WordCamp Minneapolis / St. Paul
23 - 25 Aug 2018 at McNamara Alumni Center

Nathan shared some great techniques for calming down freelance life. I really appreciated his insights.

gave me the confidence to know I could make my own blocks (I know ReactJS already)

it was like a masterclass in how to give a great talk. AND full of great content. really helped me understand how to approach using accessibility tools for web design

Appreciated her being transparent about how and why the designed their recurring revenue maintenance plans

not much depth

I've recently been working to sell my clients on the value of user stories from a development perspective, and was having some fun conversations with other WordCamp attendees about who exactly owns the role of defining what a particular feature of a site is supposed to do. Edge cases come up all the time during development, and it can cause some friction between sales and engineering teams as implementing a feature or features starts to show its scoping shortcomings.

Travis's talk, then, came at just the right time, as it helped shed some light on potential answers for those conversations. He was able to jam a lot of quality information into a short time slot (just 30 minutes!), and did it all with humor, grace, links to useful resources, and time remaining for questions! The audience was very engaged, and I think other WordCamps or business-centered conferences would see great value from having Travis give this talk at those events.

Awesome job, and perfect gifs!

Somewhere during his presentation, Joshua mentioned that the SVG specification has been around for over 15 years. I don't do nearly the amount of front-end work that I used to, but back when I wrote more custom themes in WordPress, it seemed like SVG was only starting to gain its footing with cross-browser support.

This was a great talk to reintroduce folks to the power of SVG. Joshua discussed the different modes of SVG - object, image, and inline, then did a deeper dive into how to use inline SVGs inside your WordPress theme. He demoed a cool example of a plugin that his agency uses to render their clients' logos in different color combinations, and discussed how easy it is to target elements within an SVG for color, animation, and so on.

Wonderful presentation - other WordCamps and developer conferences would be smart to select this one in the future.

Kevin's presentation covered the automated build tools used by his agency and how others could look to integrating them into their own workflow. Not being as active on the JavaScript side of things, I was happy to learn that Webpack 4 comes with a few presets for general compilation tasks, and Kevin was the second person to talk about Lando for local development recently, so I apparently need to look into it. :)

Perhaps it wasn't an issue, but one thing I think Kevin could do to improve this talk is to engage with the audience a bit more, asking questions to gauge their experience level, and then defining some terms along the way. This talk was very clearly geared toward developers, but even newer developers who may not yet have heard of many of the tools he described would glean more value from his presentation if he laid the groundwork and discussed what they are, what they do, where to get them, and so on.

Overall, however, this was a solid presentation with lots of good information, and I hope Kevin will consider giving it again at other conferences and meetups. Great job!

Russell demonstrated how using voice services can speed up the blogging process. His presentation included some stories about his blogging process - how he starts recording ideas while taking his dog out for a walk, and how he tracks his ideas using Google Keep - and showed just how quickly one can get a 1500 word blog post written by simply using one's voice (it's about 10 minutes!). Using that as a springboard, Russell then stated that if you wrote a blog post in this fashion every day for 30 days, and you scheduled them to post once per week, you'd have 30 weeks of blog posts scheduled.

I thought this was a fun and motivating talk and you should try to catch it if he's giving it again at a WordCamp near you.

Reid gave a nice overview of his own design journey and experience with Photoshop, and the main takeaway here was that Photoshop does what it does well, but that there are other tools out there designers should consider integrating into their workflow that serve purposes Photoshop wasn't intended to do. This was my first time hearing about Abstract, which is a tool for version controlling your assets and being able to visually look at their iterations quickly - it's replacing Dropbox for them.