WordCamp SF 2011: What We Learned In One Day

Falling asleep to the sounds of downtown Oakland coming alive at night.  Spending more than three consecutive hours at the Potrero Hill Whole Foods.  Passing thousands of commuters while hearing the FasTrak chirp in the Bay Bridge carpool lane.  These all are amazingly real occurrences which the AudioAcrobat team can safely say occurred outside of, yet somehow were still connected with our attendance of WordCamp San Francisco 2011 at Mission Bay.

What do these things have to do with what we learned about WordPress during our attendance on Friday, August 12th?  Probably not that much to the untrained eye, but upon further inspection one might be able to make a deep connection between real-life experiences and developing on the platform used by over 14% of Alexa Internet’s “top 1 million” websites.

Oaktown

There are many things to love about Oakland.  Take, for instance the vibrant East Bay folk who are constantly pushing civil, artistic and any contemporary boundary one might perceive to the absolute max, each and every day — and night.

Note to self: Make sure to close hotel room window before going to sleep.  Why?  Three words:  Bicycle Flash Mob

Thinking back to Pete Davies’ session, Vikings, Viagra and Versace: A Brief History of Spam, and his recommendation of closing old posts to comments after 2-3 months, we are reminded of the importance of closing these doorways (and windows) behind us as to prevent any unwanted noise getting through.  Here are some quick steps if you’d like to do this yourself:

Settings >> Discussion >> Other comment settings

Whole Foods

One of the greatest resources Whole Foods provides, besides organic produce, is an area for their customers to enjoy prepared foods, caffeinated beverages and probiotics.  Here in this area, our team was able to gather for no less than three hours without interruption.  With our time together, we were able to wrap up our experience at WordCamp SF 2011, plot our course for the upcoming SES conference and even share our favorite social networking etiquette in a live training session; which brings us to our point:

Training others in social media etiquette is like translating a foreign language.  You really do need the presence of a human (translator) in order to make sure the message is clear.

Shannon Smith did a fantastic job describing the in’s and out’s of what it takes to build a multilingual site during her session, Taking WordPress to the World: Options for a Multilingual Site, in which methods of varying precision and budget were clearly outlined.

Bay Bridge

Where were you at 5:04PM on October 17, 1989?  Watching the third game of the World Series perhaps?  If you were on the San Francisco – Oakland Bay Bridge there’s no way of forgetting the events which took place that evening.

Putting trust in one of the world’s longest-spanning bridges as you drive across is a big investment that hundreds of thousands of people make each and every day.  The level of trust put forth in the Bay Bridge’s engineering could easily be compared to the life-changing process described in Steve Zehngut’s, How to Hire and Manage a Developer session.

A word to the wise:  Take your time in planning and make sure every possible facet (who owns the code?) is covered before the work begins … not after.

…and now for something completely different!

• Follow AudioAcrobat on Twitter
• Become a fan on Facebook
• Join our group on LinkedIn
• Subscribe to AudioAcrobat RSS

Want to learn more about AudioAcrobat?  Go ahead, give it a try yourself by signing up for a 30 day Free Trial or join one of our FREE Training Classes without signing up for squat.  Already have an account?  Login HERE.

Coming up next … a brief review of our time spent at SES San Francisco 2011!