WordCamp 2007 Recap

While vacationing in Sunnyvale last week, I took some time out to attend WordCamp 2007 in downtown San Francisco. It was about the only thing I had planned to do while down there as I mostly just wanted to hang out with my friend Jason who recently started working at my personal mecca, Apple. The rest of my time was seemingly spent roaming around the Apple campus in Mac-geek heaven…but that’ll be another post.

Charles over at Bloggingpro.com has one of the best recaps of Day 2 of WordCamp (the day I attended) I’ve seen so I thought I’d share it. I’m always amazed when people can take notes with this level of detail while attending a conference….I certainly can’t unless I videotape it or something. Matt Mullenweg also mentioned that another great resource for notes from the event is the in the trackbacks on each session in the schedule as each one is a separate post.

While I found all the events of the day interesting and useful, here are a few of my highlights as Charles and others have covered everything very well already:

• Barry and Matt talking about HyperDB and High Performance WordPress – install WP-Cache even if you don’t think you’ll need it – this prepares the system for seemingly infinite scalability and as Charles wrote in his post, the benefits equal something in the realm of being able to handle 25 million pageviews per day – all on an untuned (off the shelf) server setup



• the efforts currently underway by Happy Cog shows that WordPress (Automattic) is serious about improving itself and is willing to spend the necessary time and effort to really take it to the next level. A number of the screens that were shown during Liz Danzico’s presentation on WP Usability were very impressive and addressed a number of long standing ‘wishlist’ items for me as a WP user.
• Matt’s State of the Word talk was also very interesting. There’s nothing better than hearing what’s going on in something you use all the time directly from the source. Plus Matt’s presentation style is entertaining and inspiring
• the BBQ lunch from Memphis Minnies was great…reminded me of the great bbq I had in Austin at SXSW.
• I wish the event was longer as one day (4-5 hours really) just isn’t long enough to get deep into some of the developer topics. This may have been better if I was in San Francisco longer as there were a number of events and gatherings outside of the actual event that would have been fun and probably useful to attend

Not sure if I’ll be able to make it next year but if the planets align, I’d definitely like to go again.

Check out all my photos from WordCamp 2007 – many taken with my iPhone and uploaded to Flickr during the event which I guess sort of makes me a live blogger like Rebecca.