WordCamp San Francisco 2013 Recap

This was my second WordCamp San Francisco, and I absolutely loved it. I haven’t attended too much of the sessions, most notably: Mark Jaquith on deploying, code UX by Nikolay Bachiyski, funny theme stories by Ian Stewart, introduction of the O2 theme by Beau Lebens, roles and caps by Andrew Nacin and obviously State of the Word, by Matt Mullenweg, speaking of which, I was named “recent rockstar” for the 3.6 release cycle (along with quite a few other awesome folks), which I’m so proud of.

This year I also spoke at WordCamp San Francisco, which was a brand new experience for me. I spoke at two other WordCamps prior to that (Sofia and Norway), but as you know, SF is slightly different, so I was super nervous all the time. I talked about some of the WordPress theme development best practices, and seems like it went fairly well.

It’s funny, because one of my goals for 2013 was:

Give an awesome WordCamp presentation in SF

At least one person said my talk was “awesome” but we’ll know more when the survey results are in. Another goal was to speak at five WordCamps this year, of which SF is only the second. WordCamp Russia, which is only in a couple of weeks will be my third, and hopefully I’ll make it to Sofia this year as well. I guess I can settle for four.

#wcsf @kovshenin pic.twitter.com/hB1nWvaZUi

— Ben Dunkle (@EmpireOfLight) July 26, 2013

Another funny thing about my SF talk is that I was live tweeting stuff using my Twitter account while presenting. I revealed my secret at the end – I gave a list of tweets to my brother Gennady who used my account to tweet them out while watching the live stream. Inspired by that, Justin Sainton started a new GitHub repo to work on a plugin/theme that can actually tweet stuff on slide transition. He called it “Gennady.”

As usual, I met a lot of new people during the event and all the parties, and had a good time hanging around with my friends and co-workers, especially at the new Automattic office lounge, which is a really cool place.

During Contribute Day on Sunday, I spent some time helping out the group that was working on subtitling WordPress.tv videos, and also worked with some amazing WordPress themers on a very cool project code named “Theme School,” which you will hear more about very soon.

I’ll be spending some more time in San Francisco to wind down and get prepared for WordCamp Russia, as well as co-work and have a good time. Thanks to everyone who made WordCamp SF awesome, and hope to come back again next year.