WordCamp Europe 2019

WordCamps are the conferences organized by the community around the WordPress content management system, an open source project. I was lucky to participate in this fantastic event, currently the largest WordCamp in the world.

With 3200 tickets sold this year, the WordCamp Europe far surpasses the second largest WordCamp, the US, with around 1500 tickets sold last year. The WCEU takes place in a major european city each year, for example Vienna in 2016 or Paris in 2017. This year, the city was Berlin, on June 20, 21 and 22.

The mix of cultures participating in the WCEU is very diverse, with attendants from Spain to Russia to Japan. I was honored to attend the WordCamp and conduct a workshop about creating blocks for Gutenberg, the WordPress content editor, to participate in a debate panel around Gutenberg as well.

The sun woke up early these days: it was up at 4:40 hs. It was impossible to sleep anymore.

• 

• 

The first day was the Contributor Day. It’s an opportunity for everybody to contribute to the WordPress Open Source project, either with code, designing elements, testing accessibility, writing documentation, and more.

An event this large is impossible to manage without a lot of volunteers. There were tenths of them, of all backgrounds, all identified with a single fuchsia t-shirt, which btw, is my favorite color.

Sponsors are also essential for such a huge event, and there was an specific area allocated for them, where they could be approached by attendants, who could get some sweet free swag.

My workshop went well and the room with capacity for 52 people was fully booked and there was even a waiting list. I was humbled and happy because of all the support.

I work at Automattic on the the Jetpack plugin for WordPress, and we had a booth at the event. We had a fantastic artist, Pablo Ientile, that would create a lettering of a phrase you wrote, related to personal publishing on the Internet.

Finally, Matt Mullenweg, who started the WordPress open source project on 2003, dedicated a fair amount of time to respond any kind of questions from the community.

The event was so important that even the Deutsche Welle tv network was covering it.

Here’s a bunch of other candids around the event.

I also had a chance to go around Berlin shooting and I’ll be sharing some of the phots I made later here and on my Instagram profile, along with some photos of a recent trip to the beautiful Bruge in Belgium, plus Amsterdam, Den Haag & Rotterdam in Netherlands.