WordCamp Europe 2016 was really great. MuseumsQuartier was an excellent choice for the venue — right in the city center. People were great. Talks were great. Party was great.

Talking About My Experience

For me it started on the January 31st, that was the date I submitted my talk proposal. I’ve thought about the topic few weeks back, and decided to cover a concept I rely a lot when working on projects. I was still in Munich at the time and worked on some projects in that specific way. The talk was titled Movin the Design Process to the Browser and I’ve written a lengthy post about it.

The schedule was finalized several weeks before the actual event and I was informed that I will be presenting in Halle G (seating capacity 400) which was a relief, to be honest. I worked on my slide deck on and off for several weeks. Two weeks before the talk I mostly did test runs, updated examples, tweaked copy and order of the slides. Thanks Marko and Emanuel for all the encouragement and advice in days before the talk. It’s really appreciated.

I’m trying to get as much experience as possible in public speaking so it was important for me that all goes well. It wasn’t perfect, I was probably too nervous but I got the message across. Feedback after the talk was helpful — especially the Happiness Bar concept, a place where speakers could talk with attendees 1–on–1. What next? Well, I’ll be submitting this talk to other WordCamps in the area, plus I already have an idea for a new topic that I want to talk about. Since all talks I do are based on my work experience, the type of projects I choose and get to work on also shape that idea.

Good Content

There were really interesting talks during the conference. The overall quality of the talks was excellent. Some of the talks I got the chance to listen really inspired me:

• Code is Poetry: A Musician’s Tale by Helen Hou-Sandí
• Assistive Technology Demo by Graham Armfield
• My condolences, you’re now the maintainer of a popular open source project by Daniel Bachhuber
• Making Ads Great Again by Adam Silverstein
• Art Directed Web Typography by Marko Dugonjić
• Your content is trapped – How a proper content architecture can save it by Thomas Kräftner
• Publish in 10 Minutes Per Day by Andrea Badgley
• The making of Calypso: a team perspective by Davide Casali
• Privacy and the Web: are you doing what it takes? by Anders Jensen-Urstad and Amelia Andersdotter (article)

I also missed some talks which came highly recommended:

• My friend the Impostor Syndrome by Sonja Leix (article)
• Emotional Interfaces by Tammie Lister
• Inheriting large and legacy projects by Andrew Nacin
• WordPress, state of the accessibility by Rian Rietveld (article)

That’s the problem with two or more parallel tracks in conferences. But since everything is recorded it shouldn’t be a problem to catch up on WordPress.tv.

Community And Networking

When the WordCamp Europe 2016 was announced I thought about applying to help out as a volunteer but I had other things on my mind at the time and didn’t want to spread my free time to thin. Two weeks before the event, my brother Emanuel (communication team lead) asked me if I could help with live tweeting the talks and I was more than happy to do it. Getting a chance to help out probably kept me from not getting too much stressed about my talk. 🙂

For Contributor’s day I went with Design team which Hugo Baeta was leading. Always nice to learn about the process that shapes WordPress UI and how to actually contribute in a design process. I’ve selected some issues I plan to tackle with in the next few weeks.

Lucijan and me sad but proud for being part of it, after #wceu ended

A photo posted by Emanuel Blagonic (@emanuelblagonic) on Jun 29, 2016 at 4:10am PDT

During those four days in Vienna, I got to chance to meet a lot of new people, talk to others in our community and learn a lot of things from talks. Most importantly, I was inspired by others to work on myself and to dedicate more time for writing and giving back to the community.

Once more, I’d like to thank all the organizers and volunteers for making WordCamp Europe 2016 a reality. See you next year in Paris.