WordCamps 2014 recap | Marko Heijnen

Last year was a great year of visiting WordPress events over the world and then specially WordCamps. In total I went to 10 WordCamps where I went to 5 new WordCamps which include that I finally went to Asia to have a look at the community in Tokyo. With a big thanks to my employee 1&1 which paid for all WordCamps except the one in Tokyo.

When you travel all over the world and meet the communities, you see and do really cool things and in this posts I want to highlight a few of those moments.

WordCamp Norway

This is a WordCamp that is close to my heart since it’s my first event that I spoke at and even more important, it’s organized by a great group of people. You always feel really welcome there and the cold snowy weather makes it an unique experience. This time I did a talk about Javascript and showed some cool examples. It was the first time I talked about it and was a great thing to show new technologies you can use.

And this time, a plan to grab food on the Korketrekkeren hill failed because the restaurant had a private event. So instead we decided to go on a sledding adventure down the hill. This resulted in a lot of fun with people from around the world. After that we grab some food in the city and did some sightseeing. Walking through Oslo we saw Frogner Park and the Royal Palace. All-in-all it was an amazing experience that everyone should have at least once.

WordCamp NYC

It’s my second visit to New York and it was really fun to be back. It’s always great to be in the USA since most of the active contributors are there and always good to catch up with them. Somehow as the first time my talk kind of changed during the period I submitted it till the moment I presenting. Which in this case resulted in a really cool grunt plugin for GlotPress which you can check out here: https://github.com/markoheijnen/grunt-glotpress.

As usual when traveling you do some sightseeing and I decided to go to the 9/11 Memorial Museum which I didn’t had the time the first visit. It was an unique and great experience. The waterfalls are impressive to see and after walking around I also saw that they commemorating the birthdays of the victims by placing a single white rose on the names. I didn’t expected that but it’s a great idea to do. It gives meaning and a feeling what the person would have done if it was still alive.

WordCamp Tokyo

This was an event and a week to never forget. I always wanted to go to Asia and told multiple people that I wanted to go. At WordCamp Europe 2013 I asked Naoko Takano to inform me when the next WordCamp would be and sometimes I would ask(nag) her about it. When it was announced I informed and was allowed to speak and together we decided to speak about GlotPress. And I was not alone that wanted to go to Tokyo so I had the luck to travel together with Mike Schroder to Tokyo.

Before my talk I had to prepare with my interpreter Yusuke Nakayama to see how something like this work and what my talk is about. It was really interesting and good to explain someone what it was about and the questions he had since in the end I could improve my slides. the talk itself went pretty well and as far as I can tell Yusuke did an awesome job. Sometimes I believe he was even explaining a bit more so people would really understand. In the end some of the attendees said they will look at GlotPress which is always a win.

After the WordCamp there was also a WordPress meetup we attended. It was really interested since the spoken language here is English which makes it for the foreigners easy to join and learn from others. Because of this, the meetup was small but that is a good thing. It was an event for 6 hours which includes many breaks with pizza, donuts and drinks. A great environment to speak and to learn.

After all the WordPress things we also went to grab food and drinks in the city on Sunday and Monday with a bunch of people. With as highlight around 7 hours singing in two karaoke bars on Monday evening/night.

Conclusion

This is just a highlight of three WordCamps I had a great time. The other WordCamp are listed below. Every single of of them had their own unique experience and from this year I will start blogging more about this events and highlight the cool side of WordPress.