It was a great day Saturday at Wordcamp, meeting so many interesting people, fostering some new ideas, and learn quite a lot. I’ve used wordpress now as my default blogging software for a few years, but I’ve never had the opportunity to get in touch with the community first hand, to see whose really behind the software. As my first Wordcamp, I had high expectations, and I wasn’t let down!

Early Morning

I showed up to the Mission Bay Center around 9am and was pretty amazed, it was my first time over by SOMA. Lots of apartment buildings and construction going on, that area is going to be amazingly once it’s all completed. I checked in and found out that talks had already started! The breakfast food was delicious, with bagels, fruit, and Peet’s coffee. There were 2 conference rooms, upstairs and downstairs, which were the User Track and Developer Track respectively. After looking at the entire schedule, I settled on most of the developer talks. The majority of the talks were only 20-30 minutes long, which was a bit disappointing. Not enough time to dig into anything really. My highlight of the morning talks was on LOLCats from Ben Huh. Ben gave a very straightforward talk about the viral nature of LOLCats and presented things in a serious matter, which I was surprised about considering the nature of his content. I also enjoyed the talk on Microformats from Tantek Celik. Microformats have caught my interest since Kevin Marks demoed them at Google IO, I hope they continue to gain interest, I think they have a lot of potential.

Lunch and Afternoon

Buffet style BBQ with macaroni and chicken, vegetarians be damned! Long lines at first, but they subsided quickly. Another meal done well. I headed into more talks and was quite happy to hear Nginx mentioned by Chris Lea. Nginx is a Russian developed webserver that is substantially faster than Apache or Lighttpd, but due to be Russian, it’s always been hard as hell to find docs for it in English. From what I heard, the situation has improved now, so maybe it’s time to switch back to Nginx now! jQuery was demoed, the Wordpress APIs were shown, and BuddyPress, a Facebook-like version of Wordpress was shown, to be public by end of the year.

I found there was a very distinct difference between users and developers, I could tell which side people were on immediately. Users just created content and have no clue about anything else. I applaud them for pushing forward and having a passion, someone needs to poke the developers to be productive. One of the other interesting aspects with the crowd was the rampant use of flickr and twitter. Everyone in the room was twittering nonstop. I would post a picture to flickr, mention it on twitter, and watch it appear on 8 laptop screens instantly. It was a unique social experience.

One other cool thing were several tattoo of wordpress that were lying around. They asked us to apply them and mentioned prizes. I added the tattoo to my foot and then ended up winning a WP Moleskin notepad! Very cool contest and prize.

WP Tattoo

WP Moleskin

Evening

Things died down by 6pm, but not before a performance by the SEO Rapper aka Chuck Lewis and it was awesome. I wandered around for a bit and then wound up early at the after-party at Pete’s Tavern with some other folks from the day. We chatted about the iphone, blogging, and tech stuff in general until 9pm when the open bar hit! After that, bourbon warmed my belly and I mingled for the rest of night.

It was a well run event with plenty of volunteers and good food always within reach. Good talks and good company all around. Matt Mullenweg was the informal moderator of the entire event and was always hanging around the edges of the room. From here, I will try to get more involved in the wordpress community and contribute to wordpress development. Hopefully, I can attend again next year!

As mentioned, I attended Defcon 16 this weekend in Las Vegas and had an excellent time! Defcon is a computer security and general hacking convention. Vegas provides an excellent background for a pretty technical and semi-serious event. It took place in the Rivera Hotel, which is quite old and busted hotel, but it works fine for a bunch of nerds that just want to drink and hack all day!

Thursday

We arrived around 6PM in LAS and checked into our room pretty quickly, just dropping off our things and then heading out to dinner at the Treasure Island hotel. Walking around outside in the Vegas heat is interesting, it’s like a hot sauna or something, but the dry heat isn’t that bad for short periods of time. We continued partying and enjoyed the night someplace, I don’t even remember.

Friday

I woke up around 10 or 11am and showered and headed down to the first day of talks. Plenty of good info and interested people. The rooms and talks were crowded, but well managed. The goons, people in redshirts running the event, took charge when needed and herded people properly because even for the all smart people there, we all become stupid in a crowd. I attended talks until 5pmish, then we headed out to dinner someplace I forget, then went to a party at the Hard Rock Cafe around 7pm. Getting drunk and realized it’s only 8pm is such a weird Vegas moment. We hit up a few more parties all around, there are just so many, it’s so fun to have them all be free pretty much. It was a late night and I ended up sleeping at the Treasure Island hotel somehow too! I find when I’m drunk, I love to ramble about how awesome wordpress is.

Saturday

Didn’t wake up until noon and after pampering, headed to more talks by 2pm. I attended the EFF panel, which was informing people about a bunch of MIT kids received an injunction over a talk they were going to give, my friend Drew has more info. It was interesting to get the info first hand and hear people chatting about throughout the conference. Talks ended around 6pm and we headed to the Star Trek Experience for warp core breaches and really good dinner, which is surprising for a place like that. The Star Trek yearly convention was also going on at the Hilton surprisingly, it was cool to see the other nerds wandering around in full costumes. The people dressed as Klingon’s were fully in character and quite impressive.

I attended a few talks Sunday morning 10am talks before we headed to airport early and just hung out for a bit. There are around 3,000 slot machines in the airport, you can gamble constantly. Overall for the conference, it was an awesome time to meet so many cool people interested in learning and sharing together. I had attended Google IO a few months back, which is more of a programmer and web development gathering and the overall themes were quite different. IO was all about building new things, imagining what is possible and how to accomplish it. Defcon is more like “stop doing it that way, you’re doing it all wrong” and being very technical and thorough about knowledge. Just a different way of doing things and it was interesting to get that perspective. I have to go back next year!