I had so much fun at WordCamp Miami. The FIU campus was beautiful, the organizers were amazing, and the volunteers were so helpful. The speaker reception was at Dave and Busters. We had great fun playing games and letting off some travel steam. We ended up visiting South Beach that night and saw some things. I am not sure I’m done laughing.

The table was extraordinarily busy. Lock pick sets disappeared quickly as novice lock pickers found their way into each lock.

When we sponsor, day one is typically insanely busy and we get a break on day two. Not so at WordCamp Miami. Our table was busy all the time.

I ended up giving two talks. The first was very well attended on Saturday afternoon. I talked about Evaluating Plugins. I’m sure I’ll give this talk again. Given recent news, it’s even more important to evaluate what you plug into your site. Max came with me and was a total rockstar videotaping a number of talks, including mine and my colleague, Chloe’s talk.

One of my favorite things about WordCamp Miami was spending some one-on-one time with Chloe. I knew she was smart. I knew she was nice. But I also just adore her. Big fan, I am.

I also got to spend some fun times with my co-worker Tim. Tim and I are dorks together. We have a lot of fun. Here, we play a bit with the GoDaddy sign and the #savetim hashtag.

There were a number of cats on the FIU campus. We decided to name them Akismet and Dolly. (Inside joke most WordPress people get.) They had tipped ears, so likely had been captured, spayed/neutered and released.

Many attendees had fun using lanyards to play with the kittens. Why? Because kittens! Oddly, they look just like my cats Luna and Sven, even with the little white spot on Luna’s chest.

The WordCamp offered attendees an opportunity to provide feedback on the talks via mytalk.rocks. The feedback I received was awesome, letting me know that the talks were well received. If you’d like to watch either of them, please feel free (embedded below). I had a computer freeze up in my first talk, but I think I recovered ok. I came home to a new computer, so that was nice. And a fellow speaker talked me through how he uses an iPad to run his slides instead of a laptop, and I’m totally going that rout next time.

First, Evaluating Plugins.

Then, Security 101, hacking horror stories and what we can learn from them.

I also walked around and chatted with a few sponsors about their experience at WordCamp Miami. Because we often are at neighboring booths over the course of a weekend, we end up becoming good friends with other sponsors. We also end up serving the same customers, so it’s great to connect and talk about what we’re seeing on the ground. You can see our little tour of the WordCamp sponsor area below:

Overall, Miami was one of my favorite WordCamps yet. I see why people come from around the world to WCMIA. David Bisset and his team really go the extra mile to make the experience great for attendees, sponsors, and the speakers.

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