I mooched off of Loopconf for two days straight, watching the live stream for free. I caught at least half of the sessions, and most of the speakers were terrific. I highly recommend you just peruse the Loopconf Youtube channel to find your favorites, but I’d also like to highlight some that really stood out to me.
So much WP REST API
There were quite a few talks centered on the REST API. You should use this free opportunity to learn more about it and how folks are using it.
From a high level, Ryan McCue talks about building the API for 23% of the web. This is an excellent primer to get inside the mind of one of the biggest influencers on the API and why the leadership team is making certain decisions.
React and Flux are frameworks from Facebook, and are a popular choice for building with a REST API. Nikolay Bachiyski talks about using them.
Using the REST API as the middleman between Node and WordPress, from Wired’s Jake Spurlock.
WordPress.com has a REST API of their own, and Kat Hagan takes a deep dive.
Jack Lenox’s talk was during the workshop day, but he discussed theming with the REST API, and this post on ThemeShaper introducing the Picard theme came out of it.
Other technical enlightenment
A couple presentations were particularly vertical looks on topics that I needed to know more about. Here are some of my favorites.
In The art of Multisite maintenance, Jeremy Felt explains the architecture of WordPress Multisite better than I’ve ever seen anyone do it before.
Eric Andrew Lewis did an incredible presentation on extending the WordPress media experience. His Github profile is a total goldmine, as well, including a WordPress media Javascript guide.
Zoe Rooney did a really nice job explaining automation in WordPress theming, something every serious WordPress theme developer should be doing in my opinion.
This was another workshop and not recorded, but Zack Tollman went deep — really deep — into TLS. His slides are super awesome even without the greater context of his talk.
Bigger picture
Fellow Alabamian Rachel Carden discussed how you are not your code, a talk that discussed imposter syndrome, being nice to people, and other great advice for being a happier developer.
The art of software maintenance, by Andrew Norcross, is well worth watching. He talks about learning from your code, when to hand off a project (or retire it), being nice to folks, and I also completely agree with his take on the phrase, “Patches Welcome.”
Syed Balkhi says seeking perfection is a curse. Sometimes, you just got to ship. If you try to make software perfect, you won’t ship it.
Andrew Nacin dropped the mic when discussing the anatomy of a critical software bug. I did a whole post on it yesterday (that includes the video), that you should read if you haven’t already.
I swear I didn’t pay Ghost founder John O’Nolan to say nice things about Post Status, but I appreciated it anyway. He did a great job explaining the practical benefits of contributing to open source. My post he referenced was the one on Contribution as culture.
I felt like I was there
These are not the only good presentations; seriously, the line-up was really great. It was super generous of Ryan Sullivan and his organizing team to make the stream free, and it seems like everyone there got a ton out of the conference.
I thank them for the free videos and if they do this conference again I won’t be able to miss it.
