At the end of 2024, I counted up the WordCamps I'd attended in the previous two years and landed at nine. That number surprised me. It hadn't felt like nine — it felt like a sequence of individual events, each one distinct, each one worth the trip. But nine is a real number, and looking back across all of them together reveals something I wouldn't have seen from inside any single event.
The events span Asia, Europe, and North America: WordCamp Asia 2024 (Taipei), WordCamp Asia 2025 (Manila, where I was an organizer), WordCamp US 2025 (Portland), WordCamp Europe 2025 (Basel), WordCamp Sylhet 2024, WordCamp Malaysia 2024, and several others across South Asia. Different cultures, different community maturity levels, different dominant use cases for WordPress — and more continuity across all of them than I expected.
What Actually Makes WordCamps Worth Attending
The talks are good. Some of them are very good. But the talks are not why you fly across a continent to attend a WordCamp. You attend for the hallway track — the conversations between sessions, the dinner after the first day, the Contributor Day where you're sitting next to someone from a country you'd never otherwise interact with professionally.
The WordPress community is globally distributed in a way that most tech communities aren't. A meaningful percentage of the project's contributors come from Southeast Asia, South Asia, East Africa, and Latin America — not from the English-speaking tech hubs that dominate most conference lineups. That diversity changes what gets discussed, what problems people are trying to solve, and what you walk away thinking about.
The Asia Region Specifically
I've spent most of my WordCamp time in Asia, and the community here has a specific quality I find hard to describe. There's a seriousness to the contribution work that I don't always encounter at larger Western events. In Bangladesh, the Philippines, Malaysia, and parts of India, WordPress is infrastructure — not a preference, not a developer tool someone chose for a client project, but the actual foundation of a significant chunk of the web economy. People contributing to it carry that weight.
WordCamp Sylhet 2024 in particular was memorable. It's a regional event in northeast Bangladesh — not the flagship international conference, but a local community showing up for the project. The energy at smaller WordCamps like that one often exceeds larger events precisely because the people there chose to be there, not because they were sent by a company.
WordCamp Europe 2025: Basel
WordCamp Europe is the largest WordPress event in the world, with thousands of attendees from dozens of countries. Basel was my first European WordCamp, and the scale is genuinely different. The production quality is higher, the speaker lineup is more international, and the conversation at Contributor Day is more architecturally ambitious — people working on significant Core features, not just documentation cleanup.
I also contributed at WCEU — not as a table lead, but as a contributor working alongside the team. The cross-pollination of ideas at a WordCamp that size is something you can't manufacture at smaller events. You end up in conversations with Core committers, plugin developers with millions of active installs, and community organizers from countries you'd never otherwise have an excuse to spend time with.
WordCamp US 2025: Portland
WordCamp US has a different character than European and Asian events — it's more developer-focused, more infrastructure-oriented, more attuned to the enterprise end of the WordPress ecosystem. For someone who works in hosting infrastructure, that's a natural fit. The Contributor Day Hosting table conversations at WCUS tend to be more technical and more connected to immediate Core development work.
I led the Hosting table there, which I've written about separately. But the surrounding conference was valuable in its own right — the sessions on performance, caching, and scalable WordPress architecture are consistently among the most substantive technical content in the WordPress conference circuit.
What Nine WordCamps Taught Me
The clearest thing I can say after nine events: the WordPress community is the product. The software matters — obviously — but the network of people maintaining it, documenting it, translating it, and teaching it to new users is what makes WordPress durable in a way that technically superior tools often aren't.
- Regional WordCamps are often more energizing than flagship events, because the community is smaller and the investment is more personal.
- The friends and collaborators you make at Contributor Day are often more valuable than any session you attended.
- Going to a WordCamp outside your home region is worth doing at least once — the perspective shift is real.
- If you're a first-timer, go to Contributor Day. It's the day the event actually earns its name.
I don't know exactly how many WordCamps I'll attend in the next two years. But the answer will be more than zero, and probably more than I plan for. That's what happens when something keeps being worth it.
