I flew down to San Francisco at the end of May and went to WordCamp San Francisco with my brother Chris. Chris works for a gigantoramous tech company and was interested in finding out what WordPress was all about. It was great to go with him, just made the event all the more better, and he thought it was stellar as well. Plus I got quality face time with the niece and nephews :-)
The event was $25, and for that we got: breakfast, snacks, beverages all day, an amazing lunch, a party after, a T-shirt and a bunch of bling. AWESOME!
Oh yeah, I also got to hear Matt Mullenweg, founder of WordPress, speak about the company, future plans and current amazing things. Matt is 26 and is, quite frankly, adorable.
In addition to Matt, I heard Tim Ferris of 4 Hour Work Week fame, Matt Cutts – head of the webspam team at Google, Dave Gray – founder of XPLANE, Steve Souders – performance guru at Google, Scott Porad – CTO of the infamous lolcats, & failblog, and John Lilly – CEO of Mozilla, his company makes a little browser called Firefox.
Everyone spoke for about 45 minutes to an hour. There were more speakers, but they were doubling up, one upstairs, one downstairs, speaking at the same time, so I had to choose.
You can see the entire line-up here:
2009.sf.wordcamp.org/speakers
Go here to see videos from the SF Camp:
wordpress.tv
Everything about this conference was first rate, from the venue to the speakers. Where else can you have some of the head people from Google show up and tell you how to improve your SEO rankings and performance overall? Or have the head of Mozilla talk about what it’s like to keep Firefox ahead of the game?
Did I mention there was also a Genius Bar there that many of the speakers were at so you could personally gab with them?
I especially loved Dave Gray – I thought he was fascinating and could have listened to him for another hour or two.
Also, the next day, Sunday, there was a Developers Day. I didn’t stay because it was over my head, but anyone that is into the inner workings of WordPress, writing Plug-Ins or Themes, etc…would have loved it. I am more “front-end” designer but thought I could take notes for my developer, however I quickly glazed over…
WordCamp has conferences all around the world. Check out their main site for more info on a Camp coming to your neighborhood.
In September, WordCamp comes to Seattle – will I be there? Absolutely!
WordPress links:
WordPress Videos – go here to see videos from WordCamp San Francisco
