Being very old (or at least, that’s how I feel being in tech!) means that after coming up to nearly forty years in technology, I’ve seen some changes.
My first computer at home, that I owned, that I could truly call my own, was a Dragon 32. It was a small, 32KB computer using the rather lovely little 6809 processor. This CPU ran at 2MHz and the system as a whole allowed me to learn a heck of a lot about computer science as a geeky teenager who was busy ignoring sports.
It didn’t exactly prepare me for my first coding job, working on an IBM MVS mainframe computer handling the payroll of 70,000 people, and distributing over £1bn a year. In fact, it prepared me terribly, because mainframes back then were similar to desktop computers today – powerful, with a ton of security features, online storage and a lot of data pipelines. But still, I knew various algorithms, knew what compilers were (though I’d only used an assembler really, but it got me half way there) and how to do a lot with a little.
That mainframe, when I started, could do about two hundred megaflops.
And today, in the picture above, I have an M5Stack on my desk. It uses the Xtensa LX7 processor. As you can see from the picture it’s absolutely tiny. And it can handle the integrated digital camera, WiFi, Bluetooth, USB… everything, really. The little CPU can run at low speeds and high speeds as appropriate to workload, and can reach over 1GHz.
Let’s put things into perspective.
The 6809 was addressing 32KB. The S3 Stack has 16MB of Flash and 8MB RAM. So 750 times the onboard storage of my Dragon 32. You can insert a 16GB microSD Card. You could put 200KB onto a C60 cassette tape back then. So that’s 80,000 times the unloadable storage! Running a lot faster too.
In terms of CPU performance, I’m struggling to find comparable benchmarks, but if we look at a 6809 you used to get 2-3 clock cycles per simple instruction – so you’d max out at around one million per second. Complex instructions would be far worse, and moving memory around was slow and expensive. The LX7 seems to get through around 0.8 instructions per clock cycle, so we can see it can max out at over a billion instructions per second. Or at least a couple of thousand times faster than the 6809.
But here’s the thing… the little computer I’m holding in my hand is at least as capable as the contents of the data centre I started to work at in 1987.
And that, my friends, is why I feel very very old in this sector! Things have changed so much.
Yet at the same time, they haven’t. UX didn’t have a name back then, but careful thought into the design of a screen could save people a huge amount of time or reduce data errors. Saving CPU cycles then meant less of a bill (we paid by CPU time on mainframes) and could save tens of thousands a year for our team. Today, it may feel as if the CPUs are endlessly powerful, but using lower power techniques can dramatically cut down on resource use – meaning less environmental damage. I know at work we’ve taken systems running on 32GB, top spec web servers down to 512MB machines! It’s incredibly satisfying to reduce resource consumption by so much.
Let’s look at it another way. The sophisticated corporate payroll, for 70,000 people that I worked on in the eighties and nineties could easily be run today, if suitably considered, on the tiny little computer I’m holding in my hand here.
Which leads me to the real point of this piece – we as software engineers and designers have a duty to minimise resource usage. Yes, that enormous library you’ve included in your project might save you an hour of time today, but if it increases the memory and power consumption of your system so much that you need loads of cloud computing to support your system then it’s not a job well done – it’s a kludge you can hide. We have an ethical imperative to do better in systems development.
Also, low power computing is awesome and fun. Try it!
At 18 I was skint and got made homeless. It took a lot of graft, patience and mistakes to get out of that and into a moderate middle class lifestyle. Here’s how.
When I was 18 I found myself in a weird situation. October 1987. I’d just started my first job, straight from 6th form, and was happy with that. My favourite song the year before had been The Future’s So Bright, I Gotta Wear Shades. I was optimistic and hopefull. I’d done my A levels finally surrounded by people who actually cared about education. I was no star pupil at 6th form, except at computers, but computers were the big thing so I had confidence.
All good then. I mean it wasn’t perfect, but I just had a fresh optimism. I’d lived with my grandmother since I was about 12 (my childhood memories are imperfect and I have few witnesses to refer to. I’d been casually fostered for a number of years prior, was fed up, and had been dumped with her. She was one of the few consistent things in my life and could see I was breaking in front of her. So I in effect ‘divorced’ my father and she took custody of me. She lived in a mobile home type caravan at the time. She was poor, but stability mattered more to me. I got my education. The future felt very bright.
I got through the various stages of ICI (then one of the largest chemical firms around) to get a job in their computer centre as a trainee printer operator, with the idea being to climb into a programming job. Unfortunately, a few weeks later, my grandmother had been in a lot of pain and, within a day of being admitted to hospital (this is another story to tell) where we discovered she had terminal cancer. Very terminal. She had less than a week left.
I was so very alone. My father turned up, signed over to me to handle everything, then disappeared to South America, never to be seen again. In 1986, my mother who I had some mild relationship with, had taken her family to Spain and, for some reason, me being told and having a goodbye seemed to be forgotten… so I’d accepted they weren’t a factor in my life. That was it. Me, alone, in the world.
Things got quite bad, quite quickly. Here’s what I learned, what I did wrong, and what I think I did right.
The world is not your friend
When you grow up, generally there are adults who look after your interests and needs, until you’re old enough to do it for yourself. But often you feel this interconnectedness with everything being generally good. Often in adulthood we discover things can be quite different – especially if we have some failures. I think learning that the world isn’t your friend is important. I discovered, for example, that if you have no cash, you can’t just take over a substantial asset (a house, in this case) and expect to not pay off debts that your grandmother had. The answer should be simple – I could have borrowed from another bank or building society to buy the house off my grandmother’s estate. Except her bank refused unless my grandmother’s estate was up to date on the mortgage payments. And because my grandmother’s estate had debts and no income, it couldn’t make the mortgage payments, and I was advised that if I paid the mortgage it would potentially make me liable for everything. When you’re an eighteen year old that leaves you in a bind.
The bank took the house, and I was made homeless, briefly (I kept a spare key and let myself in at night to sleep on the floor!), and I quickly organised myself and bought a tiny flat. Good job, because the council wouldn’t help me, the bank wouldn’t help, renting privately was almost impossible for me. Thank heavens I was organised and found the right combination of people.
Finance is risky and can be expensive
Because I was young with little credit history, all finance was risky. I figured that with my job and my flat I could now live a little and went stupid, bought myself a small engined sports car – a Scimitar SS1 1300 if you’re a car geek – a tumble dryer and washing machine all on credit, and thought everything was great. But I had nobody around to advise me I was being dumb, remember? No parents, and even most of my friends had gone off to university.
What happened was that when something went wrong with the car, it really stretched my finances to fix it. Then it got stolen and damaged, and I either repaired it myself or my insurance would get really expensive. Every little bad thing that came up, made life harder. But I discovered that I couldn’t just sell the car and forget about the finance – the interest and the way they did it meant that I’d need the value of the car plus another £1k to pay it off. I was trapped.
Toxic parents usually remain toxic parents
My father was still in touch with me, but for some reason thought I had plenty of money. So when he got into financial trouble in South America, he started giving me hard luck stories about how dangerous things were, that he was going blind (or a bit long sighted as we call it now), and he needed £1.5k. Or £3.5k in today’s money. I was 19, skint, and instead he banged on about how I must have had money from my grandmother’s death and my good job. “Yeah, Dad, but you’re not here and you have no idea.”
However, guilt led me to do my best. I sent him all my spare cash for a couple of months, before finally arranging a loan. I used some of it to consolidate my credit card debts, and two thirds went to him. I sent him, if I remember correctly, about £800 in total. He wrote to say he was struggling and needed more and he was in a dangerous situation I didn’t understand.
So I did what I felt was the right thing – I spoke to the Foreign Office, and eventually secured a facility for him to be able to catch a flight home, where he’d at least get benefits.
I called him, told him the good news, he was furious. And that was the last time I spoke to him. Ultimately, narcissistic, self-centred and selfish people rarely understand that other people have struggles. They just don’t get it. And they stay that way.
Stability matters
One thing I did right was to stay at ICI for many years. I kept that job. My head wasn’t in the best place, so I wasn’t the best employee, but I was useful and smart enough to keep it as well, and had some reasonable progression. For a while I’d been renting rooms after financially over-extending when I lived in my flat, and that job gave me the much needed anchor to my life. Eventually I bought a house with my then girlfriend. That stability then allowed me to think about taking a risk again… But it also established a nice final salary pension plan that will still be useful even 40 years after leaving!
I went contracting
Sometimes, income really matters. I don’t think contracting is for everyone. I hated some aspects of it, and it ruined my relationship at the time because I was away from home so much. But it really helped bring in money, which then really helps you to just establish a buffer of more than a month or two of money. Suddenly I felt like I had an actual surplus and proper savings. I got rid of the rust wreck of a Peugeot and bought a three year old Rover. I started to dress more smartly. I had nearly ten years of this solid and high income and it probably made the biggest difference of all to me.
At the end of my ten years, inflation and low interest rates made my mortgage look tiny, I had asset wealth in the house, shares, and low outgoings. When you’re in that situation, as many middle classes get born into, you can start to take risks. I decided to set up a proper web development business, now called Interconnect.
I could have lost a lot with Interconnect, and we came close to giving up. It didn’t ever give me more income than contracting – not even close. But it does give me another source of stability. And that, dear readers, is worth more than you might think.
I learned about how money and how the stock market works
There’s one book I read early one which just opened my eyes to the world of money. I’ve bought it several times, lent it to people, forgot who I leant it to and lost it! Doesn’t matter, it’s worth it. Its called How The Stock Market Really Works and it goes way beyond stocks, shares, and bonds, but into planning, risks, retirement and so on. In reading it, several times, I established a baseline of understanding that stopped me falling for scams, stopped me making bad investments, and generally helped me ensure I could make best use of the spare money I had.
I no longer pushed my finances hard
Now I understood money better, I knew that, for example, if you have assets of £100k and a debt you can’t pay of £50k, you’re in a really really bad situation. If you have assets of £10k, a debt of £100k and some short term cash flow issues, then you’re in a strong position to start negotiating. Why? Because if you have no assets and a big debt, the bank can’t recoup anything much if they send in the bailiffs. Once their costs are accounted for, they lose everything. So they’re more willing to negotiate. If you have loads of assets, you’re stuffed. That was, in effect, what the bank did to take my grandmother’s home from me when I was younger. They had no motivation to negotiate with me.
So you either max out your finances, Donald Trump style, or you very carefully segregate them. Because I value stability and security above all else, I segregate them.
I learned to think like an accountant
After ICI, I spent a lot of time working in corporate finance departments on their software.
Here’s a thought experiment. You have £10,000. You go out and buy a car for £9,000. How much are you worth? The naïve answer is £1,000. You see yourself as £9,000 worse off. But if your car helps you earn more money by opening up a job you otherwise couldn’t reach where you’ll earn £5,000 a year more, then you have two things happening:
First, your balance remains at £10k, because you have a £9k car and £1k of cash.
Secondly, you have a future benefit over, say, the five years you expect to have the car, of £25k. So over the five year period, assuming the car becomes worthless, you’ll end with £26k on the balance sheet. Or you use that £26k to put into a mortgage which, again, is generally a good move because it’s a limit liability loan secured on property which, in most economies, is a pretty safe bet.
But all accountants will say that cashflow is of utmost importance. You may have a pile of assets, but if you can’t service your responsibilities then you become insolvent – you can’t always easily sell assets without a big loss. So always think about cashflow – it’s best to be gently increasing your cash position as your wealth grows.
I learned to let go of status plays
When I was young I caused myself trouble by buying that sports car. It wasn’t, in itself, a bad buy on the surface – sports cars depreciate more slowly, the insurance on this one was the same as a similar powered Ford Escort, and it didn’t use any more fuel. And it’s not like a 19 year old needs to carry a family. Two seats was fine. Reliability wasn’t great either. But where it went wrong is that my boss therefore believed he paid me too much! My older superiors didn’t like that I had, on the surface of it, a fancier car than they did.
Of course, I was financed to the hilt, and they weren’t. They didn’t know that. They just assumed I had more money than I let on to.
Had I been in a humbler car, they’d have had no idea of my financial status.
It’s better to let people assume you’re a bit skint, and focus on reliability plays in order to establish your career. Took me into my thirties to work that one out.
Same with clothes. Stick to cheap clothes until buying them is easy. If you do what young me did and buy everything on credit at Top Man and Burton’s (yeah I know) then you’re setting yourself up for bad decisions and bad outcomes.
Adaptable accent and open attitudes
I’m actually quite Scouse yet a lot of people I meet and work with down South just think generic, educated Northerner with a light accent. The reality is I just adapt my accent to suit the situation. This means I don’t terrify upper middle class people, whilst I can still sit and have a chippy lunch with garage mechanics. Non-threatening to everyone, basically. I accept that most people know stuff I don’t, that they believe they’re trying their hardest (they may not be trying optimally, or coping badly, but I accept their belief), and generally try to learn from the people I meet.
Meet lots of people from different backgrounds
The more people you meet, the more lives you get to understand, the more mistakes you can avoid and the more opportunities can come up. Local politics can teach you how councils and Westminster works. Bankers can tell you how finance works. Medics can give you really good reasons why you shouldn’t smoke, drink, or eat too much sugar! Bin men can teach you that you can make a good living even if you’re not well educated (or are – there are some very well educated bin men and women out there). Truckers can tell you how their industry works.
Just avoid the cynical and the put upon – there’s little useful information there.
One good thing with the internet today is that there’s so much sharing online that you can virtually meet almost anybody, from African villagers to corporate board members. Just be kind and open and remember that they’re all humans, every one of them.
What about you?
None of the above is unique to me, or in any way makes me special. I just think they’re what helped me. Feel free to comment on what you’ve experienced. Everyone lives different lives and found different ways out of poverty traps. And of course, some people find themselves ground down by a system that can be unfriendly and downright hostile at times which means they can never escape, no matter how hard they work.
Hello – here’s the refreshed blog. I’ve decided to revert to a more typical blog format, after many months of soul searching on the issue. I previously had a layout based on a framework we used at interconnect/it for a couple of clients
But not only have I opted to switch to a blog layout, I’ve decided to use an off-the-shelf theme. I’m now using Khoi Vinh‘s Basic Maths WordPress theme.
Why?
Well, it’s a lovely theme, for starters. The typography is pretty good. The archives page is brilliant (check it out) and should be the standard bearer for all themes archive pages.
But the real question for many, I suspect, is why I’m not using an interconnect/it designed theme. Well, for starters, interconnect/it hasn’t produced an off-the-shelf theme in years. It’s just not our business. So rather than use a product of ours, we’d have to spend good and valuable time on creating a new theme. And, well, why would we want to do that?
Lots of reasons, actually. I could have a theme coded at the office that really shows off what we can do. But the problem with that is that there’s not much need. My blog is not an important one. It isn’t about WordPress (most WP related content will be on our company site, not my personal one) and it just doesn’t get much traffic.
I run a business. Its purpose is to make money, employ five people, and, with a bit of luck, turn a reasonable profit. Its job is not to service my ego or make me look good. A really good theme costs the equivalent of around £10k-£20k of chargeable time to design, code, test and implement.
Given that we’re turning work away, I thought “why bother?” And decided to go shopping for something.
So What’s It Like?
It’s actually quite weird using somebody else’s theme. I actually tried a few out and here are the things I learned that will hold us in good stead.
Themes don’t do enough to make life easy.
No really, they don’t. One of interconnect/it’s biggest challenges is making sure that WP is as easy to use for clients as possible. This means following standards, but it also means using some little tricks that help out – for example, registering and setting plenty of different image sizes, and setting/over-ruling whatever the media settings say.
Migrating WP content really sucks.
There’s a fundamental flaw with the default WP export/import. If you have inline images, although the importer has the ability to download and attach the image in your new site it won’t change the links. And if you do a search and replace, and your image sizes have changes, your lost. Totally – the img tag will point to a file that doesn’t exist.
So what do you do? Well, usually if I’m moving a site from one server to another, even switching domains, it’s a non-issue. I have my tools. But if you’re starting from fresh and working like an end-user would then you have to go through every single damn post in order to fix the images. Every post with an image in it. That’ll take a while.
If you’re really geeky, you’ll sort it, but it takes time. Way too much time. This kind of stuff needs to be sorted and it’s something we may look into as a contribution to the WP project.
Some Plugins Leave Lots of Crud
The reason for a reboot was that I felt that my site’s DB had been filled up with all sorts of crud. Lots of plugins create tables, leave options, and so on. Surplus tables have little impact, but they clutter the place up. But options, lots and lots of them, do have a minor performance hit, and they add up.
Other plugins leave hooks, don’t deactivate properly and so on. And over the years, I’d been through an awful lot of plugins. The site hadn’t been redone since WP 2.0 had been set up on it. I felt it was getting sluggish.
So… there are beautiful and amazing themes out there, and WP is wonderful, but there are little things that could make life just that bit better. Better migration tools, a better system of managing images within content and their migration, and a better system for activating themes so that image sizes are better handled.
Is it a lot to ask? Well, we’ll see what we can do about that!
And so it came. In a way it’s weird… I always felt there were only two likely things to happen.
First, I would find my father (or he would find me) and a period of reconciliation may take place. Closeness, perhaps never, but reconciliation would be fine.
Second, I would never find him, and that would be that. Finito.
I’d actually come to the conclusion a few years ago that maybe he’d died some time ago. In some ways it was an easier conclusion… it stopped me feeling guilty for not continuing a search or trying harder.
I don’t think I was ever ready for this. And this morning I woke up very early at around 5am. Partly because I went to bed very early, but also because my mind was spinning. I decided to put some music on. And this piece came up:
And I took a moment to try and remember what was really good about my father. I’ve told the story that shows the negative in him. The curious thing is that our negative moments in life tend to be far fewer in occassion than our positives, yet they often define us.
So I remembered:
Football in the garden when I was very young.
Him teaching me pinball – and his pride when I started to beat him, and most people, from the age of about five. I still love pinball and if I ever have the space, I’ll have one!
Going to watch Liverpool play at Anfield on several occassions.
Learning about different cultures through him, that there was more to the world than the area(s) I was growing up in.
When I was 16 I met a girl in Oostende and, late in the evening, him quietly handing me enough money to take her clubbing. He then made his excuses and dragged away others to give us space. He continued in this vein all week. It was just a holiday romance, but hey…
There was more… but those are what sprung to mind. And I had my first ‘moment’ there in bed at about 6am this morning.
The next came during the funeral. But first, a little about Chilean funerals…
Culture Shift
Chile doesn’t feel wildly different to Spain, in so many ways. The climate, the landscape even… at least, when I compare it to Alicante where my family lives. Culturally it’s similar enough that you expect things to be reasonably similar. And I suppose they are. But that’s still quite different to Britain.
First things first, you arrive at the hospital with all your paperwork a little before the funeral directors come to collect the body. In our case we then had an hour or so of waiting before heading to the cemetary. I’ve already mentioned that instead of burial plots, niches are used.
And in our case, as there were only two of us at the undertakers we could ride in the hearse, up front. I was disappointed, in a way, as the hearse was simply a silver Ford Taurus Estate. With BMW hubcaps. As a car geek I was disappointed! But then in the UK we use Fords for hearses as well, so I can’t complain… but I’d still prefer to head off in a Daimler, if anyone’s listening….
In the back was the coffin, wrapped in the skin of Bungle.
I realised that if we had an accident (not entirely unlikely) the coffin was unrestrained. It would be… messy, to say the least. Still, we made it to the cemetary where I met the kindly David Hucker from the Anglican Church, his wife, a singer he’d brought along, my father’s landlady, and several of his friends.
Given that funerals tend to be arranged very quickly here, and that he had no family at all here, it was a good turnout.
We then slowly walked behind the car to the tomb, where two rows of plastic garden chairs were laid out. The Bungle-Coffin was then placed on a support, and the car left. Nearby a bell tolled.
Rev. Hucker gave a simple ceremony in both English and Spanish with accompaniment and song from the delightful guitarist. And then the moment I was completely unprepared for. Everyone who knew my father stood up to say a few words of remembrance. When it came to my turn, I fell apart. I didn’t even start talking, just sobbed.
It’s so unlike me. A few tears, sure. But sobbing? Proper, wobbly belly, heaving chest sobbing? Nope, not since I was a little kid.
Every time I remembered the good parts of my father, I went again. More than in the morning which was a single burst of tears.
After a few minutes and a few tissues I managed to compose myself to string together a barely articulate sentence. It would have to do, or I’d just be off again. I patted the Bungle-Coffin, sat down, and the ceremony was then brought to a close.
Of course, the English bits didn’t make sense, entirely, in the context, but they were familiar, which helped, I think.
Then the next new part – the coffin was then pushed into the tomb, and we got to watch the workers carefully seal it up. The flowers were then placed in front of the stone, and we took turns to quietly pay our last respects.
My thoughts have also drifted to my brother and half-sister back in Europe. The five grandchildren my father never even knew about, and the joy he missed out on with all of them.
One day I’ll explain this whole story to my new born son (and any others) and maybe I’ll be back in Arica once more.
And when we come back, I’ll give Joaquin Alvarez, the British Honorary Consul, a call. He has been amazing, taking a lot of time and trouble to help me with arrangements. He came to the funeral with us as a friend of my father’s, and has touched me with his kindness and generosity of spirit. A true giant amongst men.
I went to WordCamp UK 2010 in Manchester… this is my write-up of the event, and its controversies along with my presentations…
I’m just settling in at the office having spent the weekend at WordCamp UK 2010 which was staged in Manchester and is a community event for WordPress users and developers. I gave two presentations, one about WordPress in Big Media, and another about WordPress in the Enterprise. These followed on from presentations given at last year’s WordCamp.
The Craic
Yes, this isn’t the logo actually used, but I prefer this one :o)
I’m going to say now that one of the key elements of a good conference or unconference is the socialising – this is where you meet people, bond with them over beers/food/dancing and form alliances that in the future could prove to be very powerful. You certainly get to make friends and feel like you’re a part of an actual community, and this happens in a way that you’ll never be able to reproduce with online technology. As a consequence it’s no surprise that the awesome Thinking Digital conference has been nicknamed Drinking Digital by some wags.
As ever,Tony Scott excelled himself by getting us access to the famous Factory Manchester (FAC251) which also happens to be across the road from a magnificently geeky pub that sells good beers, has various classic 8 bit and 16 bit computers adorning the walls, and classic arcade games on free play. Awesome.
The Presentations
There was a typically varied range of presentations running across three rooms, along with other folk busy coding up for the WordHack (the fruits of their labours are online). One particular stream that particularly caught my attention was that of a sequence of involvement from John Adams of the Department for International Development. He ran a free-form discussion group on testing strategies which was followed by an interesting talk on PHP unit-testing Nikolay Bachiyski of GlotPress fame. This session showed up some of the lack of structure in general testing of WordPress core code, plugins and themes. Although the approaches used were probably fine for a publishing platform, they would struggle to gain ISO approval. In other words, you wouldn’t want to fly on a WordPress powered plane!
Other presentations that I particularly enjoyed were Michael Kimb Jones’s WOW plugins, and Toni Sant’s very underattended Sunday morning slot where he discused the way WP has helped with a range of Maltese websites.
The Controversy
What’s a WordCamp without at least a little controversy? However, for the attendees of this one, this was a biggie… Jane Wells is Automattic’s Master of Suggestion (seriously, that company has some weird job titles) and she made a suggestion that we shouldn’t have a WordCamp UK, but instead locally organised WordCamps for cities.
There’s a number of issues I have with this:
Everyone in the UK knows that quite quickly WordCamp London would be the big one with all the attention in both media and attendance. It would quickly dominate – in large helped by the enormous population density of the capital. A WordCamp UK in London would be fine and popular (also considerably more expensive) but that’s all that’s needed.
Many British cities have intense rivalries whilst we all still stand together as a nation – there are folk in Glasgow who would never attend a WordCamp Edinburgh, but would definitely be more interested in a WordCamp Scotland. End result? Cities would have small attendances by and large, and our impressive capacity for indifference for minor events would mean that they’d end up as little more than tiny, cliquey gatherings. Anyone who’s tried to run GeekUps will understand this problem.
A lot of work, energy and our own money has been spent on building up WordCamp UK. Is Jane seriously suggesting we should dump that?
What is Jane’s authority on this? She’s simply an Automattic employee. We chose WordCamp UK and its structure – it’s ours. If someone else wants to run a WordCamp UK in the country they’re perfectly entitled and there’s no real reason why we couldn’t have three or four running each year – that would be a huge success. A highly capitalistic organisation that is just one of thousands of contributors to the project and which plays no part in actually running most WordCamps shouldn’t get so involved.
The UK is also very small – 90% of the population can reach all past WordCamp UKs in less than 3hrs – there is no real problem about accessibility.
None of the UK’s key WordPress community members want to give up WordCamp UK.
Jane admitted only six or seven people had complained to her about the situation, two of which turned out to be in Ireland – which except for a small part isn’t in the UK at all. She couldn’t confirm whether they were Northern Irish or not, which was actually something of a poor mistake to make in front of 150 or so Brits.
Us Brits are a pretty apathetic bunch at the best of times – actually running a WordCamp in each major city would be surprisingly unlikely to happen – there were only two bids submitted for this year’s event – one in Portsmouth and one in Manchester.
The whole point of the *camp suffix is that it’s all free and easy with no big organisations sticking their oar in. They are inconsistent and joyful. They’re fun. Automattic should keep out.
The WordCamp name is not trademarked, and we’ve been using it in the UK for some time now. It’s ours!
Of course, there are two sides to each argument. Here’s some reasons and benefits to splitting up WordCamps in the UK:
If somebody wished to run a WordCamp for their city they may feel that the UK badge is dominating and there’d be little interest as a consequence if it was called WordCamp Bristol, or WordCamp Salford.
A national event called something like WordConf could happen.
Erm…
Thing is – we can’t necessarily win this battle here in Britain. We don’t control the WordCamp.org website – Matt Mullenweg does (he has the domain registration in his name) so if we fight to keep calling it WordCamp UK there’ll be no ongoing support for the event from Matt and his team if they wish to stop the use of the UK moniker.
Which would mean standing up to them. Do we want to? Are we prepared for a fight on this? What do the likes of Mike Little (co-founder of the WordPress project) and Peter Westwood (a UK based core developer) feel about this?
Interestingly we were told the same thing applies to the likes of WordCamp Ireland which will now face this problem – but I wonder if Matt understands Ireland particularly well (we know Jane doesn’t) and that in that country the dominant WordCamp would quickly become an expensive Dublin event. You may get one doing well in Cork, but Kilkenny, with a population of just 22,000 and which staged this year’s event, probably wouldn’t be able to sustain an annual WordCamp.
So, Jane has to really allow each country to understand its own social constructs and history and let their own communities choose how they do things. One or two may complain, but it’s not possible to please everyone.
And we showed off too…
My company Interconnect IT have released, through our Spectacu.la brand, the following plugins which you may find useful:
I can’t say thank you enough to the people who make WordCamp UK a success for no personal reward. Tony Scott leads it up, with Mike Little, Nick Garner, Chi-chi Ekweozor, Simon Dickson and many many more working hard behind the scenes. Also to Nikolay to letting me play with the fastest 85mm lens I ever saw! Thank you, you’re wonderful people.
Over the weekend just gone I made two planned presentations at WordCamp UK 2009 down in Cardiff. I also threw in a quick 45 minutes of show and tell on the Caribou Theme that runs this site and is available for download from Spectacula.
Over the weekend just gone I made two planned presentations at WordCamp UK 2009 down in Cardiff. I also threw in a quick 45 minutes of show and tell on the Caribou Theme that runs this site and is available for download from Spectacula.
I also got to mix with some very interesting, talented and cool people that know a heck of a lot of stuff about what we’re working with. In this conference were, potentially, the next generation of web creators. People who will make things happen. And this year, more than last, there was a real buzz at the potential of WordPress, its markets, and its uses.
Presenting at WordCamps
Presentation
I’ve never actually done a formal presentation in front of more than about ten people before in my life, and even then only perhaps four five in my life. I’m a techie – I would do technical discussions and demos, but never with Powerpoint and a laser pointer. I did do an unconference show and tell at Barcamp Liverpool last year where about twenty to thirty people turned up, but that wasn’t planned… it just kind of happened.
But I could also appreciate the benefits of putting myself out there in front of a room full of my peers. So in a fit of enthusiasm I volunteered for two presentations – WordPress in the Enterprise, and WordPress for News and Media. I expect one or even both might be dropped by the organisers. I have no history or background in public speaking.
Both got accepted.
Damn!
But it had some great potential too. I could play with approaches and actually ‘test’ the results. So what did I learn? Read on:
1. L-Shaped Rooms are Tricky
The main room for the event turned out to be L-shaped… or, a better description, V-shaped, with the presented at the bottom of the V. At this event three rooms were in operation, a large L-shaped room with up to 150 people, a medium sized rectangular room for up to 70 people, and a small boardroom type for about 15 people.
I had expected my first presentation on the Enterprise to be the tricky one – it’s not a fascinating subject. But it was in the medium sized room, and it proved very easy to get engagement with the audience. In the L-shaped room you’re trying to look in two different directions. It’s almost impossible.
2. Consider an Assistant for Demos
One can work the computer, the other can talk. Saves awkward silences, and it’s something I’m going to try in a future talk.
3. Get in Early
I did one of the first, and the very last, formal presentations of the event. I noticed that in the first everyone was wide awake and very enthusiastic. By the end of the conference people were flagging. Getting and keeping attention becomes trickier at this stage. You also have the advantage that nobody ever wonders off from the conference at the very beginning – it’ll never be fuller!
4. Start Funny
In the Enterprise talk I started with a humorous quote and in the News & Media I started with a pithy quote. The funny one got the mood lifted and people in a cheerful mood. It gave me a chance to relax and settle into the presentation.
5. It’s a Great Audience
I was dealing with fellow geeks. People in the same situation as me. It was, frankly, the best audience I can imagine. The few presentations I’ve done before have been up in front of a board of hardened and cynical directors, or senior management, or people who have tough deadlines to meet. This was a whole lot more relaxed. Nobody’s going to consider firing you because of a minor mistake.
6. Get Engagement
I noticed that speakers who asked for shows of hands, asked questions of the audience and so on generally had a better applause at the end than those who didn’t. It doesn’t take much to engage your audience, but I’ll admit that it’s trickier when you can only look directly at half of them at any one point.
7. Be Prepared
At conferences opportunities come up. Have business cards, listen to people, smile a lot.
8. Freebies
You can’t believe how the mood of a room lifts when you hand out gifts. Good gifts though. I remember the really rubbish calculators we got given in my ICI Systems days. What geek in the world needs a calculator? So I handed out the penknives we had made for Spectacu.la and they went down a treat.
9. Matt
I finally met Matt Mullenweg at the weekend. I’d promised him a beer months ago in reconciliation following our (now seemingly minor) argument over WordPress’s take on the GPL. So I bought him a pear cider and had a good chat. He’s an affable chap, easy going, says ‘awesome’ a lot (but he’s American, so that’s normal) and has clearly listened to the concerns of WP developers about how they’ll make any money.
Funny hat tho’ ;-)
Summary
An ace time, basically. I’d like to say hi to everyone I met, but I’m scared of missing someone – so instead, let’s just say I look forward to chatting and, hopefully, working with some of you in the not so distant future.
