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A Busy August
So this past month has been quite a busy one for me. I’ve really been trying to gather up some of my work so I can share them with the community. Recently I started up a GitHub account so I can start to throw some of my open source plugins and (possibly) future themes up there to more easily share them with the community. Currently, the only project I have up there is my WordPress Icons – SVG plugin. On top of that I have really become involved in the community by contributing bits to the Codex as well as supporting others in the forums (eherman24).
To Attend Or Not To Attend
That wasn’t enough for me though. I really want to get more heavily involved in my hyper-local community, people in my direct area. It’s great helping the guy out in Texas, or out in California, but I want to meet others in my community that are leveraging WordPress in similar, or not so similar ways. I want to meet people that have a passion for web development and just love talking about it. I do have the occasional friend who enjoys chatting about web development, but our conversations are few and far in between. I need something to keep me motivated and keep me hooked.
I had heard about a conference that is held once a year called WordCamp. But I had no idea when it was coming back around, so I started to look in to that and who was responsible for organizing the event, as well as who spoke there and where the event is usually held. To my surprise the event had not come up as of yet, and as far as I could tell nothing had been planned. After prodding around for answers I was able to determine (to my dismay) it wouldn’t be until the Spring of 2014. But I happened to stumble on a local group of passionate WordPress entrepreneurs and developers, much like myself. I found this group on the website Meetup.com and was pleasantly surprised that the group was run and organized by the same person who helps organize the local Philadelphia Wordcamp event, Brad Williams.
I know of Brad Williams because of his popular pod cast show that he hosts, along with Dre Armada, called The Drad Cast. I listen this pod once a day on my hour long bus ride to work. I would highly recommend you check it out if you are a developer or plan to work in this field.
I instantly knew I HAD to get involved with the WordPress Philly Meetup. I’m lucky enough to have some truly great and influential people from the WordPress community right in my backyard, I knew I couldn’t let an opportunity like this pass. I registered for the event on Friday, August 23rd, paid my $5 and attended the event last night, Tuesday, August 27th.
The Meetup
I wasn’t sure what to expect at first, as this was really the first meetup of any kind that I would be attending. It was held in one of the research buildings on the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, property. It was actually a really sweet, brand new, building with a huge glass facade. I walked in to the meetup room, which was a small conference room with tables and projector set up. I would say roughly 16 people were there, including my self.
The WordPress Philly Meetup was centered around leveraging the Jetpack plugin, supplied by Automaticc. The speaker was a man named George Stephanis, who is a self described ‘code monkey’ working for Automaticc. George walked us through many of the newer modules introduced into Jetpack and a few of there features. To name a few of the ones he spoke about, Photon (Automaticc’s free image CDN), Omnisearch (an advanced admin dashboard search), Publicize (link social media accounts and share new posts), and Infinite Scroll (which loads content using ajax to avoid page refresh). Although I had used a few of these modules in previous projects, George walked us through and provided code examples on how to do things out of the ordinary. Things like removing specific modules or disabling them altogether, and using filters to bend Jetpack to our whim. I think it was a nice introduction, and preceding explanation, of Jetpack for both the beginner and more advanced users.
Will I Continue To Attend?
You bet! Just seeing others who have a passion for either the open source community, web development or WordPress is really great. It was awesome hearing what others are doing with WordPress and how others are using what they know to benefit the community. Unfortunately I didn’t actually get to meet anyone there, which I really wanted to network a bit, but the WordPress Philly Meetup comes around once a month, so there is always next time. Before getting involved in the community, I never knew what the open source community was all about. But after being apart of the community for a little over a year now, I have no plans to ever leave. I have found my home.
