8 - 2019 - Andy McIlwain

Fall 2019: WordCamps & meetups are back on the calendar!

August 23, 2019August 19, 2019

Happy Monday!

We’re nearing the end of the summer and my attention is turning to the fall.

Autumn is a busy season for community groups. Attendance picks up as fair weather gives way to grey skies. Meetups, conferences, and other indoor events fill the calendar through to the new year.

I’m joining my friend Brent Kobayashi on August 27th to co-host the first of a new monthly meetup series. We’ll talk about building WordPress sites for not-for-profit organizations. I haven’t done much NFP work in a while and I’m eager to jump into the conversation.

Also coming up, I’ll be:

Co-hosting WP Durham’s Fall Social meetup on September 5th. We’ll be at Brock St. Espresso in Whitby, which is fantastic, because it combines two of my favourite things: websites and coffee.

Keynoting WordCamp Rochester 2019 on October 5th. I’ll be talking about the history of WordPress as a platform and as a community, and where we can go from here in 2020 and beyond.

Speaking at WordCamp Niagara 2019. My session is a step-by-step walkthrough for building a community hub website with WordPress.

Co-hosting the “Grow Your Meetup!” workshop at WordCamp US 2019 on November 1st alongside some talented organizer friends.

Recommended newsletters & more guest posts

August 12, 2019August 12, 2019

Happy Monday!

An article appeared in the New York Times a while back lauding email newsletters as an alternative to social media. Excerpt:

My favorite new social network doesn’t incessantly spam me with notifications. When I post, I’m not bombarded with @mentions from bots and trolls. And after I use it, I don’t worry about ads following me around the web.

I agree with the premise, but from the perspective of a subscriber.

Newsletters have become my primary means of consuming news. I was a voracious Google Reader user in college; and for the first handful of years after, I used Twitter as a sort of pseudo RSS replacement. But, as time went on, I couldn’t keep up with the flood of links.

Curated email newsletters became my go-to alternative. Every week I receive a thoughtfully compiled digest of interesting links, and usually some commentary from the newsletter’s author.

At the moment I’m subscribed to dozens of these digests, covering a variety of topics. So I’m curating my favourites on a new Recommended Newsletters page.

Guest post: Creating a service company website (Jobber)

July 30, 2019August 5, 2019

I had the pleasure of writing a guest post for the folks at Jobber. They’re an Edmonton-based startup building a sleek management app for professional home service providers.

Great designers have to figure it out

August 1, 2019August 1, 2019

“You belong in design not because you already know everything or already have perfect taste or already have mastered technology and psychology and art and language, but because you’re going to be curious and learn and experiment every single time. In a weird way, it’s that worrying thing that means you’re qualified. You’re going to try to understand what technology can do right now and what’s best for people right now. People who already know the answer can’t do that—it requires an open mind.”
– Advice for New Designers (Jake Knapp)