My Non-Geeky WCEU 2014

Vasil from Free Sofia Tours explaining why everyone hates the St Sofia statue

Setting WordCamp Europe 2014 in such a beautiful and unusual city as Sofia, Bulgaria, was a stroke of genius.

Creative inspiration lay around every street corner and the National Palace of Culture itself (the venue for this year’s event) was full of awe-inspiring views over the city as well as other interesting curios on the walls of the halls and the layout of the floors kept you literally on your toes! (I, typically, got lost several times on the first day going between talks)

Combine this with a patchwork history, culminating in a city pulled in at least 3 geographical directions – clear influences from Russia, Turkey and Europe made for a ‘layered’ city (as described by our excellent guide Vasil from Free Sofia Tours on our only free day there) which has at times neglected its infrastructure for various reasons, so you have to watch your step a LOT for wonky paving and hanging telephone wires. It all added to the experience!

If ever there was a perfect setting to get your brain into accepting new ideas and concepts, this was it.

The event

I have to shout out to the local organisers Petya and Tina of SiteGround who, along with all the other organisers and volunteers, did an amazing job of making the weekend run smoothly and keeping us well fed and watered throughout.

All helping to get our creative juices flowing.

International

There were around 950 people there from more than 25 nations, the majority of which were designers and developers but by no means all.

There was me, for example – I don’t know any code and struggle even to tell you what the difference is between PHP, HTML and CSS. My husband has explained this to me on many occasions but to no avail – it’s like my ‘offside rule’ blind spot. Only I do actually understand the offside rule.

I was also able to attend and add value to the Contributor Day, but more on that story later.

The talks

Still, I learned an awful lot thanks to the system of colour-coding the talks so I could avoid anything labelled as ‘Intermediate Developer or ‘Advanced Developer’ and instead could instead opt for ‘Design’, ‘Business’ or ‘Humanities’.

Great summary of the WordPress ethos

Highlights for me included Yana Petrova on depression in the IT industry, Chris Lema on professional WordPress, Hugo Fernandez teaching us how to unlock our creative minds, Tony Perez on WordPress security, and Simon Wheatley from Code for the People summing up what makes WordPress what it is and how running a business in the same way benefits us all.

The eagle-eyed link followers among you will notice that a couple of those talks were developer-aimed, so guess I know more than I think I do!

Contributing

I got to prove this to myself on the Monday, also known to us as Contributor Day. The myth goes that only developers and designers can contribute, but that’s just not true. Everybody’s skills are valued and everybody found a job to do.

I was in fact torn between two sub-groups: Documentation or Marketing. Marketing won, and what followed was the best day of my professional life so far. I learned so much, and was part of a process that will benefit the WordPress community as a whole for years to come. Don’t want to give away too much just yet though! Believe me, when it goes live, I’ll let you know!

The whole weekend highlighted for me what makes WordPress what it is – its people. The people that spawned the philosophy.

Rockstars

Me, 2nd from right with the team at Contributor Day

Head of this is Matt Mullenweg of Automattic, the company that heads up the various arms of WordPress, who was hanging around with everybody else and anybody who had any questions for him were welcome to just walk up and ask. He’s a very affable chap as are all the other WordPress ‘rockstars’, many of whom were also there, and who I, with many free drinks inside me at the after party, had a right good laugh with. Chris Lema calls this Approachable WordPress.

And Contributor Day gave me the opportunity to work with another of WordPress’ rockstars – Sara Rosso. An inspiring woman, it was amazing to be a part of her team.

Speaking of which, this is WordPress in a nutshell yet again. A team of 8 people including me and Pat (other half personally and professionally and my partner in Moghill) from England, Sara Rosso – an American living in Italy, a German, a Dutch guy (from the Yoast team no less) and three Bulgarians, one of whom was living in Canada – none of whom had met before (apart from me and Pat, obviously) working together for the greater good of WordPress.

After all, as Simon Wheatley quoted in his aforementioned talk (and I’m paraphrasing here) if the overall pie is bigger, then each slice of that pie grows bigger too. So the better WordPress is and the more professionals use it well, the more there will be for each agency or developer to do with more potential to grow their businesses.

So here I am!

This was actually my 5th WordCamp event, but it had such an effect on me, it has prompted me to finally start myself a personal blog. Let’s hope it’s one I continue to feed, unlike my last Blogger effort… (You don’t want to know…)

You can read other people’s experiences of the day by following #wceu on Twitter.