 Thank you very much. I'm a little bit nervous. There's a football game going on right now. So if you could just turn off your Wi-Fi, so I could watch the live stream here, that would be great. No, seriously, though, it's a pleasure to be here today, second time working Bureau. And I think I have some interesting things to share with you, despite a couple of you probably being tired and excited for the after-party. So by talking about my journey from being a blogger to becoming a WordPress core committer or WordPress core developer, I want to inspire you to do the same and show you how rewarding contributing to an open source project can be. In addition to that, I will reveal what with chocolate has to do with getting commit access. Oh, yeah. OK, that should be a good idea. So far, so I don't really need to get too much into detail. I usually start with this very simple explanation, really high level, to show what Calypso means for us. OK, good to know. So if you want to follow me on Twitter, I'll share the slides of the talk afterwards. And before I begin, I want to briefly clarify the term WordPress core committer. Sounds awesome, but actually isn't that special. So as many know, WordPress is made by hundreds of people. Every single person here in the room can contribute to WordPress, for example, by suggesting bug fixes or suggesting new features. And after that, the committers are just the people who actually add these suggested changes to WordPress core. So I think there are about 40 committers at the moment. My journey with WordPress began over 10 years ago when I wanted to build my own personal website. Somehow, I ended up using WordPress to keep an online journal. So it was basically my personal diary. And that's how I got to know the software. We all use today. And back then, I think version 2.0 was released and was brand new, and was like 12 years old. And of course, the content was pretty boring. But I liked blogging. And a few years later, I decided to solely blog about WordPress. So I blogged about new features in WordPress, exciting plugins, and fancy themes. The site was initially called the Swiss WordPress Magazine. Awesome name. And I even created a real digital magazine, actually, in form of a PDF magazine and later as a mobile app. I think it went quite well and got a lot of great feedback. And retrospect, blogging about WordPress was a very good decision. Because diving head first into WordPress, you get to learn the various aspects of the software and the community very, very well. Plus, if you blog yourself, you get to know the needs of an everyday WordPress user much better. But blogging alone wasn't enough for me. I wanted to exchange with like-minded people. I was aware of the international community, but not of any WordPress community in Switzerland. So was there even one? I was keen to find out. And it turned out there was none. At least not fiscally. So there were no local meetups, no work camps. So only a handful of people blogging about WordPress from time to time, which most of the time was me alone. And I realized that I needed to take action myself in order to change that. A few years went by, and together with people from the German WordPress community, we managed to organize a little work camp in Western Switzerland with about 50 attendees. That was like 2011. But it was a sign of life for WordPress in Switzerland, even though it was only with 50 people. Because after that, WordPress really got traction in the country. We managed to get much more people together in 2014, 2015. So there was no work camp before. Each work camp had more than 200 attendees and speakers from all over the world. For example, Constin Obenland. He's also a WordPress core committer, and he was the release lead of WordPress 4.3. Around the same time, NobleTalk started the first local meetup group in Zurich. I attended many of those meetups and even helped organize a few. And you know what? It has been worth it every single time. For me, meetups and work camps have always proved to be very rewarding because of all the discussions and the friendships that arise out of them. So in my opinion, you should really think about joining or even organizing a local meetup. That's why I like this statement by TACO. So if there's no meetup yet in your city, you're the one to organize it. Simple as that. So let's recap this for a moment. I was blogging about WordPress, quite successfully actually, at least in Switzerland, and became very confident in working with WordPress. I also attended a few WordPress-related events. And I even finished my apprenticeship as a web developer. Yet I never managed to actually contribute to WordPress more directly, which was always my intention. So what was the problem? So as I said before, WordPress is made by dozens of very talented people. People that I admire and look up to and then there was me. There was this self-doubt that I was not good enough to help contributing or that was just too difficult. And being rather shy didn't help either. And contrary to today, there was also a lack of documentation for new contributors. So I was pretty much lost. Things changed a bit when the first work in Europe was announced in 2013. For me, it was clear that I just had to attend. And it was a great opportunity to meet new people and get to know the international community much better. Somehow I even ended up with a bunch of shot glasses when traveling back home. I don't know what happened there. But back to the work camp. The announced contributor day seemed like a great opportunity to get started with wrangling with core. It was my first contributor day, actually. And so I didn't really know what to expect. And again, I thought I was not good enough to code for WordPress. So I chose to work on documentation. It turned out to be a great decision as I got my first props for contributing to WordPress core. And that's when I realized that even improving inline documentation is a contribution as well and as important as any contribution. So in the end, no matter how small the change was, it somehow was a big deal to me. And I don't know why it didn't start contributing earlier, but I'm glad that it eventually did. The most important thing I learned back then was that I'm not alone. Everyone struggles once in a while. Or as anyone who attended Sonya's talk this morning learned almost everyone has the imposter syndrome. But there are people who can help you. They will help you getting started and show you ways to improve your code, for example. And in the end, you get better at what you do, day by day. After the work camp, I continued to frequently contribute to WordPress. This meant getting to learn parts of WordPress which made me shake my head. And if you touch these parts, chances are higher things will break. One fun example was the addition of some new functionality to query users by different user roles. Nothing spectacular, but I was motivated to fix it. And I was in need of that functionality myself. So I spent a couple of hours working on the ticket and after some final tweaks and considerations, the change got committed to core. Wow, that was easy. Unfortunately, it wasn't that easy. A few hours later, WordPress.org went down. I didn't pay much attention because these things happen, right? Suddenly, I got some notifications on Slack and via email and it turned out my patch was the culprit. So due to an oversight, there was a massive loss of performance when querying users, eventually crashing the database. Have I already mentioned how much you learn when contributing to WordPress? This is a great example of that learning process. For me, contributing to WordPress got even more fun last July when I got the chance to work on a feature project. This feature project, so a feature project is essentially an idea that is being developed as a plug-in first, and eventually it would be proposed for being merged into WordPress core. So this feature project was about embedding content from other WordPress sites, like embedding a WordPress blog post in a blog post. Here's an example of how we imagined it to look like in the early days. Luckily, people liked it, so I started working more on it. So there was suddenly leading a small feature project, all with weekly meetings, decision-making, and more than 500 commits in just a few months. Eventually, the embeds plugin became part of WordPress 4.4, enabling millions of sites to embed each other. And you can only imagine how proud I was that day. For me, this shows that with a great idea and some dedication, everyone can do it. And that's what I like about feature projects. After the core merge of the embeds plugin, a fun bug was reported out of nowhere. Someone said that embeds didn't work properly on older WordPress versions, because the embed code, consisting of HTML and JavaScript, was broken. The culprit, n%s. So basically, WordPress was encoding n%s in the embed code, and we needed a clever way to fix it. So this is how it should be, and WordPress messed it up. See the difference? Like, simple. And to fix it, we refactored the embed code to not include any n%s. And it doesn't look as nice as before, but it works on all WordPress versions, which I think is far more important. And there are now even unit tests to ensure that it will stay this way. And I think this bug shows quite well how WordPress was committed to backwards compatibility. And it also shows that maintaining backcompet is not always that hard and very well worth the effort. Finally, I can tell you what Swiss chocolate has to do with all of that. As a reward for my numerous contributions to WordPress, I got the chance to attend the Community Summit and the first ever World Camp US last December in Philadelphia. And of course, as a Swiss tourist visiting the United States for the first time, I brought some Swiss chocolate with me. And it all started with a single tweet. So was it possible to bribe WordPress lead developers with Swiss chocolate? Of course, I could count on Gary Pendergas, who is also a WordPress core developer, and he was already of great help when developing the embeds plugin. A few hours later, my strategy seemed to pay off. So Andrew Nathan followed me on Twitter, and yeah, I guess he wanted some Swiss chocolate too. And only in my dreams could I have imagined what happened the next day. So in his annual State of the Word speech, Matt Malinweck announced that several people got commit access to WordPress core, including me, and no need to tell you that I was super honored. And when I first heard the news, it really was an awesome feeling. And I still can't believe it today, which goes back to the imposter syndrome. But yeah, here I am. So the very next day at the WordPress US contributor day, Andrew Nathan was giving me the instructions for the task of the day, my first commit to WordPress. It wasn't a spectacular commit or anything. Someone wrote a nice little patch, and I was just the one to press the final button. And I can assure you that I spell checked the commit message dozens of times. So what can I say when looking back? I think in the end, hard work eventually pays off. So for me, it was a validation of my engagement with the project. It's also a huge honor and a reminder to not stand still and keep giving my best. And as you can see, I really found my passion in working with WordPress. And nowadays, I even make my living by developing custom WordPress solutions, which I'm really grateful for. So this was my journey to getting commit access and how I found satisfaction in contributing to WordPress core. But why should you do this? The easy answer is that together we can make WordPress great again. There's even a dedicated site for that if you wanna try it out. Seriously, as we all work with WordPress, we know that it's not perfect. But why not help making something better that you're using every day anyway? Not only does it benefit you, it benefits all of us, the whole community, and every single WordPress user out there. In general, contributing to open source software comes with many benefits. So as a developer, it's obvious that you'll improve simply by knowing that dozens of other developers will review the code you wrote. Besides that, it will also give you a better sense for other aspects of web development. For example, I learned a lot about accessibility and user experience best practices. If you ever wanted to work remotely or perhaps already are working remotely, you realize that contributing to open source software is not that different. I mean, you're working from home, you're using Slack, and you're definitely improving your communication skills by doing so. And I learned, for example, I learned to ask why and to say no. I definitely learned to deal with unexpected changes and to deal with deadlines because we know that in the WordPress world, deadlines are not arbitrary. You'll also deal with other aspects like community involvement and translations. So 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. It will get your places. And finally, and perhaps most importantly, you will meet awesome people. And maybe you will suddenly find yourself relaxing on a beach in the middle of Vienna like we did last year. In the end, I'm glad that I began contributing to WordPress and I'm grateful for where it took me. And if you aren't already doing so, I think you really should think about contributing to WordPress. Thank you very much.