Fernando Tellado

Get to know Fernando 🎙️

Can you start by painting a picture of what a typical day looks like for you? What fuels your passion for the work you do, and how does it tie into your involvement with WCEU?

I dedicate my life to WordPress, so my normal day starts almost always in the admin of some WordPress installation, mine or client’s, writing something for the blog, updating plugins, and themes, fixing bugs or cleaning malware, modifying code or adding features to some WordPress.

You could say that I live inside wp-admin and public_html. Maybe it seems a bit sad, but my life has been like that for more than 15 years, and I’m still passionate about it every day.

As I am dedicated to creating, maintaining, and improving WordPress websites, I spend all day with my team talking to customers about WordPress, talking to each other about WordPress, and reading documentation and WordPress code. We are really monothematic.

The best part of this, far from sounding sad, is that we have a great time, we learn things every day, which I either share on the ayudawp.com blog or we spread the word at WordCamp events.

Attending WordCamp Europe, being part of the biggest WordPress event in the world, is for me and my team like the Olympus of what we do every day.

What sparked your interest in becoming a speaker at WCEU? Was there a particular moment or experience that motivated you to share your insights with this community?

I try to attend WordCamp Europe every year I can, and since I couldn’t be in Athens this year, I couldn’t miss it. I wasn’t planning to present any talks, just attend and enjoy learning and meeting colleagues and friends from all over the WordPress world, but suddenly, I remembered that I was a speaker in Berlin years ago and that there has been nothing like it, even though I’ve been a speaker dozens of times in other WordCamps.

Also, coincidentally, I had in mind an idea of a talk about humanity and technology related to artificial intelligence, but not focused on AI, but on the human side of the technology, and I thought that maybe I would like that kind of approach in the event, and surprise! it seems that the idea was liked, and I hope that those who come to see my talk will like it 😉

For those awaiting your talk, could you give us a preview of what we can expect to learn from your talk? Any sneak peeks?

At that particular moment in our lives, those 45 minutes that those attending my talk are going to give me of their time, I would like to get us all to reflect together based on some ideas and information that I will share about our responsibility as human beings regarding the rational use of technology.

The guiding thread that I propose is a journey of more than 3 million years to the present, analyzing what makes us human and what value those differences have, if any, for the present and future of our society.

Is it your first time at a WCEU or WordPress event? Any standout memories or lessons learned that you’d like to share?

As I mentioned before, this is not the first time I have spoken at WordCamp Europe, and yes, there are some important tidbits that can help anyone who wants to share their knowledge at an event of this size.

First, and most important, share what you know and how you know it. Don’t pretend to lecture anyone about how good you are at something; just share what you’ve learned with WordPress and life that can help others.

Next in importance would be to focus on something small, simple, straightforward, that attendees can easily absorb and apply to their professional or personal lives. Don’t try to lecture on everything there is to know about a broad topic, focus on a practical aspect of that knowledge.

Finally, don’t worry, don’t be overwhelmed, at WordCamp Europe there are many people, but they are friendly people, eager to learn and share, professional colleagues and WordPress lovers, always grateful to those who share their knowledge freely and altruistically. It’s not an exam, it’s a meeting between colleagues and WordPress enthusiasts.

Looking beyond the scheduled sessions, what do you hope attendees will take away from their overall experience at WCEU? How can they leverage the event to enhance their professional development or personal growth? 

The most important thing is to make your own WordCamp Europe schedule, parallel to the official one, in which you always keep time for the 3 fundamental things you can achieve at a WordPress event:

1. Improve – Mark in your agenda those talks that you don’t want to miss for anything in the world, you don’t want to learn PHP or REST API, for that there is documentation, it is better to choose talks that guide you on how to improve processes or how to approach tasks from different points of view, thanks to the experience of the speaker.

2. Share – Save space in your agenda between talks to chat with the other attendees and continue sharing knowledge and life and professional experiences.

3. Networking – Also reserve time to go to sponsor spaces, the big ones, but especially the small ones. Visit them, make it worth their while to be present at such a great event, and you will both find the meeting enriching.

And finally, try to give yourself at least one more day to get to know the city hosting WordCamp Europe, in this case Torino, better if accompanied by colleagues from the local event team.