So this year I was fortunate enough to attend my first Word Camp.

I’ve been meddling (at best) with WordPress for the better part of the last decade, I’ve set up a few blogs and sites and even completed some custom development using WordPress as the base but I’ve never been someone who was ‘focused’ on WordPress or the WordPress community. This year I decided to take a deeper look into what makes the local WordPress community tick. Boy, what a ride it was.

Day one dawned a typically early spring Cape Town day, namely rain. After getting out to the awesome venue that is the River Club, we got to mingle with some of the attendees and pick and choose our selection of ‘swag’. I wasn’t sure what the protocol was, so I just grabbed a few interesting items, my favourite of which was the USB power banks supplied by FNB/Paypal. A spread of coffee/teas and muffins awaited us while we milled around the entrance area, and then onto the workshops we went.

I chose to attend all the developer workshops and I wasn’t disappointed. From Brent’s talk on Varying Vagrant Vagrants to Pippin’s ‘Commitment to Backwards Compatibility’, each speaker was interesting, knowledgeable and insightful. I especially enjoyed Justin’s talk on the WordPress API, mainly because how interesting and funny he was at the same time, even after a 16 odd hour flight.

Day two was more of a typical conference day, with everyone seating in the auditorium, cinema style, listening to the talks of the day. Our’s MC’s were the always funny Derick Watts and the Sunday Blues who had the crowd in stitches in between each talk.

The talks on day two were just as interesting as day one, but the two that stood out for me the most were Drew’s ‘It takes a Village to make Wordpress’ and Bruce’s ‘The Age of the Digital Superhero’. Not that all the other speakers weren’t great (they were) but these two resonated with me on a personal level.

The last talk ended with the words ‘f*cking awesome’ which was apt, as this was the feeling I had when I left WordCamp. I met some amazing people and was inspired as a developer, both and a personal and a technical level. WordPress has come a long way in the past few years and it was really great to see and meet so many people who are developing, using and growing WordPress as a platform.

Special thanks go to Hugh Lashbrooke, who put all this together and was super friendly every time you chatted to him, even though I am sure he was buzzing from the nerves of running such a huge event.

And finally, thanks to all the amazing WordPress users and developers I meet, who made me realised that there is something special about belonging to an open source community.

I’ll definitely be back next year.