WordCamp Sacramento Recap

The first WordCamp Sacramento was yesterday.  This was also the first WordCamp I've ever attended (in any location).  I don't advertise myself as "WordPress specialist" tho I have done a few projects with it for clients (I try to be objective and pick the right tool for the job, rather than having a default go-to platform for everything -- though I will say ColdFusion ends up as my tool of choice way more often than anything else, but I digress).  So while I was an attendee and a speaker, I probably had a different mindset and perhaps a different level of expectation than many others at the conference.  Overall the conference was successful, though it was clear that this was the first one and not all the kinks had been worked out just yet. Hey, nothing's perfect.  

There was a "Speakers Dinner" the night before, which was really well done.  Dinner was at Ten-22 in Old Sacramento; all the food was great, and the staff took good care of us.  While at dinner, we also received our conference registration items (name badges, schedule, etc) so all the speakers could skip the registration line in the morning.  This was appreciated -- I'm not much of a morning person anyway. :)

Wifi worked pretty well usually. I had to reset my connection a couple of times during the day, but there weren't any "dead spots".  I didn't do anything super fancy while I was there, but my connection to GitHub (required for my presentation) was plenty fast and reliable.

The WordCamp speakers were about the caliber one would expect from a conference.  Most presenters had well organized slide decks and demos, many were pre-recorded rather than doing any "live coding" in front of everyone and risk "demo fail".  Several talks ended considerably early, but I think that was due to a variety of factors, rather than because the presenters didn't plan accordingly.  Typically at a conference each talk is the same set length (I'm used to 50 minute sessions myself).  If the talk needs to be longer (say, a 2 hour deep-dive session), this is all discussed in advance.  We weren't given this info at WordCamp, and it was only a few days before the talk that I learned my session would be 30 minutes, instead of the usual 50 or 60.  There were several seemingly random lengths for the talks -- some were 50 minutes, others were 30 or 35, then there were "lightning talks" only lasting 15 minutes.  I hope at least -those- presenters were aware of that in advance! Yikes!  (I sent an email to the coordinator asking for more details about why my talk was scheduled for 30 minutes, and was told this was a pretty "standard" length at conferences -- in the 8 years I've been presenting, I don't think I've ever seen a talk that lasts 30 minutes).

At the end of the talks, each speaker would budget time for Q&A, a pretty typical thing.  For some reason, the conference staffers "took over" this part of the presentations.  They'd often interrupt the speaker's flow and announce "okay we have time for 2 questions".  In at least 2 presentations, the staffers then ended the talks early, and started "shooing" everyone out of the room.  I never could get useful answers as to why this happened.  (I took it upon myself to just speak to the volunteer helping in my session and told her that I'd manage the time myself and didn't need any assistance -- that worked like a charm.)  Still, why did the conference feel the need to "babysit" everyone so much?

Speakers were given a hand-held mic instead of a headset or clip-on.  This made working on the laptops while presenting a challenge and slowed down a few sections of my talk (I suspect others too).  The PA systems had a bad static problem that never did completely get resolved.  During several talks, the PA would randomly cut out and the audience would hear loud static instead of the presenter. Fortunately this was only in the "beginner track" room; the "advanced track" room was smaller and didn't need a PA (though the presenters here had a clip-on mics, so they could be recorded properly -- which makes me curious, why wasn't a second clip-on mic made available in the "beginner track" room too? That might have solved some problems and made talks go more smoothly.)

WordCamp is obviously mostly focused on WordPress related content.  Several speakers (myself included) submitted talks that were based on general web development, and not specific to WordPress.  Apparently this was good enough to get my talk selected, but not good enough for the description on their website.  The session description I wrote got highly edited -- several paragraphs were removed, and WordPress-specific verbiage was added without my permission! I wasn't made aware of this until very late in the process; as I suspected, several attendees were expecting a more WP-focused preso, and were left with many questions toward the end of the talk, feeling they had missed something.  This has never happened to me before at any other conference -- I found this behavior pretty off-putting.  Better communication overall with the speakers would have been greatly appreciated.  

Lunch was provided by Chipotle, and was the same caliber you'd get at their restaurants. However the logistics were done poorly, lines moved slow, and it took over 45 minutes to get food.  Given that my session was immediately after lunch, this was kind of nerve-racking!  I had some serious scrambling to do!

Zack Tollman's talk on HTTPS was excellent! This was easily the highlight of the conference for me.  Zack is well versed in the topic, his presentation skills are exceptional, and he's generally just a very friendly guy. Several of us had more questions after Zack's talk ended; he happily answered all our questions out in the hallway.  Definitely check out this presentation if he gives it again!

Dawn Pedersen's talk on content design was another highlight.  I picked up several great tips from Dawn, including learning of the Hemingway App -- an easy (and addictive) way to check if your site content is worded properly for the audience.

Due to a schedule conflict, I had to skip the after-party; hopefully that was fun.  Congrats to WordCamp Sacramento on finishing their first event!