How had I gone my whole life without having sweet tea?  While my goal for attending WordCamp Raleigh wasn’t to find out how amazing it is, the fact that I did was icing on the cake.  And what a delicious cake it was.

Some of the highlights:

• Doug Cone talking about best practices for plugins. It was a great first session and provided a good base for many of the other presenters. It also bookended the developer track perfectly with…
• Andrew Nacin talking about how not to write a plugin to close the developer track. Over many conversations with Nacin him and I have come to have a very similar ideology for WordPress plugins so it was great to hear him eloquently tell the developers ways that they can code better. I also can’t complain because he called out the AddThis WordPress Plugin as an example of a plugin doing things right (by hiding our post meta box by default).
• The SitePoint podcast with Brad Williams (@williamsba), Patrick O’Keefe (@ifroggy) and Stephan Segraves (@ssegraves) was a lot of fun.

I also presented on Debugging and filing bug reports for WordPress and had a blast. Hopefully helped out a few developers as well.

It was great to see many friends as well. I also loved the opportunity to talk about open source software, both the process of making it and the benefits that so many people can derive from it. I’m hoping to see a few more people contributing.

WP Candy did a great job live of live blogging WordCamp Raleigh. Check it out for a highlights from many of the speakers.

I’m looking forward to my next WordCamp. If you have never been to one, check out WordCamp Central to find one near you.