Gutenberg: How do we tell our story?

As a developer, we face challenges of being inadequate. Thus my dilemma writing about the talk I did today at the WordCamp in Kampala.

Learning Gutenberg was a challenge I took as soon as it was announced by Matt Mullenweg in state of the Word 2015.

I am writing this while at WordCamp Kampala 2018.

My Journey learning modern JavaScript and React

Gutenberg, what is it? What did Matt mean when he advised the whole community to learn Javascript deeply? Well, I wasn’t going to wait for the train to hit me. I dived into the uncharted and murky waters.

My challenges spanned from lack of adequate knowledge in Javascript and React JS to be exact, a library that was chosen to write Gutenberg. All of this was out of fear. A fear that I would soon be outdated to work with WordPress or even make some money.

My journey started with procuring courses from Wes Bos picking up on ES6 for modern Javascript and then React JS from the same tutor. For Gutenberg development, I picked up courses from Zac Gordon on Gutenberg block & theme development. He was the only educator to start out with a course on the topic at the time.

I wasn’t only watching video tutorials. My learning was mixed with following the leaders in the WordPress space on social media and taking in what they discovered as they built new blocks or were challenged.

Failure! I can’t create a block

Yes, you read that right. I learnt and wrote blocks but they would break every time. My frustrations grew with each single line of code that I wrote. Why? Simply because the blocks I wrote could not store the information but broke as I added a feature to the block.

“Pufff!” The block content just disappeared in thin air. I realized that at that moment, I need to take a back seat and watch as the Block API was developed further. It was unstable and I couldn’t keep up. So I quit and started watching from a safe distance. I wasn’t alone. Many where in the same boat.https://github.com/WordPress/gutenberg/issues/4849

Gutenberg to be in WordPress 5.0 core soon

News trends change so fast and so was the case with Gutenberg being merged into core. Even though controversial dates have been shared and changed over time. The general agreement of amongst developers in the community was that they need more time for the 100s of bug fixes reported on Gutenberg to be sorted.

As this article is being written, 5.0 has been delayed until proper feedback comes in on the 5.0 Release Candidate. There are a number of bugs and issues still being raised but we wait for the official calls from Automattic.

On the brighter side of the news spectrum, Gutenberg is superb and is something that will over time allow content creators to make more rich content when the software comes out of A/B testing with fixing.

It’s a challenge writing or speaking about a topic that you feel you have little knowledge. At least, that is what I feel right now but I realized in my quest for learning how to build blocks, I needed to share how I understood it in the simplest of terms. That’s why I share my basic understanding of blocks in the presentation attached here.

I will be picking up Gutenberg development in a few months to come and will share the details again.

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