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.

I am writing this while at WordCamp Kampala 2018.

Gutenberg, what is it? What did 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 Journey learning modern JavaScript and React

My challenges spanned from lack of adequate in Javascript and React JS to be exact, a language that was chosen to write Gutenberg. All of this was out of fear. A fear that I would soon be outdated to work or even make some money.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 for the Gutenberg development. Thereafter, I picked up courses from Zac Gordon on Gutenberg block development since he was the only educator to start out with a course on the topic. I wasn’t only watching video tutorials, I mixed the learning curve with following the leaders in the WordPress space and what they discovered as they built new blocks.

Failure. I can’t create a block

Yes, you read that write. 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 store the information but 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 Blocks API was developed further. It was unstable and I couldn’t keep up. So I quit and started watching from a safe distance.

5.0 to be in WordPress 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 is 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.

Writing or speaking about a topic that you feel you have little knowledge is a challenge. At least, that is what I feel 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. 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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