In this episode of Women in WP, Tracy goes on the road and takes on WordCamp Europe! She spends time talking to women from all over the world who work in the world of WordPress.
This special episode brings you 11 short interviews with women Tracy Apps met at WordCamp Europe in Berlin, Germany, June 2019.
1:00
@WiseArts
Website rachellewise.com
She has been using WordPress since the very beginning. She freelances doing a lot of different things: coding, SEO, design. She’s trying to learn React.js to develop for Gutenberg. She enjoyed the WCEU talk about refactoring your code for PHP 7 which can force you to make your code more efficient. [We will post a link to the WordPress.tv video when it’s available.] This is her second WordCamp Europe.
06:36
https://www.linkedin.com/in/maringaemons/
Website: www.socialemediacoach.nu
She wanted to be a veterinarian, so she went to veterinarian assistance school to start. She went to a type of career day at a medical school and ended up working in medical research for many years. She fell from her horse, so she had to quit her job. She started building HTML sites for friends, so she thought, why not do this for a living? She started working with WordPress in 2012. This is her second WordCamp Europe.
10:19
@vasvalch
Website: valchanova.me
She discovered WordPress 12 years ago. Over time she learned more and started to attend WordCamps. She does marketing communications consulting. She has been to WordCamp Europe three times. She has enjoyed meeting new people and learning how people use WordPress has been her greatest take away from WCEU.
12:47
@hanopcan
Website: www.operationcanopy.co.uk
She is a freelance developer and has a background in computer science. She is also an instructor for a beginner boot camp and does the WordPress week. She is also a presenter and moderated the panel at WordCamp Europe on Gutenberg. [We will post a link to the WordPress.tv video when it’s available.]
She decided to focus on WordPress on felt very welcome in the local Bristol WordPress community. She now organizes the Meetup. This is her second WordCamp Europe and MCed last year. Tess recommended she MC, otherwise, she didn’t realize she belonged at WordCamp Europe. Being asked is what made the difference. The power of invitation within the female community is very strong.
22:17
@Laura_Nelson_
Website: pragmatic.agency
Marketing manager at Pragmatic and also joined mental health charity at Trustee @WPandUp – She started video games blog in WordPress. She got a job in a company that used WordPress and took her skills to a new level. Her first ever WordCamp was WordCamp Europe in Vienna. It was quite impressive! She went on to organizing WordCamps. In Brighton, they will have a panel at their WordCamp about female organizers.
26:22
She does marketing and created her first website using WordPress in 2011. [OMG – She’s wearing a Tracy Apps sticker tie in the video.] She paid a developer to build a site, but he was wasting so much time. So went on the Internet and found WordPress and did it herself. As a community, she only discovered it two years ago. She was bored in Paris and went on Twitter to see what she could do there. She found a company that was giving out tickets to WordCamp Europe in Paris, and she went! Her first WordCamp and found the community to be fun. She helped organized WordCamp Europe after that! She used to organize for Web Summit in Lisbon.
31:52
Ten years ago she wanted to create a website, and she tried several solutions. She tried Magento and others, then she found WordPress, and it was much faster. She fell in love with it and tried to figure out how things worked, like what is “fatal error.” Then she found herself being a backend developer! She is a workshop speaker and speaker wrangler now at WordCamp Europe. She has been helping development teams set up WordPress multisite which she loves for scaling. She now works for WP Rocket which tries to speed up sites without breaking them.
39:00
Website: wpandup.org
She started working with WP and Up developing content. She has been making websites for 20 years and loved WordPress for their clients to be able to maintain. She also works within the community as a volunteer at WordCamp London (2016), then went on to manage the volunteers for WordCamp London (2017), and then she co-lead WordCamp London (2019). What she loves about the WordCamps in the UK is that there has been 50% women speakers. She feels like everyone in the WordPress community is friendly and on your side.
43:06
She is a content writer and social media manager at WP Rocket. She loves writing and speaking languages. She met the community and found a job by being curious about what was behind the scenes of WordPress when she was seeking help with her own site four years ago. This is her 4th WordCamp Europe. She learned about the WordPress community and jumped in. She spoke at WordCamp Europe about her story and how she got started. She is a polyglot for the Italian team. She’s very involved with the Italian community, and there are a lot of powerful women involved in that community. They use Slack for connecting. She describes the huge need for translators for plugins. Their goal is to translate the top 200 plugins on WordPress.org.
49:03
@anyssaferreira
Website: hastedesign.com.br
She is an organizer of WordCamp Sao Paulo and has her own agency. They started building websites for clients and got involved with the Sao Paulo community by asking a lot of questions when they got started. She feels like she is 50/50 designer and developer. Her go to resources for learning CSS are:
54:33
Website: fromplacetoplace.travel
She is a travel blogger. Her husband was working with WordPress, and she picked up WordPress for her blog. It’s her third WordCamp Europe. She loves the sessions on content and SEO. For her most recent travel experiences, she loved Montenegro. The most interesting city she visited recently was London [Angela agrees!]. She recommends Morocco in the early spring. She skies in Switzerland.
