Are you ready for some WordCamp?

WordCamp Salt Lake City is TOMORROW!

Are you ready?

A couple things you should be aware of for tomorrow’s event:

We’ve SOLD OUT!

Six months or so ago, when we started planning this WordCamp, I made the arbitrary decision to set the number of tickets to 250. This was before we even knew for sure that we were moving to Church & State and it was more or less random. We’d never sold more than 200 tickets, after all, so 250 seemed like a pretty good, large number, that we’d probably never reach.

We sold our last ticket yesterday.

Church & State is an amazing venue and we can absolutely fit that many people in here. We’ve made some adjustments with chair rentals and food to accommodate more people but those were based on numbers earlier in the week. As a result, we won’t have tshirts for absolutely everyone, so if you registered late, you might not get a shirt. In the past, we’ve always had leftover food and had to find people to take the leftovers home with them. This year that will probably not be the case, so we ask that our attendees make sure that everyone has had a chance to get lunch before going up for seconds.

Because we want as many people as possible to be able to come to WordCamp, we’ve opened up a few more tickets for late registration. If you were holding off getting a ticket, I urge you to get it now before they’re gone. We won’t be adding another block of tickets.

Parking and transportation

Church & State is in downtown Salt Lake City and parking is limited or paid. If you are driving, probably your best bet is to park in the underground lot by the Salt Lake Main Library and walking a block to our venue — which may have been what you did last year when we were at the City & County Building. But I highly recommend you to use public transportation or Lyft to get to the venue. There is a Trax station right across the street, buses run all day and Uber and Lyft have excellent coverage in downtown SLC.

Last minute speaker change

One of our speakers — Natalie Osborne — had to back out this morning after having to make a trip to the emergency room last night. She’s okay, thankfully, but she isn’t able to travel. Her talk was going to be the last one in the Training Room. We’re working on shifting the schedule around but if we aren’t able to find someone to fill in for her, that slot will be left open.

Comicon is this weekend…

Maybe you hadn’t noticed, but there’s another conference going on this weekend.

Be on the lookout for folks in cosplay with large swag bags. This also means that a lot of places downtown (restaurants, hotels, etc.) will be pretty busy this weekend (if you’re coming in from out of town, you may have already figured this out). If you’re in town today, and you can make it, you might want to check them out.  The Friday-only pass is just $35.

That’s it! We’re excited to have such a historic gathering this year. This is the largest WordCamp we’ve had in Utah, ever, and you helped make this possible.

Thank you!

Getting around at WordCamp SLC

We’ve mentioned before that this year’s WordCamp is at a new venue — Church & State. Church & State is located on the northwest corner of 400 South and 300 East. There’s no dedicated parking lot for Church & State, so we highly recommend using public transportation/Trax to get there — the Library Station stop is directly across the street.

Street parking is available in the area, but it’s paid with a maximum time of 2 hours. If you use the ParkSLC app, you can get notified when it’s time to move your vehicle but, speaking from first-hand experience, it’s not possible to simply top up your time — it’s a hard 2 hour limit. There’s a Diamond parking lot up the street that is $1.50/hr or the library parking lot west of the venue which is $1.50/hr after the first 30 minutes.

Across the street, there is the old location of the Salt Lake Roasting Company, which has moved up the street. As such, their parking in the back is currently not being used, and it may be possible to park there if spaces are available. Please check for any indications of unauthorized parking as things change frequently. If in doubt, the library parking (or Uber/Lyft/public transportation) is your best bet.

WordCamp SLC will take place across three floors inside Church & State. The downstairs multipurpose room is known as 1893 and will also be where lunch will be served. On the main level is the Chapel area, which is where the keynote, opening and closing remarks will be happening. We will also have a third track in a smaller conference room/training room. We’re waiting for confirmation on this room but signage will be available and we will post here when we have confirmation.

This venue is old and there are no elevators. The main level can be made accessible to wheelchairs but the lower and upper levels cannot. As such, anyone requiring assistance for food or to attend a talk in one of the other areas should reach out to one of our volunteers wearing blue WordCamp SLC shirts.

Tell me there’s an afterparty…

For the last several years, following a full day of WordCamping — socializing, networking, learning new things and meeting new people — we’ve typically held a small afterparty at The Green Pig pub down the street from the City-County Building, our old home. This has suited us fine, usually it’s just a casual group that hangs out and oftentimes we’ve had our own space within the venue. And part of moving to The Green Pig had to do with our venue for the WordCamp — we had to be out of the building by 6pm.

This year, we’re doing something different.

We know that not everyone wants to hang out at a noisy bar and we’re well aware that some of you might not even be able to get into the bar in the first place. Our new home at Church & State has told us that they are happy to have us just stick around at the space and have the afterparty there, so that got us thinking.

Inspired by our friends at LoopConf, we reached out to Oasis Games to see if they would be interested coming to the afterparty to demo some games. I’ll be honest, I’m a major tabletop gaming geek. And Oasis is where I go when I want to buy or sell Magic: the Gathering cards. But more than just collectable card games, Oasis has loads of other games in the store, too, and they’ll often break them open to play them at the store. Our family loves playing Dominion, and every time we go into Oasis, it’s all we can do to not buy up all the Dominion expansions. So, I’m pretty excited, personally, that they agreed to come out.

Oasis will be bringing some games for folks to play and what’s better than hanging out with some new (or old) friends and playing board games? Nothing, that’s what. MOJO Marketplace will be supplying food and drink for anyone who chooses to stick around for the afterparty. Make sure you stick around for the afterparty this year, it’s going to be a ton of fun and we can’t wait to see you there!

Live Code Review Panel Coming to WCSLC!

We Need Your Code!

At WordCamp Salt Lake City we’re trying out a new concept – a live code review panel brought to you by Mike Selander from Human Made, and our own Tyrel Kelsey from 10up and organizer of the UtahWP Salt Lake City meetup. You will be able to see the thought-process and feedback that goes into a code review in real time. This will be a hybrid panel/talk where we walk and talk through code that’s been submitted by attendees.

But, we need your help to make this happen!

confused travolta with a backdrop of code

We need code snippets to walk through together on stage. Code snippets should not be more than 300 lines (the smaller, the better) and have a clear purpose. Plugins and single-purpose snippets are encouraged.

How to submit Your Snippets:

1980's era hacker typing on multiple computers confronted with the error:

Whichever method you use, please include some general context around the snippet such as what the code is trying to achieve, when it would be used, etc.

Kids 17 & under can get into WCSLC free!

WordCamps are all about education and learning and sharing knowledge. But one thing we’ve never done at WordCamp Salt Lake City is invite kids to learn alongside everyone else. We’re changing that this year.

While kids have never been explicitly excluded from WordCamp SLC, we’ve never taken the time to actually invite them or provide any kind of resources for kids and their parents. So, this year, we’re making it easier to take your kids to WordCamp with you. Using the wcslc2017-17-and-under you’ll get a full price discount ($20 off) for kids and young adults.

Kid president dancing with grover

A couple caveats:

  • This coupon code can’t be used in combination with another coupon code. So if you’re using, for example, the early bird discount, you’ll need to register yourself and your kid separately.
  • There will be no child care available at WordCamp SLC. It’s assumed that you will keep track of your own kid or that they are old enough to take care of themselves.
  • There’s no specific kids camp or kids track (this year). But they’re welcome to hang out with you, at the Happiness Bar, or attend whatever talks they are interested in.
  • This offer only extends to kids and young adults 17 and under. But we do have a coupon for students — wcslc2017-student — for $10 off.
  • It’s unlikely that we will have youth-sized t-shirts, but they can get an adult small.
  • Please make sure to actually register your kids. That way we are able to properly make a head count for shirts, badges and food.

If you have a kid that’s interested in WordPress, coding, or making websites, this is a great opportunity to introduce them to the WordPress community, and some of our amazing friends, colleagues and teachers!

Ride the Lightning! Flash talks are coming to WCSLC

I’ve teased it for the last couple weeks but we’re officially announcing it today, WordCamp Salt Lake City will have lightning talks!

For those of you who don’t know what a lightning talk is, or need a refresher, lightning talks (or flash talks) are short presentations that are usually only a couple minutes long and typically cover one specific idea or topic. In a WordPress context, it might be this cool plugin you discovered (or wrote!) that you want to show off. Or it might be a story about that one time your site was hacked and how you dealt with it.

There are different flavors of lightning talks as well, including Ignite Talks, which are strictly defined as 5 minutes and 20 slides long, with the slides automatically advancing every 15 seconds.

What I like about lightning talks is that they can be very laid back and casual — much more so than a traditional presentation. They can use slides, or not, and can be used as an opportunity to demo something really quickly, like how NPM works and what it does. One pro-tip I learned about lightning talks is to put very little text on your slides — or none at all! You don’t have enough time to read it, and your audience will be trying to listen to you speak while reading the slide which means they’ll end up retaining less information.

How it works

Now that you know what lightning talks are, let’s talk about how they are going to work at WordCamp SLC.

  1. Lightning talks will be no more than 5 minutes long. They will be timed and you will get kicked off the stage if you go over.
  2. There will be no time for questions, so be sure to include your Twitter handle or email in your presentation so people can ask you questions later.
  3. There will be two rounds of 3 lightning talks with a 5 minute break between them for a total of 6 lightning talks.
  4. Talks can be on any subject but will be loosely grouped into “general WordPress stuff”, “WordPress development” and “business”.
  5. The submission deadline for lightning talks is August 13.
  6. All lightning talk speakers will receive the same benefits as other WordCamp speakers, namely free admission and an invitation to the speaker dinner on September 22nd.

If you didn’t get a chance to submit a talk, or your talk wasn’t accepted, here’s your chance to still take the stage and present your idea. It’s especially great for people who are new to public speaking and want to dip their toes in the water without having to prepare a full-length talk. We’ll especially be looking for lightning talks that are:

  • original or presented in a unique way
  • fit into one of the three general “categories” of general/userdevelopment, and business/entrepreneur
  • can easily be presented within the time limit
  • present a new idea, technology or trend that is emerging in your realm of expertise
  • by speakers who haven’t presented before at WordCamp Salt Lake City
  • by speakers who are part of an underrepresented or marginalized group (people of color, LGBTQ, refugees, Joomla! users, etc.)
  • fun!

Submit your lightning talk!

Update: Lightning talk submissions are now closed. Check out our lineup of lightning talk speakers and let us know if you’d like us to do lightning talks next year!

Resources

Still feeling nervous? Check out these resources for more information and some ideas about the format. And don’t worry! Lightning talks are fun and casual and low pressure (even if the time limit seems like a lot of pressure). If in doubt, submit your idea!

WordCamp Salt Lake City 2017 is over. Check out the next edition!