SERVING THE COMMUNITY
Last year I wrote about my experience attending my first Boston WordPress Meetup in a while and how I asked the organizers if I could help out. Sure enough, I am now an official organizer managing some of the basic tasks!
What I hope to accomplish from this new role is to help with the special exposure of the organization. Drumming up enough influence to help revive the WordPress community here in the city of Boston. The long-term goal is to see if we can bring back WordCamp Boston, which was last held in 2019. There was a 2020 event scheduled, but we all know what happened that year.
Start small and build up that audience!
STRONG TALKS
Last night, we started off strong with two great talks. The first to speak was Nicole Addeo. She is the founder and managing director at Mythic Digital. Her talk was called, “Debugging Yourself: How to Move Forward When the Blocker is You.” An excellent discussion on dealing with one’s own demons, especially for us who are in the tech space.
We’re heavily wired to work and maintain components between complex web systems, but we never allow ourselves to evaluate ourselves and fix the much-needed issues until it is too late.
Nicole provided some helpful tips on how to manage your stress. One of which was journalling your thoughts onto paper. If the thoughts come in the form of a question, answer it as if you were someone else. You’d be surprised what can come out of it.
Our next guest speaker was Rob Petrin who runs his web development agency in the local Boston area called Petrin Development Services. His talk was no stranger to us within the WordPress community, but there has been a slow adoption rate since the Gutenberg project’s inception back in 2018 and Automattic first announced its rollout.
His talk title was, “Gutenberg: Yesterday, Today, Tomorrow,” which covered a brief history of WordPress from its early days up till 2018 when the user interface on the administration side started to change. He listed the roadblocks that made it difficult for agencies to develop sites and the confusion in using the platform from a client’s perspective.
Eventually, we would enter phase 3 of the project where the rate of use has been increasing steadily due to improvements from WordPress.org documentation and third-party plugins that enhance the flexibility of building out block and pattern elements.
MORE TO COME
As we slowly move into 2024, there will be a lot more speakers and exciting topics to cover. So please join us if you are a local WordPress designer, developer, content writer, project manager, or even business owner. We would love to hear and connect with you and share the development of this wonderful community.
If you want to know more about the event, you can visit the Boston WordPress Meetup link.
Looking forward to seeing you at the next event!