WordCamp is really awesome so far! lots of great talks this morning on making your site fast. while I already knew many of the strategies being discussed, I’m learning about a whole plethora of new tools to help out.

Ilya Grigorik’s talk (measure all the things) was particularly good for this. Once I get in front of a non tablet I will include some more information and links. But Matt’s speech is starting now!

UPDATE

So it’s now Sunday, and I have to say that this WordCamp was very very cool. I was a little nervous because of the shorter time span and quicker talks, but I think the new format worked very well. While a couple of the speakers weren’t able to cover everything in 15 minutes, most of the topics translated well to a quick, rapid fire speech. It kept people on topic and cut out a lot of the clutter that was in last years talks.

The after party was a lot of fun, with food trucks serving free food and an open bar. I had delicious korean tacos from Kung Fu Tacos and mind blowing puff pastries from a truck I can’t remember, although I’m certainly going to look it up.

I’m going to share more about the convention over the next week but I need to relax and gather my thoughts. Thanks for reading!

WordCamp SF is coming up in just a few days, and that means its time to meet a bunch of new people. I hate going to these things blind, so last year I wrote a small Python script to go through the list of attendees, extract their website, and run a WHOIS search on their IP to find  out who their  website host was.

This was useful at the time to get a read on the upcoming crowd and see approximately how many customers we had who were attending, and how many our competitors had. Unfortunately it wasn’t nearly as useful once we were there. I wanted to do something similar this year, but instead of getting statistics on the attendees as a whole I decided to get some data on the individuals.

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William Morris was a 19th century figure in England, known for his socialist philosophy, design, and art. He was a member of the Arts & Crafts movement, as well as the Pre-Raphaelite brotherhood. Of course, you can get all this information on Wikipedia.

His deep appreciation of work and his dedication towards making beautiful functional things is one of the reasons I greatly admire him. As I ensconce myself more and more in the world of coding, I gain a greater appreciation of how deeply programming is connected to the arts. Matt Mullenweg, the founding developer of WordPress, often says “code is poetry”. Stewart Brand’s “How Buildings Learn” has become my bible for thinking about the structure of software. So obviously, William Morris has some fascinating things to say that I find very relatable to my work:

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