Posts in Category: Japan and Travel
The ElectNext workation in Lake Tahoe
ElectNext team dinner in Tahoe
The ElectNext team at Maggie's Peak
Granite Lake, along the trail to Maggie's Peak
View from the top of Maggie's PeakI’ve been with ElectNext for a little over a year, and this past week was only the third time since I started that everyone in the company was in the same place, and the first time that it was for more than a day. There are currently 7 of us, roughly equally divided between New York, Philadelphia, and San Francisco. So a typical workday entails a good amount of time in Google Hangouts, which is a great tool for keeping a distributed time on the same page. But there are a couple things for which there is no substitute for spending time in person: one is building team relationships (here’s a great article on building distributed Agile teams), and the other is brainstorming around challenging problems. As good as Hangout is, and tools like RealtimeBoard, there’s still no substitute for a team putting their heads together in person around a whiteboard or big easel pad.
We rented a 4 bedroom/7 bed house on the north side of Lake Tahoe, right across the street from the lake. This was a workation, which means we put in at least as much work time as usual. But we also enjoyed our evenings and our surroundings. We each had a turn preparing dinner, and sat down most nights around 8:30 to eat, staying at the table until late into the night. And we took the day off on Friday for a hike up to one of Maggie’s Peaks.
Click the album cover below to see more great pictures!
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)
WordCamp Nashville
People arriving for the start of WordCamp Nashville, at Watkins College
My dependency injection talk at WordCamp Nashville (photo by Patricia Melton)
@rfair presenting "Less, JS, and WP"
The Otto and Nacin show - @otto42 @nacin
@ryngrn presenting "Child Theme Frameworks"
@studionashvegas presenting "The Blank Screen: Overcoming Fear of Pressing from Scratch"I’ve traveled coast-to-coast across the US 4 times, but until this past weekend I had never been in the South (except for a brief visit to UVA many years ago). I was in Nashville for only 48 hours, and I enjoyed every minute of it. The first thing I noticed was how kind and polite everyone is. The driver of my shuttle bus from the airport pointed out all the sights as we drove into town, and he seemed genuinely interested in what everyone on the bus was planning to do that weekend. I spent the day on Friday with my friend Caryn, who I hadn’t seen since we finished grad school 16 years ago. She showed me around town, and it was great to catch up.
This was Nashville’s first WordCamp. The organizers did a great job pulling it together, and they clearly had a lot of local talent to draw upon for their speakers. Coming from Philly, I think I was the only Yankee among the speakers – I felt honored to be included (Nacin, coming from DC, is a borderline case 😉 ).
I was in the developers’ track all day. The first two sessions were design focused, and here’s an excellent summary of both presentations. They were followed by the Otto and Nacin show. They are both deeply involved in the development of WordPress, and they gave a preview of features in WordPress 3.4. Their talk was the most popular of the day in the developers’ track.
I was up next after lunch, and my talk went well. It was an advanced topic (dependency injection) so I drew a smaller crowd. But I got some good questions towards the end, and some good tweets:
Here is a non-technical summary of my talk.
Russell Fair wrapped up the day, and he did a great job of sharing his experiences using LESS with WordPress.
I didn’t get to see Joel Norris’ WordPress bootcamp presentation, but from what everyone was saying, I believe he gets the prize for having the most popular session. He stayed in character as a drill sergeant for almost the entire session. And he was in costume – here’s a photo.
The speakers dinner and the after party were both a lot of fun. I learned a lot chatting with Otto and Nacin, made some new friends, and my friend Caryn was able to come too, so it was a great evening.
If you want to read more, WP Candy has a great review, and they also have links to many of the presenters’ slides. There’s also a great photo pool on Flickr. Here are my slides: