WordCamp Philly

I got up early Saturday morning and took the shuttle to Temple. Saw a lot of run down post-apocalyptic looking buildings on the way. One building, once a majestic 15 to 20 story early twentieth century apartment building (?), had a giant green hand painted on its side with sharp fingernails protruding in what looked with a vaguely sexual gesture (I’ll let your imagination run with that). I have a respect for graffiti, but this piece was more than a little disturbing.

The first two sessions of the conference that I attended were a little disappointing. I should have opted for something in the design track. The third session was by Mike Toppa and was about clean code, something I’ve been struggling with at work. Since I’m not new to coding, the concepts were are all too familiar. What I think happens for me is that when I get something working, I’m afraid to go back and clean it up. Refactoring ends up being a pipe dream since everything is measured in terms of time to completion. The implicit mantra is “if it works, it’s done”. I consider this an ill that is fostered by software development driven purely for profit. Or, maybe a better way to phrase it is rushing a product to market. “Release early and often” mutates into “release and hope it doesn’t break.” The only way to improve is to study in my free time and work on writing better, cleaner code then. As my confidence improves, I can bring these practices into the work world.

In the afternoon, Sam Napolitano gave an awesome talk on HTML5. I used HTML5 on this blog when I re-skinned it. At the time I was worried that I was using asides incorrectly. Sam’s talk assured me that I used them reasonably well. Sam was an energetic and funny speaker. Chris Cochran gave a great talk on responsive design. Brian Richards gave a nice demo of StartBox.

The only session that I thought would be really informative turned out to be a disappointment. Andrew Nacin is a lead WordPress developer. He talked about meta capabilities and went too fast through his material. First he warned the group in the classroom that the topic was very developer-oriented. Then he informed us that if we weren’t ready for the topic he’d “carry us” through. Frankly, I found his initial tone to be insulting. Maybe that shut me down. I tried to follow him, but I was mostly lost. The main talk was over in 15 minutes then he took questions on the future of wordpress.

Overall, I thought the conference was light on developer topics. I’ve been doing a lot of work with custom post types, extending wordpress to consume web services, and theme options. Maybe these topics are too simplistic for conferences (?) I was hoping for more sessions like Toppa’s about best practices when writing a plugin.