It started with a rainy Friday afternoon in Massachusetts, literally. It was the same storm surge that hammered New York City that same weekend, causing massive floods in the city. It took me nearly an hour to drive out of Massachusetts due to the slow traffic. But once I hit the open roads of Upstate New York, it was a relatively smooth ride to Rochester, New York.
We didn’t arrive at our hotel until midnight. The staff was friendly and the place was cozy. It had a fireplace! It was time to crash and set my mind to WordPress programming mode for the next day.
INITIAL IMPRESSIONS
As I had written before in the past, this was my first time attending a WordCamp event in all of WordPress’s 20 years of existence, and my 13-plus years of using WordPress on and off. I didn’t know what to expect. The only thing I told myself was that this would probably feel like another Meetup event. Sure, there was the usual sign-in station, coffee station, panel rooms, and food but what made it different were the people.
Meetups usually bring in web developers, web designers, and other tech enthusiasts, but WordCamps felt more intimate. People who attend these events are really utilizing the platform for serious professional purposes. There were also sponsors who spoke at the panels and shared their contributions to the WordPress ecosystem.
The hosts, speakers, and sponsors were big-name players in my book and I was pretty damn excited to actually meet these folks! Folks like Michelle Frechette, Nyasha Green, and Jonathan Desrosiers. Then there were the big hitters of the hosting world like GoDaddy and Bluehost. I’ve been using Bluehost since 2009-ish and haven’t moved from them since. It was nice to actually meet someone who is a representative of the company.
Oh, and the swag. Holy crap!
CONNECTIONS WITH THE PEOPLE
The biggest takeaway for me was the comradery. The feeling of being part of an actual “community.” I’ve always been part of the web development community, but there was never a niche that I felt as comfortable as this. The attendees were talkative and shared valuable knowledge about project techniques, basic business practices, and advice on system setups and tools.
I met people who were seasoned veterans of the WordPress platform. Folks who have seen the ups and downs and massive update changes with the system since its early days. There were people who I connected with who were new to WordPress and were looking to start their own business or looking to join the community and start contributing to open-source projects.
MOTIVATED
Ever since coming back from the conference my mind literally flooded with motivation. I downloaded 16-plus podcast channels, subscribed to a dozen or more YouTube channels, followed people on Twitter (X), and downloaded themes and plugins to mess with. I had new thoughts about what to add to my client projects as I will be entering a development phase pretty soon. Block theme expansion it is!
Also, while still riding the high from WordCamp, I’ve since joined several other Meetup groups in the United States and have requested to help contribute to the WordPress Meetup efforts here in Boston. Hopefully, there will be a WordCamp closer to home. The last WordCamp Boston was scheduled for 2020, but it was canceled due to the pandemic. Perhaps it can be revived or maybe a newer WordCamp that brings in the whole of New England (Connecticut, Maine, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Rhode Island, and Vermont)!
In the meantime, I will definitely attend the next one if it takes place up in the North East. There may even be a possibility that I would like to speak at one of these events someday :). For the time being, I will need to find a way to fund future trips.