WordCamp Paris 2023 recap

The talks and my experience as a speaker.
Posted in Talk, the 16/05/2023.

Introduction

I have been honored to get once again selected to be a WordCamp speaker, this time at WordCamp Paris on April 21st. It was my second WordCamp, and as I did for Lyon, here’s a recap of this very nice day spent alongside the WordPress community.

Being selected as a speaker

I’ve had a great time being a speaker in Lyon. It was my first WordCamp, and also my first as a speaker.

I prepared myself a lot for this day, built a thorough FSE talk, and rehearsed the presentation. It was a lot of work, and also I must admit a lot of stress, which made me wonder if I would do it again.

Then the WordCamp Paris call for speakers went live, with different talk formats compared to Lyon which was focused on conferences. In Paris, you could propose either a lightning talk or a “parlotte“, which is a more participative format made to engage the conversation with your audience. I found this new format interesting because more interactive and less formal.

Furthermore, at the time, I was right in the middle of a very interesting discussion with Florian Truchot. We were debating the optimal use of blocks in the context of different advanced scenarios. We enjoyed exchanging and agreed on some very interesting conclusions. From there came the idea to continue the conversation with the community and propose a parlotte about the search for the optimal use of blocks to meet high business requirements.

After a few weeks, we got the talk approved. It was time to prepare again, but in a different format, and also as a duo this time.

Preparing the slides

At the time, we were facing different situations in our respective jobs, and that naturally gave us the talk outline. We would discuss 4 scenarios, and analyze what could be the best use of blocks for each of them while paying attention to avoid particularly bad uses.

Here are the 4 scenarios :

  • Creating a theme that makes heavy use of blocks
  • Integrating with a Design System
  • Website industrialization (production at scale)
  • Headless WordPress

We had a great time preparing the slides via collaborative sessions and made adjustments until we found the material was ready.

Conference eve

As a speaker, I got invited to the pre-conference dinner with all the other speakers, the organizers, and the sponsors. It was at the Stalingrad Rotonde, where the food was great.

I reconnected with friends I made in Lyon, and had the chance to have interesting conversations with the guests there. We were all excited about the coming day, and couldn’t wait to deliver our talks, meet the attendees, and watch the other conferences.

Conference day

The event was located in the Pajol Halles in north Paris.
There were three different conference spots: one theatre for big presentations, one medium conference room, and a smaller one.

Here’s a recap of the talks I’ve attended:

Gutenberg, comment le transformer en outil surpuissant pour le SEO ? By @rochdaniel

Daniel Roch

I started the day with Daniel Roch, who presented us with plenty of opportunities to improve our SEO via the use of Gutenberg blocks or capabilities. I’ve learned a lot from this talk. I discovered concepts I didn’t know well like the “search intent“, “position 0“, or silos. Overall a very good talk that I advise you to watch in replay when available on WordCamp.tv.

Constructeurs de page et développement sur mesure : les bienfaits de l’approche hybride. By @Maximebj

Maxime Bernard-Jaquet

In his talk, Maxime presented many clever ways to benefit from the use of existing technologies, libraries, and builders, while leveraging hooks, to augment the underlying functionalities with custom code. Indeed, I often see agencies investing a lot in code, rebuilding features that already exist, sometimes reinventing the wheel while burning cash, instead of making decisions on where to code, and where to reuse. Maxime’s talk was full of advice for that matter.

La Sécurité Web et WP en 2023. By @JulioPotier

Julio’s reputation in web security is well-established. It’s always interesting to listen to a specialist, and I wasn’t alone to believe that, the room was packed. It was a parlotte format in which Julio let his attendees ask plenty of questions, which he answered thoroughly.

Exploiter les pleins potentiels du Design dans son projet WordPress. By @bter_design

Joffrey Jochum

As I enjoyed his design talk in Lyon, I decided to go listen to Joffrey again. He explained the importance of establishing a common language as a whole within organizations. I appreciated his views on processes and industrialization as those are subjects I’m particularly interested in. I was glad to see we were aligned on those matters.

WordPress l’outil nocode au service de votre productivité. By @Hugopsn_ecom

Hugo Pisan

I’m a developer at heart, always had this true passion. But I respect no-code tools, I understand their usage, and I try to avoid coding bias when a no-code solution is appropriate. Sometimes, coding is too expensive, sometimes it’s not the right tool for the job. That’s why I went to see Hugo’s talk on no-code. He presented us with a few solutions and practical cases.

Our talk : Gutenberg, à la recherche de l’utilisation optimale d’un bloc face aux exigences de vos métiers. By @floriantruchot & @jdmweb

Florian and me. Picture by Rachel Peter.

We had a great time presenting this parlotte with Florian. Our preparation paid off, it went smoothly, as planned, and the planning was right. We had a good audience that, despite being a bit shy at first, opened up and asked interesting questions.

Here are the available slides (in French).

The after party

The wonderful organization team

After such a great day, we were invited to the Rotonde Stalingrad again, where the food and drinks were perfect. We had a great time together, you can always feel the pressure of the day going away, especially for the speakers, organizers, sponsors, and volunteers, whom I’d like to thank a lot for the time and effort they put into the organization.

Thanks to those people, WordCamp Paris was a success!