Archives for October 2014

I’m proud to announce that my first Team Treehouse course has launched today! I wrote yesterday about my Treehouse experience back in September when I was their guest instructor for a week in Orlando, and today the course has gone live: Genesis Framework Foundations.

In the course, I discuss and demonstrate Genesis child theme selection, Genesis-specific plugins, the framework settings, and run through a couple of child theme demo site setups using a simple FTP/SFTP connection and some simple CSS edits and pasting a PHP snippet from the StudioPress site.

Here is the trailer for the course you’ll see on the Treehouse site:

Everything from the producer, audio tech, and teleprompter were top-notch and it really helped make the best product I was capable of on my first go. Then the artists and motion graphics department took my scripted descriptions of my vision of what would help the students and they blew me away!

I am also happy to let you know that we are working on our next course that will lead into something… special. Something a LOT of people will want to dig into. I can’t say what either one is yet, but I’m thrilled to have the opportunity to teach people about what I love to do on a much bigger scale.

If you take the course and have any feedback, I’d love to hear it so I can improve and build upon this in the future.

Back in May, I was watching my Twitter stream instead of working (admit it, you do that, too) and saw my friend, Zac Gordon, ask for Genesis experts to do a course. Me, being no dummy and being a big fan of being in the right place at the right time said:

@zgordon @treehouse Sure.

— Jesse Ⓦ Petersen (@jpetersen) May 27, 2014

Looking at that now, I can’t believe I saw that one week after he tweeted it. That’s a bit odd.

I met Zac in person at WordCamp Orlando 2013 and I was already familiar with Treehouse from the previous year’s WordCamp where I met another Treehouse instructor and got an account for a year. I was familiar with the quality and my mind started racing about how to teach Genesis.

Rewind nearly 15 years and you’d find me working at a local startup in Tampa doing screencasting tutorials of dozens of popular software suites from the likes of Microsoft and Adobe by decompiling their help files, creating scripts, screencasting, voiceovers, and quality control. Funny how life comes full circle on some things…

After one Google Hangout, it became clear the task was mine to lose, so I took to writing an outline and we agreed on a schedule. In September, I was their guest in Orlando for a week where I blasted out all of the in-studio camera work in the first day and spent two more days in a recording booth doing screencasting. I hung around until the next morning just in case I needed to re-record anything and headed back home for lunch.

I had a BLAST!

Here’s the behind-the-scenes video they released a few weeks ago:

You can tell I had fun, right? As exhausting as it was being extroverted for a week, I came back recharged.

So, the course is coming out very, very, VERY soon, and I wanted to be sure to give you all access to a 50% discount for your first month of Treehouse if you click this link or banner. There are plenty more WordPress courses that Zac does regularly and I may be doing another outline right now… as well as watching a course on working in the console today. One more month until WordCamp Orlando 2014 and I saw Zac will be there again, so come meet and greet.