Recently, I had the privilege of presenting at WordCamp Albuquerque 2016 in a talk that I called “From Bootcamp to WordPress Agency in 6 Months.” I shared some of my personal experiences from starting Hermes Development, and discussed why I decided to change careers and start a WordPress web development agency. The focus of my talk was relating to lessons learned, and some live-or-die resources we’ve found, and how they’ve helped streamline our team for success. If you’re interested to learn more or chat specifics, shoot me an email, and I’d love to provide more info.
But why? Why would I want to share my WordCamp experiences on the blog and with you? First and foremost, because as a WordPress developer, I think it is imperative and mission critical to be both involved with the larger WordPress community, and always giving back to the WordPress.
Sweet WordCamp swag.
At Hermes Development (now 11 Online), we use WordPress as the foundation of most of our client work, and therefore, we feel indebted to WordPress and its volunteer community. We feel that it is important to support the open-source software development model, and know it only thrives with community contributions. We choose to be involved with both our local and global WP communities, and hope that our involvement inspires other WP developers, team, and agencies to get involved and give back to their WordPress communities, too. WordPress is a community that exists solely based on the support, participation and contributions of volunteers; if volunteers don’t step up to support the community, there is no community; there is no WordPress.
If you’re interested in getting involved with YOUR local or global WordPress community, good news: there are tons of ways you can do it.
- Here are a few examples of ways that we’ve given back – maybe you can get some ideas:
- Volunteer to speak or present at your local WordPress meetups
- Volunteer to speak or present at your local WordCamp (link to my talk)
- Volunteer to help organize at a national or global WordCamp event!
- Find a youth organization, and teach! (We’ve shared our WP knowledge at local classes for Girl Develop It)
- Create a WordPress plugin; then share it with the world. For free. (We recently released a WordPress plugin, Static Snapshot, to the public repo.)
- Share info and cool stuff on GitHub! (We released a bash + WP-CLI script for super-fast WordPress local dev with Laravel Valet on GitHub.)
I can’t say it or stress its importance enough: get involved with the WP community. It matters. Not only has our team felt personally and professionally fulfilled by all that we have been able to do and give back, but, it’s fun, too. We love the people, we love the community, and truthfully, we’ve even gotten business from it!
This year, in addition to giving my presentation, I also helped out as a Volunteer Wrangler, and it was a great experience. The other event organizers were some of the more active Albuquerque WordPress community members, so getting to spend extra time getting to know them was just an added benefit.
Oh yeah – we sold out WordCamp ABQ 2016, so that was cool.
So, to conclude – do you use WordPress? If so, I think it’s time to step up and get involved. The WordPress community exists, you just need to show up and participate (and it’s really easy – there are literally endless opportunities for you).
The more the WP community gets involved, the richer the WP experience is for everyone. That’s the beauty of an open-source platform – we all benefit from each others contributions.
Check out my talk below:
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