I’ll be at WordCamp Orange County, presenting a session on plugin development, specifically looking at some of the more advanced things we did in Jetpack. It will be fun — you should go.

I'll be at WordCamp SF, 2010

WordCamp Indonesia

Below are the slides and notes from my presentation, which covered the current state of WordPress, what’s coming up in the next release and some of the related projects. You can also get the slides on SlideShare. Click the link below the slides to expand my full outline/notes.

I’d also like to send out a special thanks to the organizers who treated me to a tasty, spicy, Indonesian dinner at a restaurant after WordCamp. I know you were all exhausted from keeping everything running so smoothly during the day (I know I was tired, and all I had to do was get up and speak for a little while!), so I appreciate you shuttling me around and showing me some of Jakarta. Here are a few of the pictures I took during my trip, you can see the rest on Flickr.

I’m in here for another day or two, so I’m catching up with an old friend from Australia, getting a bit of work done, then jumping on a plane back to San Francisco.

If you’re anywhere near Indonesia, book your tickets around January 30, 2010 and come and chat about WordPress with a bunch of like-minded folks! Michael Koenig (a fellow Automattician) will be joining me, and spreading the love about IntenseDebate (which is a major sponsor of WordCamp ID).

My first appearance was to give a 5 minute lighting-style introduction/demo to the IntenseDebate WordPress plugin. Since we thought internet access might be a problem, and since I hate doing “live” demonstrations, I pre-recorded a screencast (using iShowU for Mac) running through all the features, then just talked over the top. Here is the video, and you can click the link below the video to get the notes I used while speaking. This same presentation was given on Sunday during the Ignite-style talks.

After lunch, I was involved in a Google Summer of Code round-table discussion, where we talked about what the SoC was, how WordPress was involved, and some of the things that both mentors and students learned during the experience. We were also trying to explore what WordPress as an organization could do in the future to improve the experience for everyone involved, and also how we could potentially include more mentoring as part of the “normal” operations of the community. Daryl Koopersmith (the student I mentored), Justin Shreve (Search API student), Jane Wells (WordPress GSoC program admin) and Mark Jaquith (another mentor) were all there, and we had a few other folks who came along to learn about GSoC and the projects that came out of it. I’m personally super excited to see Daryl’s project, Elastic, mature and get into the wild a bit more.

Finally, during the last timeslot of the day, I presented a new talk called “Advanced WordPress Development Environments” (boring title, pretty technical information). The idea of this was to present some of the perhaps more advanced development techniques, tips and tricks that have become a part of my everyday development work over the past 13 years that I’ve been working on the web. Again, my notes are available via the link below the video.

I want to say a huge thank you to Jane and Steve (the organizers), to all of the sponsors, the other speaks, and of course to all of the attendees. WCNYC just rocketed to the top of my list of coolest WordCamps thus far

I’ll keep you posted on what I’ll be talking about and when I’ll be on, but I’ll be there all weekend, so if you see me, grab me and say Hi!

Blogie and Chattee (and Blogie’s brother) picked me up from the airport and then once I was checked into my hotel, took me out to get some lunch and hang out for a bit. There was a pretty impressive thunderstorm with some heavy rain in the afternoon which was a bit of a treat since the weather in SF is normally so mild I took a nap in the afternoon and then we went out again for some dinner and drinks with some of the organizers and their friends. We ate at an Italian restaurant at the mall near my hotel, where I also met Regnard from AIM. When we were done with dinner (and a few pitchers of their home-brew beer), we headed to a beer-bar claiming to have 100 beers. My jetlag was kicking in so I could only manage 1 more beer before I was falling asleep in my seat.

When I got back to the hotel, I a bit of drama with my laptop — I had left it plugged in, but of course when you leave the room the power goes out. I guess the laptop didn’t realize it was unplugged, so it drained my battery to the point that it was non-responsive when the adapter was plugged in. Apparently it didn’t even have enough power to light up the small light on the plug to say it was charging. Decided there was nothing to do, so I’d deal with it the next morning.

The next day I went straight to the Mac store which I had luckily noticed the night before, right across the mall from the restaurant we ate at (what are the chances?). They didn’t open until 11, so I went to hunt down some breakfast. At a place called FlapJacks, I bumped into Regnard again, along with the 2 guys (Seth and Gen) who were attending WordCamp from Mozilla. After chatting with them for a while I headed back to my room to hang out and read for a while, freaking out about my laptop still.

11am rolled around eventually and I went to the Mac store… where I was quite embarrassed when one of the support people there plugged it in and it promptly started charging up like normal. He ran some quick diagnostics that said the battery and adapter were both fine, so I charged it a bit more there, then took it back to the hotel to keep charging it up. Crisis averted. Grabbed a juice blend/smoothie to keep me going, and got some work done improving my slides for Saturday’s presentation/talk.

That afternoon I gave an interview at AIM (Asian Institute of Management, the venue of WordCamp) which was videoed (was not expecting that!), adn then met some of the volunteers and checked out the actual venue, all of which looked good. After that we had some halo-halo (Philippines shaved ice + “other stuff” drink) which was very tasty. I ended up spending the rest of the day having dinner in my room and working on my presentation (since my laptop drama earlier in the day prevented me from doing it then).

The next morning I walked to the venue for WordCamp and things got started. They were very well organized and people were excited. My talk was up first and I think it went reasonably well. The way the laptop/projector was set up meant that it wasn’t easy to see my notes, so I just winged it, based on my slides. I did a full intro to WordPress, WPMU, bbPress, BuddyPress, BackPress and GlotPress. Throughout the day (and especially at the end), I took photos with people, listened to some of the other talks and drank copious amounts of coffee to try to stay awake. At the end of the day we had a panel with all the speakers on stage and answered questions from the audience.

That night, Seth, Gen and I joined all the volunteers and organizers out for dinner at a restaurant called WhistleStop. The entire time I had been there, Chattee had been trying to convince me to eat balut, and tonight was the last chance. Seth was all for it, so we ended up doing this:

You can see some more of my photos over on Flickr.

Topics covered include:

• WordPress
• WordPress MU
• bbPress
• BuddyPress
• BackPress

UPDATE: The video from this talk has been posted at WordPress.tv, so here it is:

I’ll be giving my talk called “Meet the Family”, which is an introduction to some of the other WordPress-related projects going on which you may not have heard about. I will have just given it (for the first time) the weekend before at WordCamp LA, so hopefully I’ll be able to improve it based on feedback from that event!

I will be there, not just because it’s going to be a really interesting day (I love WordCamps), but because I’m honored to actually be speaking at this event!

My talk is called Meet The Family and will give you an introduction to some of the WordPress-related projects which sometimes don’t get enough love. I’ll focus on:

• WordPress µ (WPMU): The multi-user version of WordPress that powers sites like WordPress.com
• bbPress: bulletin board/online forum system that uses a lot of common code/approaches to WordPress, and can use SSO
• BuddyPress: social-networking in a box. A drop-in framework for turning WPMU into a social network
• BackPress: a collection of code libraries used in WordPress which are useful for other projects (e.g. bbPress)

Hopefully I’ll be scheduled in the morning because I think it’ll provide a good “mental framework” for people to get an idea of what’s going on with some of the technologies that are likely to be discussed throughout the day.

I’m looking forward to getting some feedback on this talk as well, so please feel free to tag comments on Twitter with #mtf or @beaulebens them to me. You should also use the main tag for the event, which is #WordCampLA. Watch our for any tweets containing it, search Flickr for photos, etc to keep on top of things. You can also leave comments below of course.

See you all there!

There’s a new website online as of yesterday and it’s looking pretty spiffy. I’m looking forward to seeing Tim Ferriss and Tara Hunt speak in particular.

Oh, and I’m going to be helping out on the “Genius Bar” for a bit as well, so drop by and get some questions answered!

This will probably be a bit of a different experience for me than previous years because I’ve been doing some consulting work with Automattic, so I’ve met a lot of the crew now, and it’ll be good to see a lot of them again here.