My Feeling Restful

It’s been now more than a week since Feeling Restful, the first conference exclusively dedicated to the WordPress API.
Being away a couple of days and a reasonable amount of new projects meant some hundreds of emails to process and several meetings to attend to which made it quite hard to have time to reflect on this conference.
I should say upfront that I felt it was a very well spent time and it was really worth it to be at this conference.
To have 2 days just to talk and think mostly about one aspect of WordPress was really valuable.
The presentations were all interesting although of course some resonated with me more than others.

Without having another look at the slides or the schedule I can still remember all the presentations:

• Daniel Bachhuber about wp-cli and the rest api and the possibility of powering and/or automating 25% of the web is really amazing and wpcli can certainly be a part of this process, even (or especially) if it keeps being developed alongside (and not inside of) core.
• Kathleen Vignos from the Wired was a very hands-on talk with dos and don’ts on using the API, demonstrating some interesting use cases for the api and also sharing the experiences learned from trying to use the api on what at first seemed to be really applicable cases but which turned out to be not so good cenarios.
• Scott Taylor and the rest api on ny as well and wp adoption on the nyt was also really interesting demonstrating the
• Jack Lennox on api and rest driven themes was also a very interesting and fun presentation. Although I don’t feel, for now at least, that having a react (or similar) driven website is really important for the majority of websites, it was interesting to see how he tackled some of the usual critiques that are made to single page applications, like seo and others.
• K Adam White on javascript and using the API to integrate with other systems.
• Joe Hoyle and how using the API allowed an approach to web development that went from a monolith to a lego like approach.
• Ryan McCue and a bit of the story of the API (which I mostly missed since I arrived late to the conference).
• Nikolay Bachiyski on Calypso and Calypso-Like applications.

I got the felling the there is already some stuff being developed with the API but you have to be willing to take some pains of developing with something that is not still stable. It also felt that the API team is really focused and interested in creating something that may have a very deep impact on the WordPress ecosystem although some different perspectives on how the code base should evolve (into core, as a plugin, etc.) may lead to some delays.

As for the hackday, in the really cool Mozilla offices, it was also good fun although I get the feeling it ended when I was getting a bit more productive. Since I never had really participated on a WordPress hackday, and also because I still hadn’t use the API, most of the time was spent, at least in the Documentation table, debating how we could best contribute, setting up our environments and finally trying to get some pull request to the documentation branch.

It was nice to talk to the guys and gal that were with me on the documentation “team”: Kirsten Cassidy, Tom de Bruin, Mendel and all the others. By the way, if you guys feel like coming to Porto why not come to the 2016 WordCamp Porto it will on the 14 and 15 of may. It would be nice talking to you again.