March has been a busy month and it merged into April a little too quickly. So sorry this is a bit late but here we go with Random Mutterings volume 2. We have had a fair share of #WPDrama and then
I have a couple of WP&UP bits in this roundup, but before you read if you haven’t done their recent survey then go and do that at https://wpandup.org/go
I will wait.
WordCamp London Recap
WordCamp London is a WordPress Conference in Brighton…
nah it’s London and for like the 5 or 6th year I attended along with my colleagues from 34SP.com Keith and Dan. This was the first year in a while we haven’t sponsored having taken the choice earlier in the year not to Sponsor WordCamps and focus on Usergroups and we were a little nervous how it would go…
WordCamp London 2019 is hand down favourite WordCamp London I have been to. It was fun, informative and actually re-energising in many ways.
Which might explain:
I got to go to a few talks, I also spoke (You can see my talk on WCLDN Youtube channel livestream, the full polished version will be up soon) and I MC’d a track on Sunday Morning.
Two talks stood out for me (but I was impressed with all the talks of the weekend) Ross Wintle “I TRIED WRITING SOME CODE… YOU WON’T BELIEVE WHAT HAPPENED NEXT!” and Andrea Zoellner “EFFECTIVE COPYWRITING TIPS FOR BETTER UX”. I highly recommend watching both talks, unfortunately, Andrea talk had issues with the live stream so you will have to wait until the finished video out.
One of the advantages of MC’ing was I would never have gone to Andrea talk had I not been in that track. I realise more and more I’m becoming in favour of single track conferences. If I trust the conference organisers to pick and put together a great set of talks I think I would love to be pushed to see talks I just wouldn’t normally want to.
All in all WordCamp London left me re-energised and interested in WordCamps something that has been on the wane and I’m looking forward to going to WordCamp Bristol in May.
WP&UP Podcast and Survey
One of the lovely things to see at WordCamp London was WP&UP who had a stand. For folks not familiar WP&UP is a UK based mental health charity specifically focused on people in the WordPress community. I really love that such a thing exists, and I try where possible to support its efforts, I also help as a skills advisor to WP&UP.
At WordCamp London they announced their new Podcast, hosted by Nathan Wrigley (who also does WP Builds) the podcast features voices from around the WordPress community, discussing their stories and hopes to deliver advice and comfort to folks.
It’s really worth a listen.
The second bit of news was that WP&UP has released a survey to look at an overview of mental health and working environments within the WordPress community. At WordCamp London, folks were doing the survey in person, but they need far more entries than just one conference for it to be useful data. So if you haven’t please go and complete the survey https://wpandup.org/go
What Have I been up to?
Not a great deal, March and to be fair April have run away with me, most personal projects have been non-webby. That said I have a large lump of the holiday (err its taken so long to do this post, I’m now in said holiday) at the end of April so I expect to finish/start/get half way through a few projects.
You Ok App
On my list is to continue working on my buddy app, I’ve started thinking about beyond my needs and you know work on a user interface, I would like to say that I’m going to keep it clean and simple but the reality is that simple is about my skill ability.
Meanwhile I’ve hit a bit of a pain point with influxDB when scaling it to multiple users and am currently pondering if actually returning to the original postgres setup might make more sense. I’m also considering switch out Lumen for full Laravel. Choices Choices
TimNash.co.uk
Speaking of clean and simple, this site is getting an overhaul with little tweaks, like you know aligning bullet points and some mobile improvements. The big changes though are going to be in my talks section which really needs some love. I also want to make some better use of Gutenberg blocks.
Videos
I really want to get back into making videos, so that is high on the list for this holiday, simple tutorials like remaking my WP-CLI tutorials or some basic security videos are high on the agenda.
What have I been reading
Computer Science
- Machine Learning to ensure capacity safety of microservices
- A PHP Compiler , AKA the FFI Rabbit Hole
- A gentle Introduction to Multithreading
WordPress
- How to Boost Your Productivity (Featuring unproductive me)
- Pipdig Insecure, DDOS’ing competitors
MacOS
Misc
- So you want your site to work in China
- Introduction to PromQL (Prometheus monitoring built-in query language)
Shout out to WebOps Weekly by Cooper Press (Though Ironically I don’t think any of this months reading picks come from WebOps its still a great newsletter)
Where am I going to be?
With Holiday in the middle it’s going to be quiet little time but you can catch me at:
- WP Leeds – 23rd April
- Blog On Conference – 4th May
- WordCamp Bristol – 18th -19th May
- WordPress London – Coming to the Darkside – 30th May
- WordPress Bristol – 4th June
WordPress London is possibly the last time Coming to the Darkside will be done at least in its current form. You have been warned!