May 26, 1981, was my 8th birthday (I’m the one holding the cake, BTW). 👇
I love my parents 1970’s inspired matching flowery carpet and sofa. The wallpaper in the hallway also matched the floor design. 😆
I can’t remember much about the birthday party, but the ’80s were awesome!!
I got my first computer as a birthday present a year later – a ZX Spectrum 48k. While the neighbour’s kids were all playing games, I was reading the BASIC programming manual that came with the computer.
I was hooked and subscribed to the weekly programming magazine “Input”.
Between playing the fantastic space-trading and shoot-em-up game “Elite“, I created ever increasingly complex games of my own. The highlight was at 15 when I had my 6800 assembly language shoot-em-up game “Element115″ featured on a 3.5” floppy attached to the front page of the popular “Crash” magazine.
The rest is, as they say, history.
Happy Birthday To Me 🎶🎵
It’s my birthday today, and I’m clocking the half-century. 🎂🧓
I don’t feel old, but my body is telling me some things aren’t working as well as they did back then.
I’m not one for blowing my trumpet, so this year, my birthday celebration will be quiet with close family. Family is so important to me.
Gone is the ZX Spectrum 48k with its BASIC operating system. I now have a custom-built, water-cooled 16-core AMD Ryzen 9 7950X PC with 64GB of ram, an Nvidia Geforce RTX 3080 graphics card and countless terabytes of local disk space.
I’ve moved on from the BASIC language, regularly using PHP, JavaScript and Python, but still proficient in C++ and x86-64 Assembly for low-level driver programming.
Yeah, I’m a geek. 🤓
Happy Birthday To WordPress 🎶🎵
Another friend of mine is turning 20 this year on May 27 – Happy 20th birthday, WordPress!
Twenty years is a milestone to celebrate for an ongoing and current software project, not to mention the most popular Content Management System (CMS) on the internet.
Here’s a throwback to WordPress version 1.
What a lot has changed since then!
WordPress has evolved from a simple blog posting app to the cornerstone of published content on the internet.
As much as I love using WordPress, I enjoy the community even more.
I took over as co-organiser of the WordPress Sydney meetup group in 2013, a year after moving to Australia with my Aussie wife.
The WordPress community and the larger open-source community are my second family. They are also important to me.
Local WordPress Meetup Groups
Local meetups are the grass-roots foundations of the WordPress community. My best friends and closest business colleagues have come from networking at a local meetup group over the past ten years as a co-organiser.
Networking in person is still one of the best ways to get involved with a community, upskill and bounce ideas off other people with similar interests.
The pandemic took a heavy toll on in-person meetups here in Australia, and they are just now starting to come back. I relaunched in-person meetups for WordPress Sydney in February 2022, exactly two years after being forced online due to COVID.
Before the pandemic, we got around 50-60 attendees to our monthly meetup group. Now, it’s more like 10 or 15, but even networking with a handful of people in person is worth more than a hundred-person online Zoom event.
This month WordPress Sydney is celebrating WordPress’ 20th birthday with a networking event, pizza and perhaps some cupcakes. Come along and meet some other WordPress users on Monday, May 29, at 6 pm and help grow the community to where it once was.
WordCamp Sydney
If you enjoy attending a local WordPress meetup group, you’ll go bananas for a WordCamp. 🍌
WordCamps are (usually) a multi-day event centred around a weekend. Our WordCamp Sydney events have previously been on a Sat and Sun, running from 8 am registration, with a 9 am to 5 pm schedule, packed with talks, workshops, networking, hallway tracks and a Saturday evening party.
This is a snapshot from WordCamp Sydney 2019, where we had around 300 attendees getting their WordPress geek-fill. 👆
I ran several hallway tracks, including the “Gravity Forms for Beginners” workshop.
Open source communities are fantastic, but IMHO, the WordPress community is the creme-de-la-creme of them all. 💯
My Challenge To You 🏆
I’m setting you a challenge for the next couple of weeks to find and attend an in-person local WordPress meetup group. If there are no WordPress meetups in your area, look on meetup.com and see if there are any tech networking events and attend one of those. Let’s get back out there in person and build up a community.
📸 Send me a picture of you attending the networking event, and I’ll include it in the following newsletter.
Until next time.
Wil
