Traveling the Globe With WordPress
I’ve had quite an eventful October and wanted to fill you in on where I’ve been and what I’ve been up to. Last week I was honored to attend and participate in two exciting events across Ireland and Manchester, one WordCamp and a festival & conference all wrapped up together as one.
Uprise 6 Dublin
Uprise 6 billed itself as the SXSW of Dublin and took place on October 26th at RDS in Dublin. Uprise brings together technology and innovation in a chaotic yet relaxed and social atmosphere with panels, workshops and an exhibition. I attended as a mentor and met with attendees who were interested in WordPress and development to help and advise in any way I could. I had several slots scheduled to meet with other attendees and it was an excellent networking event with many people traveling in from all around Europe.
I was planning to attend as a mentor, but just a week before the event I jumped at the chance to moderate a Music Technology panel called “Slaves to the Algorhythm”. Music Technology is a passion and I have spent many years living and breathing Music Technology as a musician and producer. The panel brought together three music industry experts, Rory Kenny of JAM Germany, Andreas Mahringer of Record Bird and Vincent Favrat of Musimap in a casual discussion on how technology is changing the path of music marketing and promotion. I was happy to steer the conversation of three music tech CEOs who spoke on a range of topics from the role voice assisted technology is impacting music marketing, predictive analytics and the rise of the playlist as a way for artists to get noticed.
The panel discussed the modern-day gatekeepers to the music industry, who are large social media platforms like Facebook and Google and the idea of free flow of information – being able to reach consumers and fans directly. It was an inspiring discussion and I was thrilled to be a part of it.
WordCamp Manchester
This is my second time visiting the land of the Mancunians and on both occasions, I attended WordCamp Manchester as a Speaker. This year had 2 tracks and each room was a full-on auditorium with huge screens and monitors. After a very successful first event two years back, I was more than happy to return to be a part of this year’s WordCamp. This year was noticeably larger than the past WordCamp I attended in Manchester and attendance was impressive.
WordCamp Manchester was held at Manchester Metropolitan University, which was a smart environment to help inspire networking and learning throughout the day. I spent most of the day chatting with attendees and was able to hope into a few of the technical sessions. The talks that I saw were informative and well organized. I was selected to give a talk on Deployment and Continuous Integration, where I outlined a solution that I have been working on for the past few months to help automate the process of getting code tested and pushed to a production server. The talk went really well and I’m looking forward to seeing the video on wordcamp.tv as soon as it’s available.
Sadly I was unable to attend contributor day at WordCamp Manchester, but hope to contribute to the next one. I’m sure it was a great day of working together to help advance WordPress Core.
These two events mark the beginning for me of a series of WordCamps and events which will take me on an adventure through Europe until the end of 2017.
Next stop WordCamp Cologne. See you in Germany!
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