WordCamp Belfast 2016

**Update: since this post, we have attended WordCamp Dublin 2019. You can read the blog post Wibblers go to WordCamp Dublin 2019. **

Wibble attended the first WordCamp to ever be hosted in Northern Ireland last weekend. It took place over two days and was hosted in Queen’s University in Belfast.

Despite it being the first ever to be hosted in Northern Ireland, there was a big attendance from both the speakers and the attendees.

Wibble were lucky enough to be able to attend both days and the quality of the talks, demos and discussion panels were excellent.

Below are all the events that we were able to attend.

• WordPress Developer Operations For Beginners
• Build web apps with the WP REST API
• What not to do with WordPress!
• SEO for WordPress
• The Voice within Your Interface: An Easy Way to Grow User Retention
• Managing your online presence on Google Search
• Pic ’n’ Mix WordPress: Using the WordPress Rest API to super-charge non-WP sites and apps
• How developers can make a website SEO friendly
• SEO Panel Discussion
• Security & Speed Panel Discussion
• WooCommerce Workshop
• Yoast SEO WorkShop

The presence of Juan Felipe Rincón who is the manager of Webmaster Outreach within Google’s Search Quality team was a great bonus for the whole WordCamp and he provided great insight into the steps web developers can take to help get their content correctly picked up by Google.

One particularly insightful and interesting talk was by Stewart Ritchie from Powered by Coffee on Dev Ops covering version control and automation. It highlighted the need for accurate version control when dealing with code collaboration.

The rest API is a really intriguing part of WordPress that we are very keen to work with. Talks by Michael Martin and Conor Woods on the subject were excellent and demonstrated some of the great features of the API.

Our favourite panel discussion was by Russell from Big Wet Fish, Paul Goodchild from Shield, Juan Felipe Rincón from Google on Security & Site Speed. The discussion covered caching, CloudFlare Rocket Loader and the Vulnerability Database.

Overall, we met many great people, learned new techniques and features and had a great time. The event was well run and it is hard to believe this was the first ever WordCamp in Northern Ireland. Hopefully, there will be more in the near future.