Those who can… Teach

With all the recent changes around the office, I find myself in an odd place… at the lectern. As many of you know, I’ve been the “lead monkey” at Collective Bias for an amazing three years now and to this point, I’ve been the guy behind the curtain, designing, building, and researching to bring the best product possible to our staff and clients. In that time I’ve built a strong team of developers and designers that have eased the workload considerably. Now it’s time to hand over the day to day and start sharing what I’ve learned. So, oddly enough, it is now time to “pay attention to the man behind the curtain.”

Worst Picture Ever

Last month I started my humble speaking tour at Wordcamp, Fayetteville. For those who haven’t attended a Wordcamp, I would strongly suggest it. They’re held all over the world and feature local and national WordPress wizards, sharing their tactics, secrets and knowledge. Topics range from design, to development and even to the how’s and why’s on blogging as a hobby or profession. My session was held in the Development track and I focused on Responsive Design.

Though well received, I’ve learned that I need to slow down a little! My session was allotted almost an hour and by some oddity of the space-time continuum, I was done with my slides in about 10 minutes. Luckily, my audience (standing room only, a-thank you) saved me with plenty of questions. The entire session ran about 30 minutes and we broke early, buying everyone a little time before their next session. Loads of fun, but I’ve got a long way to go before I’m back to a good steady pace.

Currently, I’m putting together my next presentation for Niche Mommy in New Orleans. I’m doing a session on HTML and CSS for Bloggers and this time around, I’ve got about 90 minutes to fill. The good news is that the topic has plenty of caveats for deep discussion. The hard part has been to pick what areas to focus on in preparation. In working through what to talk about, I remembered our company motto, “For Community, By Community” and turned to Social Fabric® to ask a few questions. “What are you interested in?” “What would you want to learn about?” “What questions do you have?”

The feedback was great and I think I’m well on my way to a good presentation that will be both helpful and interesting for the attendees at Niche Mommy. I can’t thank my community enough for their help and hopefully I’ll see lots of you in New Orleans in a couple of weeks. For those who will be in attendance our own Ted Rubin (@tedrubin) will be the Keynote Speaker on Friday morning at 8:30am. Kate Berg (@KateTBerg) will lead the Lunch General Session on Friday. Stewart Cox (@stewart_cox) will be teaching everything you want to know about food photography on Friday afternoon at 3:45pm and I will be speaking on Saturday morning, August 25th, at 10:00am.

We look forward to seeing everyone there!

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