Presentations

I have given 70+ talks and keynotes in four continents (Asia, Europe, North America, and Oceania), speaking on topics like component design, style-guide-driven development, agile, information architecture, CSS, PostCSS, Sass, and responsive design.

— Munich

A designer-friendly theme system in Drupal 8?

conference: Drupalcon Munich 2012

In Drupal 6, printing variables in template files was fairly straightforward. But you quickly ran into limitations when wanting to override the innards of a single variable (for example, render some node fields or links in a different region than the rest of the node content). This problem was solved in Drupal 7 with the Render API, but exposed too much complexity that added a large learning curve requirement for anyone needing to make frontend customizations to a Drupal site. For Drupal 8, can we get the best of both worlds: the power to fully customize every element's markup and placement without needing months of PHP and in-depth Drupal training?

Drupalcon Munich 2012 — 20-24 August
— Taipei

Rethinking Responsive Building Techniques

camp: DrupalCamp Taipei 2012

We’ve had over a year to think about how “Responsive web design” affects us. In this session, we’ll think about the limitations we’ve placed on ourselves with our current layout building techniques and how to break free from them. Break free from regions. Break free from CSS limitations. Break free from the difficulties inherit in responsive design.

Creating a layout is like…a game of Tetris…but upside-down.
— Berkeley

Rethinking Responsive Building Techniques with Sass and Drupal Themes and Modules

meetup: Berkeley Drupal User Group

We’ve had over a year to think about how “Responsive web design” affects us. In this session, we’ll think about the limitations we’ve placed on ourselves with our current layout building techniques and how to break free from them. Break free from regions. Break free from CSS limitations. Break free from the difficulties inherit in responsive design.

Custo CTools Layouts
— Denver

Making Drupal Core Mobile-Friendly

conference: Drupalcon Denver 2012

Drupal Eight needs to be mobile-friendly. One of the tasks in the core Mobile Initiative is to bring a quality user experience to the administration interface in line with the expectations set by native applications.

This session covers the challenges, pitfalls, and potential solutions for the initiative, as well as outlining future road maps and how you can get involved.

Drupal 8 Mobile Initiative goals
— Denver

Re-thinking the render/theme layers

conference: Drupalcon Denver 2012

Drupal 7’s theme layer is powerful, flexible and massively complicated. With the introduction of the Render API into our template files and the double preprocess/process functions, the number of different ways that a piece of content might get rendered has made it difficult for themers to figure out… what the hell is going on at any given moment.

Common complaints of our current system: consistency, consistency, consistency
— Denver

Rethinking Responsive Building Techniques with Drupal

conference: Drupalcon Denver 2012

We’ve had over a year to think about how “Responsive web design” affects us. In this session, we’ll think about the limitations we’ve placed on ourselves with our current layout building techniques and how to break free from them. Break free from regions. Break free from CSS limitations. Break free from the difficulties inherit in responsive design.

The obvious method: region-based layouts (Stark in Drupal 8)