Jonathan Bossenger

This year, I was fortunate enough to attend WordCamp US in Portland, Oregon. It was both my first time at a US WordCamp and a US flagship event.

Monday: Arrival

I arrived in Portland after approximately 23 hours of travel at around 10:30 in the morning and was met by a fellow Automattician, Ojoma Emina, at baggage claim (the power of the WordPress-branded laptop bag!). Ojoma (or OJ as he introduces himself) is from Nigeria, and it was his first WCUS as well. Someone had recommended trying the TriMet train from the airport to the hotel so we grabbed the train and settled in for the 30 minute ride into town. The station stopped just outside the entrance to our hotel, and we were both pleased to learn we could check in early. After 24 hours in the same clothes, the shower was heavenly!

In the hotel lobby, I met Andy Fragen and Topher DeRosia, who had also arrived that morning, and after chatting for a bit we decided to grab lunch at the Burgerville around the corner. There, we were joined by Jake Spurlock and David Baumwald.

I had no idea that Burgerville was a bit of a local brand, but the food was great, even if the diner area wasn’t that spectacular.

After lunch I went back to my room to unpack and rest a little. After that I wandered down to the hotel lobby. This turned out to be a great place to hang out with many of the other WordPressers attending WCUS. While I know most Automatticians were staying at the Hyatt, it seems many other attendees were as well. There were WordPress folks everywhere!

By dinner time more and more folks had arrived, including folks from my team, Nick Diego and Birgit Pauli-Haack. At around 6pm we started thinking about dinner, and rounded up fellow Automatticians Robert Sreberski, Manzoor Wani and Mike Stott, as well as Andy Fragen and walked over to the Metropolitan Tavern on the rooftop of the hotel across the road. There we happened upon Wes Theron, who joined us for dinner.

Image courtesy Birgit Pauli-Haack

For dinner I had the fried chicken, which came with a biscuit. Having never had the American biscuit I was intrigued to try it out, only to discover it was actually just what I know as a scone. My refusal to accept that what I was eating was not a scone frustrated my American friends, but it’s a hill I’m prepared to die on!

The realities of time zone travel

One of the downsides of travelling across multiple time zones is the affect it has on your sleep patterns. Whenever I travel to different time zones, I try and stay awake the whole first day I arrive, and then go to sleep at my usual bed time, but in the local time. Unfortunately this means when I’m in the US, I’m going to bed close to the time I’m usually waking up at home. So means that my body keeps trying to wake up when I’m trying to sleep, and by 5 am Portland time every day I was wide awake. I could feel each day how my brain function was affected, and by the end of the week I was dead tired, and struggling to function properly. I need to see if I can do something to mitigate this if I ever travel across time zones for events in future. A number of folks I’ve spoken to have recommended TimeShifter so it might be worthwhile trying this out.

Tuesday: Contributor Day

For Contributor Day, I had signed up as co-table lead with Wes Theron for the Training Team table. The WCUS organisers were trying out a different format for Contributor Day, which I think worked really well. Instead of having the table leads introduce each team, Aaron Campbell acted as MC, introducing each table, their table leads, and their goals for the day. This meant the day was much more streamlined, and we could get working pretty quickly.

We had an excellent turnout at the Training Table, with a total of 20 contributors taking part — a full table!

Highlights of the day included completing the creation of all outdated thumbnails and having a contributor thoroughly test our PolyLang implementation.

I also met and had a chat with Mitch Canter from WebDevStudios about helping with reviewing PRs for the Learn codebase, which I’ve had to step back from in recent times. Mitch is keen to take over this role, and I plan to connect with him to follow up.

Tuesday evening was the WCUS Thank You Dinner for organisers, speakers and volunteers. It was held at Spirit of 77, a local sports bar within walking distance from the hotel. Dinner was DIY tacos and nachos, which were delicious.

I was also tickled by the sign they had hung up above the urinals in the men’s room!

Wednesday: Showcase day

On showcase day, I had planned to spend most of the day attending talks and talking to folks. However, I had a couple of unexpected side quests.

Firstly, an update to the Abilities API threw me for a bit of a loop, as I was planning to use this in my Workshop on Friday. (more on this later)

I was also asked to join two other meetings: one internal meeting, and another with Matt and folks from my team which Anne had organized with a group of YouTubers attending the event:

• Michael Cunningham
• Christian Taylor
• Mark Szymanski

I found the meeting with the YouTubers interesting, as they were (as Nick pointed out later) asking questions that anyone who follows Core updates would know. It made me realise there’s more work to be done around surfacing news and updates to WordPress Core and the project in general to the regular user base. One thing I’ve wanted to do is grow my own YouTube channel and include more content on WordPress Core news and updates. This meeting inspired me to kick off more efforts in this area, especially as I’m part of the 6.9 release squad.

After these meetings, I was able to connect and speak with several developers about WordPress and AI, and I found them to be mostly very interested and excited about how AI tools can enhance the developer experience. A number of them already knew me from my live streams, Learn videos, and online workshops, and were planning to attend my workshop at WordCamp. A couple even asked me about AI-assisted block generation. I hope they enjoyed Matt’s closing on Friday!

Conference days

The two conference days were a bit of a whirlwind of activity.

I spent Thursday morning doing the rounds of the sponsor area, meeting folks, chatting with sponsors, and just generally hanging out. A personal highlight was the Voodoo Doughnut truck, which I’m embarrassed to admit I had two of, before someone pointed out we were only supposed to take one per person! I love doughnuts.

One thing I did not expect was walking away with write access to the WP REST API docs. I had already chatted briefly with K. Adam White at Contributor Day, but we bumped into each other again as he was walking past the sponsor area, and I was sat at a table checking an email. On a whim, I asked him what it would take to get me access to those docs, so I could update them without needing to ping him every time. Apparently, all it took was me asking, and he added me as a contributor to the repository on the spot!

Friday morning, I joined Ryan Welcher, Birgit Pauli-Haack, and Brian Coords for a Creator Studio discussion about the future of WordPress and AI. This was a fun chat in which Ryan used AI to generate 10 questions, and we answered them.

Straight after the Creator Studio chat, I presented my workshop, Turn Your Local WordPress Install Into Your AI Coding Assistant.

As I mentioned previously, an update to the Abilities API happened the same week WCUS. As I was using this API during my workshop, the unexpected update caught me off guard.

I ended up testing the updates on the morning of Showcase Day, but it had me worried for a day or so. The changes required me to make updates to my slides, but in making these last-minute presentation updates I inadvertently introduced an error in the requirements slide that I missed during my last check.

Fortunately, I was able to work around it during the workshop, but it’s a lesson to me to perhaps not present workshop content that’s based on software that’s actively being developed.

During the workshop, things went fairly smoothly, although I did encounter many more attendees having issues than I expected. Instead of using the last half an hour to showcase some of my example Abilities, thereby hopefully sparking interest in what’s possible with Abilities, I ended up merely discussing them.

Then I spent the rest of the time helping those who encountered issues. As it turned out, the main problems were related to their development experience, with folks making coding errors, missing specific steps from the workshop, or putting things in the wrong place.

I left feeling that the workshop wasn’t as effective as I’d hoped. As I reflected on this afterwards, I need to plan better for these types of hiccups during technical workshops.

If you want to watch the workshop recording, it’s available on WordPress.tv or YouTube.

Thursday and Friday afternoons were spent on my WordPress.com booth shifts. Given the nature of WordCamps, the last 2-3 hours of each day were very quiet, and we only had a handful of visitors to the booth. Those who did pop by were very interested in our swag, specifically the bags and caps, with several folks complimenting the bags as the best at the event. I didn’t really get much of a chance to demo Studio to folks, although Daniel Bachuber did stop by and ask for a demo to see what new features had been added.

By Friday I was so tired that while everyone else was at the official after party, I opted to have a quiet dinner with Birgit, Ryan and Nick. I then picked up a few snacks from the hotel market, and spent a quiet evening in my room watching a movie.

General thoughts about Portland

During my time in Portland I didn’t really see a lot of the city. What did strike me was the number of folks who mentioned how they felt unsafe walking the streets. I’ll be honest, as a boy from Cape Town, I felt pretty safe.

I did see some interesting folks out and about during any short walks I did take, but nothing that made me fearful for my life. I guess everyone has a different perspective. The city certainly was very eclectic, any many locals had a very 90s alternative/grunge appearance, which I guess to some folks could be considered alarming.

Mostly, everyone was just friendly and helpful and I had no issues walking around the local area.

Saturday

On Saturday morning, Nick joined me for breakfast at Denny’s, and then we shared an Uber to the airport.

On the flight home I thought about how wonderful it was to be able to connect with both Automatticians and WordPress community members I’ve worked alongside for many years, and never had the chance to meet.

Post Script

On Saturday morning, while waiting for the Uber in the hotel lobby, a workshop attendee came up and thanked me for presenting the workshop, and for the work Nick, I, and the other members of our team do.

Several people also reached out to me via Slack afterwards with the same sentiment, and I’ve seen some attendees discussing the MCP Adapter on Twitter. It also helped expose a bug in the MCP adapter, for which a workshop attendee has already submitted a PR to fix.

The icing on the cake happened when I got back to work. I opened Twitter and saw I’d received a new DM, with probably the most delightful conversation about my workshop.

After leaving WCUS feeling a bit annoyed with myself for the mistakes I made in the slides, all this activity afterward has left me feeling much better about the effectiveness of the workshop. After almost 5 years of doing them, there’s still a lot I can learn about presenting live demo workshops, but just knowing they had an impact makes it all worthwhile.

Featured image courtesy Automattic events team/Pixel Nick Photography