Review of A Week of REST UK 2016

A big thanks goes out to Siobhan McKeown for following through on her idea from near a year ago (or more?) to have  A Week of REST.  The Day of REST conference earlier this year went quite well and plans were made to do a week long version of the conference where attendees would go in depth learning and building a project with JavaScript and the REST API.

I was quite honored to have the opportunity to work with Siobhan, Joe Hoyle and Ryan McCue  on this bootcamp, which aligned so well with my JavaScript for WordPress Master Course.

We started preparing a number of months ago, including meeting in person for a week to build the project and plan the course modules.  I did a nice writeup on our experience preparing for A Week of REST.

Welcome to Matlock

Matlock, UK is home to Human Made headquarters and the event took place in a quant local up the hills from the office amidst a beautiful pond and collection of stone cottages.

The course flow went like this:

Day 1 – Setup and Introductions

• Folks arrived starting around noon
• We did an overview of the schedule and content
• Helped get local develop environments setup
• Hung out and got to know each other

Day 2 – Up and Running with JavaScript Development

• A few folks came to the morning office yoga I offered
• I took the first half of the day to do talk about JavaScript Development Tools, ES6 and React Basics
• Joe took over in the afternoon to talk about the React boilerplate we were using with our app (and can also be nicely adapted for other projects )
• That night we held a long informal Q&A that raised and answered a number of great questions

Day 3 – The Big Day of Authentication

• A few more people came to morning yoga 🙂
• Joe went over how to read posts from the WP API with a nice library he built and I did some exercises on using it with React
• Ryan rocked the afternoon with an in depth walk through of Authentication, OAuth and the WP Broker they built.
• By the end of the day we had our live blogging app authenticating with a WP site and pulling in content

Day 4 – Posting via the API & Leveraging Custom Content

• A few morning folks joined in morning office yoga
• Ryan walked through the WP Broker OAuth JavaScript library that Joe made for the workshop
• Then Joe walked folks through the ins and outs of posting to WordPress via the API and JavaScript and working with custom post types and content
• My work mostly involved doing some example exercises to bridge between the slides and building the project
• It was pretty cool how fleshed out the Liveblog project was that we built over the week

Day 5 – Taking it Further

• On the last day I talked about places online folks could go for further learning (including of course my JavaScript for WordPress Master Course)
• Joe showed some extended features of our app that folks could use for taking things further
• Then we discussed important related topics like React Native, Redux, React Router and more
• I’m looking forward to hearing about a number of the projects that attendees had shared about doing

A Big Thanks to Everyone

Matthew Haines-Young and Paul de Wouters from Human Made were tremendously helpful, walking around helping folks all week.

The attendees, who ranged from full stack JavaScript developers to folks new to React and the API, and everyone did a great job helping one another.

Overall I had a great time and I think the event went really well.  I look forward to the next Week of REST, hopefully in the US 🙂

What’s Next?

For now I suggest folks check out A Day of REST, a single day conference in Boston on March 9th that will give a big picture overview and real world examples of the WP API in action.

I can also share that a lot of what we covered in A Week of REST is also covered in my JavaScript for WordPress Master Course, which has an open enrollment coming up in the next month.

So, if you missed A Week of REST UK 2016, check out A Day of REST Boston 2017 and my JavaScript for WordPress Course to catch up!