During Contribution Day, WordPress enthusiasts get together in a coworking space and work on various WordPress-related tasks such as translations, fixing Core tickets and others. Yesterday, we had a first-ever Contribution Day in Slovakia as the part of WordCamp. It was awesome! Why?
Organization
The Day was organized fairly well. It took place in a fancy Bratislava coworking space Connect. Beginning at 11 a.m. and going home at about 19 p.m., all of us were tired but happy. People could choose a “team” to join to work together on specific tasks. There were two to three teams (Core, Polyglots) as far as I can remember. We were constantly fed by an endless stream of pizzas and lemon water. Communication was made easier by using our Slovak WordPress community Slack app.
People and atmosphere
To be honest, I’ve never met anyone from the event in person before. I’m quite new to Slovak WordPress community (not to WordPress, though). Luckily for me, the atmosphere and people were really friendly. After a while, we all began passionate conversations with each other. I especially liked talking with the people from other countries because I could practice my rusty English skills. Listening to @miss_jwo for half an hour was rather challenging (in the good way).
Work
I joined the Core team which consisted of Dennis Snell, Ján Bočínec, Michal Zuber, Robert O ‘Rourke and myself. The first thing we had to do was to select a ticket from WordPress Core Trac. Somehow, we stumbled upon a ticket that was solved but not yet merged into the Core. We thought that this might be a good chance to learn how to write PHP unit tests so we went for it. After composing the unit test, we made a patch out of it and submitted it into the Trac. A while later, we got an insightful feedback from Gary Pendergast so we tried to fix all the issues he mentioned.
What could be improved?
Although the event went pretty well, I think there is a room for improvement. A few things:
- Since not all of us were on the same expertise level, we spent a good amount of time on configuring and setting up our local WordPress environments.
- Things to work on weren’t prepared beforehand so we also had to guess how to do this or that.
- I don’t like pizza :D.
- Contribution Day would be much better if there were two of them (e.g. spanning two days instead of just one). So much more could be accomplished this way.
While I’m mentioning these things which could be improved, I’m also aware of the fact that Contribution Day is more of a networking action, not a programmers` hackathon. It probably is just me being accustomed to feeling productive only when programming a lot.
All in all, our first Slovak WordPress Contribution Day exceeded all my expectations. Talked to a bunch of “strangers” (also in English), programmed a little and had a fun: check. I’m looking forward to more of these and might also visit some of them in other countries as well in the future. Thanks.
Photo by dmsnell23
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