Finally! After looooong years at corona break i finally had the chance to visit a WordCamp on site again. Not just any WordCamp, but a WordCamp Europe. WordCamp Europe (WCEU) are the biggest WordPress community events ever. It takes place every year in another European city. This time it was in Athens. Greece.
There were exact 2545 attendees from 94 countries. But since there are actually only about 50 states in Europe, you can see very impressively that this event is is definitely a global one and what significance it has.
Some vacation before and a new coffee experience
This time I arrived a few days before WCEU and had a very nice vacation with my wife. Since we had already traveled the country extensively 30 years ago and had really checked out every sight, we just wanted to enjoy the Athens city life and of course the local beaches.
My biggest discovery in Athens was: Freddo coffee. This is (another) delicious Greek version of coffee and shows a vibrant coffee culture Freddo comes in two versions: Freddo espresso and Freddo cappuchino. You can get it everywhere and the baristas here really know their craft. 👍
Day 0: Contributor day
WCEU allways starts with the Contributor day (CD). On this day you can contribute together with others in different work teams to power up WordPress a little more. It doesn’t matter if you can program or not. There are enough opportunities for all kinds of skills and levels to get involved – e.g. testing, debugging, documenting, translating….
In fact, there were 658 participants in 23 teams.
Here you have the big change to learn from others or to show others your skills.
This year i decided to contribute in the Test team. Actually i wanted to get to know the Tide project – this is a set of automatic tests for plugins and themes. But it turned out a little different than planned. I had instead pulled a few pull requests. These are code changes that are waiting for a release before they are allowed to be transferred into the official code. I learned how to check code changes und how to test.
Day 1: early bird and enlightenment
This day was the “hardest” for me, because I had to get up very early to work. I always help out at WordCamps and do some work for the community. This time I helped from 7:30 to 13:00 at the registration as “Registration Wrangler”. The good thing about this job, you really meet everyone here. 😉
I spent the rest of the day wandering the aisles greeting old friends and making new ones. Networking at its best.
But the day brought me an unexpected surprise: I had made a mistake in the primeval time and ended up in the Lighning talk. Lighting talks are short presentations that briefly outline and introduce a specific topic. There were a total of three lighning talks that had something to do with AI. I can’t remember the first two talks. But I do remember very well the third talk, which was by Silvio Endruhn: Content creation with the help of AI.
Silvio has wonderfully done an A/B comparison of two websites. On one website the content was created by a human and on the other website with the help of AI. Then he compared these two websites over time. Result: the AI website performed better than the human website.
On his blog he has a detailed article (in German):
https://endruhn.de/case-study-content-writer-ai-vs-human/
Day 2: lazy and running
Because this was also my last day of vacation in Athens, I spent the morning having brunch with my wife and went to WordCamp around noon.
Therefore I worked a little bit in the afternoon. This time as a Photographer Supporter. I had to bring the SD cards of the photographers from a lecture room to content central in no time. So that the pictures could be processed there immediately and published on the website in a timely manner.
I liked the job because I could walk around all the time and met even more people 😉