WordCamp Brittany: we never finished learning

Last week, part of the team took the road, direction Rennes, to attend the WordCamp Bretagne. The opportunity to find other web professionals, and spend time between colleagues – when you work remotely all year long, it counts!

This year, five Be APIstes were on the side: Coralie as a volunteer and photographer, Amaury and Bilal as speakers, and François and Yann as participants.

Two Be APIsts on stage

Amaury said about the resilience of WordPress integrations. The starting point is annoyance: a form sends its data to a CRM, and one day the CRM no longer responds. What happens to the lead? Lost? Blocked on an error message? Waiting somewhere? Amaury showed how to detect failure, keep the data warm and return it clean once the service returned.

Bilal attacked the GEO, and to site visibility in the responses of ChatGPT, Gemini or Perplexity. Who says topic of news says noisy topic: Bilal has sorted between what is based on solid fundamentals, what remains experimental and what is primarily a marketing discourse.

These two conferences will soon be available in replay and we will not fail to share them!

The winning recipe of WordCamp

Why are we going back every year? For two reasons.

The first is the program. It reflects fairly well the subjects that make our jobs move.

This year, unsurprisingly, the AI was well present: in development workflows, in content production, in visibility issues... And as everything evolves very quickly, it's interesting to see what really works on the ground.

Special mention at the conference on harness engineering presented by Jeremy Desvaux de Marigny: how to ensure that the AI code according to the conventions and practices of the team.

The program also allows us to go very far in concrete issues: accessibility, architecture, development, performance... So many opportunities to compare our daily practices with those of other experts.

Finally, there are conferences that get a little higher. They talk about our jobs themselves: how they evolve, how they are exercised. We note, for example, the Marine Evain conference “Being a woman in the web : from imposter syndrome to empowerment”.

That's the right recipe: to spend the same day on a very specific subject to a very human question. Do not treat the web in silos, cross topics and viewpoints.

The second reason is community. There are freelancers, small and large agencies, devs, project managers, highly specialized profiles and more versatile ones. Seen from afar, « WordPress ecosystem » is a little abstract. On the spot, it becomes very concrete, through discussions between conferences or during coffee breaks: and often, that's where we learn the most.

WordCamps keep us young (and cool?)

Young people, we are no longer completely: Be API exists since 2009. Seventeen years of projects, some complex, some with high stakes, that asked us for rigour and method. It has become a full part of our expertise.

Over the years, we know that the risk is not to lack expertise: it is to settle in. And to avoid that, WordCamp is an excellent remedy!

We meet people who are truly brilliant.

Freelance or tighter teams, with their constraints, tools and ways of doing things. Contexts that allow us to test new approaches, and to draw really ingenious solutions.

This curiosity is part of our technical culture. Testing, understanding how to do better: it's at the heart of dev. To find it in others, in their technical choices or in their way of collaborating, is a real wealth for all the ecosystem.

These exchanges are valuable. They question us, and it's essential to last.

As long as we continue to inspire, we say that we have not yet become dinosaurs.

(For the cool side, we let you judge 😉)

Thanks to the organization

This edition was remarkably well organized. When everything seems as fluid on D-Day, it would be forgotten almost all the work behind it: months of preparation provided by a fully volunteer team.

So thank you to the entire WordCamp Bretagne team!

Photo credits : © WordCamp Brittany