WordCamp: San Francisco Edition

This past weekend saw WordCamp SF come to town, and it pretty much rocked my socks off. Though MIGHTYminnow represented last year, it was before my time so this was my first WordCamp. I think I’m totally hooked now. Below are some highlights:

Speakers

The sheer number of hugely talented presenters was astounding: WordPress core developers, prolific theme/plugin authors, and generally a ton of high quality people working on cool stuff. Some of the sessions that stood out include:

• Confident Commits, Delightful Deploys by Mark Jaquith
  Tons of useful info regarding version control, code deployment, and loads of helpful tools to check out. Bottom line: do version control!
• (What’s So Funny ‘Bout) Themes, Love, and Understanding by Ian Stewart
  A full-on inspiring talk about WordPress, theming, and the amazing potential that is yet to be tapped in this field. Note to self: time to start theming!
• State of the Word 2013 by Matt Mullenweg
  And. . . of course. . . the State of the Word. Cool to hear the man who (co-) started it all speak candidly about the strengths, weaknesses, and future of WordPress. End result: WordPress rocks!

Learnings & Doings

It was an information-filled 72 hours, and my brain feels like it just ate way too much knowledge-spaghetti, but here are some of the noteworthy takeaways:

• Cool tools:
  • Grunt – cool automator, I’m thinking we can use it to quickly set-up plugin and theme files.
  • Jetpack – we’ve used this do-it-all plugin for a while, but it’s time to dig a little deeper into it all of it’s features.
  • WP-CLI – sweet-looking command line tool to expedite all things WP.
• This crazy retina image technique – TLDR: you can blow images up to 2.2x their display size and export them at low-quality in Photoshop and BAM – you’ve got retinized images. Need to play with this one some more.
• Got introduced to WordPress Trac and submitted my first patch!
• query_posts is not so good.
• The new post revisions interface in WP 3.5 is niiiiiice.

Shout Outs & Thank You’s

I have to give a huge shout out to two people who made the weekend possible: Devin Price (@devinsays) and Chris Lema (@chrislema). As of one week ago, I had no ticket to this sold out event. I got in touch with Devin (rockstar themer and plugin developer) to see if he knew anything I didn’t. Devin put word out on the twitters, and Chris Lema (author, speaker, and lover of fine cigars) came to the rescue. A sincere “thank you” to both of these gentlemen for an awesome weekend.