Prior Trip
I am anxious person, always have been, and so my body was reacting to this anxiety very strangely. This might be much of an exaggeration and overstatement, but the night before that I was going to Oregon, I felt as if that day was my last. It felt like an acceptance to the future, but being fearful of it.
The sky looked as beautiful as a piece of art from the renaissance. It was frightening from how beautiful every part of the sky was as beautiful as the first, but I sat with that peace, and went with it.
Day One
The first step to get to Oregon. I live in North County, San Diego, so I had to catch a flight at 6:50 in the morning to get to the conference one time. Luckily, I think, I have been waking up at 5:30am, so waking up early for the flight was going to be easy. Thankfully, my mom was able to take me, but I had to wake up at 4:30am to get ready. However, instead of waking up at that time, I woke up at 4am due to the cold weather, but that will come with a price. Once I got to the airport, I was expecting there to be no traffic, and no waiting time to pass through the TSA… and yet, I was wrong. The San Diego airport was packed, and the line was so long that I was scared that I was not going to get on my flight on time. In fact, I only had 10 minutes to make it! Luckily, I had about 2 minutes to spare.
The flight was smooth, and when I landed to Portland, Oregon, I was surprised to see how much forestry there was! It quickly reminded me of Santa Cruz, and I loved it. I heard a lot of stories from friends of how Portland is filled with homeless, and drugs, so that started to startle me a little. I made my way to my Airbnb, but had no time to rest! I had to rush to the convention center to make it to the Contribution Day at WordCamp, but before that, I went to Starbucks to grab myself some coffee. I don’t really drink caffine, but this time, I really needed it. After a couple of sugar packs, and a few sips in, I started to feel the effect.
Wait, what’s Contribution Day?
Contribution Day in WordCamp is a day filled with collaboration amongst many other developers for any open source projects that is being sponsored at the event. From Mobile to Testing, there is a wide variety of things to contribute to. So, I walked around and found myself in the Mobile desk. I was the only person there, so the table lead and I talked a lot about the project that he was working on, which was Gutenberg.
Unfortunately, I was not able to contribute with code at all given the hunk of junk that I am running… a dual-core 16GB RAM i5 chip laptop from the early 2000s. However, I was able to contribute with any bugs that rose from the WordPress mobile app on iOS. So, although it was not much, it felt as if I made somewhat of a contribution.
After some time, I went in for lunch, talked to two lovely people, and went back to contribute. This time, it was with the Core team. Therefore, my laptop was meant to be used, and I was not prepared for the amount of tools that I had to download. In fact, it was quite embarrassing from how slow my laptop was. Eventually after HOURS, I was able to pick up an easy ticket to contribute to with the complete help of the engineer at the table. It wasn’t much, but I felt good about it.
Sadly, I started to feel extremely exhausted from various reasons: the flight, waking up too early, the caffeine and sugar crash, and overloading of work. There was a social gathering that night, but I was fried, and I felt like going home, so I did that.
At home, I talked to my housemates that were there. Very interesting people, but I was too exhausted to speak that I excused myself to go to my room to rest. Although I should have just closed my eyes, I quickly jumped into my PHP project that I was planning to release after completing the LinkedIn Learning: Essentials of PHP track. I thought that it was perfect planning to launch this website while being at the WordCamp US conference in the case that there were any recruiters lurking around looking for a PHP developer.
As the night crept in, my eyes began to shut, so I had to finish that for another day. And so, that was my first day at WordCamp US in Portland, Oregon.
Leave a Reply