Since I moved to Bristol in the middle of 2017, I’ve been regularly joining Women’s Tech Hub Friday co-woking sessions at Desklodge. Talking to other women who work or want to get into tech always leaves me very inspired and motivated. The organisers also try and encourage women to challenge themselves. One of these challenges is public speaking. I thought I should be more proactive that way because I would like to share the knowledge I gained throughout my eight-year career.

Tess, who is a co-organiser at Bristol WordPress People, was looking for people to give talks about technical subjects. I offered to talk about WordPress child themes at their event in April 2018.

Preparation

I participated in a global diversity CFP workshop that aimed to encourage women to get engaged in public speaking. It was organised globally on the 3 February 2018 and facilitated by Jaycee Cheong here is Bristol. Even though the proposed talk I worked on wasn’t about WordPress (that presentation is hopefully yet to come), it gave me some great ideas and directions where to start.

Why child themes?

Since I’ve started developing WordPress themes at dxw digital, some issues around child themes, like development, best practices, kept coming back in various projects. For this reason, I thought that giving a talk even about something that has pretty good online documentation but still can cause problems, is a valid topic.

Presentation

I created my slides using Ludus web app which is a great tool. It’s free if you don’t mind your presentation to be publicly available. I received excellent feedback about my talk. I felt uplifted and had a few chats with some of the participants afterwards. My slides are available online.