Nearly 11 years ago, I attended my first and only WordCamp in London, not knowing a soul. Fast forward to last year, I became active on X (formerly Twitter), and my circle expanded to amazing folks from all over the globe, immersed in WordPress, web development, and great conversations. This time, before even stepping into WordCamp Europe, I already knew many attendees. Even better, many recognised me from X, making the in-person meetups incredibly fun.
Getting ready for WCEU
I had planned to attend WordCamp London last year, but it was cancelled due to costs. So, this year, I decided to take the plunge and book my way to Turin to attend WCEU 2024.
I booked my flights and hotel in February. I had hesitated to book the hotel and could not get the NH Lingotto, which was closest to the venue. I booked the AC Hotel which is about 10 minutes away and was still available at a discount. I used my last Amex voucher along with my miles to book business class flights for a quid on British Airways!
I printed some business cards and two T-shirts via Canva ahead of my trip. I thought it would be a good idea to wear a WebberZone-branded T-shirt for the days of the conference. And, what a great idea it was!
Off to Turin
My flight to Turin was at 6am from Gatwick, which is relatively the closest large airport to me. I woke up at about 1.30am and saw that the flight had been delayed by two hours, which meant that I could sneak in at least another hour of sleep. Which I did.
The bad news was that I missed an interesting Full Site Editing workshop that Anne Bovelett organised to help some of us lost souls.
I ended up spending a lot of time at the Gatwick lounge and bumped into a few people on the plane. It was only well into the second day that I realised that Turin airport at that time was full of WCEU attendees from London.
I took a taxi to the hotel from the airport. In retrospect, I’d have probably taken the train which was efficient and significantly cheaper.
The First Day in Turin (Wednesday)
Besides the FSE workshop, I had planned to attend the pre-event picnic in the park which was a great way to meet people even before the event. I’ve never been comfortable walking up to a random group of strangers and introducing myself and I was hoping the picnic would help me get to know people.
I had planned to meet Katie Keith from Barn2 and James Kemp from WooCommerce to explore the city and bumped into them while I was making my way to the park. They suggested exploring Turin using World City Trail, which is an interesting app that lets you solve puzzles whilst learning about the history of famous landmarks.
We took the tram to the city centre and began our tour from there. I strongly suggest wearing comfortable shoes as we were on our feet for a very long time. We had a drink and Katie posted this great photo of us that made me instantly famous. After dinner, we headed back to the Lingotto area and met up with several other attendees. Of all places, we found ourselves at The Dubliner, an Irish pub close to the venue.
The Second Day (Contributor Day and Freemius Makers’ Meetup)
Although I had signed up for Contributor Day, I decided to sleep in and take an office call and landed a bit late for Contributor Day. I had signed up for the plugins stream but was quite lost when the afternoon session began. So, I instead used the rest of the day to meet with a few people.
I launched Contextual Related Posts Pro at the start of the month and used Freemius to power the licensing and plugin updates. So, obviously, I signed up for the Freemius Makers’ Meetup which I had quite a bit about. It was a great place to meet other creators in a friendly, happy environment. I also got some good insights from Goran Mirkovic, who is the Chief Marketing Officer at Freemius and scheduled a sit-down with him on Saturday.
Can you spot me in the below image?
The Third Day (WCEU Day 1)
I had initially planned to attend a few talks on the first day. However, as I strolled through the venue, I ended up spending quite a bit of time around various sponsorship booths in the venue catching up with several people I had either met online or the previous day. The day went by rather quickly as a result. I hadn’t signed up for any of the huge number of parties to be held on that day and made the wise choice of relaxing on the day. My feet and back did thank me.
The Fourth Day (WCEU Day 2 and the After Party)
I had earmarked two talks on Saturday afternoon that I was keen to attend. The first was a short one by Torsten called “Nobody loves the native search” and with Better Search as one of the plugins that I will release a pro version for, I was keen to hear some of his thoughts on what we can do to make the WordPress search better.
The second was Katie and Matt’s talk titled “We spoke with over 50 different WordPress product owners. Here’s what we learned“. As a long-term dev with zero marketing experience in this space, I was keen to get some perspectives on what I can do to improve the conversion rate of my pro plugins.
I also spent 30 minutes with Goran getting some great ideas, which I now need to find the time to implement.
The WordCamp After Party was okay. A little bit of drinking, a little bit of dancing (if that’s what it can be called), a lot of conversations with several people and the “after after party” at the Dubliner till the wee hours of the morning. Including an “interesting” discussion with Bowe Frankema from Dollie about Schrödinger’s pizza – go ahead and ask me what that means.
I also snagged a selfie with Matt Mullenweg!
And the ever popular #MichelleAndMe selfie which I have seen a few times over the past year.
Summary
Besides those mentioned in the post above, I met a lot of people over the four days that I was in Turin and I’m sure I’ll miss a few. In no particular order:
- Remkus De Vries
- Maarten Belmans and Ine De Baerdemaeker from Studio Wombat
- Patrick Posner
- Ross Morsali from Search and Filter / Codeamp
- Vova Feldman from Freemius
- Vikas Singhal of InstaWP (aff.)
- Akshat Choudhury from BlogVault
- Raushan Jaiswal from Codewing
- Topher Kenobe
- Paul Halfpenny of PersonalizeWP
- Alex Panagis
- James Brooks
If you’re reading this and we met each other, please do leave a comment below (yes I still have them open in 2024).
WordCamp Europe 2025
Next year’s WordCamp Europe will be held in Basel. Are you coming?
