Category Archives: Discussion

Stay Classy Siobhan

Clownfish in Anemone

Disclaimer – before anything else is said in this post I think it's important to mention that I have a hard time discussing feminism. My first reaction is to be defensive. I feel like I'm being attacked just for being a guy. It usually takes me a while to process the information and to try to begin to understand what's it like to live in a patriarchal culture. I post this not because I pretend to know what I'm talking about but because I want to express my thoughts and have a candid discussion about this really important issue.

Those of you in the WordPress world probably know the name Siobhan McKeown. She's writing the History of WordPress, she writes for Smashing Magazine, she organized WordCamp Europe, she works with all sorts of documentation projects for WordPress, and she's all around awesome. She recently wrote a post about how several members in the WordPress community went about describing herself and other women.

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WordPress Can Handle High Traffic E-Commerce Demands!

I had a great time at WordCamp Grand Rapids last weekend. In addition to meeting awesome people I think that my presentation went really well and I had some awesome questions at the end. One of the questions I was asked during my presentation at WordCamp Grand Rapids last weekend was whether or not WordPress is even the right choice for an e-commerce solution and can it scale to handle high amounts of traffic? The answer is YES!

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Thoughts on WordCamp Chicago 2013

It's about a month since WordCamp Chicago 2013 and I'm only just getting around to write about it if that tells you how busy I've been at the new job. My first thought is how much difference a year can make. The people were the same, the atmosphere was the same, and the sessions were similar but after throwing my self head first into development this past year made the experience quite different.

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I’ll be Speaking at WordCamp Milwaukee 2013

WordCamp Milwaukee 2013 Background

I have some pretty exciting news. If you remember way back to the beginning of 2013 I mentioned that one of my resolutions is to speak at a WordCamp. Sometimes amazingly, it seems that all you have to do in life is set your intention and everything else falls into place. Shortly after announcing that I wanted to speak at a WordCamp, Dustin Filippini reached out to me and long story short – I've been accepted as a speaker for WordCamp Milwaukee! I'll be talking about my experiences working in an ad agency and how to effectively use marketing tactics without any of the shenanigans that you usually see.

The speaker list hasn't been officially announced yet but I can tell you that we have an absolutely phenomenal group and you'll be very pleased you took the time to go. If you're around Friday June 7th, through the 9th I encourage you to drop by WordCamp Milwaukee.

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A Lack of Communication with Adria Richards

The internet can be relied upon for two things:

  1. Pictures of cats
  2. Firestorms

Over the last couple days there's been a huge firestorm over Adria Richard's blog post about being offended by sexual jokes at tech conferences. The gist of the post is that Adria was offended by two guys making sexual jokes and she reported them to the staff as well as posted the whole story to her blog.

The resulting firestorm consumed not only one of the two guys' job but Adria's job as well.

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