Northeast PHP 2018

We've all been there. Whether it's inheriting a codebase with a lot of CSS debt or just careless mistakes from the past coming to haunt us in the present. In this talk, I will share some strategies my coworkers and I have taken when refactoring CSS bloat. Through this talk, you should expect to learn from my mistakes and have a better understanding on what approaches you can do to manage CSS technical debt.

Discover how you can take the stress out of building website and app designs by understanding design concepts and principles from the past. Starting in the early 1900's design principles were established to help those dealing with usability and information design. See how you can take those same principles and apply them to modern visual art and design.
1. Form follows function
Form follows function is a principle associated with 20th-century modernist industrial design which states that the shape of an object should be primarily relate to its intended function or purpose. See how this concept applies to website and app design of today.
2. Less is more
Less is more was made popular by industrial designer Dieter Rams. With all the information “noise” out there this mantra is more important now than ever. Find out how you can iterate your content to show less distractions, and offer your user more relevant information.
3. Always use a grid
During the time of the International typographic style era, grids were heavily used for a purpose. Using a grid is the best way to organize a great amount of content in a manner that is easily interpreted by viewers. Discover how to use grids for both layout and type.
4. Really understand typography
Early in the 20th century Jan Tschichold set forth rules for standardization of practices relating to modern type usage that are still relevant today. At the time he condemned all typefaces except for sans-serif types, advocated standardized sizes of paper and set forth guidelines for establishing a typographic hierarchy when using type in design. Find out how to use these same concepts in your designs.
5. Follow proportions that work
Some designers may intuitively know where to place objects and text on a screen, but many also rely on basic principles of math that allow them to place type and images quickly and with confidence. Discover some of the proportional rules that you can apply to your layouts.

On the East Coast, our startups are known for being able to solve hard tech problems, but often companies get more excited about their technology than in the customer value they're creating. In this talk, we introduce practical framework for building customer-centered tech products. You will learn how to craft and communicate a far-reaching vision and strategy centered around customer needs, and balance that vision with the day-to-day needs of your company.

In this talk, we'll cover the following:
- Intro & Radical Vision: What's a "good" vision? How do you craft a good vision and align your team to that vision?
- Product Strategy: What are the elements of a product strategy? How do you translate your vision into an actionable strategy?
- Prioritization into a Roadmap: How do you translate strategy into a roadmap, especially with the revenue pressures you face as a startup? How do you recognize and pay down "Vision Debt"
- Metrics That Matter: Many of the popular metrics may not apply to your tech product. How do you align metrics & measurement to your product strategy and vision, so you can measure what matters.

This unconference session will be an attendee-driven community discusion for anyone interested in User Experience Design.

Jenna Quindica was working at her third startup when she was diagnosed with bipolar disorder. Her journey has been a rocky one, marked by medication changes, mental health days, and more. She wouldn't have been able to maintain her full-time software engineering job without help, support, and encouragement from her manager and coworkers. Jenna will share how she navigated a diagnosis and now a chronic, mental illness. This is a story with a happy ending. Attendees will walk away feeling more comfortable discussing mental health in the workplace and everyday life.

Working in a new role could be daunting and challenging for newcomers. It's not only about the technical challenges but could be a lot to learn about specialized domain knowledge and how effective team communication works. How do newcomers find answers to all these questions? How do they know what is the best path for the given problem? How can they be sure that they're challenged to think differently and guided toward professional growth?

Effective mentorship can help to answer these questions and make sure that the new person feels confident in their position. Mentoring is a process of teaching and growth - making sure to bring mentee to the speed of required team knowledge and expertise. The mentor acts as a guide and challenges mentee to think creatively about the given problem. It is essential for the mentee to discuss their questions with the mentor and get guidance if something is not quite clear. However, this should not be mistaken as a readymade path to the full solution. The mentee is expected to listen to mentor, clarify any doubts, research on its own and apply the advice to get to the solution.

I have previously worked as a mentor at my current organization and I would like to share some of the thoughts and experience I gained during the process. I was fortunate enough to get some of the best mentors when I first started working in the software industry a few years ago. As a person who worked as a mentor and mentee, I would like to share my thoughts from both the perspectives. My goal is to make this talk useful for people who are excited to be mentors in the future by letting them know the elements of effective mentorship and for mentees teaching them how to leverage mentoring to establish the strong foundation and planning for long-term growth.

We often find ourselves designing against a tight deadline compromising how we get things done and the way we work together. We can lose sight of our client's needs if we focus only on the frontend interface. And can we call a newly designed website a success if the client resents entering content or is constantly confused by how to edit or add to the CMS? Ultimately, interface design is only one component of the full user experience and in order to design a system that truly meets a client's needs, UX thinking must be integrated through all phases of a website build.

This session will provide an overview of how we can apply UX thinking to our client's end experience and why it's important for UX designers and their teams. Using a case study of a large organization looking to create and manage their own content we'll explore the value of collecting client input, strategies for integrating client needs into your system UI, and understanding how and what to communicate to development teams as they build a back end structure for our designs.

Attendees will gain insight into strategies and tools that have helped our agency improve internal workflow and client that they can apply to their own projects.
-- The importance of collecting client input and how to document it.
-- Strategies for integrating client needs into your system UI.
-- How UX designers and developers can effectively communicate.

The tech talent shortage continues. Some experts predict that the push toward automation will only exasperate the challenge and create a generation of workers that may struggle to keep pace. This talk is designed to offer a case study of seven years of virtual self-study group training offered by Boston PHP Meetup that contributed to membership growth from 1,000 to 3,700 members. This talk will explain the concept of a virtual self-study group -- blended learning using existing resources at virtually no cost. These groups include the following:

~ PHP Percolate
~ jQuery jAM
~ HTML5 Brunch
~ Git Lunch
~ Drupal Diner
~ Agile Appetizer
~ Angular Stew
~ AWS Snack
~ WordPress Dressing

In this community discussion about the hiring process, get insight into one manager's thought process and learn how to ace your next interview.