WordCamp Sofia – View From the Inside

Yesterday the biggest in Europe WordCamp has reached it’ logical end. For two days people from all continents were sharing their thoughts, experience and insights on the subjects that gathered 800+ professionals just in one place.

In this blog post we’d like to outline most amazing talks presented during the last couple of days.

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Noel Tock - Beyond the Code

The first one to speak was a digital nomad (how he calls himself) Noel Tock. Noel wanders the globe and shares his experience (trust me one he gained will be enough for five people more.)

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Being one of the owners at Human Made, a WordPress.com VIP partner, Noel heads up great amount of projects, including Happytables.com & WPRemote.com. While not working he does some training.

Actually what Noel was talking about was a matter of interest for everyone. He told us how he managed to become what he is, how he manages his time and which apps he uses either to read articles of to manage his daily/weekly talks.

Mostly this was an inspiration talk that would probably help most starting developers reach outstanding results. The phrase which made the whole audience gasp sounded like this, “I’ve created the first website 10 years ago, and the moment I’ve started taking this activity seriously happened three years ago”

So what did you achieve for the last three years?

Want to talk to Noel? You can find his contacts here:

https://www.noeltock.com/
https://twitter.com/noeltock

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The next one to talk was Yana Petrova

Yana is a marketing person and also an event organiser, foodie and traveler. She’s been blogging about food since 2010 and In the past couple of years she’s been organising local technical conferences in Bulgaria including the biggest Bulgarian event dedicated to free software, free culture and knowledge sharing – Open Fest.

She had a really inspiring talk that had an unexpected theme. Yana touched upon a problem that no one really wants to talk about, and that it depression. Bet you know what it is if you’re one of those guys spending 15+ hours a day looking into the gleaming screen.

One of Yana’s phrases made everyone gasp, "The first rule of depression is, nobody talks about depression."

If you’re feeling that this problem may occur to you, don’t be afraid to talk about it. Yana gave us pieces of advice that can help you overcome your emotional problems, here they come:

• breathing exercises, practicing regular, mindful breathing can be calming and energizing and can even help with stress-related health problems ranging from panic attacks to digestive disorders.
• daily rituals, if don’t have any, you need to start one right now, this could be anything possible starting from waking early or staying up late, cooking everyday something new for the breakfast, bathing, drinking vast quantities of coffee, or taking long daily walks.
• lists, it’s have already been proven thousands of times that lists help people arrange their daily routine and manage their time effectively.
• provide small wins, to fulfill this step first of all you need to make a goal, minor goals will also work.
• listen to listen, learn to share, this is pretty clear.

https://twitter.com/ypetrova/

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Next talk we’d like to mention is by Siobhan McKeown

Siobhan McKeown works at Audrey Capital where she writes about WordPress, deals with documentation, and has nightmares about the Codex. She’s currently working on an open source book about the history of WordPress.

In her talk Siobhan told about the freedoms which WordPress gives to users, developers and everyone involved. Being licenced under the GPL WordPress provides 4 freedoms for everyone: use, modify, distribute and redistribute, this is the so-called WordPress “bill of rights”.

• The freedom to run the program, for any purpose.
• The freedom to study how the program works, and change it to make it do what you wish.
• The freedom to redistribute.
• The freedom to distribute copies of your modified versions to others.

Part of those licensing requirements include licensing derivative works or things that link core WordPress functions (like themes, plugins, etc.) under the GPL as well, thereby passing on the freedom of use for these works as well.

Obviously there are those who will try to get around these ideals and restrict the freedom of their users by trying to find loopholes or somehow circumvent the intention of the WordPress licensing, which is to ensure freedom of use. We believe that the community as a whole will reward those who focus on supporting these licensing freedoms instead of trying to avoid them.

The most responsible use of WordPress community resources would therefore be put to best use by emphasizing high quality contributions that embrace the freedoms provided by the GPL

http://siobhanmckeown.com/
https://twitter.com/SiobhanPMcKeown

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Jenny Beaumont...and her cry of despair

Actually this tweet inspired Jenny’s talk...

Plugin devs/sellers… What’s the dickiest thing a customer has done? I just have a morbid curiosity about this.

— Brianna Norcross (@sarcasmically) July 2, 2014

For every designer or developer relationships with a client play the most important role, but sometimes it happens that client acts the way you don’t when to act. Overall this leads to some catastrophes. In her talk Jenny described a few of these horror stories to see how things went terribly wrong and what she might have done to prevent them.

Looking at the pitfalls in managing client relationships, taking responsibility for our own actions and working to improve our communication skills.

Want to talk to Jenny about some inadequate client you can reach her here:

http://www.jennybeaumont.com/
https://twitter.com/jennybeaumont

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Adrian Zumbrunnen - Rethinking Content Creation

Judging by the emotions and the response of the audience this talk can be called the best from WordCamp 2014. Being presented under the motto “guys I love you all” Adrian presented thing that made all listeners jump on their places, but let’s start from the beginning.

How many pages or posts can you create in your WordPress site? The offhand number would be 5-15 but the number will depend on the amount of text you will have on the page or a post. Most of the time is taken away by the loading preview of a page. But how can we overcome this inconvenience and significantly accelerate the process of page creation?

And here is what Adrian can offer to all WordPress users, he called it the FrontKit.

Basically it’s a plugin that helps you manage your page content without the need to open the dashboard or use your WYSIWYG editor.

Simple but highly effective thing that will save tons of your time. Adrian promised to make an official release of his plugin in the next few months, as well as offer an API that developers will be able to use to adapt the same plugin for other CMS.

Want to get some more details? Talk to Adrian here.

http://azumbrunnen.me/
https://twitter.com/azumbrunnen_

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Karin Christen - interactive prototyping made right

The focus of Karin’s talk was the rapid prototyping, user experience and interaction design. Karin introduced us here workflow as well as prototyping setup.

As you know there is a wide majority of prototyping apps, Kristen uses Sketch and she wanted to tell us how amazing this tool is, due to its native functionalities one can easily build highly functional prototypes.

Karin is a co-founder of a web design company required+, Karin as an Interaction Designer she is setting her focus on the user’s perspective. Clients hire her to either work on applications with usability issues or to integrate in teams where they start a project from scratch.

https://required.com/team/karin/
https://twitter.com/karinchristen

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Chris Lema - Professional WordPress

If you think that it's hard to find a good storyteller, probably you are wrong, being presented at WordCamp I was lucky to hear the talk by Chris Lema. In a funny and unusual manner Chis talked about the most common problems any large company can have...starting from the bosses and ending with salaries.

Chris shared a story from his life, once he got an offer from a really huge and profitable company [let's omit its name] but Chris is a smart guy and he managed to persuade superiors to rearrange the workflow and to make one boss for one worker, this may sound insane, but it actually happened.

https://chrislema.com/
https://twitter.com/chrislema

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Tony Perez - WordPress security starts with a good posture

Tony is one of the Co-Founders and a CEO of a globally recognized website security company, Sucuri, Inc. He has invested the better part of 4 years analyzing and assessing the state of security within the realm of websites, with a special interest in WordPress. He travels the world engaging website owners of all levels, beginners to advanced, in an effort to build a bridge between traditional Information Security processes and those that end-users should employ. He strongly believes that the challenges WordPress users face today around security can be addressed through education and awareness.

According to Tony the threats website owners face today range in scale and complexity – from large DDOS attacks leveraging WordPress core functionality, to vulnerabilities found in some of the largest plugins in the ecosystem. The Security dilemma is not shrinking, it’s getting bigger and more today, than ever, it’s important we take the time to educate and bring awareness to the things everyday website owners can do to improve their over security posture.

Security is not a turn of a knob, or click of an option, it’s about state of mind, it’s about good posture.

https://sucuri.net/
https://twitter.com/perezbox

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Davide Casali - Gestalt principles for developers

Davide is an experience director at Automattic with 11+ years of experience and a hybrid background in design, psychology and technology. He led cross-disciplinary teams of designers and developers, created and advised successfully funded companies and has done coaching and training for global and local organizations (DHL, EY, Atos).

During his years of professional experience he led the design of consumer and enterprise services for more than 2 million users worldwide in different markets, industries and countries. He worked with Nokia, Mastercard, Red Bull, Ferrari, Bank of England, Intesa Sanpaolo, Banca Sella, Unicredit, Vodafone, Telecom Italia, Benetton and more.

The talk Davide presented at WordCamp Sofia was quite unusual. Actually some time ago we’ve published a series of articles on practically the same subject:

Design and development go hand in hand, however it can be difficult to collaborate between these two different skill sets, even just because we speak different languages. Design patterns and guidelines aren’t really the answer because they just detail the how, but don’t highlight the underlying why.

The gestalt principles are at the foundation of human perception and give us a framework to think about design solutions, allowing us to make the right decisions.

After Davide has finished his talk one of the attendees asked him a question, as for the gestalt principles used in the WordCamp logo, Davide found 4 principles, try to find them and give an answer in the comments.

https://intenseminimalism.com/
https://twitter.com/Folletto

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That's it, got any questions feel free to ask them in the comments below.