Just a little wrap up from WordCamp Vegas that was this last weekend. I had a great time, I am always impressed with the WordPress community. Open, caring, and would literally give you warm cookies just for driving down to Vegas.
This trip was a lot of fun. The conference was great, lots of really good, relevant talks. Highlights included Brandon Dove of PixalJar.net gave a great presentation about Child Themes vs. Theme Framworks. Having built a bunch of custom themes and child themes, personally I have stayed away from frameworks, but after hearing him, I kind of want to dig into Thematic and see what else there is to learn. Also really like when we looked into a site and he said, “This filter applies to all the single ladies.” Kind of a WordPress joke…
I had the opportunity to present myself, and was really happy when John Hawkins invited me to come down at WordCamp Utah. I spoke on the Loop, on how to build custom queries, template tags, and working with custom post types. My slides, similar to the WordCamp Utah ones below:
I also enjoyed hearing the flamboyant Eric Marden and hearing him speak on DevCraft: Best Practices for WordPress Teams. I never worked professionally as part of a dev shop, so his comments were interesting on a lot of levels. Taking a lot of his critique and commentary to heart, hoping to become a better developer as a result.
I guess this brings me to the crux. No one is a perfect developer. For all of the WordCamps that I have been to, (been to eight now in the last two years) there is always something to learn. For the $20-$30 that they normally cost, there is no better way to spend a Saturday learning from everyone around you on how to be a better developer, better blogger, or better designer.
Hope to see you at the next one!