 This is Pascal Birchler. He's 22, which means he's about half my age. He started blogging when he was 12, and he's now 22, and he's a WordPress core committer. So, I mean, I'm just going to hand the stage over to him, basically, because he's achieved way more in his life than I have. He's going to tell you all about his journey from blogging to core committing. Please give him a round of applause and welcome him to work at London. Well, good morning. It's an honour to be here today. I know that work comes in a lot of work, so thanks again to all the organisers and volunteers. As he said, I'm going to talk about my journey from being a blogger, a WordPress user, to a WordPress core committer. How is it to be part of such a big project? How is it to be breaking the web every once in a while? By sharing my story, I want to encourage you to contribute to open source software and show you how reward it is. Also, I'll reveal what Swiss chocolate has to do with that. As a quick note before I begin, it was a good time to follow me on Twitter, where I'll share the link to my slides right after my talk. And yes, there's three S's in a row. Last year, I attended work in London for the first time. I had a great time with my friends and colleagues, and it turned to be the start of an amazing 2015. Naturally, this time, I decided to go and stage myself. I've been thinking about the title of my talk for quite a while before I actually applied. I even had a working-draft title in my notebook. It's awful, but it can also be not that bad. Together, we can make it even more awesome. Today, I'll show you how we can do that. I love this animation. For those of you who don't know what a core committer is, I briefly want to clarify the term for you. Simply put, WordPress is made by hundreds of people. Every person here can, such as the bug fixer or an enhancement to WordPress core. After that, committers are the ones who put that change into WordPress. There are currently about 40 WordPress core committers. Now, let's roll back in time for a bit to my beginnings with WordPress. It all started 10 years ago when I wanted to build my own personal website. I don't know why, but I chose WordPress to keep an online journal. WordPress 2.0 was brand new at the time, I think. The content was pretty boring for a 12-year-old. Luckily, it was written in German, so most of you won't be able to decipher the text here. Yeah, but it was fun. I was always fascinated with technology and the web, and I was learning about how could I customize the site, tweaking the HTML and CSS and stuff, and I spent hours on that. Wrong button. Two years later, I decided to blog solely about WordPress and news and findings because I was so interested in it. This site was called Swiss WordPress Magazine. Pretty, not that interesting name, but it was a real digital magazine. I created a PDF magazine and later even an iOS app, and all in my spare time. Yeah, that's the most embarrassing screenshot you'll see today. I didn't realize it at the time, but blogging about WordPress, spending a lot of time tweaking my site, helped me to get to know WordPress very, very well. I read all the blog posts, I attended meetings in IRC, or tested all the releases. Sorry, I tested all the releases. I learned about plugin and theme development, and how the WordPress community was organized in general, with the WordPress Foundation, and that WordPress isn't made by magic. It made me feel more comfortable working with it. I think if you're new to WordPress, diving head first into it. It's awesome. It's the best way you can learn it. Plus, if you blog yourself, you learn the needs of everyday WordPress users the best. Just yesterday, I met a guy from Germany at Contributor Day for the first time. It turned out that he was a blogger, a co-author on my blog, eight years ago, just kicking off his... Oh, sorry. Just kicking off his WordPress career simply by blogging about it. So, in short, blogging about WordPress is great. Having people reading your blog and your content and learning from it is awesome. It's an awesome feeling, and out of these wizards emerge conversations, and you get to know people who are like-minded. And I naturally started to wonder, was there a WordPress community in Switzerland, like not an online community, but a physical one, and I was keen to find out. Turns out, there was none. No local meet-ups, no work camps. There were only a handful of people blogging about WordPress from time to time. So, I realized that I needed to take action myself in order to change that. I began looking for some general tech events in my area, so not necessarily WordPress-related. Guess how I felt when I attended a bar camp for the first time? There were lots of other people way older than me, and I really had no idea what to do there. So, luckily, I've grown up at least a bit, and I hope none of you is feeling the same today. Let's have a chat afterwards. A few years went by, and together with people from the German WordPress community, we managed to organize a small work camp in Northern Switzerland with about 50 attendees. It was pretty small, but it was a sign of life for the WordPress community in Switzerland. After that, WordPress really got traction in the country. In 2014 and 2015, we managed to organize work camps with over 200 attendees, and well-known speakers from all over the world, like this guy, Konstantin Obenland, who is a WordPress core committer and works for Automate. At the time, Novel Talk organized the local meet-up group in Zurich. I attended many, many meet-ups, even organized a few. But for me, local men taken one-hour train ride to Zurich from the eastern part of Switzerland, which is kind of silly because now I'm taking a plane to London to do the same. But anyway, today Switzerland has a more active community than ever before, and there are active meet-up groups in multiple cities, lots of successful developers and agencies offering high-quality WordPress services. There's even a work camp coming up later this year, I think October. Yeah, I guess WordPress really has arrived in Switzerland. For me, WordPress meet-ups have always proved to be very rewarding because of all the discussions and the friendships that arise out of them. It's been worth it every single time. In my opinion, you should really think about joining or even organizing a local meet-up. And if you want to get out of town, why not combine your trip with a work camp? The work camp in London is just, sorry, the work camp in Europe is just around the corner. So, let's recap this for a moment. I was blogging quite successfully about WordPress and using WordPress, and I became very confident in working with it. I attended plenty of WordPress events, and I even finished my apprenticeship as a web developer a couple of years ago. Yet, I never managed to really contribute to WordPress as I hoped to do. As you know, WordPress is made by many, many people. People way smarter than me, talented experts in their respective fields. And for me, there was something that I was not good enough, or that contributing is too difficult for me. And contrary to today, there was also lack of documentation or good help for new contributors. So, I really struggled to get going. But when the first work camp in Europe was announced in 2013, with a contributor day, I just had to attend. I knew that it was my chance to change this. I only knew a handful of people there, but it was a big opportunity for me. Yeah, but I didn't really know what to expect or how to prepare for that contributor day. But for me, in the end, success in every way, because I got my first jobs in a WordPress core commit. I didn't even need to code anything complex or something. Simply improved inline documentation, which is pretty easy. Still a few years ago, and, yeah. So, no matter how small the change was, for me, it was a perfect deal. And after, sorry. I earned some more props by contributing more regularly to WordPress. And I don't know why I didn't start earlier with that, because it was easy and I really liked it. And you learn something new every day when you contribute. sorry about the microphone or people will help you getting started little mistakes day by day you get better at what you do oh and somehow I even ended up with a bunch of shot glasses from the work camp I guess I had to celebrate something so after the work camp I continued to frequently contribute to WordPress it meant that I get to know lots of aspects of WordPress and lots of parts that will make you shake your head when you touch them and if you do touch them chances are high that things are going to break one example that was particularly fun was a change to a class about querying users by different roles nothing spectacular but it was something I was in need of myself and learned that it was a three-year-old ticket and I got motivated to fix it I spent a couple of hours writing tests actual implementation and after a couple of more tweaks and considerations it's got committed to core I thought wow that is easy it was pretty cool now can work with it unfortunately it wasn't that easy a few hours later there was a report track went down so that's a ticketing system where press users but I didn't think anything about it because it happens often after that WordPress.org went down as well I still thought didn't pay much attention because that can happen too right suddenly I got some notifications turns out my contribution was the culprit so due to an oversight there was a massive loss of performance when querying users crashing the database yeah have I already mentioned how awesome contributing to WordPress is that you learn a lot from and I guess it's true that you learn from and not from success but for me contributing to WordPress got even more fun after that last July when there was a feature plug-in chat on Slack so a feature plugin is essentially an idea that is being developed as a plug-in first and eventually be proposed for being merged into a press core and I think now they are called feature project but it's kind of the same so just as contributing a patch to WordPress developing a feature plug-in makes you learn something new every day in addition to that you you get bugs you get stress and deadlines nonetheless if you ever have an idea for a feature project do not hesitate to pursue it so in this feature plug-in chat I talked about an idea I shared several ideas and one of them was about embedding content from other WordPress sites in your website so we're precise in a WordPress site not more here's a couple of how that how we how we imagined it to look like in the early days luckily people seem to like the idea so I started working more on it so there was suddenly leading in 20 contributors and 500 commits just like five months and all with weekly meetings decision-making and of course the deadlines and eventually the plug-in to WordPress 4.4 last fall and you can only imagine how relieved I felt that after core merge a fun bug occurred when someone reported that and didn't work properly on older versions and that code consisting of HTML and JavaScript got mixed up and was broken on all the WordPress sites to culprit and presents so basically WordPress was encoding and presents in the embed code and we needed a clever way to so do you see the difference what it was eliminating and presents from the embed code creating some nested if state along the lines and to ensure that this doesn't actually end isn't talked about this can be as last December and you to watch this talk WordPress TV this bug shows quite well how WordPress is committed to backwards compatibility and it also shows you that maintaining back that isn't that and very well worth the effort because now embeds work on all WordPress versions finally I can tell you about a Swiss chocolate you may ask to do with the whole story as a reward for my numerous contributions to WordPress I got the chance to attend a community summit and the first ever work in US last December I didn't manage to see the famous stairs of the Rocky movies but the trip was a success nonetheless and of course as a tourist within the US for the first time I brought some Swiss chocolate with me and I thought and I started with a single tweet of course I could count on Gary Pendergast who is also core committer and was a great help when developing the embeds plugin in just a few hours later my strategy seemed to paid off and only in my dreams I could have imagined what happened afterwards in the annual state of the word speech Matt Malinweck announced that several core contributors would receive commit access to WordPress core in the next year including me yeah no need to tell you that I was flabbergasted and super honored and when I first heard the news the very next day I said to next to verpers lead developers at the World Camp US contributor day and Andrew Nasing gave me the instructions for the task of the day my first commit it wasn't a spectacular commit or something someone wrote a patch improving a small part of the toolbar and I can assure you that a spell check the commit message dozens of times well what can I say I guess hard work eventually pays off and I think it's a validation of my engagement with the community and it's also a huge honor and reminder that I should not stand still and keep giving my best suddenly people were asking me for WordPress help or help when contributing to WordPress and I realized that's where I was just a few years earlier and perhaps one of them will be a fellow core committer someday I want to even had some new followers on Twitter if that's any helpful so this was my path to WordPress and how I found satisfaction in contributing to core so but why should you do this well the easy answer is because together we can make WordPress great again and yes that URL really works but seriously as we all work with WordPress we know that it's great for blogging it's also great for building huge web applications as well for example using the new rest API but it has its flaws and so why not make something better that you're using every day anyway for me contributing to open source software in general comes with many benefits first it makes your better developer but it would also give you a better sense for web design for example you'll definitely learn to deal with unexpected changes to deal with deadlines and you'll deal with other aspects like accessibility community engagement working talks and translations it'll simply put participating in a big project like WordPress will absolutely improve your skills and of course from now on you will always have Swiss chocolate on you because you know it gets you places finally you'll meet awesome people around the world people that are smarter than you and that you can learn a lot from you'll attend great conferences like the one today and perhaps you'll even end up in a beach in the middle of a city relaxing and sobering up just like we did here on this photo taken at work in Vienna last year so I'm very grateful that I started contributing to WordPress and where it took me and if you aren't doing it already I think you really should thank you very much right I think we have enough time for questions now so I've been looking around there's a big clock on the back of the hall I don't know if you can see that it's about five minutes slow confusingly for everyone that's up here but I reckon we're here until 20 past so we've got about 15 minutes for questions if you're happy to take them does anyone a great story great to hear how you go from being a blogger to a core committer hopefully a journey that all of us are on does anyone want to ask Pascal any questions about their journey yes there was a hand I saw a hand in the middle can we could you just wait for a mic to come over blue shirt right in the middle you put your hand up yeah cool thanks Matt so how did you even get started you started when you were 12 vlogging right did I hear that right yeah yeah so like what's a 12 year old blog about and how did you even I mean were you I don't know was your dad a web developer you know how do you even get the ideas a 12 year old to blog and then what kind of stuff were you putting out I'm really curious so luckily the content was in German so you couldn't see it on the screenshot I blocked about school about exams about online games and pretty boring stuff or like a new video I found on YouTube and yeah I don't know why I got interested in the web I was spending lots of time on at the computer and somehow it was yeah web development hi it's Mike little as a co-founder of WordPress I want to say thank you for contributing to WordPress and making core better and yeah just to iterate what you said about anybody can make any kind of contribution and yeah Pascal story is is awesome we we can all get involved in contributing to WordPress we can all make it better maybe not as developers but everything from from translation to documentation and so on so take inspiration from from a great guy who's achieved so much in such a young age it's it's really inspiring thank you anyone else can I can I just point out well this is more of a comment than a question my first commit to WordPress core I've only made two my first was a comment but you still get credit for doing that so that was fantastic my second was about two lines of JavaScript so though I'm officially core committed by status only for doing really really tiny things but that's the kind of place that you can start committing to call right would you agree with that so yeah when you contribute it doesn't matter what what you change and how big the change is doesn't matter if you're experienced or not really anyone can contribute great I'll do a little countdown in my head from five to zero good morning I think your case in terms of getting commit was a bit special in that you had big contributions in the OMBED feature plugin and I think you're I don't know if you were the first but you're one of very few who came in that way can you talk about that a little bit and how people can get more involved with WordPress through future plugins so the feature plugin the OMBED plugin it was something I worked on in 2014 just as a proof of concept and yeah I I don't know when when the future plugin chat came up I thought hmm why not share the idea of this feature of this plugin I just had on GitHub there was also a track ticket about it so I knew there was some interest in it and yeah if you have an idea for a feature project or like an existing plugin just participate in the feature plugin chat on Slack which happens quite frequently I think or like before a release and usually like it doesn't mean your plugin will get into WordPress core it just mean that you can explore something and you have get a huge user base to test your plugin and probably your idea will not end up in core like the way you imagine it because things will change and you learn that users want it differently so the OMBED plugin turned out to be like it was a simple simple thing we thought and then we thought about like security and all the WordPress versions and yeah that that's why we ended up with lots of commits in a short amount of time does that answer your question okay cool I'm assuming no more hands means that track A has finished 10 minutes early just to brief you can we give give Pascal around the applause please thank him for his talk he's come he came all the way from Switzerland did you bring chocolate today sorry did you bring chocolate today no I'm puzzling on