WordCamp Atlanta Roundup

WordCamp Atlanta came to an end yesterday and as usual, I'm inspired, motivated, and a little overwhelmed by the amount of information, people, and experiences. This post will summarize a few of the talks, some ideas that I am going to try, and some of the people that I'm excited to follow and learn more about over the year until next WordCamp.

Let me start with some of the talks. As you could have guessed, I was pretty much camped out in the WP Professionals room. So I'll go over the talks I attended. Cory Miller, the CEO from iThemes, gave some great insight in building a team. What I truly enjoyed about Cory was his level of integrity regarding his work/life balance. In addition to that, I took some time afterwards to talk with him and really enjoyed a graph he talked about... Performance vs Values. I'll save that for another post, but was a great start to my WordCamp 2014.

Following that was David Laietta and Web Trends. I met David at last year's WordCamp and he continues to impress me with his knowledge of the industry. I loved his stated opinions especially about sliders vs heros. I highly recommended going through the slide deck when it comes online.

The next one I went to was Jason Swenk talking about the smarter you get the less you make. I could go on and on about his tips, experience, but the thing that made the most sense to me was his approach to budget definition, scope creep prevention, and his presentation technique. Rather than duplicate all the effort he has put together, I would suggest just going to jasonswenk.com and follow him on twitter. Truly an inspiring speaker.

Immediately following that was the well-known John Saddington, practically a legend in the WordPress community and the development world as a whole. As always, he provided a very candid discussion about starting WordPress-centric businesses. From theme development, training, plug-in development, automation techniques, problems to solve, finding ideas in your everyday life. It was nice to finally touch base with him and always enjoy his approach to business, clients, and problem solving.

I kind of laid low on the second day regarding the presentations, and focused on the happiness bar on who I could help. However, I did make sure I was there for the Russell Fair presentation of Vagrant. If you haven't heard of Vagrant, go look it up. It will improve development time so much. I was able to setup 3 local wordpress sites with 2 commands in about 40 minutes. That includes, plugins, databases with custom scripts, etc... Varying Vagrant Vagrants as my base image against VirtualBox. Definitely something I got from WordCamp that I put into action the next day.

All in all, it was a great experience and motivated me to keep writing, keep pushing, and it always inspires me when I go to conferences. I think it is so valuable not just for the networking but the great ideas and new techniques. From Beanstalk/Capistrano to Advanced Custom Fields to Business ideas and client interactions.

I sincerely want to thank Judi Knight and the entire staff of WordCamp 2014. Jason Swenk, John Saddington, Russell Fair, Cory Miller, and David Laietta thank you again for inspiring and keeping me motivated. I love that I need to keep learning and getting better. It is amazing how important having people around you that inspire you.

I love WordPress and so glad of the opportunities that have been presented to me.

Thanks for stopping by. :-)

ps- That image is my new logo created by SusieM.com designs.