WordCamp Jabalpur 2011 : From Start To End

6 days back I had started on my journey to Jabalpur to speak at the WordCamp. Let me start with the whole thing.

Started off in the evening of 13th from Goa in a semi-sleeper to Mumbai and reached the very next morning. Caught a train in the afternoon and left for Jabalpur.

Got down from the train on 15th and headed for my hotel room.

Day 1

I had no idea about how amazing my day was going to be. I guess around 9 all the speakers were taken to the venue, got the speaker tee shirts and the badges :)

(Skipping the Key Note)

The sessions started off and the first one was by Mohit Pawar. The very first session was so amazing and the way he spoke, he was able to connect to the audience in a brilliant way.

This was followed by a short tea break. Next Sathish talked about WordPress as a framework. During his talk King and I kept wondering that our talks were not so like the other’s, we were going to do demonstrations and how to go about things.

And just after Sathish, King was going to talk about Thesis and how to use it. I can definitely say one thing, the way King spoke, it was way different from than the rest.

(Lunch)

And now was the time for the “Little” Whiz Kid, Gautam, I think I don’t need to write anything about him. Gautam spoke on bbpress, and how to work with it, it was very interesting to see such a young kid speaking on stage. (He is in 10th class) And to be frank, I have never made a plugin in my life, and this kid works on plugins and pure development.

R Bhavesh got to the stage and like a great storyteller he spoke on how his company worked on their first project without any plugins, and created something using just the core functionality of WordPress, focusing on Custom Post Types.

A short tea break and the event was back with me on stage explaining “Theme Development and Customization”. (Won’t give any details on this)

And following me Jaydip Parikh spoke on “Quality Content is King”. It was a mesmerizing talk for me, the way he spoke, the way the presentation carried on and the way he connected with the audience. I loved it.

Day 1 was over and we all headed back to our rooms for a short while. Moments later we were back in the cars on our way to see the Marble Rocks (which were unfortunately closed as we reached late) and the waterfall. Spent some time there (leaving out the part where Nishtha gets scared by dogs) and we were back on the road to get some dinner as the last meal most of us had was lunch.

Past dinner, some of us went back to the hotel, while the rest of us (including me) went and had tea :P

The night didn’t end this way, we all were in Room 501 sharing pictures and tweeting :)

Day 2

(Tea Break)

Next was Puneet Sahlot with his talk on “Tips for Optimizing WordPress Performance and Usability”, another very relevant and great topic to speak on. :) Great talk and interesting points.

Oh, great, one after the other, amazing talks by amazing people.

Next on stage, Ashish (Pocha) Sharma just nailed it. He spoke on Hacking a WordPress Theme, and he said this smiling on stage, I am not a WordPress guy, but I know PHP, I make it work my way. I absolutely loved the way he interacted, talked and chatted, answered questions and solved simple problems by editing a plugin and changing things in Twenty Eleven.

(Lunch)

Joshu Thomas aka Orange Copper spoke on “monetizing your blog” and I guess it had the longest Q&A round in the 2 days. After his talk, me and King asked him, how many times had he spoken before, and we were quite astounded by his simple answer,”This was my first time.”

Hats off to him.

The day and the WordCamp ended with Soumya Pratihari explaining about Google Panda. It was great to hear this one, cause, honestly I had ‘no idea’ about it.

I had to leave in a some time after the event and I quickly got to my room, packed up and went to Room 501. Entering, I saw that nearly all the speakers were there exchanging photographs, talking and sharing on facebook (the twitter session was going on for the 2 days continuously).

This was the first time that I had ever gone for such a big event and I had the honor to speak along with such great people.

I am very glad that I got such an opportunity, I hope to meet all of them soon.

Sorry, if I wrote less about any speaker.

And Gaurav Singh, amazing work with the organization and management (sorry couldn’t meet you while leaving).

Will end this with a quote of mine from my talk -

People say Web Design is not coding, I call that bullshit. We design the web by coding.