WordCamp Nashville 2013
Update: here is the wordpress.tv recording of my talk. It spent several months featured on the wordpress.tv homepage:
A Minnie Pearl poster from 1944, at the Station Inn
Eric Brace and Peter Cooper at the Station Inn
Video: a clip of Eric Brace and Peter Cooper playing "Nobody Knows" at the Station Inn
Nashville's life-size replica of the Parthenon
Spring in Nashville
Mike Toppa presenting "Clean Code" at WordCamp Nashville 2013Spring is conference season, and I’ve given four presentations in the past four weeks: two in Philadelphia, one in Nashville, and one in Washington DC. Each presentation was different, and I did most of the preparation outside of my regular work hours, so I’m looking forward to not doing any more presentations for a while 😉
I already wrote about the first presentation – Knowledge Slam, and a few days after that I headed to Nashville for their 2nd annual WordCamp. I also presented at the first one last year, which was my first time in Nashville. For both trips I was there for only a couple days, but I was able to get out and see some of the city each time, and I have to say it’s a great place. It’s a small, clean city, with very friendly people, and has culture and arts you’d normally find only in a bigger city… as long as you like country music.
My friend Caryn from grad school lives there now, and after I arrived Friday evening, I headed to the Station Inn to meet her, and see a show by Eric Brace and Peter Cooper. I’d never heard of them before, but Caryn was a fan, and after hearing the first song, so was I. Here’s a version of that song – “Ancient History” – that they recorded for Couch by Couchwest:
…If you liked that, I recommend the album.
The WordCamp was great. It had 3 tracks scheduled – one for beginners, one for users, and one for developers (a 4th was actually added on the fly, to accommodate the variety of skill levels in the beginner track). I spent the day in the developers’ track. Something I was excited to see in several of the presentations was a wider focus, showing WordPress as part of a broader ecosystem of development tools, as opposed to being the only tool in a developer’s toolkit. This came across especially in the talk about using WordPress in an enterprise software environment (unfortunately there is no information about this talk online), and Nathaniel Schweinberg’s talk on debugging strategies (many of which apply beyond WordPress).
My Clean Code talk was scheduled between those two, which was perfect, as the 10 techniques I presented are ones which you can apply to any software development project, not just WordPress. My talk went really well, with lots of good questions at the end. We even went over our scheduled time (normally that’s not allowed, but I was right before lunch, so it didn’t take away from anyone else’s speaking time). Here are some of the tweets people made during my talk:
Right before I came to Nashville, we finished working on the WordPress plugin for the ElectNext Political Profiler, so I took the opportunity to debut it at the start of my talk. The plugin relies on PHP in the WordPress plugin, and 3rd party javascript to dynamically inject into the WordPress site the political profiles generated by a Ruby on Rails application running on the ElectNext servers. It’s actually a great example of the importance of having clean and consistent coding practices across platforms (otherwise such a project would quickly become a nightmare to maintain).
Here are my slides, as well as the recording of my talk I made with my Flip camera (a professionally recorded version should be available on wordpress.tv sometime in the next few weeks is now on wordpress.tv)