Back from WordCamp San Francisco

I’m back from my WordCamp San Francisco 2014 tour and I’m genuinely excited after meeting close to a thousand WordPress community members over the past few days. The magic of WordCamp San Francisco is impossible to describe unless you’ve been there at least once, and if you haven’t – I’d definitely suggest you to plan for it. However, WCSF with it’s scale would not exist in the same form and from 2015 this would be WordCamp US (or USA), hosted somewhere else and ready to accommodate more than 1500 attendees given the growth pace over the past 9 years in San Fran.

SiteGround's team at WordCamp San Francisco
SiteGround’s team at WordCamp San Francisco

As a WordPress Ambassador and Contributor for SiteGround I was able to attend the event and spend a week at San Francisco. I would like to thank SiteGround again for sending me there and the WordPress crew behind WCSF – especially Andrea and Jen – for making sure the logistics would not lead to any confusion for attendees despite of the flexible and diverse program this year.

2014 was a special one since the Community Summit happened on Monday, together with team meetups on Tuesday and Wednesday. I’ll get back to that in a bit.

The first day of the WordCamp was Saturday, when close to a thousand people attended the massive event in the Mission Bay Conference Center. There were plenty of speakers, sponsors, contributors, experienced developers and designers, project leads and committers and newbie users, too. Everyone was more than welcome to join, learn and gather inspiration from the source.

Sunday was a mixture of a blogging track, Contributor day and short presentations by contributor team leads – a flexible schedule suitable for newbie users and bloggers, experienced contributors and people taking their first steps contributing to various aspects of WordPress. I joined the WordPress Core team working on a few patches, and pair-programming with Rodrigo, a great Brazilian developer who contacted me to co-work on a ticket with him.

Also, I got my first BuddyPress patch in this weekend – thanks for the commit Boone!

Speaking of Boone, I wasn’t able to attend many sessions this weekend, but I would certainly recommend Matt’s State of the Word (the annual talk) covering the last year and the future of WordPress, and Boone’s Practical Guide to Contributing one – a must see for anyone interested in WordPress in general, regardless of your contributing culture so far (this would change your perspective for sure).

Monday was a great start of the week, since numerous WordPress contributors and team members met and discussed the future of WordPress. The story of those meetings won’t be revealed, since the first rule of Community Summit is: “You DO NOT talk about Community Summit”. But trust me, what’s going to happen with WordPress over the next year or two, would be worth it. 🙂

Tuesday and Wednesday gathered different teams together, working on various projects and discussing specifics for each team’s field. A lot of internal riddles were solved and solutions were taken, and most discussions ended up with actionable items that would (hopefully) be executed over the next few months.

It’s been a great pleasure meeting enthusiastic and heavily involved WordPress contributors over the past days, and this energy is certainly keeping a tight grip on me for some time. Given the plans for WordCamp US, the success of WordCamp Europe 2013 and 2014 and the growing Asian community, keep your eyes open for the local WordCamps and meetups, and the closest massive gatherings happening in 2015.

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