WordCamp US, the national WordPress conference, was back in Nashville for a second year on December 7-9, 2018. Jodie and Scott from LTDS attended — here are some highlights.
Jodie:
I attended several great sessions on topics such as project management for developers, ARIA/accessibility, and code review. Tracy Apps gave a very compelling talk on diversity and inclusion, and how that must play a huge role in user experience work. Lara Schenck hand-drew her slide deck for her talk on CSS algorithms — they’re worth a glance, even if you don’t understand the content! 🙂 I felt right at home in a lightning talk from a former Drupal developer comparing Drupal with WordPress — in the end, he asked us to just all get along, since both are great platforms with their own strengths. John Blackbourn introduced us to Git Bisect, a debugging tool that uses a binary search to help you pinpoint where a bug was introduced into your codebase.
Scott:
The sessions that I attended had some interesting topics. I went to two sessions that dealt with WordPress’ new block editor, Gutenberg, which will be replacing the classic text editor for creating posts in new versions. Gary Pendergast talked about how the flexibility of Gutenberg’s block system will help users create more exciting sites and posts without the use of custom code. In Jason Bahl’s session, he demonstrated how Gutenberg was used in an innovative way on a state government WordPress site he helped build. I also enjoyed Dwayne McDaniel’s talk “Nobody Wants a Website. They Want Results!“. Among other things, he discussed the importance of ensuring that a website keeps true to the reason it was made, and that that doesn’t get overshadowed by the design and building of the website. Basically, he maintains, a cool website is no good if it doesn’t lead to the results that were intended.