Board games aren’t really about winning. They’re about shared experiences.
You can look at your opponent’s brilliant, game-winning move and say, “Wow…that was awesome,” because you’re actually celebrating how they pushed themselves to think outside the box and overcome a tough challenge. (And besides, next time you’ll use their own idea against them.)
It doesn’t matter that you haven’t memorized the whole rule book, or that your last strategy completely blew up in your face. When you play a board game, you and your friends are encouraging each other to try harder and have fun at the same time.
We face many challenges when we create and work with websites. and all the skills involved would take many lifetimes to truly master. But rather than being frustrated by the obstacles, intimidated into doubting ourselves, or misled into believing that we’re on our own, we can shift our perspective and remind ourselves to have fun and grow together.
“Code like a writer” seems like a recipe for disaster on its face. But it’s actually a helpful way for some of us to approach WordPress development.
Many of us in the WordPress community didn’t necessarily start out as programmers or Computer Science grads. But most of us probably did some kind of writing before coming to WordPress. Maybe we still do, managing site content or writing posts.
Crafting clean, bug-free, effective code is easier when you approach writing code as an editor approaches copy, or as a writer approaches a story.
Typos cause white screens. Confusing conditionals makes collaboration difficult. Failure to comment things makes it difficult for others to contribute to your theme or plugin.
This is a lightning-session-length presentation that puts good coding practices, specifically WordPress coding standards, into terms that people can understand to make it easier to build sites with WordPress and contribute back to the WordPress community. My own background as a magazine editor and copy editor for 8 years before starting to develop with WordPress gives me the experience to present this material with confidence.
Can one day’s work benefit thousands of people in the local community? Yes. For every do_action there is a positive and empowering re_action.
Hear the inside scoop about the first do_action day to take place in Europe, a one-day hackathon where we created WordPress sites for 5 non-profits and charities in the South West of the UK.
This talk provides a transparent account of why Bristol chose to do_action, what successes and challenges we faced, who it helped and how it made an impact.
Joining such a welcoming and inspiring community as is the WordPress project can be exhilarating and makes people want to contribute their part to join the movement and strengthen their feeling of belonging.
The initial enthusiasm can easily lead to contributors slowly spiraling into overcommitment and a feeling of obligation and responsibility towards the project. There’s a cost attached to anything we do, even when we’re talking about unpaid volunteer work done in the spare time. And that cost will be paid in some way, no matter what.
We need to more openly talk about the adverse effects of doing open source contributions in an unsustainable way, destigmatize the money topic when it comes to “”free”” software and directly address immediate issues of frustration and burn-out as they surface.
Let’s all have our fellow contributors’ backs, and make sure we’re all in it for the long run!
