Believe it or not, this year was my first WordCamp Atlanta experience ever. While I have lived in Georgia for a number of years, I’ve never been able to make it.

Let me tell you, I sure am glad I made it this year. In short, WordCamp Atlanta was great. It was a weekend full of thoughtful talks, bright folks from all over the world, awesome parties, and a lot of what makes the WordPress community so vibrant — diversity.

My first WordCamp talk — ever

Saturday afternoon, I had the pleasure to speak on Gutenberg block development. In fact, there were three talks on Gutenberg this weekend, not to mention a workshop dedicated to Gutenberg development on Friday! Ever since watching the Gutenberg demo at WordCamp US 2017, I’ve been diving into Gutenberg block development quite consistently.

I’ve been working on Writy.io and GutenKit, two projects which wholeheartedly embrace Gutenberg, and I’m so honored to be able to teach folks what I’m learning along the way. This was my first WordCamp talk — ever, so as you can imagine, I was super stoked! If interested, you may view and download my slides, and as soon as the session is up on WordCamp.tv, I’ll add a link to that as well.

Gutenberg Dev Workshop

Friday morning, Aaron Reimann, Micah Wood, Evan Mullins and I (pictured in order below) kicked off the day full of Gutenberg development lessons.

We talked about block development, how themes and Gutenberg will interface, matching WordPress themes and Gutenberg styles, React, development tools, resources and even more. It was an awesome time sharing with a room packed with folks looking forward to the future of WordPress. I even gave a demo of custom blocks I’m developing for Writy.io & GutenKit , which was pretty well received. If you’re interested in either Gutenberg-centric project, you may subscribe for updates at each project’s website.

Aimee Copeland inspires everyone in the room

I couldn’t tell you how many inspiring snippets Aimee gave during her session on Saturday morning. There were dozens—at least. Having overcome so many tremendous challenges since her life-changing accident, Aimee shared that we are all so much stronger, and more capable, thank we really think.

“If you give up on try 47, then you didn’t really want it anyway.”

— Aimee Copeland

Aimee talked on how through her WordPress website, the greater community rallied together and supported her through such a challenging stage in her life. WordPress also powers the Aimee Copeland Foundation website, which is all about empowering people of all abilities.

11 year old wins 3rd place #WCATLCTF

WordFence hosted the first ever capture the flag hacking competition, involving cryptography, web vulnerability and WordPress. There were a number of challenges with point values assigned based on difficulty. To everyone’s surprise, the competition’s third-place award was given to an eleven year old boy, who went by the handle “Unstoppable.” Unstoppable completed five challenges to take the third place spot. The future of WordPress and security is looking good!

Finding happiness at the Happiness Bar

On Saturday I spent a good amount of time at the Happiness Bar. Many of us actually ate lunch there as well! It was honestly a great experience helping folks with their WordPress sites and I recommend it for folks looking to give back a little.

WordCamp Atlanta 2019

All in all, I was blown away at WordCamp Atlanta — in fact, I’m already looking forward to next year! Of course, this would not have been possible without the generosity of the sponsors, organizers, speakers and volunteers. They all deserve a huge T H A N K  Y O U and a nice quiet week to kick back and relax.