Meetups WordCamp Europe 2014 Report
This year’s WordCamp Europe was held from 27 – 29 September in Bulgaria’s capital – the beautiful city of Sofia. This fabulous event took place at the National Palace of Culture bringing together more than 900 attendees who all gathered to gain valuable insight on everything “WordPress”. Yes – that’s right. The Slicejack team were there in force! Now that we’re back in Split, we’d like to share our WordCamp Europe experience with you.
DAY #1
The WordCamp Europe event was divided into 2 different tracks, There were also 5 topics which was great because there was really something interesting for everyone. The first day of the event kicked off with a short opening speech where a bunch of event related numbers were presented with other information about WordPress, WordCamp and the event schedule.
We mainly attended ‘Developer’ tagged presentations while we were there. We really enjoyed the presentation held by Daniel Kanchev who talked about the right way to do WordPress migrations. Andrew Nacin shared a great talk on ‘Post-Modern WordPress’ while Stefan Kanev share valuable insights and ideas about functional programming and why we should at least TRY to code that way.
Towards the end of the day we listened to 2 more presentations. The first held by Helen Hou-Sandi, WordPress 4.0. project leader and the second by Michael Schroder who is indeed one of the first WordPress core contributors. Michael spoke about researching and contributing to the WordPress core along with some details on how to do it.
At this point the presentations were finished for the day. This meant one thing. We now had some time to discover a little of what Sofia had to offer. Our team went for a good walk around Sofia getting a flavour of the city experience and it’s culture. Not to mention a bite to eat! Later that night a glorious large party was held at the Mixtape5 club organized exclusively for WordCamp 2014 attendees.
DAY #2
The second day started with an energetic presentation held by Tony Perez. Tony is a security expert, who passionately spoke about WordPress security. We were shown how we can make it better by simply changing our point of view and preparing ourselves for incoming ‘disasters’. I must say I have never in my life felt so much energy coming from a speaker.
After the presentation and ‘Coffee break’ time we had a good chat with a few interesting people from ‘MultilingualPress’, ‘WordPress VIP’ and ‘SiteGround’ booths. Right after we then headed over to the ‘Code Deodorant’ presentation held by Tom Nowell. Here he mostly spoke about code complexity calculation and how large code complexity reduces the testability of a product with several amusing (but true) comparisons. Great job Tom!
Straight after launch we were ready for some more WordPress insight! We had a chance to hear everything we planned to know about WordPress at the ‘Q&A with Matt Mullenweg’, This was a great session entirely packed by almost every WordCamp attendee with lots of questions as well.
Another interesting presentation was ‘The devastating power of defaults’ presentation held by Joost de Valk. Joost talked about how we should present customization options to non-technical people. Also how many options they really need. A few presentations, talks and coffees later we reached the ‘Closing remarks’ talk where we heard a little about the organizers, volunteers and sponsors that made the WordCamp Europe 2014 the success it became.
CONCLUSION
All in all we were glad we attended this amazing conference. We met a bunch of interesting people and learned so much. Unfortunately we didn’t have time to attend the contributors day. Nevertheless, I’m now 100% sure that we’ll attend this fantastic event next year.
