What can you say about San Diego – it’s almost perfect. The weather is the same year round, it’s sunny every day and it’s surrounded by water, beaches and palm trees. If that’s not enough reason to make a trip down there, attending and sponsoring the very first WordCamp San Diego is good enough for us. So Dave Cowgill and I packed our bags and headed down.
WordCamp San Diego is bound to become one of the better WordCamps around. Dre Armeda and Chris Daley put on a great show. Throughout the weekend, it was obvious that these two and their staff of volunteers poured a ton of effort and loads of passion into making it fun and memorable.
The excitement started on Friday night with the speakers and sponsors dinner atop the Ramada Gaslamp in downtown San Diego and continued on through Saturday night, wrapped up by an after-party at Downtown Johnny Brown’s. There was good food, good drinks, informative speakers and even an appearance by Matt Mullenweg himself. Luckily Dave took some time to capture it all on video.
Again, a big thanks to all the organizers at WordCamp San Diego. If you have not attended a WordCamp yet, we highly recommend that you go to the next one near you – or hey, start one yourself. Next up: WordCamp San Francisco. If you plan on being there, drop us a line in the comments. We want to see how many AppThemes customers we can meet at WCSF. See you there.
Each month we (along with Exygy and Automattic) organize the San Francisco WordPress Meetup which is a local gathering to discuss all things WordPress. It’s conveniently held just a few blocks away from our office at Pier 38 and topics typically vary from “What’s your favorite plugin”, “WordPress in the cloud”, “Speed geeking”, to name a few.
This past Meetup’s topic was, “What’s your favorite WordPress theme” and we had six different presenters showing off their stuff. As usual, we had a great time but what was really special was that some of our customers stopped by to chat. On top of that, our friends from Page.ly attended and they put together a video of the Meetup highlights which includes some footage from the AppThemes team.
Road Trip! We’re getting ready to attend three WordCamps this summer and we want to meet you there.
The first WordCamp is just a few days away in Reno. We’ll be making the beautiful drive over the Sierra Nevadas to attend WC Reno. We’re really looking forward to it.
Next up is WordCamp San Diego on July 16. This will be San Diego’s first WordCamp and they have had a great response. The 200 available tickets sold out in no time. We’re even more stoked about WCSD as it will be the first WordCamp sponsored by AppThemes. To top it off, the World Champion Giants (yes, we are fans) will be in San Diego to play the Padres. WordCamp on Saturday and hot dogs and baseball on Sunday – how could it get any better?
Of course, the big event will be WordCamp San Francisco in August. There’s no way we’d miss this one. We’re making plans to do something fun that weekend and we will have more news later.
If you are planning to attend any of these events, let us know. We’d love to meet you in person. Also, if you are local to the San Francisco Bay Area, try dropping in at a WordPress meetup. David is one of the organizers for the San Francisco WordPress meetup and will be speaking at the next meeting.
It’s going to be a great summer. Hopefully we will get a chance to meet you in person.
This past weekend was the annual SF WordCamp which I had the pleasure to attend. It’s always a great event and the energy was especially high this year with the upcoming release of 3.0. The first day consisted of general sessions and a “State of the Word” keynote from Matt Mullenweg (WordPress founder). There was a nice bbq outdoor lunch and even live Jazz.
I also had the pleasure to meet Matt Mullenweg and Brian Gardner (who are both great guys, btw) to discuss WordPress 3.0 and Premium WordPress Themes. Lots of good stuff which has helped me strategize and better plan the direction of ClassiPress and the upcoming launch of our new theme business. It’s a very competitive environment and the sad part is lots of theme developers just aren’t doing a good job. It’s still the wild west when it comes to theming standards and guidelines. Hopefully that’s something WordPress will change in the future.
What I was surprised to see was the number of people who had iPads. It’s apparent that a majority of the attendees are early adopters and big fans of Apple. I guess I shouldn’t be surprised and in fact, I am one of those people as well sporting my new 3G iPad. 😉
Overall this year was a great conference and if you’ve never been to a WordCamp before, I highly recommend going. Look for a WordCamp coming to a city near you.
Here are a couple pictures I took during day two at the “Unconference” for developers.
It’s a great experience so if you are able to ever attend a WordCamp, I highly recommend it!
