One of the best IT events around. This time, on the edge of Europe.

/ MY MENTAL IMAGE OF POLAND?

Karol Jozef Wojtyla and Jerzy Kukuczka, these were the two important figures who came to mind whenever Poland was mentioned. My friend Zibi had also told me about the Polish mountains and the industry of this great country. Yet, I had never had the chance to visit.

Then, all of a sudden, I told myself the time had come: I sent a message to my friend Matteo, and within five minutes we decided to go. We didn’t want to miss this Eastern European WordCamp!

WordCamp undoubtedly offers a major advantage: in addition to providing top-tier talks and workshops, it gives attendees access to a city with free public transport (included in the event ticket) and includes most meals.

As for us, all we had to do was find an apartment five minutes from the ICE Krakow Congress Centre, and we were all set!

/ THE CONTRIBUTOR DAY

For this edition of WordCamp, we wanted to arrive prepared for Contributor Day, the day when the community dedicates itself to WordPress development. We signed up for the Core group and set up development environments on our PCs by following the official documentation: https://github.com/wordPress/wordpress-develop.

For the occasion, I set up my new Dell Latitude laptop with the rolling-release Manjaro distribution. As always, it took some time to figure out how to configure Xdebug on both of our laptops. Then, we looked for a patch to test at https://core.trac.wordpress.org/tickets/needs-testing and tried to replicate the scenario described in the ticket.

We managed to understand the problem that was highlighted (and perhaps resolved), but we were unable to go any further; indeed, time had already flown by, and the day had come to an end.

In the future, I would like to dedicate some time to the project on a more consistent basis. In fact, I feel that everything I have done so far has been a very minor contribution to WordPress.

/ THE PRESENTATIONS

There was a huge number of presentations and workshops over the following two days. Among the ones I managed to attend, there are two I would like to recommend.

The first is the CERN presentation, truly interesting and unexpected. For me, it confirms that WordPress is now being used by high-profile organizations as well.

The second is this workshop, where we had the chance to try using AI to build a plugin. Both Matteo and I initially followed the steps on our own PCs, but after the first part, we preferred to just follow along without trying to replicate everything immediately. I’ve always found it difficult to properly follow a presentation and write code at the same time.

/ CONSIDERATIONS

The next European event will be in Malaga; I would like to attend better prepared for the Core-related aspects, so I plan to try taking on some tasks in advance and gaining a better grasp of the WordPress development workflow.

I would also love to get a larger group of friends and colleagues involved so we can share this special experience together.