A developer at WordCamp 2018

After recently adding developing in WordPress into my ever growing skillset I decided it was time to attend my first WordCamp in London. If you are unsure what WordCamp is, then take a look at our WordCamp London 2018 post.

While the whole event was very informative to me, I just wanted to focus this article on a couple of the talks I found the most beneficial.

Introducing my friend, XDebug

The first talk I went to which was worth a mention was a talk on Xdebug. Xdebug is an extension for PHP to assist with debugging and development. It adds stack traces for Warnings, Errors, and Exceptions plus many other helpful features to improve production. For developers a good debugging tool is essential so in the near future, I will be taking a look at how I can start to use this when developing new websites in PHP.

future.css

As a Frontend Developer, this was the talk I was most enthusiastic about. As the title states, it was a brief summary of new features being rolled out to CSS in the near future.
In this talk, Keith Devon went into detail about some really cool new properties such as ‘custom properties’, ‘color functions’, ‘filters + blend modes’ and ‘shapes + clipping’. Most of these properties can be used now however not all browsers currently support them (IE) so actually putting them into practice right now isn’t ideal, however, hopefully, we can include some of them into our projects in the near future.

If like myself you enjoy using CSS to bring sites to life you should also check out the following CSS properties coming soon; ‘Houdini’, ‘scroll-snap’, ‘object-fit’, ‘conic-gradient’ plus lots more.

Gutenberg

Finally, I just wanted to explain about the hot topic of the WordCamp London event which everybody seemed to be talking about – “Gutenberg”. If you don’t know what it is yet, Gutenberg is a take on a new editor for WordPress. Their goal is to make creating web pages easier, especially for those just starting with WordPress and judging by what I saw at the event they are doing an exceptional job with it. Once Gutenberg has been fully released to WordPress I foresee it being used by the majority of WordPress users because of how simple it will be to make flexible looking web pages.

WordCamp London was a great thing for a developer like myself to experience and I would encourage other developers out there to try to attend a similar event. It’s a great way to learn new techniques and it also opens your eyes to what’s going on in the world of WordPress. The weekend was also a great way to meet fellow developers from all across the world who like me, are passionate about what they do on a daily basis.