What inspired or motivated you to give this talk at WordCamp?
I want to move the web development community beyond a checklist mentality when it comes to web performance. Focusing on the technical checklists often obscures underlying problems that result in slow sites.
How do you “create intention” in your job, career, or life?
I perform with an improv company called Comedy Sportz and we have a game called “What are you doing?” In that game, the question is always answered with something other than what you are actually doing. In normal life and work I often ask myself that question too. I may want the answer to be “writing code to get a test passing” but the answer might actually be “checking email while tracking three Slack rooms.”
If you were a WordPress Plugin, what Plugin would you be and why?
WordPress GitHub Sync. Years ago I rebuilt my blog in Jekyll (and now again in WordPress with GitHub Sync) because I love the idea that anything (content as well as code) can be improved by anyone with a pull request.
If you were not doing your current job, what profession would you be in and why?
I got in to web development because I was working at a theatre company that needed a blog. I made a WordPress site and just kept digging deeper, thinking I might eventually hit bottom and come back up to working in theatre. Now it seems more likely that I’d take my coding experience to the data journalism community.
What professional and/or research resource(s) can’t you live without?
I have gotten hooked on PHPStorm recently. Compared to simpler text editors it makes navigating multiple files so easy. Learning a codebase gets much faster.