General Slicejack at WordCamp Europe 2018
About two weeks ago, between June 14th and June 16th, we’ve visited the capital of Serbia, Belgrade and the biggest WordPress conference in this part of the world.
The city of Belgrade
We’ve used our free time for roaming around the streets of Belgrade, sightseeing, and of course tasting the local food and drinks. Although it’s a fairly big city, with lots of traffic we were able to walk around freely. The tram network is well organised and most of the time we didn’t notice any larger traffic jams. The city itself has lots of historic monuments and buildings and while we, unfortunately, weren’t able to to see them all due to attending the conference and few rain showers, we still snapped plenty of photos.
Local food is definitely one of the strongest advantages of Belgrade. There is so much local restaurants so it’s really hard to choose the best among them, but we would recommend the Jazz Cafe if you want to eat somewhere inside the city, and Time Out is a great beach bar and restaurant right next to river Dunav located on newly built Belgrade Waterfront, which we definitely recommend as a must go because of the magnificent view and chill out atmosphere. If you want a good local drink, we found the Jelen beer to be really good.
Conference
We had really high expectations from this conference and to be honest, it exceeded them all. From talks, workshops, stands to food, drinks and networking, organisation was spot on. With 2 tracks and 33 speakers in two days, some would expect it to be too much, but that was most certainly not the case. The talks were interesting and informative, with just enough length to leave enough time for Q&A after each talk, and even 10 to 15 minutes of time left to check what’s coming next and move from one track to another if needed. We kicked off with Andromeda track and Adam Silverstein’s talk about Javascript APIs in WordPress, and went on to spend most of the first day on the Andromeda track. Other talks that we found the most interesting on the first day were When to use the API by Sean Blakeley, The Balancing Act of Caching in WordPress by Maura Teal, The State of WordPress Mobile by Cate Huston and Technical SEO to grow your WordPress business by Joost de Valk. One more talk we would like to mention from day one is Matt Mullenweg’s Summertime Update and Q&A. Of course, most talks revolved around the upcoming Gutenberg and we would like to point out key takeaways from Matt’s talk:
June:
- Freezing new features.
- Inviting hosts, agencies, and teachers to opt-in. (Including wp-admin users for http://WP.com )
- Mobile apps
July:
- 4.9.x. release with “strong invite” to install.
- Opt-out for wp-admin users on http://WP.com
- Bug triage
- Exploring “beyond the post” into site customization.
August and beyond:
- 100k+ sites having made 250k posts using Gutenberg
- Core merge, beginning the 5.0 release cycle.
And so the day one came to a conclusion, but the day two was nothing less exciting. We’d like to point out a few of the talks we found to be most interesting on the day two, even though all the talks were really great. In the morning we started with Intro to Drupal by David Needham, which we found to be one of our favorites in the entire conference, not because it gave us some technical knowledge, but because it gave us a different perspective and showed us that there are other communities out there aside from WordPress community and encouraged us to connect with each other and help each other grow, and the speaker coming from the world of Drupal himself, the message held even heavier meaning. All the Gutenberg talk made us want to try it out immediately, so we did :). We joined Gutenberg Block Development with React workshop and got to know how to build our own Gutenberg block. Later we found even more of Gutenberg in depth, with Tammie Lister’s talk about the Anatomy of a block: Gutenberg design patterns, and Beyond Gutenberg by Matías Ventura. Aside from talks we would also like to point out how approachable the people at the stands were. We got to talk with the most of stands and everyone seemed to share the same opinion, that this years WordCamp Europe really felt like it brought people together and getting to know someone was never easier. And we share the same opinion, this years WordCamp Europe really hit the spot.
Conclusion
We genuinely had a great time at this years WordCamp Europe, and Belgrade really set the bar up high, but nonetheless we are looking forward to next years WordCamp Europe which will be held in Berlin, Germany. If you see us there don’t hesitate to approach us, we will gladly buy you a beer and have a talk :).
