Category Archives: Events

Bay Area Events

Events

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

State of the Word 2012

Events, ,

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.

WordPress Party Tonight

Events, Yahoo

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.

Entertainment Gathering 08

Events

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.

Berlin WordPress / Web 2.0 Expo Drinkup

Events,

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.

Entertainment Gathering

Asides, Events

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.

WordPress Party Next Monday

Asides, Events

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.

El Pais Interview

Asides, Events, Press

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.

MySQL Camp Google Notes

Events, Google

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.

Continue reading MySQL Camp Google Notes →

Web 2.0 Lies and Appearances

Asides, Events

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.