WordCamp San Francisco 2013 Inspires WDS

The dust is starting to settle from WordCamp San Francisco, but the team here at WebDevStudios has been invigorated and can’t stop talking about our time in San Francisco. We were lucky enough to be able to have the entire WebDev team make the trip out to San Francisco and we took full advantage including a bunch of team activities along with one great WordCamp. Today, I asked everyone what was their favorite part of our time at WCSF and I thought I would share some of their responses with you:

Justin: Meeting all the WP minds and hearing some awesome presentations on Saturday.
Jayvie: Meeting the team and networking, as usual.
Greg: The lunch!
Brian R: Matt showcasing the DMA and Eric Mann’s talk about GruntJS- he got our entire team excited about automation.

One thing that really stood out to our team is awesome job the WordCamp San Francisco organizers did selecting speakers for the event. There were two huge days filled with so much great WordPress information that you might have thought your head would explode by the end of day two. Some of the more popular technical talks of the weekend (as voted by the WebDev team) are Andrew Nacin: Current User Can Watch This Talk; Eric Mann: Automated WordPress Development; Josh Bronton: Sticks, Spit & Duct Tape: Advanced RWD Layout Techniques & Mike Schroder: Magical WordPress Management using WP-CLI.

There was also a very interesting and humorous presentation from Siobhan McKeown on WordPress And The Ten Year Itch which highlighted her work on the history of WordPress over the past 10 years and how it has grown thanks to the people who have had an itch to make websites better.

As always a major highlight of WordCamp San Francisco was Matt Mullenweg’s State of the Word 2013. Matt discussed how there has been a shift in the way WordPress is used and how he believes the shift will continue, focusing on using WordPress as an application framework. He mentioned a project that we have been involved in building, BadgeOS and the DMA Friends relationship management system. He also mentioned the now released WordPress 3.6 and the rapidly progressing plans for WordPress 3.7 and 3.8.

After hearing Matt’s State of the Word everyone was really excited for the great things that are to come with future releases of WordPress. With a little nudging from Nacin to attend Sunday’s contributor day, the WebDevStudios team started working on a refresh of the widget UI for future inclusion in WordPress core. We plan on providing much more details on this soon, but you can see the current progress!

If you didn’t have a chance to attend WordCamp San Francisco in person or virtually be sure to check out the videos on WordPress TV. There are only a few presentations up there now, but I’m sure they will be adding more soon!