After helping organize nine WordCamps, I’ve made just about all the mistakes. Hopefully I’ve learned from each of them. Recently an organizer of an upcoming WordCamp asked me my thoughts on using food trucks to feed WordCampers. The pro is that you get a nice variety of foods to choose from. Much better and much more fun than the grab-n-go sandwich boxes you’ll find at a lot of camps. (I’m not knocking the grab-n-go option. All options have their pros and cons.) The con is that the lines can back up if food truck logistics are planned poorly. Long lines can dampen the mood of a camp, especially when folks are hungry. And the number one thing to make any camp successful is keeping folks happy. So, here are my tips: Taste test: (This is my favorite tip, because I love to eat.) Test out the trucks ahead of time for service and speed. Again, moving folks through the line quickly is key. All trucks will claim they can move people, but that’s not always true. So if you find the trucks you are considering out in the wild, you can see just how quickly they can turn around and order and…
Continue Reading ⇨Improving Productivity
This post supplements a presentation originally delivered at WordCamp Los Angeles 2015. Most folks have to work to make a living, which is totally fine. Many of us have chosen to work in the WordPress world because if we have to work, we want to work on something we enjoy with people we like. In doing so many of us have become freelancers and entrepreneurs. This makes us responsible for our own time, and time is a precious and limited resource. Let’s not waste work time working. Waste time somewhere awesome. Most of what I have learned regarding being more productive is either through friends or reading articles. I…
Continue Reading ⇨The Story of Me
Last Christmas my wonderful wife gave me a National Geographic DNA kit. (On our trip to Morocco, one of our travel companions had completed this process and I was fascinated.) Today my results came in. For the most part, if you know me, the results are not too surprising – lots of northern European action. But there are two points that are interesting. One, I am 18% southwest Asian, which any number other than zero would have shocked me. Two, I am 2.8% Neanderthal. Most people have somewhere between 1% and 4% Neaderthal DNA, and the average person has 2.1%.…
Continue Reading ⇨WordCamp Ventura County 2014 Recap
I remember when Konstantin first starting talking about putting on a WordCamp Ventura County he mentioned that his vision was for a more intimate, more developer-centric camp. He and the organization team delivered, big time. Coffee in swag is the best coffee #wcvc A photo posted by Jeff Zinn (@jeffreyzinn) on Nov 11, 2014 at 9:16am PST The venue at Green Art People set the tone for the whole event. Right away, it was clear that this camp was going to be an exchange of ideas amongst friends and not a formal classroom which put the whole event at ease. Imagine participating in a…
Continue Reading ⇨Orange County Designer Meetup Links from 3 March 2014
Here are some helpful links from the Orange County Designer Meetup from 3 March 2014. Sass – Sass is the most mature, stable, and powerful professional grade CSS extension language in the world. Bourbon – A simple and lightweight mixin library for Sass. Neat – A lightweight semantic grid framework for Sass and Bourbon. Bitters – Scaffold styles, variables and structure for Bourbon projects. Emmet – A plugin for many popular text editors which greatly improves HTML & CSS workflow
Continue Reading ⇨Ideal El Porto
Well, the water could have been warmer, but otherwise setting were perfect. The water was clear and glassy. There was just enough breeze blowing off the shore to throw a little mist off the crest of the wave. The crowds were low by El Porto standards. And the waves, oh the waves. They rolled in the chest-to-head high range. And If you picked off the right one, it’d peel all the way to shore. The Sausage performed beautifully (though I didn’t really do it justice today). Josh, CW, Mike and I all seemed to have a good productive session. I…
Continue Reading ⇨The Sausage Is Back
Big waves on order this week. I went back up to Harbour to borrow the Sausage again. Man, I dig that board. I need to get one of my own. Although I am tempted to try getting it in a quad set up. Anyway, big beautiful waves at the Sunset Jetty today. Long peely rights for the taking. And I took. It was very similar to that foggy day in December at Bolsa Chica. It’s supposed to be even bigger tomorrow.
Continue Reading ⇨Sight|Sound by Mikey DeTemple
New film by Mike DeTemple trailor now available. Dig in! Follow the updates on his blog. [vimeo]http://vimeo.com/18758953[/vimeo]
Continue Reading ⇨All Back Together Again
Finally! The rains have stopped, the holidays are over and we all managed to stay healthy to get together for another coveted El Porto Friday. Great crew today to: Josh, Mike, Aaron, Edgar, CW, and even Sean stopped by to say hello (but couldn’t stay). It was a junky day too, but I think we were all craving to get back into the groove that it didn’t matter what the conditions were like. We did our best with what came, but there wasn’t much to surf. Mainly we just bobbed in the line-up and caught up with each other.
Continue Reading ⇨Bolsa Chica Friday
All of the LA-based crew how to bow out today, so Sean and I opted for Bolsa Chica instead. It was super foggy. So foggy one couldn’t see the break from the shore. Tensions were high while out in the water. We had to be on orange alert for a rogue wave to come out of the fog and sweep us away. I was on the Sausage prototype again, this time with my Solus Future Fins. Had one of my best waves ever. A nice meaty one came right to me and picked me up with barely a paddle. It…
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