WordCampSF 2009 has come and gone, and the day was everything you could really want from an event that is put on by the group of people who have the day to day job of making WordPress be everything that it is. The day stayed fairly well on schedule, the food was excellent, there was an abundance of water (which is always a huge thing for me personally when it comes to any event or conference), the location was a perfect fit, the wireless was blazing fast, and there was plenty of places to plug into when your battery was running low (aside from the minor issue of a circuit breaker tripping in the downstairs room a handful of times during an afternoon session). I’m really not one to complain about many things, but there isn’t very much that I can complain about when I try to think about it.
There were a lot of great people that I ran into today as well. It was great to see Lloyd and Lorelle again, and I even met a developer who came all the way from Orlando to be at this WordCamp. When you have the chance to be around a group of people like this, especially in a city like San Francisco, you’ll make that long journey to spend a weekend talking about all things WordPress.
Steve Souders had a really good session about how to make your themes faster when it comes to page load times, and Scott Porad gave an interesting session on what goes on in the empire that is known as Pet Holdings, Inc., home to I Can Haz Cheezeburger and many other hilarious sites.
My time at the Genius Bar was relatively slow, but I did get asked at least one question as how one gets a basic, entry level to HTML because the person felt that might help them as a user with WordPress. That was a really tough question to answer, and I could only think to direct him to the WordPress Codex. I’ve been doing this stuff since I was about 14, and a lot of that was trial and error combined with simple reverse engineering. It’s not so much about having trouble with teaching what comes naturally as much as it’s tough to teach what took years to just make sense, so I hope I helped that person out a little bit.
In all honesty, I spent a large part of this afternoon reading through some of my RSS feeds on Google Reader that have been piling up over the months. I’m still not used to having a laptop that actually allows me to function on a very efficient level. My old PowerBook G4 was very sluggish, and this weekend has been one of discovery in terms of what I can actually do with this beautiful MacBook Pro. I spent my time at the Genius Bar doing some padding of my own genius by plowing through the various WordPress related feeds that I’m subscribed to and bookmarking things of interest into my Delicious bookmarks. If you want to get an idea of what I’m finding interesting, that’s a good place to check into.
Tonight is the post-WordCamp party at the Automattic headquarters on the San Francisco waterfront, just near AT&T Ballpark. It will be another chance to talk to people and get to know this community of developers and users more, and that’s what is really important when it comes to these types of gatherings. These are the people who are making the world get better and better when it comes to the Internet.
We also know how to have fun. As Matt Mullenweg said in his session today, “If you make a feature request at the party tonight, you have to do a shot.“
