Last week, I took my first trip to Canada for WordCamp Canada 2025 (WCEH). Anyone who follows me on social media, may have seen the video I recorded in anticipation of the trip.
While sadly I didn’t do a lot of exploring, I had a number of takeaways from the event.
Organization
There have been a few posts reflecting on the event as I write this and I think it’s safe to say they all have (at least) one thing in common — the organizing team did a fantastic job. So much props to the Canadian WordPressers who put this together. It’s not easy to run a WordPress event — especially as a volunteer — and they deserve a ton of credit. This is an event that felt like it punched well above its weight class.
For my part, I was pulled in to act as an emcee. Besides emceeing at my own events (WordCamp SLC), this is the first time I’ve been formally named as such. It was a lot of fun, and I was happy to introduce and riff on the introductions for my friends Michelle Frechette and Dee Teal.
The vibe
I got a distinct feeling that WCEH had a higher concentration of what I’ve referred to as “movers and/or shakers” — people who are known either within the WordPress community specifically, or the broader internet software ecosystem. Bringing in speakers like Dave Winer (a fundamental contributor to the RSS protocol on which much of the internet and podcasting today operates) and Evan Prodromou (who helped create ActivityPub, the backbone of the open web Twitter/X alternative, Mastodon) made the event feel much larger in scope than just WordPress, even when both talks centered a lot on WordPress implementations and ideas. Other speakers, like Jill Binder, Carl Alexander and Brent Toderash, among many others, I could expect to see on the stage of a “flagship” event.
And that’s even before we get into Matt Mullenweg’s surprise appearance.
With (at least) three distinct voices who have had a hand in shaping the modern web in attendance, it felt a lot like PressConf did (it didn’t hurt that opposite my emceeing spot was PressConf’s founder and lead organizer, Raquel).
My WCEH Wapuu video (and possibly my recent pro-Wapuu post) and even the Sora AI experiment (where I asked Sora to make me rap about WordCamp Canada, far more effectively than I could actually rap about…anything) seemed to do the job they were intended to do. While I don’t want to make myself out to be focused on social media success or being a “content creator” (even though that’s exactly what I am 🤮), I did come up with the idea for and started creating those shorts (and the Community + Code podcast) as a way to “elevate my personal brand”. I say that it seems like it’s been effective because even if people didn’t recognize me, they recognized the videos (and had good things to say about them). And Wapuu met some new friends at the event.
But the biggest “vibe” takeaway I had was the feeling of community. A lot of the folks in the WordPress community I’ve known for years. Some I’ve only known of. And still others I’ve only met (virtually) recently. But, being at WCEH felt like I was surrounded by friends. And this was far more so than at WordCamp US a couple months ago. Maybe it’s a Canadian thing, or maybe because the size of the event was 1/6th the size of WCUS in August, but I left feeling very deeply appreciative of the connections I’ve made in the time I’ve been in this community and felt way more enthusiastic and positive about the WordPress project and ecosystem as a result.
The event
Part of my job as a Developer Advocate at Pantheon is to be the face (or one of) of Pantheon for the community. That means that, far more so than in my previous engineering roles (at Pantheon and elsewhere), when I go to events like this, I’m working. Don’t get me wrong, “working” in this context very much means having conversations with people and making connections. And I enjoy doing that. But that means that often, that facetime takes precedence over other things.
As such, I didn’t make it to everyone’s talk, but I was pretty happy with those that I did attend. It’s a bit of a “known issue” that at a certain point in your WordPress journey, you get to a point where you aren’t learning much at events like this anymore. As such, those sessions I do go to tend towards the “soft skills” side of things rather than technical talks, or I go to support my friends or former colleagues. But I definitely came away from this camp feeling like I learned stuff. And beyond the talks I went to, there were a number that I didn’t make it to that I would have had I not been caught up in the “hallway track”.
And the hallway track was really good. Again, there were a lot of interesting people in attendance which made it easy to have interesting conversations with people. And easy to find some folks to recruit as guests for my podcast.
While I didn’t get to really explore much of the Carleton University campus or Ottawa generally, the view outside was also very pretty.
Finally, while I won’t pretend to agree with the #WPDrama between WordPress’ founder and a private-equity-owned competitor to the company that I work for, I was interested that Matt decided to do a live Q&A at such a small event. And while I don’t feel like he adequately answered the question I asked at the town hall, from the perspective of earning the ticket that took me to a place where you can, apparently, get poutine from Pizza Hut, I was able to:
- name my company
- talk about drupal
- appear (sort of) on a video asking Matt a question
which I take to be a success.
(I did not have the poutine, which was not a success…not that I expect Pizza Hut to have vegan-friendly poutine…)
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