Impressions of the WordCamp Conference in Thessaloniki, December 2018

In December 2018, I attended the WordCamp Conference in Thessaloniki and I had a blast. WordCamp is a conference about WordPress and other relevant fields important to the IT community. It holds discussions on different topics including Startups, e-Commerce and Blogging and it is supported by the WordPress Foundation. I enriched my knowledge with up-to-date trends while enjoying the interesting, practical and useful presentations by this year’s speakers. Here are my highlights of the conference.

A Glimpse into the World of Artbees

The first presentation I attended was held by Maziar Firuzmand, who plays a hybrid role in Artbees and is in charge of their marketing strategies, product designs and overall strategy. Artbees raised their relevance on the market by creating the popular WordPress theme Jupiter X which has more than a million users around the globe. His presentation was “Wordpress and the problem of diversity with a case study of Artbees” and it was about how he managed to deal with problems in his country Iran in order to make a legal and successful business with more than 30 members from different ethnicities, religions and countries. What he did was defining the problem of diversity that affects the tech world. Then he shared how WordPress as an open community helped him and his brother to focus on the evolution of Artbees. Finally, he provided a list of principles and practices that WordPress and Automattic include in their work to encourage diversity and how this can be inspiring for the tech world to solve the current problem of diversity. A very inspiring and interesting approach was the impression I got from the this first presentation.

Design and Life

Next, the presentation “The 7 pillars of design (and how they apply to our lives)” by Raffaella Isidori, coach and consultant, reflected upon how the fundamental concepts of graphic design can be applied to all aspects of our lives. Some of these concepts are space, gestalt, unity, dominance and balance and the same way they govern the design, they should govern our lives as well. It was a great parallel between life and design and all the things they have in common.

Plugins and Other Similar Stuff

Then, the presentation “Using acceptance tests in your plugin” was held by David Remer, a web developer for the biggest WordPress agency in Germany and also a WordPress VIP partner. This was a very practical presentation that showed how the Pluginkollektiv team developed Antispam Bee, a spam-fighting plugin for WordPress.

Gulp and the Modern Trends

The next presentation was held by Alessandro Kaounas, a web developer and system admin along with being a student at the Department of Informatics of the University of Athens. He demonstrated modern development practices with Gulp and how to improve an existing working flow. Gulp is a build tool for automating many repetitive tasks like running a local server, minifying code, optimizing images, preprocessing CSS, etc. He also showed how to use Gulp from scratch in order to create a successful project.

Digital Marketing Enhanced by Inbound Marketing

Finally, the last presentation I attended was “The Art of Inbound Marketing” by Marina Vassilyovska who is a full-stack marketer. She talked about the basics of inbound marketing and how to implement this amazing approach in order to completely transform the online presence. Inbound marketing, basically, is the combination of marketing channels (content marketing, SEO and social media) in creative ways to attract people’s attention. It was a distinctive approach that certainly nudged my digital creativity.