WordCamp 2014 Minneapolis

Over the weekend I attended a conference at St. Thomas in Downtown Minneapolis called WordCamp, along with many others from our office. WordCamp is a conference that focuses on everything related to WordPress. Website Developers, Designers, and Marketers attend to learn about WordPress and look to the future to stay progressive in the web design industry. In each session, I saw people taking notes on laptops (mainly Macs), tablets, phones, and even notebooks.

There were 4 sessions each hour, for an incredible total of 28 sessions the entire day. Every speaker who was there volunteered to share their knowledge with everyone else, so we can all come together collectively.

I went to the sessions listed below:

• Let’s Get SASSy! by Suzette Franck
• Designing for Interaction by Travis Totz
• You Don’t Need jQuery by Josh Broton
• Site Analytics in WordPress: Building for Success by Julie Kosbab
• WordPress Security – It’s all About the Basics by Tony Perez
• Picture this: WordPress Images for Responsive and High-Density Designs by Alec Rippberger
• WP-to-JS and Back Again by Nick Pelton

The most informative session that I attended was “WordPress Security – It’s All About the Basics” by Tony Perez. Tony Perez is a co-founder of a company called Sucuri. He went into detail about all the different ways that hackers use to either get access to a website or how to take down a server; all great information to know!

Steve Slater, SEO Specialist with Vivid Image also attended WordCamp and had this to say, “Diversity was encouraged and discussed. It’s impressive when a large group gets together and makes an effort to invite and encourage diversity.  Accessibility– The first session I attended on Saturday was a session on accessible video. This topic seemed to come up again and again. How do we design and created sites that are accessible to all?  Security was also a reoccurring theme. It’s great to see that WordPress contributors care about making sites that are secure and that the community continues to make it better. The day was great. When the day ended you could tell that everyone wanted to keep the conversation going… over beer, of course.”

Karlie, Graphic/Web Designer with Vivid Image adds: “The thing that stuck with me the most was probably the atmosphere and enthusiasm of WordCamp. I love sitting in a room full of fellow designers and developers. There’s something to being surrounded by 200 other people who are just as nerdy as you are and being excited about learning new things from each other. We all had something in common, a love and passion for WordPress and making it the best tool possible. You kind of get this feeling of being able to change the (web) world when you all come together. I learned something in every session I sat in. All the speakers were great and had something to teach. Tyler and I sat in on a SASS track for our first session. I think it was great to have both a designer and developer from Vivid in that one. We both walked out of it excited to bring that tool back to our daily work. I also really enjoyed the “So, You Want to Build a WordPress Theme”. Being a designer who dabbles in code, I was pleasantly surprised at how much I understood and caught on it. It has me motivated to try and build my own WP theme now. Travis from WerkPress and Reid from Modern Tribe were also fun to listen to and great to talk to afterwards. You can’t leave something like that an not walk away with pockets full of new knowledge.”

Overall, I had a great day, and I walked away with a ton of new knowledge and met a lot of new people. I’m looking forward to attending more of these in the future so I can further expand my knowledge with WordPress.

Do you have a question about WordCamp or WordPress I can answer? Comment below!