Can you please introduce yourself? What is your job?
Hi, my name is Fellyph Cintra, I’m originally from Brazil, my passions are travelling, music, sports and funny socks. I’m a Front-end engineer, I have been working as „Web Developer“ since 2006. Web Developer because at that time the professionals were classified in Web design and Web developer. My stack when I started was HTML, CSS, JavaScript, Flash, ActionScript and Coldfusion. In 2008 I had my first contact with WordPress with my personal blog and 2009 I created my first theme to a famous blog in Brazil with 3 million views per month, wasn’t usual for someone get the first project on that scale, but not so many people work with WordPress at that time and after this project for a long time I just worked exclusively with the platform. 2016 I’ve moved to Ireland looking for new Challenges. Actually, I’m Solutions engineer at Deloitte there I’m working Umbraco a CMS in C# is nice to see a different world, on my free time I’ve produced online courses to Brazil.
How did you start working with WordPress?
I’ve started with a personal blog in 2008 worked a kind of experimental blog, there I was testing the theme and reading the documentation, but one day in 2009 at the work someone asked: „Who knows WordPress?“ I raised my hand, I didn’t know what the project was about and I thought that I knew WordPress at that moment, that moment was very important in my life. The project was the top Fashion blog in Brazil and the top 10 fashion blogs in the World according to Vogue. I had a lot of work but I learned so much on that time and Just worked with WordPress for a long time. In 2012 when moved to São Paulo, I’ve received an email calling for volunteers to an event called WordCamp I never heard before, but I replay thinking could be a nice place to make friends, another special moment, I did make friends but meet this special community the WordPress community and today I’ve attended more than 15 WordCamps around South America and Europe.
You have a lot of experience talking on WordPress events. What do you like about it the most?
Doesn’t look like but I’m a shy person, by a necessity I started to teach at my hometown after finish my college, after that I this passion about share I saw how we learn when we share any knowledge, I believe everybody has a specific view of the same solution and this is nice to see. Before I am involved with WordCamps I had a few presentations on Front-end conferences, after my first WordCamp I started to travel to different Wordcamps across Brazil, talking with people during those conferences I started to listen: “You should share it”. After that, I started to submit my talks to Wordcamps and I’ve spoken at 8 Wordcamps on 5 different states in Brazil. When I move to Europe I started to apply to be a volunteer, my first WordCamp as a volunteer was WordCamp Europe I was an amazing experience. After that WordCamp Belfast, When I was travelling to Belfast one of the speakers was sick, I the organizers need to replace a speaker in 12 hours, I volunteer to replace him and on that time I did my first talk in English was at the same time scary and rewarding the experience after I went to 5 different events.
What did you find the most interesting about Prague WordCamp?
The atmosphere inside a WordCamp is really special, during one or two days people with different backgrounds share the knowledge about something in common. This is really unique the audience that has developers, social media, journalists, designers, filmmakers, writers and musicians… at the same event understand each other we can’t see it at other conferences. What is more special is I can feel the same vibe in Brazil or Belfast. About Prague, I went for the first time last year, to an IT conference and I was impressed to see how big the market it is there and the good reception that I had to make me think about “I need to come back there” and the WordCamp was a good reason to come back.
The issue of Gutenberg raised a lot of discussion in the WordPress community. Do you think the issue was hasty?
Gutenberg was the biggest change on the platform since I’ve started to work with WordPress, the previews updates always included something new: appearance menu, REST API, performance improvements, any of those updates change the way of work inside WordPress, but Gutenberg does. WordPress has more than 15 years the technology needs one step further for the next 5 or 10 years. The web development changes a lot in the last 5 years especially front-end technologies. How WordPress can follow it? Gutenberg could be a good answer for it, the project is bigger than the new editor, involve many new features behind the scene for Developers that bring to the developers a new power.
About the negative reviews, it is a mix of different points some relevant and others not. Who likes to leave the comfort zone? The Change always is difficult and it is the human nature make the problems bigger than they really are. Some points were “I don’t like it” or “I prefer the classic editor” those comments doesn’t help the platform. But some issues were relevant, for example, accessibility just a few people complained about it was something kept to the last minute to fix.
About the code issues the project was available for the test as a plugin for more than 1 year and a lot of fixes were done during that time. My opinion the decision should be released in January but wasn’t the end of the World.But this is Matt’s decision and it was a movement to remove any undefinition about the platform. If you compare to REST API, none complain about it and one month later we had a big issue with security. The main point is: you should have the control of your business if you have a big project in any other platform you should test your application before releasing an update to production.
What is your presentation about this year?
In 2016 on my old company we started this project with ACF to create reusable components, where we do map the most used visual elements in our project and from that we created this theme base. It was a workflow that we adopt for a small team, we did some theming with SASS combined with the reusable components. One year later I saw the WordCamp US presentation about Gutenberg, just thought “holy codex… why we didn’t have this before?”. After I moved to a new company, they kept the project with ACF, a few months later we went for drinks and we decided to create the agency-creation-kit a update of the ACF project and keep it as an open source project.
The Idea was learn more about Gutenberg and see how it affects our routine as a developer. I don’t want to give spoilers but I will compare those two mindsets: the classic theme development and what changes with Gutenberg.