Mark Manders, a member of our talented development team, gives an overview of his experience at WordCamp Europe 2023 from a developers perspective.
This year, we sent our largest group yet to Athens for WordCamp Europe 2023 – one of the largest WordPress conferences in the world.
Mark Manders is a member of our talented development team, who was part of the WCEU group which travelled to the event and has kindly put together a few thoughts on his experience, from a developers perspective.
WordCamp was once again back in Europe and this time the chosen city for the gathering of everyone and everything WordPress was Athens, Greece!
Filter very generously offered a number of the team the opportunity to fly out to Athens and attend this event. An opportunity which I grabbed with both hands.
While the whole event was very beneficial to me, I just wanted to focus this article on the three sessions I found the most informative from a developer point of view.
The speaker for this workshop was Luis Herranz who is a lead developer at Automattic, someone who is very knowledgeable when it comes to developing with Gutenberg so who better to learn from than Luis.
Luis explained how we can use the Interactivity API to further enhance the capabilities of interactive blocks in WordPress. The main goal of the Interactivity API is to provide a standard and simple way to handle the frontend interactivity of Gutenberg blocks. This standard will then make it easier for developers to create rich, interactive user experiences. It’s a win-win for everyone!
The Interactivity API is currently only at the proposal stage but it’s one which is hopefully being integrated into the WordPress core in the not so distant future.
This workshop certainly got me thinking on the ways we as a business can use these future capabilities to benefit the clients of Filter.
As a developer I always strive to learn new skills so to hear about this new proposal was very exciting.
As a keen Front-End Developer, this was probably the session I was most looking forward to attending, and it did not disappoint. As the title states, this talk was an overview of new features that are currently available to use or are being rolled out to CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) in the near future.
In this talk, Fellyph Cintra went into detail about some really cool new CSS properties such as clamp(), CSS Container Queries, @layer, Scroll Driven Animations as well as the :has() function plus many others.
I would encourage my fellow Front-End Developers out there to check these out as they will be incredibly helpful to have at your disposal!
Most of the CSS properties mentioned above can be used today however not all the latest browsers currently support them so putting them into practice immediately isn’t ideal.
However, hopefully, we can include some of them into our client projects sooner rather than later to make the sites we develop even slicker and efficient.
Last but not least the final session I want to highlight was an interactive workshop called ‘Stop blocking my thread’. This workshop was hosted by Adam Silverstein, a Developer Relations Engineer at Google.
Adam talked about the steps we can take to increase page load speeds by making our websites more efficient using tools such as Google Page Insights and Web Page Test.
These tools give you pointers about how you can then speed up your website as well as how you can make your site more accessible which I should stress is even more important!
Having used these exact tools recently on a client project it was reassuring to hear from Adam that what I did for our client is the correct way to do things.
WordCamp Europe 2023 was a fantastic experience for a developer like myself and I would encourage other developers out there to try to attend similar events.
It’s a great way to learn new techniques and it also keeps you informed as to what’s going on in the big, wide world of WordPress. The trip was also a great way to network with fellow developers from all across the world who just like myself, are passionate about what they do on a daily basis.
Overall, WordCamp Europe 2023 provided a fantastic learning experience.
WordCamp events offer opportunities to acquire new skills, stay updated on WordPress developments, and network with like-minded professionals from around the world who share a passion for their craft.
Don’t miss out on our recent content from WordCamp Europe 2023. Explore it all by following the links below.
CTO & Founder
Having worked in agencies since he left university, Paul drives both the technical output at Filter, as well as being responsible for planning. His key strengths are quickly understanding client briefs and being able to communicate complex solutions in a clear and simple manner.
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