Speaker Spotlight: Michal Bluma

Michal Bluma is a Montreal freelance developer who loves WordPress, code, cats and metaphors. He’s been chopping up mockups for quite a while and would love to share some tips, tricks and how to avoid certain gotchas when it comes to the website creation chain. Let’s aim to bridge to designer/developer gap together!

Michal will be giving a talk titled “Ça sent la découpe“.

What is your favorite improvement to WordPress this past year?

The REST API moving forward.

Why did you decide to speak at WordCamp Montreal?

I always love to try to give back to users in our community. Getting the opportunity to speak, share my knowledge and, perhaps, generate an Aha! moment or two is something I relish every time.

Montreal being my home base, this applies even more. I love how the folks you meet at WCMTL evolve into business and social relationships throughout the rest of the year.

What is your talk going to be about?

Chop-up!

There are many roles in the life cycle of a website. Many moving parts can mean a disconnect between certain disciplines. My talk concentrates on the designer/developer divide. I want to give both parties tools to communicate better and make their lives easier.

This talk won’t make you a chop-up master. But it might just make you want to go out for drinks with the other side more often. 😉

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

Preparation and communication are key. The less questions there are, the smoother the whole process will become.

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

The community itself inspires me. We might have some drama from time to time, but that’s only because we are such a group of passionate people.
I’ve definitely been keeping up with Roy Sivan and Josh Pollock; and their desire to make JavaScript more present in our world through the REST API.
* Confession, I’m a huge JavaScript-lover.

Of course, it wouldn’t be a WordCamp without the “Carl Track”. If you want to level up your dev skills, you’ll probably find him at one of the tables in the main lobby throughout the weekend (look for a giant fort of Diet Pepsi cans).

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

Not necessarily a “feature” but a push towards the CMS aspects rather than the blogging aspects of our ecosystem. Things like a single option to turn off the whole commenting system.

I’m also excited about the Fields (Metadata) API moving forward. I know how hard it’s going to be to replace ACF, but I think the efforts are really worth it to have a standardized API to deal with postmeta.