{"id":382136,"date":"2013-10-18T14:40:27","date_gmt":"2013-10-18T12:40:27","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/2013.capetown.wordcamp.org\/?p=382136"},"modified":"2013-10-18T14:39:05","modified_gmt":"2013-10-18T12:39:05","slug":"speaker-spotlight-gavin-mannion","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/capetown.wordcamp.org\/2013\/speaker-spotlight-gavin-mannion\/","title":{"rendered":"Speaker Spotlight: Gavin Mannion"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Want to hear about <strong>how an unknown local made waves using nothing but WordPress<\/strong>? Well Gavin Mannion will be telling us how he got started with <a title=\"Lazygamer\" href=\"http:\/\/www.lazygamer.net\/\" target=\"_blank\">Lazygamer<\/a> 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&#8230;<\/p>\n<p><!--more--><\/p>\n<p>I wish I had a romantic awesome story <a title=\"Speaker Spotlight: Maria Scarpello\" href=\"https:\/\/2013.capetown.wordcamp.org\/2013\/10\/14\/speaker-spotlight-maria-scarpello\/\">like Maria Scarpello does<\/a> but unfortunately my\u00a0stumbling into WordPress and this talk followed no planned path or great personal moment.<\/p>\n<p><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"alignright size-medium wp-image-398469\" alt=\"Profilepic2\" src=\"https:\/\/2013.capetown.wordcamp.org\/files\/2013\/10\/Profilepic2-300x266.jpg\" width=\"300\" height=\"266\" srcset=\"https:\/\/capetown.wordcamp.org\/2013\/files\/2013\/10\/Profilepic2-300x266.jpg 300w, https:\/\/capetown.wordcamp.org\/2013\/files\/2013\/10\/Profilepic2-1024x911.jpg 1024w, https:\/\/capetown.wordcamp.org\/2013\/files\/2013\/10\/Profilepic2-624x555.jpg 624w, https:\/\/capetown.wordcamp.org\/2013\/files\/2013\/10\/Profilepic2.jpg 1487w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 300px) 100vw, 300px\" \/><\/p>\n<p>I&#8217;ve been working in the corporate development world for the last 17 years (now I feel old) and\u00a0during my time working for a small C# development house I decided I wanted to go to America. I had\u00a0been self-taught so the first thing I needed was a degree, I signed up with the University of Liverpool\u00a0to study my Masters in Software Engineering.<\/p>\n<p>During this time, while I was working full time, had two small children and was studying all night, I realised\u00a0I needed a break and so I started <a title=\"Lazygamer\" href=\"http:\/\/www.lazygamer.net\/\" target=\"_blank\">writing about video games<\/a> &#8211; the things I loved to play back when I\u00a0had time to do anything except work.<\/p>\n<p>Not knowing anything about PHP at the time meant I went headlong into yet another steep learning\u00a0curve, one that I am still very much stuck on.<\/p>\n<p>Soon after starting the site I moved to Australia (yeah, wrong country but what can you do). After\u00a0spending 2 and half years over there I was offered a job in America and decided to rather return\u00a0home because like I said &#8211; I\u2019m not so good at following a planned path.<\/p>\n<p><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"alignleft size-full wp-image-398472\" alt=\"LazygamerNet\" src=\"https:\/\/2013.capetown.wordcamp.org\/files\/2013\/10\/LazygamerNet.png\" width=\"187\" height=\"80\" \/><\/p>\n<p>So\u00a0now I sit here with a full time corporate job, 2 much larger children and a loving wife and a hobby\u00a0that has turned into a business that allows me to see the world and experience new and exciting\u00a0things on a weekly basis.<\/p>\n<p>My talk is about how it is possible to turn your garage hobby into an income earner while not having to\u00a0invest very much money in the beginning at all &#8211; basically a look at how I got here and what hurt the\u00a0most.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>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&#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":9355949,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[29],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-382136","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-speakers"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p3pPMj-1Bpu","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/capetown.wordcamp.org\/2013\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/382136","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/capetown.wordcamp.org\/2013\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/capetown.wordcamp.org\/2013\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/capetown.wordcamp.org\/2013\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/9355949"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/capetown.wordcamp.org\/2013\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=382136"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/capetown.wordcamp.org\/2013\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/382136\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":398474,"href":"https:\/\/capetown.wordcamp.org\/2013\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/382136\/revisions\/398474"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/capetown.wordcamp.org\/2013\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=382136"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/capetown.wordcamp.org\/2013\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=382136"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/capetown.wordcamp.org\/2013\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=382136"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}