ohryan.ca

A Web Developer in Winnipeg

  • WordCamp US 2023

    WordCamp US 2023

    in ,

    I attended my first WordCamp US this year and it was great!

    The Travel

    WCUS 2023 was held in National Harbor, Maryland. It was my first time visiting the DC area.

    DC is such a well documented and important city that I felt like I knew exactly what to expect and it delivered. Basically to the extent that my own personal experiences feel a little trite given the vast amount that has already been written about the city.

    Personal highlights though were finally meeting some of my teammates IRL and biking around DC with them on the Sunday (also frisbee).

    So I’ll forego the usual travel blog and jump right to the talks.

    The Talks

    Videos of the talks have just been posted online (full playlist).

    Here are my highlights

    Most Groundbreaking

    The WordPress Playground has existed for a little while now and it’s one of those things I filled away in my mind to check out later.

    It is absolutely incredible.

    It’s literally a copy of WordPress running PHP in your browser! It’s not a virtual machine you’re remote desktop-ing into, it’s actually running in your browser! There’s a tonne of potential applications.

    Antonio Sejas talks through some of them.

    Check it out, I have a feeling this could be the future.

    WordPress Playground, present and future applications

    Most Engaging

    How do you make a dry topic like core web vitals engaging?

    Enter Henri Helvetica.

    Easily one of the best talks on any subject that I’ve ever seen. It’s fun and you might even learn something.

    Core Web Vitals 2023: User Experience and Performance Evolved

    War stories

    Two talks I am putting under the “war stories” slash “how we built this really cool thing” category.

    If you’ve ever worked on client projects I think you’ll find these two talks validating.

    For All Userkind: NASA Web Modernization
    All The Presidents Websites

    Contributor Day

    The Thursday before the event was set aside for “contributor day.”

    Essentially, anyone interested working on WordPress itself could break into small groups to contribute to a specific area of the project (be it core, documentation, infrastructure, etc.). Apparently, at previous WordCamps the contributor day was held after the main conference when everyone was tired/hungover. The day before definitely seems like the right choice to me.

    I fell in with the group making a renewed push for a core fields API.

    Read Scott’s post.

    Fields API Progress Summary: WCUS Contributor Day 2023

    And check out the repo: https://github.com/sc0ttkclark/wordpress-fields-api

    I’m actually semi-interested to start a local regular contributor day, if I can find any collaborators.

    Oh, And The Swag…

    I got some.

    Verdict

    I met a lot of cool people, had a lot of great food and conversation.

    10 out of 10. Would WordCamp again.

    Get Involved

    So hey, if you’re local to me in the Winnipeg area and you’re interested in WordPress, check out the monthly meetup.

    It’s not just for developers, in fact most of the attendees are often end-users.

    It’s the on the first Wednesday of the month at 7PM at Red River College downtown campus, more info and RSVP on eventbrite.

  • Time Travel

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    I often think about what it would be like for teenage Ryan to be transported 25 or 30 years into the future… as you do. What aspects of culture or technology would surprise him the most?

    The two things I come back to over and over again are tattoos and FaceTime.

    Tattoos

    I don’t even know how to explain to my children just how much of a taboo tattoos were when I was their age. Teachers, parents, adult authorities basically looked down upon tattoos (and piercings to a lesser extent) as a death sentence.

    “Nobody is ever going to hire you if you’ve got arms full of tattoos and your head full of holes,” they’d say.

    I am genuinely and pleasantly surprised just how wrong they were. Even many of the most conservative people I know seem to be generally accepting of tattoos. It’s legitimately surprising.

    TBH I’d love to see a good documentary on the normalization of tattoos.

    It almost doesn’t make sense.

    FaceTime

    Global. Instantaneous. Free. Video calling.

    We completely take it for granted that we can have a video call with anyone in the world, for free!

    As a teenager, a future with video calling seemed plausible. That it would be high fidelity and instantaneous, also seemed plausible but maybe more of a stretch goal.

    The fact that it’s totally free I think would blow my mind.

    When AT&T said they would bring us the future, IMHO there was a strong implication that we’d have to pay (a lot more) for it.

    I’m looking forward to finding out what my children’s equivalents to these are. Cyberware and space travel? Who knows.

  • The Implicit Contract of The Internet

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    Earlier I posted this…

    …and I’ve realized that this is actually something that’s been bothering me for some time.

    I’ve been living in public online – posting details about my life that might have historically been seen as private, right out in the open – for decades now.

    Especially during the heyday of web 2.0. Want to see where I’m eating ice cream right now, sure why not. Care to know every single song I’ve been listening all day, every day? There’s an app for that.

    During this era, I even thought it would be cool to correlate all of these activities into a history I could look back on. Being reminded in 2032 that I listened to Architecture in Helsinki while riding the tram in actual Helsinki 10 years earlier would be neat. Or correlating all my tram rides around the world with music, or mood, photos, weather, words, etc. (I’m hopeful that Apple’s upcoming journaling app will fill this niche but that’s a post for another day)

    That was a tangent, here’s what’s been bothering me all these years.

    Even though a tweet, photo, a bike ride, workout, check-in, etc is posted publicly, it does not mean that it was intended for a broader audience.

    These blog post are, I love it when people engage with me about the words I’ve spent time crafting for this site. IMHO this is one of the things that makes blogs unique (another tangent for another day).

    Social media is different, context is important. If you’re only flying by @ohryan on twitter every once in a while, you’re missing a lot about me personally and about the medium that is Twitter (or X app 69 or whatever its called today).

    If you’re keeping tabs on my peleton app to see how often I’m working out, please don’t. That’s gross.

    You might be saying “but Ryan, if you don’t want people to see your posts, make them private.” While technically true, private accounts are not very social. I’m been introduced to lifelong friends (locally, virtually and internationally) by mutually engaging with relevant content. That’s just not possible with a private account and really defeats the purpose of social media.

    The implicit contract of the internet is: mutual follow.

    That’s it.

    If you want to read my tweets, create an account and follow me.

    If you want to compare workout habits, grab an Apple Watch and friend me on the fitness app.

    Don’t be rude.