WordCamp Europe 2016

IvDimova   June 29, 2016   4 Comments on WordCamp Europe 2016

I just got back from WordCamp Europe 2016, which this year took place at Vienna, Austria, and wanted to share my thoughts about how it went.

First I want to thank to all the organisers, this was the biggest and, in my opinion, the most professionally organised WordCamp I have ever been to! As a speaker I had a wonderful experience – a separate room where we could prepare for our talks, help screens to not look back the main screen for the slides, great MCs and much more. The event was huge with more than 2000 attendees, volunteers and speakers, so it will be very hard to summarise it, but I will try to just highlight what I liked the most.

The WordPress core lead Andrew Nacin had an awesome talk about working with legacy projects. I personally was leading the Crowd Favorite Ongoing Clients Support team for a while and had lots of the issues mentioned in the talk, I really hope it will be soon on WordPress TV!

Mike Schroder shared his experience about how the decisions are made at WordPress core, so everyone who wants to contribute and get involved in the process can see how it goes.

Sonja Leix had a very inspiring talk about the impostor syndrome, which I recommend to anyone who is wondering if should apply to speak at WordCamps or any other event – you should! Post and slides here – http://sonjaleix.com/blog/community/impostor-syndrome/.

And while on this topic I want to personally thank to Jeremy Felt , who shared with us, the speakers, this very inspiring TED talk about body language – it helped me a lot preparing for my own talk! He also presented on Multisite, slides here.

Also our CEO Karim Marucchi had a great talk sharing his experience how to deal with different cultures.

And my personal favourite, and I believe to many others too – Helen Hou-Sandi and her incredibly inspiring talk about parallels between music and code! As a woman in tech and a person in love with music, I admire her and loved both the piano performance and the talk, hope it will be available online soon so I can watch it again. Code really is poetry!

Last but not least – I presented on WordPress developers tools that can help us automate our daily workflow and produce more reliable, clean and consistent code. My slides can be found here and I will work on a longer blog post with all tutorials and articles that can help you learn these tools and adopt them in your development projects.

It was an amazing event and I was honored to be there and share my experience! Thanks again to everyone involved in the organisation! See you next year in Paris!

 

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WordPress is my passion and love! Started as a blog system it turns in a really powerful CMS to allow us create professional, functional and really good looking web sites. WordPress also offers us a great community to help us, to develop amazing plugins and themes and to create a new better versions with more and more features. I have worked with different frameworks based on WordPress, created and customized themes and plugins so if my experience can help - you are welcome!
   

4 thoughts on “WordCamp Europe 2016”

    1. IvDimova Post author

      In my opinion it was great – it is supposed to be huge as it gathers people from all around Europe. As for the talks – almost every WordCamp is in this format, the people always can ask questions later at the Happiness bar. Hope you enjoyed it anyway!

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      1. Dustin Overbeck

        I doubt every WordCamp has a format of just 30 minutes to listen to a speaker, ask questions, get answers, and transfer to next talk. That’s stupid, if true.

        Thirty minutes is way too short, especially if “it is supposed to be huge as it gathers people from all around Europe,” as you mentioned.

        I attended WordCamp London 2016 and there was 40 minutes allocated for the talk and Q&A. Then there was 20 minutes gap for transferring from one session to another. This means a a minimum of 60 minutes between the start of one session and the start of another. Here’s the schedule: https://2016.london.wordcamp.org/schedule/

        The Happiness bar, while nice (and yes, I used it in Vienna) is not a place to ask the speaker a question immediately following the talk. The Q&A time for the talks was limited mostly to just a single question and a single short answer.

        It was just too rushed with only 30 minutes from the start of one talk until the start of the next one.

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  2. IvDimova Post author

    As I said I have attended a lot of WordCamps with the 30 minutes format and I personally don’t have issue with it. Of course everyone has a different opinion, you can reach out to the organisers to WordCamp Europe and share with them your concerns about the format, so they can consider changing it.

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