During my school days, I was crazy about giving presentations. In the almost 200 years that have passed since then, I have almost completely lost this enthusiasm and only rediscovered it this year. Now the whole thing turns to the other extreme: I’m marauding through the German-speaking WordPress community.
I’m not quite sure how that happened. In any case, it certainly wasn’t a deliberate decision. Suddenly, some other Meetup Organizers asked if I would like to come over and tell something about Topic X or Y. I was sure that I would be able to do that. Apparently, that’s all I needed to get me back to speaking.
When I was invited to visit the Meetup Bonn in October, one of the participants asked me, half jokingly, for further dates of my Germany tour. Stupid ideas have always been in good hands with me. So I installed a plugin of the great Alain Schlesser on simonkraft.de to collect slides, recordings, links and data of past (and future) presentations. Alain’s as-speaking is not (yet) available in the WordPress.org directory, but can be obtained directly from Github. Alain is certainly looking forward to constructive feedback there.
“Um, Simon? Do you really need a freaking calendar with tour dates?!” Nope. I don’t. Really not. But it doesn’t really matter. And features like this motivate me incredibly, with the small projects I start to really continue. In addition, I think it’s really nice to have a central place where I can collect all the topics I’ve already covered. This helps my future self prepare for similar topics.
The rough plan for the coming (and perhaps the following) year is divided into two main points:
- I want to visit every WordPress-Meetup in the German-speaking area again. The last time I had the opportunity to do so was in the summer of 2013 – at that time the number of Meetups was much smaller and I was able to complete the whole tour in one month.
- Slowly but surely a real WordCamp session is due. In the past I was on stage as part of panels, but never with my own real session. I would like to change that in 2018.
Hey, Simon,
as you probably know, here in Aachen there is a quite young and therefore small WordPress-Meetup. We are looking forward to your visit in any case – no matter if with or without a talk. So come and have a look…
Yeah, you’re up high on my list. Are your dates for the first half-year already set? I need a bit more travel planning for Aachen than for the Meetups, where I can just go back the same evening.