Foxland

Speaking at WordCamp London 2017

Written by Sami Keijonen

What can I say. WordCamp London 2017 was amazing. It was well organised and atmosphere was relaxed. The coolest part was meeting people as always. You know the feeling when you meet people which you have been chatting in Twitter or Slack.

I was privileged to  be in Theme Panel and have a lightning talk about SVG icon system in WordPress. Here are the slides and couple of related articles.

Big thanks to Diane Wallace who helped the speakers in most friendly way.

Here is short overview of my trip to London.

Meeting my non WP related friends

I had two reasons to go in London.

  • To visit my dear friends and their kids.
  • Attend to WordCamp London.

That’s why I arrived two days before WordCamp in London and left one day after. I was thrilled!

View this post on Instagram

I've been thrilled.

A post shared by Sami Keijonen (@samikeijonen) on

The food wasn’t that bad either.

View this post on Instagram

Was I this hungry in the last evening in London. Yes.

A post shared by Sami Keijonen (@samikeijonen) on

Contributors day

On Friday we had contributors day and I worked in accessibility team:

  • Rian Rietveld as the main lead. She keeps the ball rolling.
  • Andrea Fercia with his magic coding skills. He writes most of the accessibility Core code.
  • Graham Armfield testing new code editor with a dragon. “Wake up”, “Go to sleep” commands in the end of the day was funny for us humans also.
  • Claire Brotherton and many others helping out.

Adrian Roselli and others also talked a lot about the new editor (Gutenberg) during the WordCamp. Read summary post about accessibility discussions in WordPress.org blog.

My main job was testing the new tag cloud widget:

  • You can have tags in list format which is better for semantics and accessibility.
  • There is new checkbox setting to show tag count. This is also adds aria-label tag count in a link.

For Twenty Seventeen there is a patch waiting already.

Speakers ping pong dinner

After a long day contributing we had volunteers and speakers dinner on Friday evening. Or should I say it was all about playing ping pong! Which was super fun.

I also ate too much. It was time to get some rest and get ready for my talks.

Talks – mine included

There is no way to pick the best talks I went to see. There were so many good ones going on in the same time. And this is not a competition. There were plenty of different type of talks for everybody.

I know that the best talk that I didn’t see was from Adrian Roselli: Selfish Accessibility.

My first “talk” was on Saturday. I was invited to theme panel with Ulrich Pogson, Sue Fernandes, Afzaal Ahmed, and the panel was hosted by Jonny Allbut. We could easily talk about 4 hours about themes but we had only 40 minutes to talk about for example these topics:

  • How do you build your themes – from scratch, starter theme, parent theme, framework?
  • How do you deal with your core CSS layout – framework (like Bootstrap), own code/bespoke?
  • How do you code your CSS – pre-processors vs vanilla CSS?
  • How do you deploy custom layout in-page sections?

Theme panel turned out to be pleasant experience. Jonny kept good rhythm and panelist have different kind of perspective how to build themes. We worked together as team really well!

On Sunday I had a lightning talk about SVG icon system in WordPress. In the same session Pascal Birchler was talking about internationalisation improvements and Matt Radford about simple simple purpose plugins.

I was little nervous waiting for my talk but I got relaxed  when it was my turn to go on the stage. I think the talk went pretty well and I got some nice feedback.

Here is again the slides and related articles:

Thank you WordCamp 2017!

It’s certainly not easy to organise events like WordCamp London. But I honestly can’t think any negative feedback. Everything just worked, people were friendly, and there was plenty of time to hang out with others.

Huge huge thanks to organising team, volunteers, speakers, sponsors,  and everybody involved! See you again next year.

In the end I’m just going to leave this song here.

Categories:

Tags: