May WordPress Hack Night

Posted in Announcements by
Anthony Hortin

Update: Unfortunately, we’ve had to postpone this event due to logistical reasons. It will most likely happen in June or July.

As much as I hate to say it, I’m a bit of a night person – and I usually spend my nights hacking away at WordPress. It can get quite boring, you know. Boring and lonely! Plus, I want to contribute to WordPress in a way that’s more beneficial than just developing sites around it.

So, I’ve come up with this idea for a WordPress hack night. We’re holding it on the 14th of May from 6PM to 11PM at OpenHub (Manchester Ln, Melbourne Central).Β The goal of the WordPress hack night is to do the following:

  • Attract Melburnians far and wide who don’t normally come to the Weekly WordPress meetups to come hang out with us and hack some code
  • Engage the local WordPress community to a greater extent
  • Finally execute my idea of World Domination, erhm, WordPress Cupcakes.
  • Get people from down under involved with the WordPress core contribution process and building WordPress businesses

My personal goal is to actually contribute a patch to core by the end of the night and get at least two or three others having done the same. We’ll also be able to test WordPress 3.2 with your plugins and themes and debug any issues anyone who’s testing it is having.

What separates this from the regular meetups is the way we’re approaching things. The WordPress meetup has always been quite casual and has always been something for networking and general goss. It doesn’t appeal to everyone, and we understand that not everyone wants to listen to me rant on about Post Formats (or enjoy the free pizza provided by Envato, but why not? :D)

The unique selling point of the WordPress hack night is the idea that you come to learn and share. You don’t need to sit in on the presentations – we’ll most likely pour those into the board room with a more intimate setting. If you’ve got a WordPress dev question, chances are someone can answer it.

We’ve got a few planned presentations for the night, but they’ll all be ignite-style combined with something of a workshop component if they apply.

  • Doing cool stuff with WordPress (Anthony Cole)
  • APIs and how they’re awesome
  • How to contribute to core (Dion Hulse)

After the event is over, we’ll most likely head to a local bar and partake in the normal bar-hopping – hopefully no one buys a battle axe this time around! πŸ™‚

Keen on coming? Please spread the word about this totally awesomsauce event on twitter – and don’t forget to register. I’m looking forward to seeing everyone there!

*Β For now, I’m just chipping some of my own cash in because it’s not that big of a deal, but if you’re interested in helping out, please do get in touch!

5 responses on “May WordPress Hack Night

  1. John McKenna

    Hi Anthony, love the idea just a couple of constructive comments, do you have a sense that people are happy to go to such a gig on a Saturday night?

    Also without wanting this event to revolve around accessibility but it would be great if the venue was accessible to people with mobility restrictions. (as in no steps)
    Fully understand free venues are not always easy to find, and I will continue to explore.

    Anyway just a couple of thoughts

    John McKenna

    1. Ricky Buchanan

      Damm, that answers my question – I was going to leave a comment asking if the venue was wheelchair accessible. I guess not! Is it like a whole flight of stairs type inaccessible or just one or two? The latter can be overcome with enough strong backs…

      Please let me know about any future WP things which are accessible, I’d love to meet up with some others. I didn’t even realise there were WP meetups down here, honestly!

    2. Anthony

      Hi John,

      As far as Saturday goes, to a certain extent – yes it is, but we’re going to see how the first one goes and then adjust everything going forward. The date just happens to work for a large amount of people I know who were interested in coming.

      And on accessibility eah, we’d love to come up with a more accesible venue for the meetup and we might end up switching the venue around, it’s just a tricky situation for us at the moment.

      Regards,
      Anthony

  2. grigori

    I will attend one of these for sure.. Since I live in Melbourne now and everything.. Been using wordpress for last 6 years..

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