June 21, 2017 — “Code is Poetry” is a cute motto. It’s also quite false.

The spirit of the slogan is harmless enough. It foregrounds the easy-to-overlook fact that software is written by real people. And it provides some solace to the software developer who is looking for soulful validation of what often feels like a rote, boring, soulless job.

But code is not poetry, and coders who considers themselves “poets” risk doing a disservice to themselves, and to the software they’re engaged in building. Art is beautiful, and we want our software to be beautiful as well. But, in the service of beauty, art is often inert, inscrutable, ambiguous – hardly qualities of good code. Perhaps more importantly, software developers invested in an image of themselves as artists are more likely to shun collaboration, iteration, and criticism, an attitude that’s especially harmful in free software communities.

By breaking down the myth of the code poet, I hope to find some new metaphors that we software developers can embrace for justifying to ourselves the work that we do.

June 21, 2017 — Alice does copy and content strategy at Unramble. She’s also a co-organiser of Brighton WordPress meetups, one of the co-founders of Brighton Digital Women, and lead organiser of WordCamp Brighton 2017.

Organising a WordPress meetup in your local area is a great way to meet other people in your community, to bounce ideas off each other, and stay updated with how others are using WordPress. But it can be tricky figuring out how to spread the word and encourage people to attend.

In this talk, you’ll find out how the organisers of Brighton’s local WordPress meetup, WordUp, created a successful regular monthly event where everyone is welcome.

June 21, 2017 — Michael is a designer at Automattic working on Jetpack and WordPress.com. He contributes to the WordPress project and is the most active on the design team. Michael has also been running monthly WordPress meetups in Denver for the last three years.

What the heck can we do to improve the design process on open source projects? Designing for open source projects is difficult and comes with a unique set of challenges. The challenges include communication difficulties, tech limitations, slow implementation times, community pushback, complex developer tools, unique design considerations, and lack of design process. I’m going to address these challenges and propose ways to improve or implement an efficient design process as a community.

June 21, 2017 — When I joined the WooCommerce marketing team in July 2014 we were three. Today we’re a team of thirteen and the landscape of how we work, what we produce, and how we engage users, has changed a lot. Also, WooCommerce has changed a lot! Including being acquired by Automattic. I’d love to share a talk summarising some of the key things I’ve learnt as part of the WooCommerce marketing team.

Presentation Slides »

June 21, 2017 — As a conference speaker, community conference organiser and Open Source evangelist, Jenny loudly cheers people on to share knowledge and contribute back to Open Source projects. Her love for development goes beyond the screen and she is an advocate of both the PHP and WordPress communities.

She said during her talk “What happens when you create an event and don’t care about diversity? What happens when you don’t listen to what everyone tells you but think in entirely different terms? This lightning talk will tell you what happened when I stopped caring about diversity and started thinking about event organisation in a different way. What we learned will blow your mind.”

Presentation Slides »

June 21, 2017 — Yoav Farhi is an Iñtërnâtiônàlizætiønër at Automattic, who works on everything related i18n (that’s internationalization) and l10n (localization) and of course, translation. A core contributor to WordPress for 8 years now, he works hard to make the web a better place.

Adding Right to left (RTL) languages support to your themes and plugins doesn’t have to be a chore. This short talk will introduce the basics of RTL support and demonstrate how to use automated tools to simplify the process.

June 21, 2017 — Andrea Middleton has worked with WordCamp organizers since 2011, helping people plan events that inspire people to do more with WordPress, connect the WordPress community, and contribute to the WordPress project.

She said in his talk “The WordPress community is built and maintained by volunteers, using the same methods — and many of the same tools — that are used to make WordPress itself. In this session, you’ll get a look at the WordPress community’s “source code” and learn how to contribute to the growth of your local community — or create a community if you don’t already have one.”

June 21, 2017 — Sarah Semark is a designer, developer, and world-traveller. After running a business for eight years, she now works for Automattic designing and building WordPress themes.

The line between design and development is getting blurrier, and our approach to web design is becoming more modular. How do we keep track of it all?

Style guides to the rescue!

Using style guides that update as our projects progress, we can visually document our work and ensure that everything stays consistent. They may seem daunting and time-consuming at first, but they don’t have to be.

How do I get started with living style guides? What’s a living style guide anyway, and how do I know if mine is dead? Isn’t that going to slow me down? Why should I bother?

June 21, 2017 — Andrew Nacin is a Lead Developer of WordPress. He’s led major releases, mentored contributors, and spearheaded new development.

He said in his talk ‘You can make a bigger impact with people skills and thoughtful human-centered design than simply with code. After running WordPress releases and then spending two years working in government, WordPress lead developer Andrew Nacin wants to talk about how your interactions with others matter and how it’s important to think with people, not for them.’

June 21, 2017 — Taking that first step from working as a freelancer to making your first hire and becoming an agency is an exciting but daunting step. In this talk I will explain how I accidentally started an agency and strategically grew my WordPress specialist agency from myself to over 40 people over the course of 5 years with minimum staff turnover.

I will cover:

– How and when to make hires
– Where to find new employees (from developers to operations)
– How to create a company culture
– How you can ensure your employees are on board for the long run