Kathryn thrives on helping people get the most out of WordPress. After a career designing and building websites for clients, she joined Automattic as a Happiness Engineer in 2012. She’s currently Theme Whisperer on the Theme Team, where she helps folks with customization, configuration, and troubleshooting. She enjoys spreading her passion for WordPress at grassroots events like WordCamps, Girl Geeks, and Ladies Learning Code, and also loves encouraging new public speakers.

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Kathryn will be giving a talk titled “A CSS Adventure“.

What is your favorite improvement to WordPress this past year?

The overhaul of the theme and plugin directories on WordPress.org and within wp-admin.

Why did you decide to speak at WordCamp Montreal?

How could I not participate in my home WordCamp? :-)

What is your talk going to be about?

Customizing a site with CSS is powerful and useful – but can seem intimidating if you’re new to it. I’ll walk us through the basics of using CSS to make changes like modifying text size and colour, and hiding elements in the theme. We’ll look at what CSS can do, what the different parts of CSS code mean, and how to put together a piece of CSS that accomplishes your goal. We’ll go through a few examples together and see how much fun CSS can be.

What is the one thing you want people to walk away with from your talk?

I hope people will be inspired to go straight to their site and make a tweak they’ve been wanting to get done!

Who in the WordPress community inspires you? Who do you follow?

I’m inspired by all the folks who do the unglamorous work to support WordPress and strengthen the community, whether it’s translating strings, helping make sure WordPress is accessible, or answering forum questions.

What new feature would you like to see in the future?

More intuitive theme setup.