Last week I was in Porto, Portugal for WordCamp Europe. It was my first time at a big WordCamp, and my first time in Porto. I wasn’t expecting that I would get much time for sightseeing, and I was right. I spent almost all of my time either at the conference center or out with colleagues. There were over 2,000 attendees, including almost 300 Automatticians. I think that I met fewer colleagues than I missed, but it was still great to finally get to talk to people in person who I had previously only communicated with asynchronously.
At the contributor day, I was one of 800 volunteers who spent the day trying to improve WordPress. I joined the Meta table, which is responsible for WordPress.org and related sites. Together with Ryan Marks and Arnas Damasickis to improve documentation on developer.wordpress.org and improve uploading of captions to WordPress.tv. The developer.wordpress.org fix has already been deployed. It was a small one – simply adding a link this second link at the bottom of the page, but it turns out that it actually required talking to several people and making some code changes. It was definitely one of those moments where working synchronously was beneficial.
I think contributor day was my favorite day. It was really clear how important WordPress is to so many people and just what a great community it is. I am really proud to be a part of helping to democratize publishing.
I spent most of the next two days answering questions in the Jetpack booth. We recently announced that we are splitting up the gigantic feature-rich plugin into smaller, more focused plugins, and there was a lot of interest in this. I also got the chance to connect with many colleagues at Automattic, which was wonderful. My time in Porto ended with a fantastic meal at the Flow restaurant.
