This past Saturday marked a couple of firsts: I attended my first WordCamp, and I also gave my first talk at a tech conference.

My WordCamp experience was amazing all around: the local WordPress community was extremely welcoming, and the sessions were informative and well presented. My talk went well, despite some butterflies in my stomach and a little technical glitch to start my presentation (my browser window somehow moved off the screen when I tried alt-tab switching to my code editor and back).

I learned a lot, both from the sessions I attended, and my own experience presenting. Some highlights:

• Nathan Reimnitz’s Five Figure Freelancing gave me some amazing tips on how I could take measurable, concrete steps to improve my business, and increase my income, while doing only what I want.
• Morten Rand-Hendriksen’s Law and Order:SVG showed off some amazing techniques of using SVG images – now I need to replace all the icon fonts on my sites with SVGs! (notes/links from his talk)
• Max McClanahan’s Using Custom Post Types to Control Access was a great overview of CPTs and taxonomies, and how to use them along with user roles and permisisons to control access on your site. The session was quite complementary to my own, as I discussed setting up Custom Post Types and Taxonomies in a site structure plugin.

I also learned a few things about giving presentations, namely:

• You should write out links as text in slides, as people looking at the projection can’t follow hyperlinks
• When demonstrating code, use a light, high contrast theme in code editor
• The projection can often be less than optimal, with sunlight washing it out and edges getting cropped off. It’s best to make sure your slides use a high contrast color scheme, and have a generous title-safe area (padding) around your text

Thanks to everyone who was part of making WordCamp Vancouver happen – I can’t wait until the next one!

Session Slides

Here are my session slides for everyone to share, with hyperlinks to all the projects referenced

Do it in code! A guide to creating a custom site structure plugin in WordPress.

Once the video is up on WordPress.tv, I’ll post that too.