Jenny Wong is a web developer from Reading in the UK. She works at Human Made, a WordPress-focussed agency in the UK. As well as her development work, she works to help local communities to get involved with the WordPress project.

Her first involvement with WordPress was at the PHPNW conference. As an intern, she was given the job of updating content. In 2011, she migrated all of their annual conferences into one multisite instance and built a new theme.

UK WordPress Contributor Days

Jenny has spearheaded a drive in the UK to organise contributor days across the country. These events are focused on getting people started with contributing to WordPress. The first was a one-day event in Manchester. The day starts with the attendees splitting off into groups and learning how to contribute in different areas.

It was inspired by WordCamp London and it was to encourage contributions outside of WordCamp events. I found that it was a common problem where people either could not get set up correctly on their machines locally to contribute / didn’t know how to contribute / didn’t have any time to contribute. Contributor Days solve this because you have people who can help you get set up, you are making time to contribute by going to a event as well as getting help and support to contributions.

It’s also more fun to be contributing together as a community rather than on your own.

The first event went really well with patches being accepted into core on the day of event. Since then, the UK community has had 3 more contributor days and there are more being planned. With so much contributor activity in the UK more names are appearing on the WordPress contributor list.

Jenny at WordCamps

Jenny’s first WordCamp presentation was last year at WordCamp Lancaster, where she talked about debugging. “I learnt a lot through the Q&A,” she says, “which was more of a discussion of tools other people used to debug WordPress.”

Since then she’s been to a number of WordCamps, and organised WordCamp Manchester. She finds that she learns a lot at WordCamps, from different developers’ methodologies to tools and plugins.

The best bit about attending WordCamps has to be the awesome people you meet. I meet people who on IRC or a forum have helped me out on setting up or developing something (Paul Gibbs springs to mind as one of the many people) and being able to say Thank You in person means a lot. Other people I’ve met at WordCamps are now my colleagues and friends.

2014 will be Jenny’s first WordCamp San Francisco! She’ll be presenting a lightning talk on “The base ingredients of debugging.” In the presentation she’ll be taking you on a tour of the debugging process and tools that will make your life easier.

it doesn’t matter what level of developer you are or what type of developer you are, we all come across bugs in our development life. I used to always get myself in a frenzy over how to tackle each bug but this process has helped me keep my head cool and my stress levels down.