Hello WordCamp

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So, long story short: slept two hours, woke up, got on the plane, landed in Vienna, shout on airbnb, get to Patricia’s place half past 11pm and crashed in a deep sleep. This was Thursday, 23rd June, 2016.

First impression from WordCamp was “holy shit, too many people, too many tracks to follow”, reaction: follow everybody. On twitter. I’ll make some cleanup in the following weeks, but there were a lot of amazing people out there at #wceu (yup, unfortunate naming causes bad hashtags).

The first day, @GaryPendergast got the most of my attention with his great shakespearean introduction and the “Cultivating happy teams” panel was inspiring also, with team stories from Norway, Germany and the US.

In the evening we had a blast at WPEngine’s party at Cuban Mojito Barwhere we mingled and shared stories ranging from WordPress pre 2.9 to the damn #brexit.

Next day I started with Tammie Lister’s graph visualizations of emotions and how to humanize interfaces and interactions; she had a really nice presentation which reminded me of my speech about human robot interaction back in 2009. Next order of business on the same #2 track was a brief description of various tools developers use to code, by Ivelina Dimovawhich made me take a hard look at my current tools and seriously check others to see if they fit better.

At 14:30 on Saturday I listened to a call to action from Anders Jensen-Urstadand Amelia Andersdotter on data protection and human rights in the digital space. I knew Amelia (from the internet) since 2011 when Vlad Ursulean took an interview with her; at the time she was the youngest member of the European Parliament. Then I took a short break to watch K. Adam White’s presentation on track #1 about Building better WordPress interfaces with the REST API and went back to see Anna Ladoshkina’s tips on how to alternatively upgrade WordPress via Composer, here’s the video of her presentation and you can also find all the sessions from WordCamp Europe 2016 on the event’s page. Finally I listened to Karim Marucchi’s talk about culture and how to approach clients and employees from the cultural perspective.

WordCamp Europe 2016

Saturday ended the main event with an amazing ball where people in their usual flip-flops and tuxedos danced like there was no tomorrow and had a lot of fun and pictures with Wappu.

The final day was for the contributors, where some of us got our hands dirtyby actually contributing to WordPress’s core, reviewing themes, translating the platform or at least learning how to do all of the above.

All in all it was an amazing and well organized event, my first Wordcamp Europe and definitely not the last.

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