WordCamp London 2016 occurred this past weekend at London Metropolitan University and was a huge success and unique experience. More than 550 people from around the world attended #WCLDN to meet, learn, and collaborate on all things WordPress. Here are some highlights from the event…
WP Engine employees represent at WordCamp London.
WordCamp London Highlights
Giving back to the community
As WordPress is open source software, the sentiment of giving back to the community ran as an underlying theme throughout the event. Many of the discussions focused on giving back through code, which includes code contribution to WordPress core, theme reviews, and language translation.
However contributing to the community (other than coding) can be done through discussion, and WordCamp London was a great way to participate in this. The event included many individual attendees who shared their knowledge, experience, and insights with others in person, through make.wordpress.org, and via the official WordPress Slack channels.
One common theme of the event was accessibility and how to make WordPress a more usable experience for everyone. Many people involved with WordCamp London are driven to push WordPress forward to be even more accessible and to make it possible for all users, no matter how they interact with WordPress.
There were several very noticeable additions to the event that made it easier for all people to get more out of it, including signage, facilities and the most prominent being live language transcription throughout the three halls where talks were held.
Talk Tracks For All Levels
WordCamp London was split into three different talk tracks this year, including technical topics, business knowledge, and how to make and grow WordPress. These sessions were appropriate for all levels of developers and non-developers alike.
Many of the technical talks were suitable for n00bs, yet experienced programmers were well represented in advanced presentations. Geared toward how developers can sharpen their skills and reinforce the use of WordPress coding best practices, the technical talks featured developers that went into detail about building sites and extending WordPress functionality.
The web design agency Purple Baby Hippo presents at WordCamp London.
Business related talks ranged from advice for freelancers, SEO, and community inspired stories. These talks also centered around a company’s journey, growth, and opportunities.
Other sessions went deep into front-end development, focusing on how to optimize images for all devices. Sarah Semark gave an informative talk on using SVG images as the modern day replacement for icon fonts.
Keith Devon spoke on reducing image file sizes to improve performance as well as some of the newly introduced responsive image features in the WordPress 4.4 release.
Keith Devon of Highrise Digital presents at WordCamp London.
Other notable speakers included Derick Rethans, the author of Xdebug, who spoke about debugging tools and how to step through code in an IDE for troubleshooting as part of your development workflow.
Many developers utilize Google Chrome’s built in Developer tools and Katie Fenn’s insightful overview on how to make the most of Chrome for debugging in the browser was enlightening.
.@katie_fenn explaining how to debug @WordCampLondon
Also thoughtful warning about animated content in the slides pic.twitter.com/ehvLvinaBs— ⎛⚆_⚆⎠ (@supersole) April 9, 2016
WordPress co-founder Mike Little hosted the Core QA panel. Accessibility was represented strongly by the QA panel, which included accessibility champions Richard Senior, Rian Reitveld, Gary Jones, Mik Scarlet and Angie Vale. The panel discussed how WordPress now follows the WCAG2 AA standard for all new and updated code in WordPress core and how we can continue to close the gap for ability-impaired users.
An After Party like No Other
A WordCamp would not be complete without a night out and the after party was incredibly cool. I mean, hipster, lo-fi back-in-time, retro-gaming cool! And that’s not to mention the delicious pies and mash along with chilled beverages for all. An entire fleet of retro gaming consoles were set up and ready for attendees to jump in and start playing their favorite games, no matter what decade they grew up in.
What’s even cooler was that many of the consoles were modified to allow modern day data storage devices like SD cards to be used for loading antiquated cartridge games. Truly an amazing way-back experience and it was incredible to see the evolution of gaming technology throughout the years side-by-side.
Although there were not too many groundbreaking developments on the bleeding edge of technology at this WordCamp, perhaps there will be as WordPress 4.5 gets closer to release.
Overall, WordCamp London was a well organized event that focused on bringing together a community of dedicated people around WordPress. As expected, there was a clear focus on WordPress development, technology and business with accessibility being noticeably present.
If you haven’t been to WordCamp, there are many events that happen around the globe and it is a great way to network and learn about WordPress. Hope to see you at the next one!
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