WordCamp para Desarrolladores Sevilla 2019 took place a few weeks ago (October 4th-6th) in Seville (Spain) with a total of 256 attendees. This was the first WordCamp for developers ever organized in Spain! We are grateful and excited to have been a part of this.

The overall experience and organization was perfect, everything ran smoothly during the event. Also, there were a lot of interesting workshops and development talks of all levels – from beginners to professionals.

Below is a roundup of our experience at #WCDevSevilla19.

Opening remarks

We don’t usually talk about the opening remarks in other WordCamp recaps but this time they were different and we feel they deserve a special mention.

After David Navia welcomed all attendees, Nilo Vélez shared this video called The History of WordPress (in four minutes). It took him “almost three months, 35 Docker-Compose projects and 4 virtual machines to make it possible.” A great job from Nilo and a great summary of the history of this CMS.

But wait, there’s more: Nilo was not alone on stage. The introduction was co-hosted by a hilarious Lego Crash test dummy called Manolito. As an active contributor to the WordPress community, he even has his own wordpress.org profile. 🤖

Experience of hosting a workshop

We (David and Luis) got selected to host a workshop on How to build a React theme in less than 30 minutes – a topic we’re passionate about and felt like a great fit for this WordCamp.

We were surprised to see that so many people were interested in our session! The workshop (already available on wordpress.tv) was divided into two parts.

The first one was actually an introduction: we talked about our previous work with big WordPress publishers and what we called Frontity PRO – the mobile WordPress theme that we built with React specifically for their blogs.

We explained how we managed to develop it, the tools we used, and some of the lessons learned along the way. In short: how that experience brought us to build the current open source framework. You can check out the slides of this part here.

Then was time for action. In order to build a React WordPress theme, we explained:

• How Frontity works
• How to create a new Frontity project
• How to build a theme from scratch
• How to customize it (some basic aspects)

Here’s the GitHub repository with the final code and all the steps we followed. You can also watch the full workshop on wordpress.tv.

Before this WordCamp, Sonia Ruiz gave a React workshop for beginners as part of the WordPress Meetup for Devs in Madrid. This is a great learning resource to help you get started with React and it’s available on wordpress.tv too.

These are other learning resources that we shared too:

• JavaScript and React – Basic concepts
• Learning Frontity – Core concepts

The overall experience of hosting this workshop was great. We felt like people were learning and received very positive feedback, which made us really happy.

Other workshops

The first day we had the opportunity to attend other workshops:

• Configura todas las cachés de WordPress by Javier Casares. This was a masterclass about all types of cache, from the basic to the more technical ones.
• Crea una SPA con WooCommerce y React.js by Isaías Subero. A really interesting workshop to see how WooCommerce and React were combined here and how this combination makes possible to build modern things with WordPress.

Talks

The second day (which was only for talks) took place at the Global Omnium Auditorium in the Aquarium of Seville. What a venue! It was beautiful. 🐠

These are some of the talks we attended:

• Xdebug, el bastón blanco para los desarrolladores de WordPress by Mauricio Gelves. This was a very insightful and instructional talk in which Mauricio explained to a wider audience how to use Xdebug.

• I can’t believe it’s CSS by Marta Rey. This talk made us think that we usually tend to solve everything with JavaScript. However, CSS is increasingly powerful.
• Implementación del rediseño de Newtral.es con versión AMP by Núria Ramoneda and Javier López del Río. During this talk, Núria and Javier shared all the challenges they and their team faced to build the new Newtral’s website. Very interesting!
• Git como estilo de vida by Juan J. Merelo. A really good and different talk on how to use Git at an advanced level.
• State of the Dev. This was a very interesting round table discussion moderated by Joan Artes in which Fran Torres, David Perálvaez, Sonia Ruiz, and Marta Torres participated. They talked about Gutenberg, React, JavaScript, headless WordPress… all the hot topics around the future of WordPress.

Other fun facts

👉 This was the first WordCamp with a MarioKart tournament on a giant screen. Epic!

👉 Carmelo Establier took the fastest WordCamp group photo ever taken. Thanks Carmelo! We all look great by the way. ?

👉 We had never seen so many pizzas in a Contributor Day! There was apparently a 2×1 offer. ?

👉 The After Party took place at Iguana, a beautiful place on the banks of the Guadalquivir River. All the venues of this WordCamp could not have been any better.

Thank you!

We’d like to finish this post with a special mention to all the organizers, volunteers, speakers, attendees, and sponsors of WordCamp Sevilla 2019 – a huge thank you for your work and for making the first WordCamp for developers in Spain possible.

We had a blast seeing friends again, meeting new ones and we learnt a lot. Hope to see you all soon!

To read more stories about WordCamp Sevilla 2019, check out this post.

Comments? Suggestions? Join the conversation on the forum!