Chris Garrett — Cotswolds based web designer

I made it back from the wild lights of Birmingham after a pretty epic Wordcamp. While I found a few of the presentations slightly lackluster, the social side more than made up for it!

I missed out on the Friday night festivities as I met a bunch of graphic design students on the train to Brum and spent the evening discussing typography, grids and other such nicities - which made a nice change from the traditional geekery of these sorts of events.

Saturday saw me enjoying a very inciteful lunch with Grandpa Garrett and Mark McGuinness, with topics ranging from user-experience design to monetising blog content, pervasive media and even touching on NLP and psychology. Thankfully, the meeting of the two CG’s didn’t result in any form on natural disaster or physical anomalies.

The evening took the term “geekery” to a whole new level, with us participating in Jon Bounds most difficult pub quiz in the world virtually via the wonders of Twitter… At this point Stef had arrived (and saved me from getting hopelessly lost), as had the curry… I was saddened to find out we narrowly missed out on a Windows 3.1 5.25″ install floppy disc to Pete Ashton and crew! Although, the fact that it was only disc 2 of 2 did take the edge off…

Sunday was the better of the two days as far as presentations go, in my opinion. The code surgery was entertaining - if not that helpful and Chris Garrett’s presentation was one of the most thought provoking of the weekend. Sam (who very kindly picked up the bill on Saturday evening, thanks mate!) covered integrating BBpress with Wordpress, and while it didn’t run all that smoothly, it’s definitely put BBpress ahead of Vanilla in my forum choices.

Discussions around next years Wordcamp UK have already begun - and I have to say I’m looking forward to it! The location’s up for debate and I’ve already put forward Bristol as I think it houses some of the best venues in the UK.

In terms of presentations, I hope next year that the topics may be a little more focused - it seemed this year as though they weren’t really complex enough for serious developers, but were too advanced for non-developers. Perhaps the way to go would be to set up 2 tracks next time.

While I enjoyed going to an event and just spectating (I’ve done quite a lot of presenting over the past few months) I definitely think I’ll put forward a pitch for next years - there’s been speculation of a joint presentation with Chris G Sr. ;)

Thanks to Tony Scott, Benjamin Ellis and everyone else that put in the hard yards to make the weekend happen!