I’ll be presenting an introduction to the WordPress Contribution Community, and how you can get started with core code contributions, in particular!

If ya’ll have any specific questions that you’d like me to address in the talk, please let me know in the comments.

WordCamp OC is organized by the awesome guys over at Pixel Jar, Jeffrey Zinn and Brandon Dove, who ran a great camp last year.

It’s sadly sold out, but will be June 2-3, 2012 at Vanguard University.

For further details on the event, speakers, and sessions, check out the official WordCamp OC website.

Looking forward to seeing ya’ll there!

If you can’t be bothered to scroll to the bottom of the PDF, for further reading and complete details on what’s been done with 3.4 so far (it’s still a work in progress!), check out:

• All tickets’ status for the 3.4 Milestone on the WordPress bug tracker
• A great summary of changes on the WordPress.org Codex
• Release Notes from WordPress 3.4 Beta 1

And, please test ALL THE THINGS by downloading WordPress 3.4 Beta 2.

Apparently my brain needed a bit more time to ruminate on how to properly present what amounts to Release Notes in an interesting manner.

Regardless, here are the requested presentation notes/slides, with a few additional notes added per the Q/A!

Download (PDF, 70.07KB)

You can see further details on this meetup, along with a full YouTube video recorded from the livestream, at the OCWP Blog.

As I train myself to be a better presenter, I thought I’d share my progress and things I learn along the way.

Lessons Learned:

• Don’t expect to have time to polish your presentation on the day of, even if you’ve planned it into your day
• Give your brain enough downtime to come up with an interesting story for potentially stale information
• Include screenshots of demo’d content, so that the slides are more interesting after-the-fact
• Knew this already, but say “um” less. Or, ya know, not at all.
• Add more pictures of cats

Of particular note is the second point above:
Given more time, I likely would have crafted a story involving the participants who created the code and presented features through their creation process, rather explaining the details of the final product.

More Suggestions?
Please comment or contact me directly! Learning is good.

“The point is you never try ‘everything.’ Ever. It’s just impossible … What you really did was try everything that you could think of.”

- Mika A. Epstein (Ipstenu)

It lets you do awesome things like run wp theme activate twentyeleven to escape a broken theme, or even wp plugin deactivate w3-total-cache to perform a real deactivate if you want to see if caching is causing issues with your site.

DreamHost has been generously allowing me time to work on new features for wp-cli.
So far, this includes:

• wp plugin update --all
• wp theme update and update --all

And, currently in progress — wp theme install

It’s super exciting to be able to contribute.
You can find the entire list of available commands in the project’s wiki at GitHub.

I’m sure this won’t be the last post regarding wp-cli, but in the meantime, you can see more details on scribu’s site, and or fork it on GitHub.

On the day before flying out to an event, I asked her if it was bad that I hadn’t called ahead to set up transportation between the airport and the location, which was a 30 minute drive away.

While I had intended the question as a joke, the reply I received was somewhat shocking:  ”Yes, it’s really bad.  You should be thinking ahead, instead of planning at the last minute for things like that.”

This made me think immediately, “What fun would that be?  Is it that most people don’t enjoy living life as it comes?”

To note, It’s not that I plan nothing:  I’d booked a hotel and flight a month in advance.  But, I hadn’t planned on how I’d get to or from the airport, nor what my exact itinerary would be at the event.  I knew I would attend talks, and let colleagues know ahead of time that I’d be there.

I find that generally the best opportunities and experiences happen somewhat serendipitously, and to over-plan is to lose that sense of experience.  I suspect some of this nature comes from my upbringing.

From the age of 11 until the age of 22, I moved between different houses or apartments each year.  Five of these moves were either to, from, or within a foreign country.

It turns out that moving between locations — and in particular — cultures, requires quite a bit of improvisation.  If you don’t understand customs, or even language, how much less difficult and important is it to decide whether I’ll take a bus or taxi?  Either way, you’ll eventually get there; just give yourself time.

Simpler details are tossed aside, in the moment, letting the brain focus on the fundamentals: “What is the environment or person in front of me communicating to me, and how should I respond?”

Perhaps all of this is moot, and I’m simply lazy.  That’s certainly a possibility.  But as for me, I prefer the adventure of discovering new locations, situations, and people as they come.

I arrived at the crowded airport and looked from side to side, watching people brush past.  Some were headed to another flight.  Others were talking with their families about their first tourist spot to hit.  There was a pub to the left filled with a diverse crowd of travelers.  Walking slowly down the corridor, it was clear which direction to head to get a ride.  I looked up and decoded the text and logos above, pointing towards “Taxi” or “Van Share.”  Which would it be?

So.  I currently work at DreamHost, both to keep WordPress running as well as possible for hosting customers, and as a WordPress core and plugin contributor.

It turns out that whatever you work on is generally what you don’t want to do in your off time.  So, this means I’m very unlikely to want to fix the old blog (hosting+WordPress are a double hit against me!).

However, since neither of the above are a good excuse not to be blogging, due to the age of the blog, I decided to re-launch instead.

This is a first post.  There is a second to come shortly.

Warning: All posts will not be technical.

That is all.