Christine is a Former Chemist and University of Ottawa graduate, who became a web developer in 2001. The early days of web development consisted of building custom made PHP-based CMS and Movable Type blogs. Like so many other developers, She gradually migrated towards WordPress and has been using it in almost every project since 2005. She also teaches WordPress at a community college in Vancouver, BC, is a forums moderator at wordpress.org and an active member of the WordPress community.
Follow @bluelimemedia on Twitter.
Christine will be giving a talk titled Spearhead Your Career by Contributing to WordPress.
What is your favorite improvement to WordPress this past year?
I think that the media gallery is fabulous. I didn’t mind the old one, but now that I’m used to this new one, it’s just so much more pleasurable to work with and intuitive.
Why did you decide to speak at WordCamp Montreal?
I gave this presentation at WordCamp Ottawa earlier this summer and a few Montreal friends were in the audience. Following my talk they urged me to apply to speak at WordCamp Montreal. It’s always great to get asked to speak at a conference, but when asked right after you’ve spoken, is even better and confirms that the presentation was well received.
What is your talk going to be about?
I’ll be talking about how one can become better at being a developer/designer/blogger by tapping into the WordPress community. I’ve been working with WordPress since the very beginning, but my knowledge, career and confidence, only improved when I started connecting with the community.
What is the one thing you want people to walk away with from your talk?
Contributing to the WordPress community is not simply for PHP developers and writing code, there’s all sorts of things you can do from helping with mobile development, improving the WP UI, writing docs, editing, translating, providing support.. the list is huge.
Who in the WordPress community inspires you? Who do you follow?
That’s a tough one. There are so many. I do tend to follow folks mostly on twitter, so the ones that remain on my radar are the ones that tend to tweet about WordPress. There are loads of great developers who tweet links, tutorials, answer questions when asked. A few “twitter handles” that come to mind are norcross, ipstenu, andrea_r, tremal, pippinsplugins, kovshenin.
This list is much more comprehensive – https://twitter.com/DeFries/a-wp-list-to-rule-m-all
What new feature would you like to see in the future?
Rumour has it that there are still lots of bugs in WordPress and patches that have been submitted are ready to go, but there’s simply no time to test them and apply them. I have no idea if this is true of not, and I’m not involved with core development at all, so I don’t know what’s feasible or not.
