he can be found cooking, photographing, hiking, and building bows and arrows from materials found in the woods.

G.R.I.P.I. - Managing communication conflicts

We all want our communications with clients to be smooth and easy. But have you ever have one of those clients (or coworkers) that is just SO hard to talk to without someone getting upset? Even if it never comes to harsh words, there is a tension that keeps you from wanting to pick up the phone, when it would be the right thing for the project. Often we just say it is a matter of personality. What I offer is another way to look at, plan for, and hopefully prevent those troublesome interactions. GRIPI is a tool taught by a non-profit I have worked with for the last 18 years to help our volunteer staff to help them through these difficult communications with the best customer service outcome possible. So whether the interaction that sprang to mind is internal or external, bring your own personal case study and glean some tricks on how to work through it successfully.

Bio

Tim Hoppe
Project Manager, Creative Arc

Tim serves as a project manager for Creative Arc and has worked with ExpressionEngine for over 10 years. Outside of work, he is an avid cross country skiier (a 12-time finisher in the American Birkebeiner ski marathon). Since 2000 he has been involved with AMUN, the American Model United Nations organization. He lives in the Twin Cities with his wife Katie and their son (and dog Seagan).

Using Docker for ExpressionEngine Development

You’ve probably heard about Docker, but what is it? How does it work? Kevin is co-presenting with Nick Johnson from Reusser Design, and they’ll cover all the basics and show you how you can stop fighting your development environment and have one that just works.

Bio

Nick Johnson
Head of Development, Reusser Design

Nick Johnson, a seasoned developer and all-around interesting guy, heads up mobile and web development initiatives. In that role, he oversees the adherence to best practices, defines and implements modern solutions, and generally improves the way we create our product.

Having worked for some of Fort Wayne’s largest companies and many of its agencies, Nick’s strength is being able to see the big picture while still focusing on the details. He is equally at ease architecting and building complex solutions and communicating those solutions to our clients in terms they can understand.

When Nick isn’t editing tiny code on a big screen — headphones on and hyper-focused — he is probably still writing code someplace, or thinking about code, or busy fragging n00bs on whatever the new online game is this week.

Maintain Your Innovative Edge by Being Different

While being different in business definitely sets you apart, it also comes with a unique set of challenges. Reuben will share what years of operating an unapologetically outside-the-box business has taught him about identity, resilience, and maintaining an innovative edge – gatekeepers be damned.

Bio

Reuben Johnson
Co-Founder & Digital Director, Fly Media Productions

Reuben Johnson is a self proclaimed peace lovin’ revolutionary. He loves dope music, intellectual debates, and anything that moves “the culture” forward. He co-founded Fly Media Productions, a boutique digital agency in 2001 alongside his wife Sherri. His passion for the web stems from an innate desire to create meaningful, relevant, emotional connections that shape culture, build communities, and bridge the gap between culture and commerce.

A/B Testing - Using science to make UX decisions and increase conversions

Most people in our industry have heard of A/B testing, but many don’t know exactly what it is, or how to do it correctly. We’ll cover the basics of what an A/B test is, how to implement them, and how to use the data to improve conversion rates. A/B tests are scientific ways to make UX decisions. If you’ve ever had a battle with someone over what is the best button color to use, which form fields convert better, or what the best placement for a call to action is, then you need to A/B test it. We’ve been performing A/B tests for over a year on jamf.com to try to optimize the design and content of key conversion pages on our site and we’ve learned a lot along the way. We’ll dig into how we perform tests in EE on jamf.com, and show some successes, and failures along the way. This talk may have some technical elements (maybe a small amount of code and EE control panel stuff), but it should be applicable to anyone interested in learning more about A/B testing.

Bio

Charles Kolner
Marketing Data Analyst, Jamf Software

Charles worked in strategy and analytics at ad agencies for several years before taking on a data analyst role at Jamf. He watches world soccer religiously while balancing life as a night owl and an early bird in downtown Minneapolis, MN.

A/B Testing - Using science to make UX decisions and increase conversions

Most people in our industry have heard of A/B testing, but many don’t know exactly what it is, or how to do it correctly. We’ll cover the basics of what an A/B test is, how to implement them, and how to use the data to improve conversion rates. A/B tests are scientific ways to make UX decisions. If you’ve ever had a battle with someone over what is the best button color to use, which form fields convert better, or what the best placement for a call to action is, then you need to A/B test it. We’ve been performing A/B tests for over a year on jamf.com to try to optimize the design and content of key conversion pages on our site and we’ve learned a lot along the way. We’ll dig into how we perform tests in EE on jamf.com, and show some successes, and failures along the way. This talk may have some technical elements (maybe a small amount of code and EE control panel stuff), but it should be applicable to anyone interested in learning more about A/B testing.

Bio

Brian Litzinger
Owner, BoldMinded

Brian is originally from Kentucky, but his home is in Minneapolis with his wife, Collette. He has been building websites since 2000, and using ExpressionEngine since 2008. He currently works at Jamf and sells add-ons at boldminded.com.

ExpressionEngine and UX, What was I thinking?

A presentation of UX beliefs, policies and practices for ExpressionEngine.

The CCO of EllisLab shares his thought process, belief system, and implementation best practices for his approach and implementation of UX/UI design for both EllisLab and ExpressionEngine.

Bio

James Mathias
CCO, EllisLab

James is a father of four, husband of one, Internet Improver, yoyo player, artist, writer and outlaw. He spends his days crafting experiences for ExpressionEngine CMS, and his nights redrawing maps for Age of Steam.

Marketing Workshop For Freelance Dev’s

Looking to work with agencies or development teams as a freelancer?  Sit down with current agency owners and development team leads to review your personal marketing strategy and messaging with the people that actually make these decisions.

Bio

Andy McCormick
Director of Operations, DuBose Web Group

I live in Lexington, SC (just outside Columbia). As Director of Operations and Development, I’m responsible for all of our front and back-end development as well as operations at Dubose Web Group. I love spending time with my family (my Bride, and two sons [6 & 3]).

Building, Growing and Sustaining a Successful Digital Agency

2018 is poised to be another extremely busy year for marketers, complete with never ending communication approaches, media targeting tech and ROI measurement. As digital designers, developers, and marketers the need to stop approaching the world from a perspective of ad campaigns executions and find new and inspirational ways to tell your brand story with content. In this session we will take at the common components of what makes an agency an agency: - what it takes to start an agency - funding (producing a business worthy of fund-worthy or funding internally, or hybrid) - marketing to attract business - staffing - sales cycle (on-boarding, off-boarding) - project management cycle - development cycle - managing cash flow - recurring revenue rules all - Q&A

Bio

Brad Nietfeldt
Omaha Media Group, LLC

Smiling Award Winning Entrepreneur, Investor, Leader, Creator, Divinely Favored, ex-PayPal/eBay Lead Developer, Celebrity Web/Designer/SEO Advisor

Using ExpressionEngine and Vue.js to power your web application

In this workshop, we’ll be diving into connecting a Vue.js front-end application to an API built on ExpressionEngine. We’ll cover setting up a build enviroment, creating both a simple and more complex Vue.js component, getting an API up and running on ExpressionEngine, and talk about error handling and best practices.

Bio

Brandon O’Hara
Chief Technology Officer, Trak Software

Brandon O’Hara is the Chief Technology Officer of Trak Software, a web application helping alleviate communications between Professional Sports teams and their sponsors. Starting web development in 2010, he’s spent much of his professional career developing ExpressionEngine sites and plugins. In recent years, his projects have revolved around Laravel, VueJS, and AngularJS.

Clueless

Tracy Osborn is the author, designer, and self-publisher of three books and the solo founder of a venture-backed startup. Each of these achievements has something in common — being completely clueless about the work and problems involved in each. In this keynote, Tracy will tell stories about how she launched her projects and what she learned (after already being neck-deep.)

Bio

Tracy Osborn
Entreprenerd, Hello Web Books

Tracy Osborn is a designer, developer, and entreprenerd living in Toronto, Canada. She’s the author of Hello Web Books, as well as the creator of WeddingLovely. She’s also an avid outdoorswoman and would love to go on a hike with you.

Creating Your Culture

Every workplace has a culture whether you realize it or not. The best organizations out there tend to shape and influence the culture on purpose. We’re going to look at how everyone in an organization, from the founders to the newest hires, can help create and sustain a healthy culture.

Bio

Erik Reagan
Co-founder & Operations Director, Focus Lab

Chances are, if you’ve spoken to Erik Reagan for any length of time, you’ve heard him talk about his family. His amazing wife and kids are his world and it does not take long to discover that. He is a huge proponent of being intentional with time and keeping work at work. (His wife thinks that’s pretty cool.)

Erik’s career has been an evolution from musician, to developer, to entrepreneur. He has a variety of interests these days, but hat ties them all together is a hunger to learn how and why things work. What was once “How does this chord progression work?” turned into “How does a dependable website get built?” and eventually became “What does it take to build a great company?”

What the Ã�©Ð”ã° is going on!?

Finding Your Way Out of Charset Hell — Say goodbye to cargo cult solutions. Finally get a grasp on character set encoding, learn how it works for PHP apps and MySQL, and become confident in fixing encoding issues once and for all.

Bio

Kevin Smith
Senior Software Engineer, AxisCare

Kevin rescued his income and saved his house in 2008 when he discovered ExpressionEngine and quickly delivered a new client’s site. He then ran his own solo agency for several years, led the support team at EllisLab, and has worked with a handful of digital agencies and software companies alike. He’s on a mission to help developers grow their careers, love what they do, and consistently deliver real customer value. He answers the interns’ questions at https://kevinsmith.io

Marketing Workshop For Freelance Dev’s

Looking to work with agencies or development teams as a freelancer?  Sit down with current agency owners and development team leads to review your personal marketing strategy and messaging with the people that actually make these decisions.

Special Announcements

Susan has some special announcements for us!

UX & You: A simple & practical approach to UX design

People building for the web hear about User Experience (UX) design all the time, and all the magical things UX design can do. But UX is a massive ecosystem, and as soon as you start to learn more it’s easy to get overwhelmed. This session is geared for solo developers, dev shops, smaller agencies, or anyone that doesn’t regularly work with a UX person/team. In this talk, I will provide a high level view of what UX design is and how it fits with web site & app creation. Most of the talk will be spent discussing UX thinking, sharing how developers can support the UX process, and when and how to work with UX designers.

Bio

Susan Snipes
UX Designer & Strategist, Oracle

Susan is a UX Designer and Strategist at Oracle. She’s passionate about mentorship, inclusion and building community in tech. Susan lives in Cleveland, Ohio with her husband and two daughters.

ExpressionEngine Best Practices

ExpressionEngine support guru Robin will pull the curtain back on Fluid Fields, one of ExpressionEngine 4’s headlining features. She’ll show you the basics, the advanced, and even some cool tricks you never thought of to give content authors the ultimate flexibility and power, without compromising the site design or the editing experience.

Bio

Robin Sowell
Development Liaison, EllisLab

Robin got involved with EllisLab products in 2002, using pMachine Pro to build a personal site.  Since then, her casual interest in web development has grown into an obsession.  She’s now a fair hand at PHP and MySQL and enjoys nothing more than seeing what new tricks ExpressionEngine can be coaxed into performing.

Growth Driven Design: A retainer-based web design model that will transform your agency

What if I told you there is a better approach to website design that not only produces better client results, but allows helps your agency grow by flipping to a retainer-based web design model? Find out what over 1000 agencies in 56 counties have discovered: Growth-Driven Design! We will be challenging the assumptions of the traditional web design and walking through the new playbook of Growth-Driven Design. Move away from project-based websites, show clients better results and transform your agency through a smarter web design process. - Your agency cannot afford to miss this.

Bio

Luke Summerfield
Program Manager, Growth-Driven Design, HubSpot

Luke wakes up each morning excited to help others unlock their true potential. He does this as a program manager at HubSpot, writing, speaking, and with his startup, Keyy.io.

Luke founded Growth-Driven Design, the new playbook for building and optimizing websites. In the first year, the program grew from 0 to 1000 web design agencies in 56 countries offering GDD services to clients.

Previous to HubSpot, Luke helped grow a digital marketing and web design agency until it was acquired in 2014.

Bio

Tony Ticknor
Manager of Web Development, Optum UXDS

Tony has been making websites professionally since that dancing baby gif was all the rage. During this time he’s spent more hours than he cares to admit making websites work on all manner of browsers and devices (including the much maligned IE6) for clients like the United Nations, Victoria’s Secret, and Delta. About five years ago, he gave up full-time development and moved into leadership roles where he is known for building high-performing teams that produce quality software. When he’s not busy watching old StrongBad videos you can find him searching for Minneapolis’ best tacos.

The Evolution of Hosting and What’s Next in Cloud Architecture

VP of Sales at Nexcess.net, Josh Ward, will talk on the evolution of hosting and how the first iteration of cloud still leaves something to be desired. Josh will cover the difficulties of replicating production environments for development and how your focus should be on service, not server.

Bio

Josh Ward
VP of Sales, Nexcess

With experience in IT, marketing, and sales, Josh Ward plays a key leadership role in the web hosting industry. Currently the Vice President of Global Sales with Nexcess near Detroit, Michigan, Josh helps create secure, redundant, and scalable solutions for a diverse array of clients. Over the past three years Josh has built out a full sales team at Nexcess and has been a key contributor to accelerated growth at Nexcess consistently setting sales and client acquisition records.   

Josh is originally from southeast Texas, called Austin home for 25 years, and now lives in Brighton, MI. He met his wife, Clesha, in high school while playing basketball. Josh played college football at the Colorado School of Mines, once poked an alligator in the eye and then shot it for trying to bite him, and ate his weight in raw gulf oysters. On the weekends, Josh avidly avoids yard work by spending quality time (sports, fishing, and card games) with Clesha and their four kids who call him “El Jefe.”