I had the privilege of attending WordCamp NYC this past weekend. It was an amazing event with over 700 attendees. I’d like to thank @janeforshort and @sbruner for putting on an awesome event.
Saturday consisted of conference sessions with a set schedule. Due to the awesome session topics, the unconference sessions were pushed back to Sunday morning. Following the unconference sessions, we gathered at Mason Hall at Baruch College to check out the plugin and theme competition. We continued on with three rounds of 5 ignite-style presentations, an overview of Wordpress 2.9 features by Mark Jaquith, and a town-hall with Matt Mullenweg.
It was sweet to be back in New York again and meet up with some old friends, as well as meet plenty of new people. I actually met so many people, I can’t even list them all off here. So after a long weekend of excitement, it took me a few days to process everything so I could even post this!
Ryan Wordpress new york, wcnyc, WordCamp, Wordpress
I made it down to WordCamp Mid-Atlantic in Baltimore, MD yesterday to meet some old friends (Mark Jaquith and Aaron Brazell) as well as make a bunch of new contacts. As some of you already know, or learned yesterday, I was pretty involved in Wordpress back in the day. I had stepped out for a bit due to personal reasons and am now trying to get re-involved in the community as well play catch-up with all the changes.
Fact Check: I was having a rough time yesterday trying to remember exactly which version I started with. According to the earliest ryanduff.net page on archive.org dated Feb 4, 2005, I had posts in September 2004. Cross referencing with Wordpress Versions, that would mean I started with Wordpress version 1.2 since 1.2.1 was not released until October 6, 2004. Now that that’s out of the way…
Overall, there was a TON of energy and the turnout was excellent. The presentations, despite a lack of much choice were also good. And like any unconference, if you didn’t like what somebody was presenting, you can walk out and go to another session or start your own. There was even a genius bar for anybody with questions. I stopped for a while to mingle with some of the more technical people there like @sivel @onefinejay and @ericskiff. We got to reminisce over old times as well as talk about the general direction of Wordpress.
I’m still waiting for my MingleStick email to come through so I can access the contact info for the people I met. I like to keep on top of that before I start to forget things.
Don’t forget, if you’re looking for things on the net, make sure to search for the #wordcampmidatl hashtag. We have @technosailor to thank for that one! 
Ryan Wordpress Mid-Atlantic, unConference, WordCamp, wordcampmidatl, Wordpress
