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Events

Bay Area Events

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I have a few engagements in the coming week in the San Francisco area and online:

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Events

State of the Word 2012

I had an amazing weekend at WordCamp San Francisco hanging out with hundreds of WordPress users from all over the world at the main event and the dev day afterward. Then on Sunday I was humbled to be featured on the cover of my hometown paper the Houston Chronicle in an article David Kaplan wrote following the 10-year high school reunion I went to (PDF).

If you wanted to catch up on the State of the Word address I gave on Saturday, the video and the slides are now online, or you can watch it embedded below. The slides are on Slideshare.

It was a pleasure meeting so many of you, and I hope it’s not next year before we meet again. Thank you to Michael Pick and Pete Davies for helping me out under tight timelines again.

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Events Yahoo

WordPress Party Tonight

Tonight (Monday March 30) at 7 PM we’re opening up the new Automattic space at Pier 38 for the first time because so many of our friends will be in town for Web 2.0 Expo and all their fun events. Come by our spot (on Embarcadero in between Brannan and Townsend) starting at 7 PM and enjoy good music, free booze, and geeky friends. We’re on the left corner and there’s a bunch of circles in the window and an Automattic sign over the door. (Sorry for the late announcement, if you could help us get the word out I’d appreciate it.) You can RSVP on Facebook here.

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Events

Entertainment Gathering 08

Tim said it better than I could, but I’m also very much looking forward to attending Entertainment Gathering this year. I was there covering the event last year and it was a huge creative recharge and very inspiring.

My favorite story from last year was at lunch I noticed this amazing looking device that was totally readable in broad LA daylight sitting on a table. I was gawking at it and a voice behind me said “Pick it up! You can play with it.” It was Jeff Bezos with his trademark laugh and the device was a Kindle. He gave a personal demo and I was sold, I pre-ordered one as soon as I got online and have loved it ever since. (Except it’s broken now, but that’s another story.) Registration is currently open here.

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Events

Berlin WordPress / Web 2.0 Expo Drinkup

I’m in Germany for the first time and I’d love to meet some of the WordPress community here. With the help of Yamile Yemoonyah we have a venue and such for a get-together this Thursday. Since there’s an upcoming Web 2.0 Expo right here in Berlin we’re co-hosting with those folks to make the event extra-fun. Here are the deets:

Thursday, Oct 9th at 7 p.m.
“Dachkammer”
Simon-Dach-Str. 39
10245 Berlin
030 2961673

If you have a German blog or Twitter please help spread the word! Hope to see you there.

Update: Got a discount code from the conference, if you register here and enter the code webeu08gr99 you’ll get a 35% discount.

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Events

At SxSW

I’m at South by Southwest in Austin, Texas now. This is my fifth year at the conference, and I’m excited as ever to see what this year holds. I’m on two panels this year. If you’re a WordPress user and you spot me at the conference please introduce yourself! I’ll try to keep some WP stickers on me, so ask for one if you don’t have one on your laptop yet.

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Asides Events

Entertainment Gathering

Even though I swore off conferences for the rest of the year, I’m going to be making one final exception for the Entertainment Gathering in Los Angeles, which will be going on December 2-4. I’ll be going outside my normal role and attending as the official blogger for the conference, covering all aspects of the sessions, speakers, and attendees armed with a laptop and camera. If it sounds like your cup of tea, I think there are a handful of seats left.

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Asides Events

WordPress Party Next Monday

On Monday May 21 we’re having a WordPress party at Thee Parkside in San Francisco. It’s a cool dive-type bar across the street from a park at 17th and Wisconsin, and they have a free ping pong table. (You may want to bring your own paddle though.) The party will get started around 8 PM and go until they kick us out. What’s the occasion? Well, WordPress 2.2 is out, WordPress.com is about to pass a million blogs, and we’re coming up on our 4th birthday since WP’s first release.

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Asides Events

New York City Meetup

I’m going to be in New York next week and it’d be great to meet some of the WordPress community there. How about we do a WordPress Wednesday on April the 11th, starting around 7 or 8. Any ideas for a good venue?

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Asides Events

Houston Meetup

I’m in Houston for a few more days and we’re doing a meetup on Monday night. Erica writes more about it here. Update: The meetup was a ton of fun and went late into the night. Thanks to everyone that came out!

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Asides Events

At SxSW

Just a quick reminder, I’m going to be in Austin at SxSW next week and if you see me please introduce yourself. I’ll have a stash of WordPress stickers at all times. 🙂 There is also shaping up to be a little meetup on Saturday at Barcamp around 6, so block that out. Finally I’m speaking on Monday.

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Asides Events

In Sacramento

I’m heading to Sacramento tomorrow for the SacStarts dinner and also to meet Joseph Scott, who’s been contributing some neat code to WP.

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Asides Events

106Miles

I’m speaking at the next 106 Miles on February 15th in Menlo Park. The question is “When is the right time for a startup to hire a product manager?”

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Asides Events WordPress

Macworld Meetup

Some folks are putting on a WordPress Meetup at Moscone Center around MacWorld next week. I’ll be there, you should too.

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Asides Events press

El Pais Interview

There has been a ton of media attention here at the blog conference in Spain. Friday and Saturday were a whirlwind of TV and newspaper interviews. The most in-depth, I believe, was from Pablo Fenandez in El Pais and is now available online in Spanish. There is something really special going on here in Spain with blogs, the people are full of such energy and passion that it’s definitely going to be a space to watch over the coming years.

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Asides Events

In Seville, Spain

I’m going to be in Spain this week for Evento Blog España. It will be my first time in Spain or Seville, so if you have any tips please leave them in the comments. I’ll be bringing a huge stack of WP stickers, and if there are any WordPress users in the area I’d love to get together, just drop me an email.

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Events Google

MySQL Camp Google Notes

After speaking at Yahoo earlier, I drove a few miles down the street to Google for MySQL Camp. I caught the last session of the day, by Googlers saying how they used MySQL internal to Google. (I assume for the Adwords application.) Here are the stream-of-talking notes I took. The most fascinating bits I took out of it is how they take a partitioning/sharding strategy similar (but notably different in some ways) to WordPress.com and that they use DNS to manage all load balancing, high availability, datacenter failover, etc. DNS is a pretty powerful building block.

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Asides Events

Web 2.0 Lies and Appearances

The Top 10 Lies of Web 2.0. I am in town, but I won’t be hanging around the Web 2.0 conference too much this week. However you can find me at Web 2.2 starting Thursday. (We’re a sponsor.) I’m giving a talk at Yahoo in Building B on Friday at 12 PM. (Bring food to throw.) Finally I’ll be at MySQL Camp this weekend. (Trying to figure out how to deal with thousands of queries a second across 50+ MySQL instances.) Update: Some folks thought this was a Web 2.0 diss, or an anti-Battelle/O’Reilly/etc statement. Not at all! I looped by the conference today and saw a lot of great folks, but it’s just not the best use of my time this year.

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Asides Events

NY WordPress Meetup

Looks like there’s going to be a nice WordPress meetup in New York tomorrow.

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Asides Events

Microsoft CodeCamp

I’m still in Vienna, but this Saturday morning I’ll be at Silicon Valley CodeCamp speaking on How to say no. My Mom would be so proud. Extra: my keynote from Blogtalk is online at Google video. You may or may not be able to tell, but I was fighting keeping my eyes open (it was 5 AM for me). Next time I speak overseas I’m going to factor in an extra day ahead of time to adjust my sleep fully.