September 22nd, 2009 WordCamp Portland 2009 Recap

This past weekend (Sept 19-20) and Portland, Oregon were the setting for the likes of

• Matt Mullenweg and Jane Wells of Automattic
• Scott Porad from the icancheezburger network
• Tyler Sticka, designer at Waggener Edstrom
• Will Norris, one of the core developers of Shibboleth and author of the OpenID plugin for Wordpress
• viper007bond, one of the most prolific WordPress plugin developers
• Aaron Hockley, founder of the Portland WordPress Users Group
• Justin Kistner, senior manager of social media at WebTrends (and designer of some of the sites I currently manage)
• Rick Turoczy, from Silicon Florist, a blog about web startups in the Portland area
• and countless others

These folks and others, along with awesome food from Whiffies Pies, Windmer Beer, Zupans, Resers, Coconut Bliss ice cream, Cup Cake Jones— and the awesome folks at WebTrends for providing the venue for the event— made for an AMAZING WordCamp.

Also a big thanks to my buddy Tristan for letting me crash at his apartment Saturday night and helping me find my way around town. Tristan’s former roommate from Eugene, Aaron was also there. They both live and do freelance web development in Portland, so it was also a great networking opportunity for them.

This is a fairly long post, so continue after the break if you will

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September 19th, 2009 WordCamp in Portland

Kind of a placeholder post for now, I’ll try to do a write up after this thing wraps up.

September 17th, 2009 Learning Things

I graduated this past June, and with that (in about 2 weeks), comes the loss of my student job I’ve had for the past 2-3 years. During that time, I’ve dealt with many headaches, grown admire and respect many of the people I work with.

The major I’ve been working on for so long was in Digital Arts, and I found out about 3/4 of the way in that I probably should have been a Journalism major. It was too late to change, so I made the best out of things, took many diverse classes— from photography, to digital music, writing for media (a journalism class), to advanced video effects & compositing, I even took a class on programming circuitboards!

Now that I’m out of school, looking for jobs, I’m having to re-learn some things I’ve taken for granted, and teach myself new things that I wish my education would have covered. Things like personal marketing / branding, professional networking, and more recently this week, logo design. While I have a lot more flexibility doing these things for myself currently (as opposed to a class assignment, or in a professional context for a client), I’ve also come to appreciate the semi-structured nature of the classroom. I also look forward to the opportunities to work in a professional realm working with clients in real-world scenarios.