Aaron Campbell knows it can be challenging to be an introvert in a world built for extroverts. A lot of introverts have been told at some point in their career to “be more extroverted” so they can succeed, as though introversion is bad.
At this year’s WordCamp DFW, Aaron Campbell will show how introversion is not bad, and being an extrovert is certainly not required for success!
Aaron Campbell will take both a scientific and experiential look at introversion and extroversion, how they differ, how to tell where on the scale you are, and what advantages each has in today’s workplace.
He’ll walk through his own journey of learning to leverage the strengths of his introversion and share what he does to help him navigate the parts of life and his career that are harder for him as an introvert.
If you’re an introvert or work or interact regularly with one (hint: you do), you walk away with a better understanding of the strengths that introverts have and how you can leverage those for success.
Introversion isn’t a weakness, it’s a different set of strengths.
Aaron Campbell has been an introvert his whole life, and he’s struggled with it at times, because we live in a very extrovert-favoring world. He was told over an over that the solution is to “become an extrovert” and trying to do so many years ago made for a pretty terrible time of life because you can’t just become and extrovert. Thankfully, you don’t have to!
Aaron Campbell will share how introvert and extrovert brains are physically, observably, measurably different.
Digging in and understanding those differences, really understanding how to work WITH my introverted brain instead of against it, has been absolutely life changing. I want to make sure that every other introvert gets to have that same experience, while doing what I can to help extroverts and introverts alike understand our differences and how we can better work together.
Aaron Campbell lives Oklahoma, so while he’s not a DFW native, he still calls WordCamp DFW his “home WordCamp.” He has been to WCDFW quite a few times and has generously led several sessions as a speaker.
I think one of the most impactful things that I always associate with WordCamp DFW is the start of the mental health movement in the WordPress community. Cory Miller gave a talk on the “iceberg” of life, and I think it was part of an extremely healthy snowball effect that has helped to improve the view of mental health in our entire community. If you haven’t seen the talk, you should definitely check it out.
Aaron Campbell first started using WordPress in 2005 because he was looking for a solution that would let the small business customers he was building sites for take control of the site themselves when he handed it over to them.
At the time, WordPress didn’t even have WYSIWYG editing but it was still far more user friendly than the alternatives.
In late 2006, Aaron Campbell came across a bug that he couldn’t simply code around and had to modify core on a client site.
By early 2007, after a few updates where he had to update the site and re-do his core modifications, he was frustrated and decided to set aside a day to figure out how to get that fix into WordPress itself so updates would be smoother.
I found their IRC channel (no, we didn’t have Slack back then) and was directed to their bug tracker, instructed on how to upload the patch, walked through the review of the patch with Mark Jaquith, who then committed it into core. And I’ve been hooked ever since.
Aaron Campbell currently works at GoDaddy, focused on the WordPress ecosystem and what things they can do to help make WordPress better for everyone.
I think the achievements I’m most proud of aren’t the things I’ve done with WordPress, but the things I’ve done to help improve WordPress for everyone that uses it – adding some of the first ever javascript drag and drop to sort galleries, adding attachment support to our mail function, leading releases, leading the security team and helping to start the bug bounty program there – the things that improve the experience for everyone definitely make the biggest impact.
Aaron Campbell has been part of the WordPress community for 12+ years now, and he considers it to be a really big part of his life.
It’s a group of people that share a set of ideals with me and a passion for improving and ensuring the openness of the web. It’s been everything from a way to sharpen and improve my technical skills, to a source of lasting friendships, to a pipeline for work and even new jobs.
You can tweet at Aaron Campbell during his session at @AaronCampbell using the hashtag #WCDFW. He considers himself a “huge geek,” and his biggest “claim to fame” is having appeared on a single page in a The Phantom comic, drawn as him shaking hands with the hero as he refers to Aaron Campbell by name!
Head over to the Tickets page and register for this year’s WordCamp DFW! We’d love to see you there!