Zachary Watkins

Presentations ​

Check out the presentations I've given at conferences and meetups over the years.

  • Document Automation with Adobe InDesign

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    Can we get this report for every county in the state? Yes! Learn how Adobe InDesign can quickly turn every row in a spreadsheet into documents for decision-makers. Hear how we use this process to provide county-level rail safety incident reports for rail safety personnel with just an hour of work for each update. We will go over solutions for charts, overflow text, image selection, and accessibility which are crucial for most use cases. Slides are available. It was originally presented to the Texas A&M University System on Tuesday, February 25, 2025 from 11:00am to 11:45am CST at the annual Tech Summit conference.

  • Story Maps: Planning Outcome-oriented Solutions

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    This presentation is an adaptation of user story mapping for transportation service development and transportation research. Slides and other resources are available. It was originally presented to researchers and staff at Texas A&M Transportation Institute on Tuesday, August 22, 2023 from 12:30pm to 1:00pm CST during a meetup for Collaboration Station.

  • Strategies for Resilient Web Applications and Websites

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    This presentation identifies points along the software development lifecycle and how they can be used to improve the resilience of a website or web application. Slides are available. It was originally presented to the Texas A&M University System on Wednesday, September 28, 2022 from 12:55pm to 1:40pm CST at the annual Tech Summit conference.

  • Streamline Building, Deploying, and Maintaining Your (Higher-Ed) Websites with WordPress

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    This presentation is a case study of how I build, deploy, and maintain WordPress websites at the Communications department of Texas A&M AgriLife. Slides from my portion of the presentation are available. It was originally presented to the Texas A&M University System on Tuesday, February 26, 2019 from 3:45pm to 4:30pm CST at the annual Tech Summit conference. It was co-presented by Zachary Watkins, Hassan Abbasi, and Steven Word.

  • Continuous Deployment from GitHub to WPEngine

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    This presentation is a case study of how we implemented continuous deployment for WordPress theme and plugin development at Texas A&M AgriLife. Slides are available. It was originally presented to the Texas A&M University System on Tuesday, February 21, 2017 from 11:00am to 11:45am CST at the annual Tech Summit conference.

  • jQuery Plugin Development: Getting Started

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    This presentation is an introduction to jQuery plugin development (using jQuery version 2.1.3). Slides are available. It was originally presented to developers at a meetup in College Station, Texas on July 12, 2015 from 11:00am to 11:30am CST. This was my first ever presentation to a group of developers and the slides are few but focused. I have not verified the code against later versions of jQuery.