Recently, I got some intriguing direct messages from Nick, a friend of mine from the D.C. Sass meetup. He told me that one of General Assembly’s WordPress instructors hadn’t worked out, and wanted to know if I’d be interested in teaching a class about once a month or so. It sounded intriguing, so I followed up with GA.
What quickly unfolded was a tremendous opportunity. Starting in April, I’ll be teaching WordPress for developers classes and bootcamps. The first will be a two-hour evening class on April 23, and will focus on creating child themes for WordPress. I think this would be a good introduction for front-end developers to get a taste of the WordPress development world.
Then in June, I’ll follow this up with a two-day weekend bootcamp on building custom WordPress themes and plugins using all the development best practices we’ve established at RP3 Agency. This will be an intensive dive into the WordPress world, and we’ll get into topics like using a starter theme (_s, of course), building with Vagrant, Sass, Gulp.js, etc.
The plan for now is to teach each of these courses (the evening course and the bootcamp) about once a quarter, #ParentingLife permitting. Of course, there’s a drawback in all of this. In preparing for these upcoming courses, I’ll likely have to take a break on speaking at WordCamps for the time being. There’s just not the time to prepare for a new WordCamp talk, while simultaneously preparing for these classes and managing my other projects and commitments.
RP3 Agency has been a long-time partner with General Assembly, and while this opportunity didn’t come directly from that relationship, I still see it as a great next step to work together to help produce more great developers in the Washington, D.C. community. I’m excited to be a part of this.