Want to hear about how an unknown local made waves using nothing but WordPress? Well Gavin Mannion will be telling us how he got started with Lazygamer and how he turned his hobby into a full time job. We found out from him just how he got to where he is today…

I wish I had a romantic awesome story like Maria Scarpello does but unfortunately my stumbling into WordPress and this talk followed no planned path or great personal moment.

I’ve been working in the corporate development world for the last 17 years (now I feel old) and during my time working for a small C# development house I decided I wanted to go to America. I had been self-taught so the first thing I needed was a degree, I signed up with the University of Liverpool to study my Masters in Software Engineering.

During this time, while I was working full time, had two small children and was studying all night, I realised I needed a break and so I started writing about video games – the things I loved to play back when I had time to do anything except work.

Not knowing anything about PHP at the time meant I went headlong into yet another steep learning curve, one that I am still very much stuck on.

Soon after starting the site I moved to Australia (yeah, wrong country but what can you do). After spending 2 and half years over there I was offered a job in America and decided to rather return home because like I said – I’m not so good at following a planned path.

So now I sit here with a full time corporate job, 2 much larger children and a loving wife and a hobby that has turned into a business that allows me to see the world and experience new and exciting things on a weekly basis.

My talk is about how it is possible to turn your garage hobby into an income earner while not having to invest very much money in the beginning at all – basically a look at how I got here and what hurt the most.