Ben Lobaugh

Recap of 2012 WordCamp Vancouver ( WCYVR )
October 14, 2012

Grant Landram and I had the pleasure of representing freshmuse this weekend by attending the 2012 Vancouver, BC WordCamp as speakers. Grant and I bookended the day as the first and last speakers.

Grant’s talk on Tips to Grow your Professional WordPress Business ( slides ) has been highly sought after this year, and Grant deliver another stunning rendition of his presentation today. Though delivered many times ( and traveling together ), today was the first WordCamp presentation by Grant I was able to attend. It was very good. Unfortunately Vancouver did not video record the sessions, but I highly recommend you head to WordPress.tv and watch Grant’s Portland session. Some tweets from Grant’s session

Grant as so great he even was immortalized in an artistic rendition of his presentation!

https://twitter.com/katebusiness/status/257177499052679168

I was delighted that I was asked to present on Interacting with External APIs at another WordCamp. There was a great turnout, with 100+ people attending. I opened by telling people that I like a lot of audience interaction and that I was going to perform a live demo and heckling was encouraged. The people really took that to heard. I swear there were some professional hecklers in the crowd. It was all in good fun though. My presentation was in the last time slot of the day, which is typically when the attendee’s brains are buzzing from information overload. I designed my presentation to be pretty light due to that, and it was a lot of fun. Lots of laughs. A great way to end the day. I found myself laughing more than the audience I think. Each attendee was given an evaluation card to fill out at the end and my talk apparently received high marks and comments like “It was life changing!” I am not sure if I would go that far, but I know I had a fantastic time. I was nervous following two great speakers, but it came off well. I even received a clapping ovation when my code worked the first time around. Here are some tweets around my talk:

Pre-talk support from Jon Brown who had seen the same presentation in Las Vegas

https://twitter.com/neverything/status/257253397202366464

It is now edging closer to 2 AM and as I need to be up again in a few hours for BuddyCamp instead of doing a play by play recap I will provide you with some select curated tweet that help illustrate just how fun WordCamps can be. If you missed Vancouver WordCamp this year be sure you keep an eye out for next time around!

https://twitter.com/jameswanless/status/257182372510965761

https://twitter.com/jasonbobich/status/257224482224226305

3 thoughts on “Recap of 2012 WordCamp Vancouver ( WCYVR )”

  1. Silvan Hagen (October 15, 2012)

    Good recap Ben and thanks for your talk on external API’s! I’m trying to wrap my head around some of the stuff for a small widget right now. Glad you liked the bus on my laptop.

    1. blobaugh (October 16, 2012)

      It was my pleasure! If you have any questions do not hesitate to ask

  2. Silvan Hagen (October 16, 2012)

    I already implemented some of the methods you showed in a little widget I’m working on. It reduced code (was wir cURL before) and readability. One thing that kept me awake all night was the, in my opinion, false cookie value handling by WordPress WP_Http_Cookie. The cookie value gets filtered through urldecode (see: class-http.php) this function removes “+” and other special characters from the value and made it nearly impossible to use the cookie again in the second request with wp_remote_get(). I came up with a nasty fix here: https://gist.github.com/3903478.

    Just in case you have experienced something like this before and have the time, I would love to hear your opinion on this.