Boston WordPress Meetup

Agenda

• 6:30: Networking & Pizza

• 7:00: Presentations

Presentation 1: Design Systems, Distilled (Ashley Kolodziej)
Get ready to bring your ideas to life! In this talk, you’ll learn what a design system is, how it bridges the gap between design and development, and how it can help you achieve your professional goals no matter what team you’re on. We’ll also take a live look at the official WordPress Figma file as well as community WordPress Figma files, and learn some quick tips and tricks to help you get started towards designing your next project on the way. All backgrounds and experience levels welcome!

Bio: Ashley Kolodziej is a design systems specialist with over 10 years of experience in the WordPress space. She currently works at Moody’s Analytics, where she uses a mixture of Figma and React to help teams of designers and developers align across rapidly evolving products and user needs. She is an organizer and active participant in New England GiveCamp as well as Boston WordPress, a lecturer at Boston University’s College of Communication, and a big fan of the Fediverse and IndieWeb.

Presentation 2: You Got Your AI In My WP: WordPress and Artificial Intelligence (John Eckman)
The tech world has been abuzz with Artificial Intelligence (AI) lately, especially since the release of ChatGPT 4. But aside from posting memes about our new robot overlords, or worrying about skynet achieving sentience, what can AI actually do for users in WordPress? We’ll take a look at a couple of tools designed to use the power of AI to help WordPress content creators, including 10up’s own ClassifAI and Jetpack’s AI Assistant, and how you can start experimenting with them on your own WordPress sites.

Bio: John Eckman is the CEO of 10up, Inc, a global, enterprise-focused WordPress agency. He’s been active in the web design and development community going back to hand coding HTML (before CSS) and Perl scripts for your cgi-bin. He’s spent the last 20+ years in agency services, helping clients understand the power of the web and open source. He’s the founding organizer of WordCamp Boston and one of the organizers of the Boston WordPress meetup.

A2 Hosting - https://www.a2hosting.com/

Microsoft New England Research and Development team (NERD) - https://www.microsoftnewengland.com/