What was your motivation to become a speaker at WordCamp Prague 2020?
Last time I’ve given a talk at a WordCamp was in Zagreb back in 2017, then I was approached by one of the organizers at WCEU this year (2019) and she mentioned that I could submit talks, especially a talk about inner workings of one of the wordpress.org teams, so I thought I’d give it a try (and submit three proposals along the way). 😁 Also, Prague is a lovely city and this is a perfect excuse to visit it again. 🙂
What will be your talk about? / What can attendees learn at your workshop? Who can benefit the most from your session?
My talk is titled ‘What is it that you do at the theme review team?’, and in it, I’ll try to explain what I do as one of the representatives of the Theme Review Team (TRT) at wordpress.org. Besides that, I’ll also show what my colleagues at TRT do, and try to show that we don’t only review themes all day long, but also try to work with other teams in making the future of WordPress great. I hope to spark some interest in people to join us and help out.
What are a few takeaways that attendees will get from your talk?
Contributing to open source can be daunting, but once you get into it, you’ll see how awesome it is. The people in the community make it all worth the effort. And I want to show that you don’t have to just review themes to be a part of the TRT.
I am a great fan of automation myself, but many people, especially freelancers or small agencies, may not share the same point of view. What could convince them to make the initial investment (of time, effort, money)?
To me, automation is an awesome way to save time. There are tons of day to day tasks that we work on, and can easily be automated. So why should we waste time on tasks that we can automate? This gives us more time to spend on learning new things or contributing to open source projects. I’m working in a pretty big agency at the moment, and we use a lot of automation when working on our projects. Especially when building and deploying applications. We use CI/CD pipelines (continuous integration/continuous deployment) which speeds up our development time a lot. Plus we don’t have to care about how something will be deployed. We just reuse existing pipeline tweak it minimally and that’s it. In the end, it’s all about saving time (and time equals money as the saying goes 😁).
The biggest fear, as I see it, is when you have to learn a new thing that you know nothing about. It takes time to learn, and you need to try (and fail) until you get it right. But once you set everything up you can look back and say: how did I ever work without this?
The automation is all around us these days, especially in web development with various task runners, bundlers, etc. We should not shy away from it just because we don’t know how to use it. We should embrace the challenge and realize that we’ll learn something new – and learning something new makes you a better developer. It’s just one way we can grow.
Did you work in the Theme Review Team change in any way with the introduction of Gutenberg into WordPress 5.0? How did theme authors respond to it?
At the TRT we never pushed any Gutenberg related changes until very recently. Mostly it was because GB team was kinda doing its own thing. Only recently have they started to experiment with full site editing, which kinda ruffled some feathers at TRT. Because it looked like nobody asked us how this will impact themes. And the truth is: We still don’t know. What we are trying to do is to be a bridge between theme authors, theme users and the other relevant teams at wordpress.org. We definitely want to be a part of that discussion and see how we can influence some decisions being made, and also prepare theme authors for the changes that will inevitably come.
So far not many authors started to style GB blocks. But we hope to change this with the release of TwentyTwenty.
What is your background? What should our attendees know about you?
Before working with WordPress, I was studying physics and I’ve never thought that I’ll work with WordPress. After graduating back in 2014, I stumbled on a job that required somebody who can create themes for ThemeForest. I did have some small Joomla knowledge at that time. As time passed, I found about the awesome WordPress community. In 2016 I joined #themereview slack channel and the rest is history 😁 Now I work as a Lead WordPress Engineer at Infinum, mentoring colleagues, working on interesting client projects.
What are you looking forward to WordCamp Prague 2020? Why is that?
I’m looking forward to visiting Prague, as I really love the city. Besides that, I’m looking forward to meeting new people, making new friends in the WordPress community, and maybe seeing some old acquaintances. 🙂 WordCamps are always awesome places to be because WordPress has the best community ever 😁
What would you like to see in the future for WordPress?
One of the things I hope we’ll have in the core in the near future is GraphQL. The plugin that is currently in the works (although it’s production-ready) is just awesome, and the team behind it is excellent. I think it would open up WordPress to an even wider audience of developers (as we are seeing these days with Gatsby community and all the headless implementations out there).
Have you adopted Gutenberg, the Blocks editor? If yes, do you have a favorite use case for it? If not, why?
I’ve built one plugin for it that is currently used to make themes blog (https://wordpress.org/plugins/details-summary-block/ – shameless plug), and my theme is GB compatible. Also, my colleagues at Infinum have built their own blocks workflow (https://github.com/infinum/eightshift-frontend-libs) that we use in our projects. Personally I like it, because it’s interesting to use, and it’s easier for users to see what they’ll get in the front end right there in the admin. It has its flaws (especially accessibility), but the amount of work done on it is staggering.
For how long have you been using WordPress? And why you’ve chosen WordPress?
I’ve been using WordPress for 5 years now, you could say it chose me. The reason I’ve stayed with WordPress is definitely the community.
How do you feel about the WordPress community? Did you get involved in it?
As mentioned, the best community ever. Loads of hard-working people who do what they do because they love doing it, not because they want to gain something by it. I landed in the Theme Review team because I was working on themes and it was kind of a logical step for me I guess. Even though these days I’m more oriented towards backend stuff, it still holds a special place in my heart 🙂
What is your favorite tool related to WordPress?
WP-CLI is an awesome tool that helps developers do a lot really quickly, there are tons of awesome tools that help with development like PHPCS, PHPStan. But I think WP-CLI is currently number one for me 😀
What makes you smile/happy?
Good joke and beer with friends.
Anything else you want to add?
Can’t wait to see y’all at WordCamp Prague 2020.