My trip to WordCamp US in Philly was awesome, and a lot of fun. Like any technical conference, I got a lot out of the sessions, but I got even more out of the community interactions outside. I held back so many times from going to WordCamps because the more local ones to me didn’t seem to have “enough” developer oriented talks. After all my experiences at WordCamp US just talking to people, I think it is really important to still go to the other WordCamps. My old goal for 2016, which I set a while ago, was to give a talk at a technical conference. My new goal was to learn Javascript and the REST API inside and out – (and yes, I set that goal *before* Matt Mullenweg announced that every WordPress developer needed to have that goal). I think at this point, I’ll aim to do both.
I’ve always considered myself an excellent PHP developer, not very useful for Javascript, but more than one conversation I had yesterday at the official WCUS after party convinced me otherwise. I’ve done a lot of work with tapping WordPress’s PHP into external javascript APIs. It took me all day, and into dinner tonight, to realize exactly what I needed to do. I have a great idea for something that I’m pretty sure isn’t out there yet — so I’m setting the goal of writing an awesome plugin this week and submitting it to the repository. Well, if the plugin repository is anything like the theme repository, it will take a long time to go through review – so I’ll put it on Github and blog about it sooner. I don’t want to blog about it before I write it because it’s always better to see if it works the way I think it does, first. I would say, look for it this week — but who am I kidding? Between my kiddo’s birthday, closing on a new house, traveling for the holidays, and then moving — it’s going to be an intense month. Hopefully I won’t wait until after the move.
Any ideas of a good conference to speak at next year? Preferably one cheap for travel from East Tennessee? I’ve heard good things about WordCamp Atlanta, WordCamp Asheville…
Today was Contributor Day at WordCamp US. I wanted to work on Core, but I’m too intimidated by my lack of experience running VVV – so I decided to work on Documentation. Then I read something online about there not being a lot specific organized for Docs to work on, so I skipped it altogether and worked on Theme Review. I don’t think I had realized how much I like QA. I think it’s something I’ll definitely keep doing – a three month backlog for the theme repository is crazy long – I bet many developers give up hope before their theme is reviewed. I will keep doing my piece as time allows.
If you were not at Contributor Day and you have not contributed to WordPress, but you use it — I can’t imagine not giving back to the community. And some day, I’ll be contributing with things I write, not just QA.