WordCamp London made an extremely pleasant comeback this year. 3 Days again at London Metropolitan University, from 8th – 10th April 2016. It was good to catch up with a few peeps I know / have met before, but also meeting new amazing people. Most thanks and respect to the organising team, volunteering their time and efforts to put an enjoyable, successful event like this together. The event included impressive talks from some people known to me, but also a lot of new speakers.
It is also no secret that every WordCamp is reliable on sponsors to cover the costs and spoils of the weekend, yet I am also amazed by the creativity, enthusiasm and effort that goes into the stands and swag. There was even a life size Wapuu (part of the team at 34SP.com).
Friday, 8 April 2016
At this particular event, the Contributors day was before the conference days. There are a number of areas and ways to contribute to WordPress. At this contributors day I worked on the translation of WordPress into Afrikaans. Even though there are the much appreciated input here and there, the aim is to built further on a more solid Afrikaans translating team.
Saturday, 9 April 2016
As always, it is a bummer, when looking at the schedule, loads of good topics and talks and one has to start choosing which ones to go to. Nevertheless, the day started with the usual Opening Remarks.
After the closing remarks I attended the Lightning Sessions that focussed around the topic of code review / code quality by Dave Green and Philip John (image below). In Elliot Taylor’s talk he shared how his company started moving away from client work and instead focus on building a product using WordPress and how they utilise the existing components of WordPress to have their product looking rather different.
Belén Albeza’s, talk You might not need a CSS Framework, is close to my heart. She covered the disadvantages to some known frameworks and discussed how cool Flexbox and the new up-and-coming Grid Layout is. She made her slides available online.
Sarah Semark’s (image below) talk, How I Learnt to Stop Using Icon Fonts and Love SVG was the perfect follow-up talk on Frontend goodness. She explained why she switched between these methods of setting up icons, but also how and share her workflow setting up these icons. Make sure to visit the page, read the story and view the slides of this talk!
After lunch was another session of Lightning talks. James Roberts started off talking about how he uses Zapier to improve his business workflow. Keith Devon followed, sharing a few techniques to optimise your images for a faster loading website.
Hey folks! Here are my slides from yesterday’s talk on high performance images in WordPress. https://t.co/WzqUuhbZLL #wcldn
— Keith Devon (@keithdevon) April 10, 2016
Last but not least… some joked that he was a brave sole… Kristof Van Tomme from Drupal had a talk at a WordPress conference! There should / could be a first for everything. It was his insight how he see the differences between WordPress and Drupal and how we should / could think about co-existing in the CMS-sphere… it sounded realistic to me!
These Lightning talks followed by a very helpful and informative talk by Katie Fenn, Debugging your code with Chrome Dev tools. Some of those tools I am really pleased to know that they are actually there! I will definitely be referencing her slides and videos soon again.
For the #WCLDN crowd, my slides are online here: https://t.co/kDDXf7EXpf and videos here: https://t.co/Ogw4N1wzwL
— Katie Fenn (@katie_fenn) April 11, 2016
Saturday ended with dinner and an after party at the venue, filled with all sorts of geeky games.
Sunday, 10 April 2016
After the information overflow of the previous day I only attended two talks and were concentrating on socialising / networking a bit more.
The one was Angular Word: WordPress and AngularJS by Damian Boni. He discussed how he use AngularJS to link the frontend and backend data together, which can then also help with some developer frustrations. He did his talk from online ‘slides’ that can be seen here.
Also the last session of the day, before the closing remarks, Turbo Speed your WordPress Website by Mike Pead. With his great knowledge and experience on this topic, he shared important links and tips to optimise your WordPress website for much better speed.
There are loads of other sessions I am gutted to have missed. Just to name a few… making a note of their slides here (I will also make sure to catch up on wordpress.tv):
Slides from my Accessible Accordions talk at #WCLDN are at: https://t.co/bPtF5o65EV #a11y #accessibility. Code to follow soon.
— CoolfieldsConsulting (@coolfields) April 9, 2016
My #WCLDN talk in a post: We Need to talk about the REST API: a guide for non-developers https://t.co/Kjx5fMMHgD pic.twitter.com/zMIKPW9JxY
— Petya Raykovska (@petyeah) April 10, 2016
Transcript of our talk: How to Build an Innovative Digital Agency https://t.co/IL0F2lpsLd @WordCampLondon #wcldn pic.twitter.com/g5ytveCWzz
— Moove Agency (@MooveAgency) April 10, 2016
Slides for my WordCamp London talk are up. There’s some “script” too, but it’s not quite complete: https://t.co/d3OHC9j8tH #wcldn
— Ross Wintle (@magicroundabout) April 11, 2016
This is a PDF of my slides (sans gifs, sadly) – “The Art of Writing a Great WordPress Tutorial” – https://t.co/hsYvP6CcyB #wcldn
— Alex Denning (@AlexDenning) April 11, 2016
See you next time!
This concluded the day with the closing talk on a high. It was a really fun weekend. Already looking forward to next year’s WordCamp London in 2017. Although next up, WordCamp Europe in Vienna!
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