WordCamp Kent Announcements and Additional Feel-good News

The One About Announcements

The cat’s finally out of the bag: I’m going to Ohio in June! My presentation, Modernizing Your Development Workflow Using Composer, has been accepted by the fine folks at WordCamp Kent. I’m looking forward to sharing my love for the best command line tool in PHP with the WordPress community, hanging out with old friends, and getting to make some new ones. The event is happening at the Kent State University Hotel & Conference Center on June 15th and 16th, and I have the honor of following my friend Steve Grunwell‘s talk about PHP namespaces, something I’m especially glad to see being discussed in the WordPress community now that the minimum requirements have finally been bumped to PHP 5.6.

I mentioned it briefly in my last update, but I’ve also submitted a pair of presentations to WordCamp US (the same Composer talk, and another about object-oriented programming concepts), as well as one to WordCamp Minneapolis-St. Paul about building custom apps with WordPress as a back-end. I’m still awaiting word on those (as well as WordCamp Sacramento), but if everything gets accepted, I’ll be spending quite a bit of time behind the podium this year!

The One About Feel-good News

OOPS-WP got a mention on the latest Post Status newsletter! We’ve been having a lot of discussions about the open issues on the repo at work, and two of my wonderful WDS colleagues dedicated some of their 5 for the Future time this month working on contributions for those tickets. My hope is that this library can help WordPress developers better understand object-oriented programming concepts like SOLID, namespacing, and package use, while also giving them experience on working with third-party libraries. It feels great to see something I created as a way to make my own work a little easier gain a little traction within the community, and I’m grateful to Post Status for sharing the excitement about it.