Are you tired of TDD (test-driven development) workshops that make you do boring things like calculate bowling scores and prime factors or demonstrate how to win at the game of life? If so, this is the session for you! In this TDD workshop we will be building the domain model for EverCraft — a new MMORPG from Blizzards of the Coast. We have lots of story cards prepared covering features from combat to magic, classes to spells, and races to items. Plus, we’ll be defining some of these cards during the session in case you want that +9 knife of ogre slaying or enjoy casting magic missile at the darkness.

This workshop is language agnostic and for all levels of developers. The focus is on TDD and emergent design but pair programming will be covered as well. The only requirement is that you bring a laptop and that you be able to test-drive you code with your language of choice. When you are done you will emerge a better programmer for the experience but there is small chance you will have a craving for Cheetos and Mountain Dew.

Learning Outcomes: Attendees should leave the session feeling more familiar with a Test-Driven Development approach for developing software, what it’s benefits are and how to apply these techniques at their place of employment.

Attendee Skill Level: Attendees should be familiar with the their development language and at least a general understanding of a unit testing framework for that language.

Nothing brings content and design strategy to life like launching a shiny new site: teasers fit neatly without any awkward ellipses, images are cropped perfectly for different screen sizes, and related content is wonderfully relevant. But after a few months, I see things start to slip: headlines are weak, teasers don’t contain any helpful information, and article bylines are pasted into the Body even though there’s a separate Author field.

What happened? I wrote a training document, but it’s like no one even read it! Well, guess what: they probably didn’t. Segregating content guidelines into a separate document is a great way to make sure no one besides me sees them. If I want site administrators and authors to remember how to write the headlines, what information to include in the teasers, and what layout to use for the slideshow images, I have to put the content guidelines where they’ll see them: inside the CMS.

In this workshop we’ll explore how to improve the authoring experience for the people who are creating and maintaining content in the CMS after the site is built. We’ll talk about how to name and organize fields, and what kinds of plugins and modules exist for popular CMSs to make content creation smoother and more pleasant. We’ll work through exercises that help us think like our authors so we can write help text that lets them do their jobs well. There will be worksheets! There will be group activities! There will be sketching! Most importantly, we’ll learn how to communicate the information needed for ongoing support of structured content, information architecture, and design.

Learning Outcomes:

• Identify gaps in content training that can be addressed through improving the CMS authoring experience.
• Write field names and help text that help authors create content that meets the needs of the design and content strategy plan.
• Figure out ways to work content training into existing website development processes.

Attendee Skill Level: Experience with CMS administration (though not necessarily as a programmer – as a user is totally fine too!). This is relatively beginner-level, though familiarity with structured content and other basic content strategy ideas would be helpful.

How do you know a change you made to one small section on a page doesn’t break a large section on another page of your site, especially when you don’t have time to manually regression test every page? While Test-Driven Development has grown in popularity for languages like JavaScript, we’re still lacking automation behind our CSS/UI changes.

This workshop will walk through a few of the tools available to help out. We’ll set up the software together, then run them against real-life scenarios to show where each succeeds and where they individually fall short.

Learning Outcomes: By the end of the workshop, attendees will have a solid understanding of what options are available and know how to add a regression test suite to any project they’re currently working on.

Attendee Skill Level:

• Basic understanding of the command line
• Intermediate understanding of HTML/CSS
• Intermediate understanding of JavaScript

In this workshop, we will break down the myths and mysteries of making the leap to freelancing and cover charging what you’re worth (with my special formula!), taking inventory of office equipment and supplies, tackling the impostor complex and worthiness issues, working styles and schedules, and breaking down how to solve whether or not there is demand for your service. This workshop experience would be street level, real information, with an honest delivery and real life use cases and examples. There will be many takeaways and lots of resources offered for success.

Learning Outcomes/Takeaways:

• A framework of a starter business plan.
• A formula on how to charge for your work.
• How to network with other freelancers in their industry.
• Breaking down the psychology of worthiness.
• Scheduling and mapping your day for success.
• How to manage a full-time job and one to two side freelancing projects

Attendee Skill Level: Entry level. Open to anyone who has ever considered freelancing.

A spoonful of wireframes helps the content strategy go down. Just because the output of most content planning is written words doesn’t mean our deliverables have to be dry. Impatient stakeholders and “visual thinkers” too happily skip past content strategy, singing Lorem Ipsum all the way. Who can blame them? Spreadsheets and briefs aren’t as fun like prototypes nor pretty like mockups. Enough complaining. Let’s learn better ways to communicate content strategy.

Learn how to identify opportunities for visualizing your content, new techniques and deliverables for creating these visuals, and tips on how to apply them in your process. If you’re having trouble selling content strategy in your organization, or even understanding it yourself, this workshop will help.

Participants will learn a number of techniques for helping their team understand things like multi-channel campaigns, publishing schedules, progressive disclosure of important information, adapting tone to context and audience, and the impact and importance of style guidelines and brand hierarchies. Techniques will include quick-and-dirty frameworks perfect for sketching on a whiteboard to robust interactive deliverables that can become the centerpiece of a UX process.

Learning Outcomes:

• Able to identify opportunities for increasing clarity of content strategy thinking with visual artifact
• Mental framework for adapting existing UX deliverables and tools to suit the needs of content strategy
• Clear understanding of the role of visual artifacts within the process
• Hands-on experience with several useful deliverables for content strategists that they may not have used before
• Exposure to many more tools and techniques they may wish to explore further in their own practice

Attendee Skill Level: Beginner to intermediate experience working in any capacity on projects that involve web and interactive content.

Learn about, observe and gain experience with tools and techniques for conducting a Web accessibility evaluation. Experience Web accessibility barriers as they are encountered by a screen reader, and learn how to resolve them.

Learning Outcomes:

1. Process, tools, and techniques for Web accessibility evaluation (9 words)
2. Practice using tools and techniques to identify Web accessibility issues (10 words)
3. Learn coding practices for fixing or avoiding common Web accessibility issues.

Attendee Skill Level: Familiarity with basic HTML and CSS coding.