{"id":4827,"date":"2014-06-28T21:25:52","date_gmt":"2014-06-29T04:25:52","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/g-liu.com\/blog\/?p=4827"},"modified":"2014-06-28T21:28:11","modified_gmt":"2014-06-29T04:28:11","slug":"seattle-wordcamp-2014-what-an-experience","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/g-liu.com\/blog\/2014\/06\/seattle-wordcamp-2014-what-an-experience\/","title":{"rendered":"Seattle WordCamp 2014: What an experience!"},"content":{"rendered":"

The night before my first WordCamp event today, I looked\u00a0at the attendees list<\/a> and said, “this is gonna be good”.<\/p>\n

It was way more than just “good”. It was spectacular. Eye-opening. Not one word would be sufficient to describe it.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

\"Andrew<\/a>
Andrew Nacin of Automattic gives the closing keynote at WordCamp Seattle 2014.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

I usually doze off during presentations, but the speakers at WordCamp Seattle were\u00a0top-notch experts in WordPress, and brought some real, tangible experience to the event.\u00a0From the first minute of Siobhan McKeown’s<\/a> History of WordPress to\u00a0Kailey Lampert’s “<\/a>Hidden Treasures of WordPress”\u00a0to Andrew Nacin’s<\/a> concluding keynote, and with all the speakers in between, there was never a dull moment. I learned about WordPress’s __return_*()<\/code> functions. After a delicious lunch provided by Ingallina’s Catering,\u00a0Jennifer Bourn<\/a>,\u00a0<\/span>Scott Eklund<\/a>,\u00a0<\/span>Michelle Castillo<\/a>,\u00a0<\/span>Heather Johnson<\/a>\u00a0came to bring their expertise of Search Engine Optimization (SEO) to the crowd. Skipping the latter half of the SEO talk, I headed over to\u00a0Sonja Leix<\/a>‘s User Experience Checklist talk, after a brief chat with Matt Eppelsheimer<\/a> of Rocket Lift<\/a>.<\/p>\n

There were so many great talks in the latter half of the day that I was a bit torn at times. Paul Clark<\/a> of 10up<\/a> 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<\/a> — also of 10up — who presented a brilliant workshop on SASS<\/a>. 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\u00a0Nancy Thanki<\/a>,\u00a0<\/span>Jordan Quintal<\/a>,\u00a0<\/span>Taylor Dewey<\/a>,\u00a0<\/span>Merrill Mayer<\/a>\u00a0revealed 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.<\/p>\n

Takeaways<\/h1>\n
\"Taylor<\/a>
Taylor Dewey of 10up: “I am not a breakpoint!”<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

If you use WordPress and you don’t already,\u00a0attend WordCamp!<\/strong> Seriously! I’ll probably be kicking myself for the next two weeks for not having known about #wcsea<\/a> earlier.<\/p>\n

WordCamp<\/a> is worth more than any online tutorials or textbooks. Nothing compares to\u00a0meeting 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.<\/p>\n

From the talks and workshops I attended, here are some of the awesome things I learned:<\/p>\n