This past 3 days was the inaugural WordCamp US conference and it was held right here in Philadelphia at the Pennsylvania Convention Center.
There were 1800 in attendance and another 700 watching via live stream, making it the largest WordCamp event to date. The first one was held in 2006.
There were 3 tracks of talks running both Friday and Saturday, with one of them being “lightening talks” that were only 10 minutes long. I did like the idea of this and found myself sitting in on quite of few of those as they did have a variety of interesting topics. However, the 10 minutes went by quickly and it did leave me wanting to hear more!
Of course the talks themselves are only half of the reason and value of the event. Meeting friends from the WordPress community is always a treat like no other technical community I have seen. Meeting new people and discovering the variety of backgrounds and ways that people come into this community is also something that never stops to amaze me.
Here is a recap of the talks I attended. I took many pages of notes, but I list these out also as reminder for myself and to go back and review the presentations when they are posted. There is so much to think about, learn from and incorporate into my 2016 plans!
Friday, December 4
- Beyond Gantt Charts and Dependencies: The Emerging WordPress Project Manager – Sarah Pressler
- The Techie Continuum – Kathryn Presner
- The Modern WordPress Developer’s Toolbox – Tracy Rotton
- The Art of Minimalist Design – Lauren Pittenger
- Github for the Rest of Us – Morten Rand-Hendriksen
- How Your Worst Clients Make You Better – Hilary Fosdal
- Starting/Growing your WordPress Meetup Community – Judi Knight
- How to Build Online Courses Using WordPress – Kim Shivler
- How to Build a Compelling WordPress Product or Service – Brian Krogsgard
- Make a Good WordPression: Tech Blogging for a Reluctant Audience – Joe Schaffner
- Pushing The Creative Limit – Sara Cannon
- Get It Right The First Time: WordPress Launching Checklist – Ryan Rudolph
- Dynamic CSS: Transforms, Transitions, and Animation Basics – Beth Soderberg
- Building Next-Generation Projects With BuddyPress – David Bisset
- Publish in 10 Minutes Per Day – Andrea Badgley
- What I Learned When My Blog Post Went Viral – Dennis Hong
Saturday, December 5
- You can learn a lot from WordPress: Learning by building the Web – Andrea Forte
- How Giving Back to WordPress Grows My Network – Shayda Torabi
- Build and Launch a Custom Site Using Only Your Phone – Anthony D. Paul
- E-Commerce in 2015 – Patrick Rauland
- Things you always wanted to know about WordPress (but were afraid to ask) – Evan Volgas
- WordPress in the White House: Development of the Open Innovation Toolkit – Sara Cope
- Godzilla CSS – Michael Arestad
- WordPress, Open Source, and Museums: A look at the tools and processes of moving our collections online – Mel Choyce, Courtney OCallaghan
- Learning for WordPress Developers – Nikolay Bachiyski
- WordPress Best Practices for Enterprise – Taylor Lovett
The State of the Word closing keynote from Matt Mullenweg and the after party at Lucky Strike were also treats not to be missed.
Oh yes, in case you haven’t heard, WordPress is now powering 1 out of every 4 of the top 10 million websites. We are at 25% market share and growing!