Some Quick Thoughts On LoopConf

Josh Pollock - February 15, 2017

I was super lucky to be able to attend LoopConf last week. Ryan Sullivan and his team put on an amazing conference. I’ve never been to a fancy developer conference before, and I had a blast. Thanks Ryan for having me! I just wanted to share a few observations about what made LoopConf special and share my recommended videos playlist.

Before I go on, I should point out that while I don’t usually stay in hotels when I travel — I prefer AirBnB –Me and Roy Sivan being super classy by hotel fireplace– the Little America hotel in Salt Lake City where they put us up was classy AF. I didn’t know what to do with myself in such a big fancy room, but I super enjoyed sitting by the fire in the lobby and being classy.

One side of the fireplace had statues of dogs. The other side had a painting of wolves howling in the snow. Apex Classy.

Our REST API Workshop And Something New

Caldera Learn BannerRoy Sivan and I gave a 6 hour workshop on using AngularJS and the WordPress REST API. Honestly, we were worried we couldn’t fill 6 hours, but we actually ran out of time at the end. We had almost 40 attendees and people seemed to get a lot out of it.

I have embedded our slides below, and we also put all of the example code to Github. There is a ton of practical examples in there, some not finished to provide a start point for your own work. Some examples are running live on CalderaForms.com right now.

If you’re wishing you could attend an in depth workshop about the REST API from Roy and I too, don’t worry. We recently announced Caldera Learn. This new site will offer live webinars, recorded courses and code communities for anyone looking to level up their WordPress development skillset. It’s going to be awesome.

The Main Event

Photo by:  Anna Anikina

Our workshop was the day before the main event. LoopConf was a single track conference with excellent talks. They also did a great job of accommodating the hallway track. The room that meals were served in was open all day with the live stream playing. This was a great way to network and watch the talks. I wish WordCamps would do this.

The talks were a lot more focused on philosophy of code, then code. Not that there were not code examples. I really liked this trend for non-workshops.

For example, KAdam White talked about why the WordPress REST API was important for JavaScript developers and why he built his node.js client for the REST API, before showing code for a React app using both tools. Similarly, Natalie MacLees and Nathan Tyler shared their experiences learning React. They provided tons of React and general JavaScript resources in context of using the WordPress REST API.

John Jacoby Jones (JJJ) didn’t really show any code at all. Instead, he talked about lessons from Unix Philosophy that could be applied to WordPress. Andrew Norcross talked about improving our community by acknowledging and dealing with unacceptable conduct that happens in our community.

All the nerdy talks on how to code something or why to code something a certain way were book-ended by business-focused keynotes. Josh Koening of Pantheon talked about how the web has trended away from open source recently as companies have packaged what we created for the open web  in better experiences. He made an excellent point that most people can’t afford what free software costs — time and education.

Jason Cohen of WPEngine spoke about building a bootstrapped business. While he talked about pricing and product design, the best part of his talk was about managing yourself. This especially rang true for me when he talked about focusing on 2xing revenue over shiny features.

I’ve been working on both, and beating myself up over not delivering all the shiny new features I want for Caldera Forms. Those would be done if I wasn’t also working on a new tool that we’re testing right now. Then again, February is looking like a 1.5-2x growth for us versus January, so yah.

I really appreciated both of their talks and spending time talking with both Jason and Josh during the event. I was imagining LoopConf would be all out nerdy-codefest with out a ton of networking. But I got both.

Next Generation WordPress

Photo by: Alexey TopolyanskiyIn 2014 I went to WordCamp Milwaukee and saw two talks on the future of WordPress. Ryan McCue and Rachel Backer presented the beta of the WordPress REST API and Andrew Nacin talked about the WordPress REST API and the WordPress fields API being the basis for a modernized WordPress.

I was super-excited for the vision they shared, and got on the REST API bandwagon pretty hard. Of course, things turned out a bit differently then we expected then. At LoopConf Ryan gave a talk called “Next Generation WordPress”.

He talked about going from the blog era of WordPress, to the CMS era of WordPress and now the platform era of WordPress. Echoing what Matt Mullenweg said in the State of the Word about what got us here is not going to get us where we are going, Ryan suggested a new direction.

While State of The Word was all about user experience, Ryan talked about developer experience. I loved this obviously, as there is a reason I prefer to develop most things in Laravel than in WordPress these days — the developer experience — there has to be a balance here.

WordPress is a user-centered platform and that should never change. But, for users to get an improved experience, both from core as well as plugins and bespoke sites, we need to make it easier for developers to fit those needs. Ryan is, per usual a man with a plan. Definitely watch his talk, do what you can to contribute and let’s hope he gets a reasonable fraction of what he’s asking for there.

Vegan Food, Also Videos

I didn’t expect their to be such excellent vegan food in Salt Lake City, but I was impressed. If you’re ever in Salt Lake City, which I recommend strongly, check out The Vertical Dinner.

I’m still working my way through videos of talks I missed, but I created a highlights playlist from both LoopConfs for you. Check it out: