The last few weeks have been just a bit insane, with our kids starting school, and immediately getting sick from the new germ pool. So I forgot to mention that I’m attending WordCamp Savannah. Like, right now, as I type this. Matt Mullenweg kicked things off with an introduction to WordPress, WordCamps, a little history, and mentions of some cool sites that use WordPress in interesting ways. They’re having problems with the projector upstairs, so he didn’t get to show them to us, but he still managed to give a good idea of what kinds of things are possible. Nothing new for me, but there are a lot of people here who are fairly new to WordPress who probably got some good inspiration.
Most of my time here will be spent in developer-oriented talks, but currently, I’m sitting in on Lisa Sabin-Wilson‘s WordPress for Dummies Q&A session. We have a copy of the 1st edition, which we passed down to our older daughter, but I want to get a copy of her BuddyPress for Dummies, too.
I find that it can be enlightening to hear the questions that beginners ask. As a developer, I often tend to focus on advanced, esoteric corners of the system. But, hearing the questions asked by beginners often inspires me with ideas for plugins or patches to improve features that I might not have looked at as closely. For me, this is the biggest appeal of coming to a WordCamp (even as a plain old attendee instead of a speaker, like I’ve been at other WordCamps) — meeting users and other developers, and getting fresh insight into new things to work on, or new approaches to old problems. Networking for the win!
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