Author: Chris Reynolds

WordCamp Salt Lake City is TOMORROW!

Are you ready?

A couple things you should be aware of for tomorrow’s event:

We’ve SOLD OUT!

Six months or so ago, when we started planning this WordCamp, I made the arbitrary decision to set the number of tickets to 250. This was before we even knew for sure that we were moving to Church & State and it was more or less random. We’d never sold more than 200 tickets, after all, so 250 seemed like a pretty good, large number, that we’d probably never reach.

We sold our last ticket yesterday.

Church & State is an amazing venue and we can absolutely fit that many people in here. We’ve made some adjustments with chair rentals and food to accommodate more people but those were based on numbers earlier in the week. As a result, we won’t have tshirts for absolutely everyone, so if you registered late, you might not get a shirt. In the past, we’ve always had leftover food and had to find people to take the leftovers home with them. This year that will probably not be the case, so we ask that our attendees make sure that everyone has had a chance to get lunch before going up for seconds.

Because we want as many people as possible to be able to come to WordCamp, we’ve opened up a few more tickets for late registration. If you were holding off getting a ticket, I urge you to get it now before they’re gone. We won’t be adding another block of tickets.

Parking and transportation

Church & State is in downtown Salt Lake City and parking is limited or paid. If you are driving, probably your best bet is to park in the underground lot by the Salt Lake Main Library and walking a block to our venue — which may have been what you did last year when we were at the City & County Building. But I highly recommend you to use public transportation or Lyft to get to the venue. There is a Trax station right across the street, buses run all day and Uber and Lyft have excellent coverage in downtown SLC.

Last minute speaker change

One of our speakers — Natalie Osborne — had to back out this morning after having to make a trip to the emergency room last night. She’s okay, thankfully, but she isn’t able to travel. Her talk was going to be the last one in the Training Room. We’re working on shifting the schedule around but if we aren’t able to find someone to fill in for her, that slot will be left open.

Comicon is this weekend…

Maybe you hadn’t noticed, but there’s another conference going on this weekend.

Be on the lookout for folks in cosplay with large swag bags. This also means that a lot of places downtown (restaurants, hotels, etc.) will be pretty busy this weekend (if you’re coming in from out of town, you may have already figured this out). If you’re in town today, and you can make it, you might want to check them out.  The Friday-only pass is just $35.

That’s it! We’re excited to have such a historic gathering this year. This is the largest WordCamp we’ve had in Utah, ever, and you helped make this possible.

Thank you!

Our previously-announced speaker, Susan Daniero, from Materiell, will be unable to make it to WordCamp Salt Lake City. However, one of her project managers, Jeremy Englert, will be taking over in her stead to give her presentation titled Whoo, you’ve launched! Now what?

Be sure to thank Jeremy for filling in next week!

We’ve mentioned before that this year’s WordCamp is at a new venue — Church & State. Church & State is located on the northwest corner of 400 South and 300 East. There’s no dedicated parking lot for Church & State, so we highly recommend using public transportation/Trax to get there — the Library Station stop is directly across the street.

Street parking is available in the area, but it’s paid with a maximum time of 2 hours. If you use the ParkSLC app, you can get notified when it’s time to move your vehicle but, speaking from first-hand experience, it’s not possible to simply top up your time — it’s a hard 2 hour limit. There’s a Diamond parking lot up the street that is $1.50/hr or the library parking lot west of the venue which is $1.50/hr after the first 30 minutes.

Across the street, there is the old location of the Salt Lake Roasting Company, which has moved up the street. As such, their parking in the back is currently not being used, and it may be possible to park there if spaces are available. Please check for any indications of unauthorized parking as things change frequently. If in doubt, the library parking (or Uber/Lyft/public transportation) is your best bet.

WordCamp SLC will take place across three floors inside Church & State. The downstairs multipurpose room is known as 1893 and will also be where lunch will be served. On the main level is the Chapel area, which is where the keynote, opening and closing remarks will be happening. We will also have a third track in a smaller conference room/training room. We’re waiting for confirmation on this room but signage will be available and we will post here when we have confirmation.

This venue is old and there are no elevators. The main level can be made accessible to wheelchairs but the lower and upper levels cannot. As such, anyone requiring assistance for food or to attend a talk in one of the other areas should reach out to one of our volunteers wearing blue WordCamp SLC shirts.

For the last several years, following a full day of WordCamping — socializing, networking, learning new things and meeting new people — we’ve typically held a small afterparty at The Green Pig pub down the street from the City-County Building, our old home. This has suited us fine, usually it’s just a casual group that hangs out and oftentimes we’ve had our own space within the venue. And part of moving to The Green Pig had to do with our venue for the WordCamp — we had to be out of the building by 6pm.

This year, we’re doing something different.

We know that not everyone wants to hang out at a noisy bar and we’re well aware that some of you might not even be able to get into the bar in the first place. Our new home at Church & State has told us that they are happy to have us just stick around at the space and have the afterparty there, so that got us thinking.

Inspired by our friends at LoopConf, we reached out to Oasis Games to see if they would be interested coming to the afterparty to demo some games. I’ll be honest, I’m a major tabletop gaming geek. And Oasis is where I go when I want to buy or sell Magic: the Gathering cards. But more than just collectable card games, Oasis has loads of other games in the store, too, and they’ll often break them open to play them at the store. Our family loves playing Dominion, and every time we go into Oasis, it’s all we can do to not buy up all the Dominion expansions. So, I’m pretty excited, personally, that they agreed to come out.

Oasis will be bringing some games for folks to play and what’s better than hanging out with some new (or old) friends and playing board games? Nothing, that’s what. MOJO Marketplace will be supplying food and drink for anyone who chooses to stick around for the afterparty. Make sure you stick around for the afterparty this year, it’s going to be a ton of fun and we can’t wait to see you there!

We Need Your Code!

At WordCamp Salt Lake City we’re trying out a new concept – a live code review panel brought to you by Mike Selander from Human Made, and our own Tyrel Kelsey from 10up and organizer of the UtahWP Salt Lake City meetup. You will be able to see the thought-process and feedback that goes into a code review in real time. This will be a hybrid panel/talk where we walk and talk through code that’s been submitted by attendees.

But, we need your help to make this happen!

We need code snippets to walk through together on stage. Code snippets should not be more than 300 lines (the smaller, the better) and have a clear purpose. Plugins and single-purpose snippets are encouraged.

How to submit Your Snippets:

• Email wcslc2017-code-review@googlegroups.com with your code snippet zipped up.
• Open a Pull Request against https://github.com/mikeselander/code-review-panel with your snippet. You can see an example here.

Whichever method you use, please include some general context around the snippet such as what the code is trying to achieve, when it would be used, etc.