Tomorrow I’ll be leaving on a jet plane for the land of windmills and tulips: Holland. The purpose: to participate in, and speak at, WordCamp Europe! For the first time ever, a pan-European WordCamp is taking place on Oct. 5-7 in Leiden, The Netherlands.
As many of you know, we at illuminea have been organizing the local Israeli WordCamps for the past three years. WordCamp Jerusalem is one of the highlights of our year, when we and hundreds of other WordPress users and developers get to emerge from behind our computers and meet up, and learn from each other. It’s awesome.
However, I’ve never been to a WordCamp outside of Israel, and I particularly always dreamed of going to THE WordCamp in San Francisco. But San Fran is so far, so much jet lag, and so costly, and leaving my kiddies for as long as I’d need to in order to attend WordCamp San Francisco made it basically impossible.
But now, there is another “THE WordCamp” happening, and this time it’s in our neck of the woods(ish): Europe! What’s amazing about this conference is that it recognizes that a significant portion of the WordPress community is not located in the US, and deserves attention too. Why should the rest of the world always have to shlep to the States? Well now we don’t.
Anyways, I am so honored (and terrified) to be among the WordPress luminaries speaking at the event: check out the speakers list here. I am going to be like some awe-struck groupie, trying to meet all the amazing WP people that I’ve communicated with online, but never met face-to-face. WordPress heaven.
And here’s a twitter list of all the speakers:
A Twitter list with all the #wceu speakers? Look no further: https://t.co/ZXbYAmWdRH
— #timeback (@FloorDrees) September 26, 2013
For those of you who are interested, I’m speaking Sunday afternoon on running a WordPress business. The name of my talk is “Learn from my mistakes, don’t make them: The Business of WordPress”, and I’ll be Open Sourcing some of the most important lessons I’ve learned, by making mistakes of course, over the last seven years of running a WordPress-based business.
Speaker: Miriam Schwab @miriamschwab http://t.co/srBYm5ULWG #wceu
— WordCamp Europe (@WCEurope) August 7, 2013
Huge kudos to the organizers, who I imagine have forgotten what sleep looks like in the midst of organizing this massive endeavor. And the amount of people who are flying in from every corner of the earth, on their own dime, is also seriously impressive.
In short: this is the WordPress community at its best. I can’t wait.
See you in Leiden!
(Apparently, the Rhine River runs right past where I’m staying in Leiden. So pretty!)
Source: Wikipedia
