While I was in Paris, France on my 2017 Europe Trip ... I for the most part attended the Wordcamp Europe conference that was held in the northern part of the city. This would be my first Wordcamp in Europe and my second Wordcamp overall after having attended my first Wordcamp in Maui, Hawaii.
I was excited to meet other people who are also Wordpress enthusiasts and also perhaps learn something new from the conference speakers as well.
Wordcamp Europe Sponsors Area
Prior to sitting in on the opening remarks at Wordcamp Europe, the conference set-up a sponsors area where major companies such as GoDaddy, Bluehost, Yoast, and much more would set-up their customized booths of varying size. For the first hour, I spent some time looking around familiar companies as well as new ones that I've never heard of.
Many of the sponsors also gave out cool freebies anywhere from useless spinners to very helpful portable battery chargers. I grabbed two Bluehost battery chargers as those would come super handy for my digital nomad travels.
Short funny side story at the conference that almost scared the sh*t out of me was when the flip-cap water bottles the conference provided me opened up in my bag, which then essentially flooded the entire inside of the bag, which included my laptop.
I quickly emptied the contents and opened up my laptop to make sure it still work. Thankfully, it did. And I have Yoast to thank, since their free little notebook and purple bag that I grabbed actually soaked up the majority of the water that leaked into my bag. Otherwise, I would have had a non-working laptop.
Wordcamp Europe Conference Speakers
Wordcamp provided a small little booklet that contained both days of agenda of conference speakers as well as workshops. So if attendees did not want to sit in on a conference speaker, they could simply attend one of the workshops that were sponsored by one of the larger companies funding Wordcamp Europe. I found many of the workshops to be quite basic, so I didn't attend any of the workshops.
I decided to simply sit in on a couple conference speaker presentations, including a design talk by John Maeda as well as a Wordpress security talk by Miriam Schwab. Again, the conference talks basically spoke on a high level, although I've found the security talks to be actually quite helpful, as I'm only a visual designer and not a technical back-end designer.
Wordcamp also offers some speed networking sessions, of which I partook in one, where we would have 3 minutes to speak with each person before switching with someone else. However, I got exhausted speaking for so fast and so short, so I stopped after speaking with the third person.
Overall Wordcamp Europe Impressions
I did enjoy Wordcamp Europe as it was a great way to connect up with new people, particularly the European Wordpress community. Because I've been doing my world travels as well as already having a steady remote digital nomad job ... I didn't attend the conference for networking reasons, so didn't go out with the intent to ever find new contact or jobs.
Although I did enjoy meeting up with an eclectic group of Dutch who are based out of Rotterdam that run the Level Level agency. I also met up with couple people from Cape Town, South Africa who I got to hang out and party with at the after-party. Even funny is that the one person from South Africa I met up also got fined 50 euros on the Paris metro for other reasons. She and I spoke for hour just on our incidence in getting fined in Paris, and how we both wouldn't return to the city.
Wordcamp Europe also hosted a after party in west Paris sponsored by Sucuri that I stayed at til the wee hours of midnight. GoDaddy also had a private event sponsored at the Aquarium de Paris near Eiffel Tower.
In any case, I am already looking forward to seeing where Wordcamp Europe will be held next.
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- Have you ever attended a Wordcamp conference around the world?
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Feel free to see my full 2017 European travel plans.
Next Location >> Edinburgh, Scotland
Also Check Out My >> Paris, France post
And follow me @hustletoparadise to stay up to date on the European adventures and travels.