The Finnish WordPress community is incredibly active taken into account the size of our country: we have regular meetups in five cities and all our WordCamps have sold out in a matter of hours. Seravo has a long history of supporting these events not only by sponsoring them but also by encouraging our employees to share their knowledge about WordPress to a wider audience.
In addition to the Finnish events we like to get to know other communities too. Seravo is a regular sponsor at WordCamp Europe, which is of course a huge event for any European WordPress enthusiast, but it is not all about the size of the event either. Every community is equally important and every one of them can teach us something valuable. That is why we decided to head on to a community none of us knew before and attend WordCamp Barcelona 2018.
Seravo specializes in premium WordPress hosting and upkeep, so it’s natural that our main mission in every community is to spread the word of the importance of properly upkeeping WordPress. Through our work we are in an excellent position to see what people struggle with the most and which small changes or factors could make all WordPress websites in the world more secure and stable. In Barcelona we decided to concentrate on the database side of things: Otto Kekäläinen, CEO of Seravo, gave the audience multiple tips on what the developers need to know about the database to run WordPress optimally.
As only one of our delegation of four people actually spoke Spanish, the people that we got to meet and all the unofficial conversations that we had with them meant more to us than the actual talks on the conference day (as most of them were in Spanish). Naturally a lot of these conversations concentrated on sharing information and lessons learned in both communities. Here are a list of some things that we want to give a special shout-out to Barcelona, you rock!
- The contributor day’s attendance was incredible. There were 140 people, organized around different themes, actively working together and contributing to WordPress.
- The whole community made us feel extremely welcome and appreciated for being there. All in all, the team spirit during the WordCamp will definitely be remembered.
- The conference day venue was like something from another world to us. The beautiful, historical building of the University of Barcelona offered just as distinguished setting for the event as every WordCamp deserves.
- Taking into account WordPress users of every level and not underestimating the beginners. Everyone has to start from somewhere and the only way for the users to grow to a more advanced level is by helping them do it.
All in all we realized that our two communities have a lot in common: people everywhere hope to meet other like-minded people and to learn from their successes and challenges regarding the use of WordPress. The beauty of WordCamps is exactly that, sharing the knowledge openly and voluntarily with the sole mission of helping others and WordPress as a whole to grow and evolve.
Now, after our experience in Barcelona this year has ended (though we will definitely be back some day), we want to most warmly welcome everyone from there or any other part of the world to come visit us in Helsinki next March! That is when the first ever WordCamp Nordic will take place. And of course, Seravo is there as a gold sponsor helping the event to come together. See you there?