All posts by ElenaRego

Speaking Spotlight: Kirk Wight

Speakers

COMPANY: Automattic, Inc.

WEBSITE: kwight.ca

TALK TITLE: A Call for Simplicity

TALK SUMMARY: We all acknowledge the power and beauty of simplicity. Whether in art, technology, music, fashion, or software development, simplicity is the undisputed mark of quality craft. As WordPress blazes into its second decade, theming, plugin development, and WordPress core itself are reaching troublesome levels of complexity and confusion, challenging the very essence of what has gotten WordPress to where it is in the first place. Pulling from diverse areas of culture and tech, we’ll tie together our need for simplicity, and issue a call to arms for the next ten years of WordPress.

WHAT DO YOU LOVE MOST ABOUT WORDPRESS? WordPress is Open-Source, and therefore available to anyone to use, share, and modify however they so please. Powerful stuff.

Participate In Contributor Day

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We’re excited about Contribution Day on Sunday where we all pitch in to give back to WordPress. After all, it’s done so much for us! And don’t be fooled for one minute thinking that only developers can contribute! There are so many ways to give back to WordPress and the community that it will make your head spin. So we hope that no matter who you are, and what your experience with WordPress is, that you’ll consider pitching in and helping move things forward.

Whether you’re a designer, developer, systems or support specialist, or writer, there’s a way for you to contribute:

  • If you’re a programmer, contribute code directly to core*
  • Write or update WordPress documentation
  • Design wireframes for new features (or ones you think could be improved)
  • Help out with your knowledge of accessibility or other relevant standards
  • Answer questions on the WordPress.org forums
  • Work on the wordpress.org website itself, including the plugin and theme repositories

People who come to Contributor Day will be 1000% focused on contributing to or learning to contribute to the WordPress project — although we have fun, this is a working event. If you’ve been looking for an opening to add your contribution to WordPress, this is the perfect opportunity!

* CODE CONTRIBUTORS

If you’re planning on helping out with WordPress core code (writing patches, testing bugs on trunk, etc), then you’ll need to get set up with a few things. To save time on the day, we strongly recommend that you set WordPress up locally on your laptop. You’ll need to install a local web server and check out a copy of WordPress from Subversion.

Friday Business Workshop

Friday Workshops

For our Friday Business Workshop we really wanted to bring together a  variety of experiences in the realm of business and WordPress that would blow your socks off! Truly.

Chris Lema will be doing deep dives with each of the folks below to help them share the key learnings each has had in the development and running of their own businesses – from contracts to marketing, from hiring to mergers, from product development to pricing. The interviews and lessons themselves will only be surpassed by the Q&A following each interview.

  • Karim Marucchi – Karim Marucchi is the Founder and Chairman of the VeloMedia Group, the parent of several boutique professional service firms around the world. Over the last twenty years he’s run start ups, taken companies public, managed mergers and acquisitions, and led professional service organizations across the globe. Today he is also the CEO of Crowd Favorite, which continues to grow beyond its current offices in Los Angeles, Denver, Bucharest, Las Vegas, New York, and Rome due to its unique blend of localized project management and high quality digital solutions. As the first premiere WordPress agency for the Fortune 500, National Geographic, DirectTV, Lexus, the Dallas Mavericks and major entertainment studios count among the company’s client roster.
  • Syed Balkhi – Syed Balkhi is the founder of WPBeginner and List25 an extremely popular entertainment site with over 1.2 million subscribers and 200 Million video views. Syed’s work has been featured in NYTimes, HuffingtonPost, Yahoo Small Business, Wired, Mashable, and countless other well-reputed online magazines.
  • Sam Hotchkiss – Sam was the founder of BruteProtect, a distributed brute force attack protection tool which was acquired by Automattic in August 2014. Sam is now hard at work on integrating BruteProtect into Jetpack, and exploring the future as an Automattician.
  • Vladimir Prelovac – Successfully bootstrapped a company in eastern Europe, reaching over $1mn in revenue in the first year. Won EY Emerging Entrepreneur of the Year 2013 award. Ranked among top 100 most influential people on Social Media in the world in 2012.
  • Jeff Milone – Co-founder of Invulu – a web software, service, and application company known for the popular brands Organic Themes, KahunaHost, and more. He started Invulu on Maui with David Morgan in 2009. Jeff also contributes time as an advisor to several nonprofit organizations. An avid globetrotter, Jeff enjoys traveling to WordCamps around the world.
  • David Morgan – Co-founder, designer and developer of Invulu, Inc., the company responsible for Organic Themes, Kahuna Host and more.
  • John Hawkins – John was an early adopter of WordPress. He moved his blog to the brand new platform a few short months after it was released and never looked back. After doing countless updates to his own site and those of a few dozen friends, John co-founded 9seeds.com to focus full time on WordPress development. In his spare time, John is the lead organizer of the Las Vegas WordPress meetup, blogs at vegasgeek.com and recently became addicted to CrossFit.

KEEP CHECKING BACK FOR UPDATES!

Attendees, Get Your Avatar Image

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Some of you may be viewing the Attendees Page and wondering, “How did some people get their image up there? And why do I have the default Greendale Human?” The answer is Gravatars! If you would like to have your image appear on the attendees page as well, go to the Gravatars website and register an account (it’s totally free). Then add the email you used to buy your WordCamp ticket to your Gravatar account and associate an image/icon with that email. Once that is done, this site will automatically pull that image up on the Attendees Page. This will also work for any other site makes use of Gravatars, like other WordCamp sites, blog comments, etc.

Friday Workshop WordPress 101

Speakers

This is it!  The first of many updates regarding workshops and talks we will be offering you at the 2015 WordCamp Maui.

Friday, February 13, 2015 will offer 2 all day workshops.

WordPress 101

The first is a WordPress 101 for beginners.  We will take you from the very start of setting up your own WordPress website, through managing the back end, widgets, plugins and all the way through to publishing content.

We are super excited about the team coming together to share this information with you.  Each of these speakers comes to us with a world of knowledge to share.  If you want to learn as much as you can about the foundation of having and running your own website or blog, you don’t want to miss this workshop.

Speakers

Gregg Franklin
Kathryn Presner
Adam Silver
Ben Howard

Keep checking back.  We will be posting the outline for this workshop in the coming days.