Author Archives: Michelle Schulp Hunt

About Michelle Schulp Hunt

Michelle is based in Minneapolis, MN, and is currently the Director of UX Engineering at Lone Rock Point. She has previously collaborated with clients ranging in size from solopreneurs to enterprise as an independent consultant. Michelle employs a strategy-based approach to design and development focused on solving tangible problems and achieving real goals based on how people think. She loves the open source community, and when she is not pursuing professional, personal, or wellness goals, she enjoys giving back through speaking and connecting with others. Her passions are communication and empowerment, and she believes in the power of "Why?"

Thank You For Another Successful WordCamp!

Photo by Found Art Photography | Camp group photo highlights, at WordCamp WordCamp Minneapolis 2016

Photo by Found Art Photography | Camp group photo highlights, at WordCamp Minneapolis 2016

Now that we’ve all had a week to recover from WordCamp Weekend, we wanted to take some time to thank everyone involved for another successful camp.

Thank you to the attendees who came to learn and support our event. We had over 100 people at Foundation Friday, and over 400 people attend during the weekend. That’s a ton of people who love WordPress! We are grateful that ticket costs are kept low for WordCamps so that we can reach as many people as possible without a huge financial burden.

Thank you to the organizers and volunteers that sacrificed time, energy, and sleep to coordinate the event months before it ever happened, and showed up on the day of to run things as smoothly as possible! We understand that everyone’s lives are incredibly busy, and to see so many people choose to give up their limited free time to put this event together, purely out of a desire to volunteer, is amazing.

Thank you to the speakers that volunteered their time and expertise to join us from the local, regional, or national community. We appreciate all of our speakers, whether it was their first time speaking or their fortieth. WordCamps pride themselves on bringing you not only recognized talent, but also empowering people to present their first conference talks, enabling more people to contribute to the sharing of ideas. Who knows, maybe next year it will be you!

Thank you to the sponsors who make it financially possible to put on an event at a scale that couldn’t be done on ticket income alone. They enable us to keep WordCamps affordable and accessible to almost anyone. We are grateful to the global sponsors Bluehost, Jetpack, WooCommerce, GoDaddy, Pantheon, WPML, Dreamhost, and Plesk for committing to WordCamps around the country and world, and to the local sponsors 3five, Modern Tribe, Rocket55, SiteGround, The Iron Yard, ServerPress, Lightning Base, Flywheel, Press75, Cimbura, AreaVoices, Crowd Favorite, Robert Half, Cardinal Store Locator, and Westwerk for recognizing the value of the Minneapolis WordPress community and choosing to support us.

We will be adding links to speaker slides and videos to the session descriptions in the weeks ahead, so continue to check here and WordPress TV in order to watch your favorite talks again. If you attended WordCamp and have not yet filled out the feedback survey emailed to you, please do so in order to help us make next year even better. The organizing team personally looks at every single response, so know that your feedback is valued.

If you’re looking to continue your involvement with the local WordPress community, consider joining the MSP WordPress Meetup, and keep an eye out for opportunities to volunteer, speak, or contribute next year!

Interview with SiteGround

This is a blog post from one of our sponsors. Be sure to visit all of our sponsors at the event and thank them for their support!

Why do you enjoy sponsoring/supporting WordCamps?

WordPress is extremely important for the web hosting industry as a whole. By sponsoring WordCamps we hope to humbly contribute to the growth of the community of the WordPress users. Of course, this also help us present our brand to many potential customer and partners.

Why do you like interacting with attendees/people at WordCamps?

WordCamps are a great opportunity to interact with many cool people that are open, easy-going and ready to share their experience with the other participants. We also meet many of our existing customers on these events. In a completely online business like ours, this is a great opportunity to talk to our users face-to-face and to even have a beer with them at the after party.

How your company is involved with WordPress (speaking, volunteering, core contributing, etc)?

For the last 3 years SiteGround has sponsored over 50 WordCamps, attended 30 of them and we had a speaker from our team on 15. People from our events team have also been involved on a volunteer base with the organization of the last two WordCamp Europe and several local events and meetups. We are also proud to have a very talented person, Ella Van Dorpe, whose work as a WordPress core committer is completely financed by SiteGround.

How has the WordPress community impacted your business?

As WordPress is the most popular application among our customers, the needs of the WordPress users shape to a great extent the characteristics of our service.

Do you have something cool you want our attendees to know/learn?

We will have some really cool stuff for all Minneapolis WordCampers on our both, so stop by and have a chat with Dimitar & Miroslav from our team!

Putting Our Money Where Our Mouth Is

This is a blog post from one of our sponsors. Be sure to visit all of our sponsors at the event and thank them for their support!

WordPress is one of the cornerstones of our agency. It’s not just the CMS we choose to build on; it’s our chosen community.

The people we meet at WordCamps are some of the best humans in the world. They’re nerds like us that like to geek out over APIs and page builders. They’re puzzle masters that pull up a laptop across from ours to review code. And they’re friends we want to kick back with at the end of the day, playing foosball or grabbing a beer.

When we built our business, we set out to create and maintain a culture shaped by intentionality. That culture has always included giving back to the open-source community. Collectively, our team members have given over 80 WordCamp talks, helped organize 14 WordCamps, and made countless contributions to Core Code, Core Team, .org Code, .org Support, and more.

Sponsoring this WordCamp isn’t just to get our logo on the signs around the conference. We’re sponsoring because we believe in the WordPress project, and more importantly, we believe in supporting the community behind it.

Plus we have to admit we have a soft spot for Minneapolis. Several of our team members live in the area and are heavily involved in the local WordPress community. WordCamp Minneapolis is a great opportunity for us to support our team and show how much we care and are invested in the community at the same time.

This upcoming weekend, you’ll spot Triberians throughout the conference who have helped plan and run the event (Michelle, Travis, & Nick), and our team members who are contributing as speakers (Reid, Travis, Michelle, & Jen). Swing by our table to say hi or catch one of us between sessions.

We’re ready to reconnect with old friends, make some new friends, and learn a thing or twentyninehundred from the sessions.

About Modern Tribe

Over the past decade, Modern Tribe has established itself as the agency of choice for Fortune 500 companies, educational institutions, government entities, and well-funded start-ups.

In addition to specializing in large-scale WordPress deployments, we’re also committed to open source and excellent product design. We’re the team behind plugins like The Events Calendar, Event Tickets, The Image Widget, and GigPress.

Our plugins have been downloaded and loved by millions, including many folks here at WordCamp Minneapolis. Sponsoring this WordCamp is just one small way we like to give back to the community.

Learn more about our plugin projects at TheEventsCalendar.com or get in touch at tri.be.

James Tryon Interview

James Tryon is speaking on the Secret to becoming a great Project Manager at WordCamp Minneapolis.

What inspired or motivated you to give this talk at WordCamp?

Client work is something I really enjoy. Happy clients are great to work with and a happy team produces great results. It’s the project manager’s job to keep this type of environment going, creating an enjoyable work environment. When talking with other people in our industry, they seem to hate that part of their job.

I feel this is something I know a lot about, and if done right, it’s not that hard to accomplish. I hope after this talk someone has an ‘ah ha’ moment and it helps change their workflow and betters their work and life.

How do you “create intention” in your job, career, or life?

I try to make every moment count. We only get one shot at this(Life as we know it), and everything I do is intentional regardless if it’s not always the best choose. Be smart, take chances and always believe in yourself. Have a purpose, and love what you do.

If you were a WordPress Plugin, what Plugin would you be and why?

Jetpack because I think I can do everything! Joking.

More then likely something custom, because I’m a unique snow flake.

If you were not doing your current job, what profession would you be in and why?

This depends. Some type of urban farm program setting up aquaponic systems and teaching people how to be self sustaining. And making some type of hand crafted furniture / industrial useable art. If I had to work for someone else, Prop/set design for movies would be cool.

I do have a dream of opening up a little Soul food dinner or food truck “when I’m really old”. I used to run a steak house for 4 years, and really enjoy cooking/entertaining for people.

What professional and/or research resource(s) can’t you live without?

The internet to start. But to give a real answer, a basic mechanical BIC 0.7mm pencil with white clip and eraser, graph paper notebook, large white eraser(has to be white, pink leaves marks) and some alone time. Then my team would be a close 2nd on that list of importance.

Building WordPress is About Building Community

This is a blog post from one of our sponsors. Be sure to visit all of our sponsors at the event and thank them for their support! This post was written by Mendel Kurland, a speaker at our event and Community Evangelist at GoDaddy.

I’m an analytical sort of fellow. I like research. Give me stacks of data from various sources and I’ll connect the dots. I’ll sit in a downtown coffee shop somewhere and create a formula that explains where the most influential small-business communities are in America. Or where you can find the best artisan coffee in Louisiana.

And I’ll back it up with data.

So a couple of years ago, when I was thinking of where I wanted to live next, I did the same thing. I poured over data to try to find the best community to live in. Where can I find an awesome community? Where can I find a real community?

That’s a loaded term, isn’t it? Community? Real community is even more heavy. What is that? A pretty downtown with big oak trees and a busy diner and an Elk’s lodge? A group of collective street artists taking over abandoned buildings and making them beautiful? A bunch of families getting together on a Sunday afternoon to build a local playground for their kids?

It’s more than just hanging out. It’s more than having something in common. It’s more than defining yourself by what you’re not.

What makes WordPress a community?

Real communities are diverse and inclusive. Real communities grow because they welcome newcomers and support the regulars. Real communities have a vision that’s beyond the day to day. It’s bigger than a location or a playground or a product.

Building a community? That’s not an easy thing.

But it’s exactly what we’ve seen with WordPress and the open-source community surrounding it. These are collaborative and welcoming cultures that have built something bigger than themselves — something that contributes to the common good of the Internet and the world.

The software? That’s only of a piece of it. The real power is in the community.

When Matt and Mike first created WordPress, I’m guessing they didn’t imagine it would power the Internet, apps and enterprise sites. I’m not sure they could have seen that it would unify designers, developers and artists toward a common cause. WordPress has become another shining example of a real community. Every single contributor (big and small) is an agent of that success.

At GoDaddy, we’re committed to building the WordPress community.

With this in mind, GoDaddy’s been a part of the WordPress community since inception — at least from a consumer and website-builder perspective. We’re nerds. We love to make websites and share them with friends. It’s digital validation that we know what we’re doing.

But it hasn’t been until recently that we doubled-down and became an active member of the community and a WordPress champion. Our goal shifted from using and loving WordPress to building and nurturing the broader community.

We wanted to spread the love, so to speak.

So at the beginning of 2016, GoDaddy made a financial commitment to the WordPress community in the amount of $130,000. Money that the WordPress Foundation used to launch smaller WordPress communities around the world. And money to make meetups and WordCamps a reality for existing communities. Communities like the one coming together during WordCamp Minneapolis. Where WordPress t-shirt-wearing folks of all ages and backgrounds will join together over client war stories. Where web creators will take a moment out of their hustle to learn as much as possible vacuuming every ounce of coffee from the carafes.

Beyond money, we’re listening closely to the WordPress community and building a WordPress platform based on their feedback and their needs. The GoDaddy WordPress team continues to focus on creating an elegant and powerful platform for developers, web designers (GoDaddy Pro), and the 14 million small and micro-businesses that we serve.

And we’ve met a lot of amazing and thoughtful people along the way. People who are teaching others how to start and run their own freelance businesses. People who are showing WordPress beginners how to get started. They’re teaching them everything from themes and plugins to JavaScript. We love what they’re doing so much, we’ve hired them. Many of them have contributed to our online blog, the GoDaddy Garage. And we’ve funded local workshops for others (BobWP and the DoTheWoo podcast). Even more recently, we’ve seeded Zac Gordon’s efforts to build comprehensive training for WordPress-related JavaScript, JavaScript for WP.

And we’re not slowing down. You’ll see us at WordCamp Minneapolis in a big way. GoDaddy-ers and friends of ours are attending, covering, and contributing. We’re participating in WordCamps and contribution days in Minneapolis and around the world.

Yep, we love this community. We’re stoked to be a part of it. And like any real community, we’re excited to continue to participate, grow, and contribute to a vision that’s bigger than the sum of its parts.

Let’s connect.

Give me a shout on Twitter or Facebook (or GoDaddy), and keep up-to-date with what we’re up to next! What should we be working on? How can we help?

Oh, and if you haven’t tried our new Managed WordPress hosting, hit me up at WordCamp Minneapolis. I have something for you. 😉