The night before my first WordCamp event today, I looked at the attendees list and said, “this is gonna be good”.

It was way more than just “good”. It was spectacular. Eye-opening. Not one word would be sufficient to describe it.

I usually doze off during presentations, but the speakers at WordCamp Seattle were top-notch experts in WordPress, and brought some real, tangible experience to the event. From the first minute of Siobhan McKeown’s History of WordPress to Kailey Lampert’s “Hidden Treasures of WordPress” to Andrew Nacin’s concluding keynote, and with all the speakers in between, there was never a dull moment. I learned about WordPress’s __return_*() functions. After a delicious lunch provided by Ingallina’s Catering, Jennifer Bourn, Scott Eklund, Michelle Castillo, Heather Johnson came to bring their expertise of Search Engine Optimization (SEO) to the crowd. Skipping the latter half of the SEO talk, I headed over to Sonja Leix‘s User Experience Checklist talk, after a brief chat with Matt Eppelsheimer of Rocket Lift.

There were so many great talks in the latter half of the day that I was a bit torn at times. Paul Clark of 10up presented a wonderful case study of how, and how not to build a scalable web service. After the presentation, I headed down to Taylor Dewey — also of 10up — who presented a brilliant workshop on SASS. Having always used LESS, Dewey’s workshop presented many new insights into the wildly popular CSS preprocessor. To round off the already excellent day, the panel of Nancy Thanki, Jordan Quintal, Taylor Dewey, Merrill Mayer revealed their insights on developing WordPress themes, and Andrew Nacin of Automattic gave a splendid closing keynote. From accessibility to zeitgeist, these talks alone were well worth the $20 price of admission.

Takeaways

If you use WordPress and you don’t already, attend WordCamp! Seriously! I’ll probably be kicking myself for the next two weeks for not having known about #wcsea earlier.

WordCamp is worth more than any online tutorials or textbooks. Nothing compares to meeting other people who are passionate about all aspects of WordPress, whether it’s just getting started with a blog or doing some hardcore performance optimization.

From the talks and workshops I attended, here are some of the awesome things I learned:

• WordPress has some 3500 odd functions. Chances are, there’s some hiding in there that you don’t know about. Even Andrew Nacin admitted that there was one function he never knew existed!
• There’s a Heartbeat API? And it’s no longer experimental? Whoa.
• Ingallina’s sandwiches are really good.
• You can get a long way out by adding alt and title tags to images and links. That goes for accessibility as well!
• Advanced Custom Fields is a plugin worth using. I’ve always avoided it as a plugin minimalist.
• Don’t use PHP to generate 2000 overlays for your 2000 terms in your WordPress installation. Just don’t. Use JavaScript/jQuery for that purpose.
• Main difference between SASS and LESS? SASS has conditional statements, LESS does not.
  (Also, check out @tddewey’s SASS workshop files on Github)
• The web was designed for users. Focus on users, not breakpoints.

 It’s not over, even though it’s over

WordCamp Seattle is a one-day event, and one of the best weekend events I’ve been to. But tomorrow, there’s WordPress contributor day, led by Automattic’s own Andrew Nacin. I’ll be at the Impact Hub Seattle to do some contributing to the codebase, and I look forward to seeing many #wcsea attendees there as well.

Thank you so much, WordCamp Seattle organizing team. Kudos to all the speakers for their collective insights and volunteers for their dedication to the event. And lastly, thank you to the UW Husky Union Building for hosting this event. It was a pleasure to attend WordCamp at my home university!