Mike Auteri

Category: WordCamps

  • Reflecting on WordCamp Montclair 2025 and What’s Next

    Reflecting on WordCamp Montclair 2025 and What’s Next

    Every year, WordCamp Montclair reminds me why this local community matters, and this year was no exception. I woke up this morning to a flurry of LinkedIn tags, posts thanking everyone who helped make this event possible. It really warms your heart to know people enjoyed something you put so much of yourself into.

    Navigating the fallout from WordCamp US 2024 and what it meant to the broader WordPress community made this year extra challenging. Many organizers (including myself) were already feeling the signs of burnout. There were more than a few times when we wanted to throw up our hands and walk away.

    I’m glad we didn’t. It was exhausting leading up to the event (as it always is), but once you’re there, something shifts. At least for me. I feel calm but sharp, catching up with people I haven’t seen in ages, connecting with familiar faces, and watching everything we built come to life. By then, the camp is what it is. You’ve done the work, and all you can do is let it unfold.

    I only made it to three presentations, but I heard that all the talks were fantastic. I’m looking forward to watching the sessions on WordPress.tv once they’re uploaded.

    So what’s next?

    There’s talk of WordCamp NYC returning in 2026, and many of us on the Montclair team will likely take a year off from running our camp to support theirs. In the meantime, we’ll continue growing the WordPress Montclair Meetup and offer space for learning, connecting, and supporting one another.

    I’m also excited about the new Campus Connect initiative from the WordPress community team, which plans to use GatherPress to help create workshops and events for hands-on WordPress training from experienced WordPress professionals and experts to college students.

    I’d love to bring it to Montclair State University. GatherPress has long been one of my main focuses, and I’m really interested in how these two efforts might support and strengthen each other. If Campus Connect takes off, I think it could offer the same kind of purpose and fulfillment that WordCamp Montclair has given me over the years.

    Thank you to everyone who attended, organized, sponsored, volunteered, presented, and supported WordCamp Montclair. It takes a lot of people to make something like this happen, and I’m so grateful for each of you.

  • WordCamps and defining “local” after COVID

    WordCamps and defining “local” after COVID

    When it comes to regional WordCamps, the focus is on a speaker selection that is a majority local. 80/20 rule where the 80% are folks that live in the area of the WordCamp. WordCamp Montclair (the camp I’m an organizer of) defines this as the tri-state area: New Jersey, New York, Pennsylvania… the latter two being New York City and Philadelphia areas.

    In the past this was easy, as we had a local community that met in-person at our meetup space in Montclair, NJ at the United Way building.

    When COVID hit everything went virtual. Instead of the United Way building, we scheduled monthly meetups on Zoom. While the pandemic was very challenging, we also found opportunity. We communicated more with each other over Slack, we worked with and supported other NJ WordPress meetup groups, and as a result our community grew… a LOT. And a good deal of that growth was outside of our tri-state area. People saw we were doing things virtually, and they joined in.

    Two years later we have folks that attend our monthly virtual meetups from all over the country and world. Many of whom are also active on our Slack account.

    WordCamp Montclair 2022 is planned for June 25, 2022 and will be in-person. This got me thinking about how I now see our “local” community today. I raised this in a few channels and got some interesting thoughts.

    In my mind, if you are active in our community by attending meetups and engaging with folks in our Slack, then you are also in our community, and if you submit a talk to our WordCamp, I would consider you local, regardless of where you physically live.

    Many agreed with this new definition of “local” for regional camps that were active during the pandemic. However, one very important response that is worth noting is that another reason behind the 80/20 rule also involves travel: How will the speaker be getting to your camp?

    Having more speakers physically close to your camp makes it less risky that the speaker will cancel due to travel issues. So this is definitely something to consider as well.

    So while keeping things physically local is still important, also think of people who are part of your community that may not meet the old definition of local.

  • WordCamp Montclair 2020 Promo Videos

    For those that aren’t aware, I am lead organizer of WordCamp Montclair 2020, which is happening May 30-31st. This past Friday myself and 2 other organizers (Eileen and Howard) went to our venue at Montclair State University to shoot some short promo videos. This was Eileen’s idea, and I thought it was a really great way to show folks what to expect.

    This is only the second WordCamp Montclair. Last year we held it at our meetup space at The United Way. While the space was inexpensive, it was also lacking in features… like air conditioning and reliable WiFi. In contrast, our venue this year is a state-of-the-art, 50-million-dollar building (with AC and great Wifi, of course). It will include professional AV, a livestream, live captioning, and monitors in the lobby area broadcasting the current session. While I still want to maintain a very local feel, I also want to highlight the major and very professional improvement we are making this year.

    Granted, Howard and I are by no means professional actors. And yes, these videos are meant to be pretty cheesy. What I hope to convey is the really amazing venue we are holding our WordCamp in this year. I hope folks watching this are enticed to sponsor, speak, and attend WordCamp Montclair 2020!

  • The Day After WordCamp US

    The Day After WordCamp US

    I was fortunate to be able to attend the very first WordCamp US this past weekend. It was held in Philadelphia, which is a reasonable drive from where I live in North Jersey. It’s also usually hard for me to get away these days since I have a 17-month-old child, but luckily, my wife was fine with me going and taking all the parenting responsibilities on herself for the weekend. God bless her.

    This was by far the biggest WordCamp ever, with around 1800 people in attendance. I’ve attended WordCamp NYC and WordCamp Boston in the past, neither came close to the size. I was in awe.

    Though it was a huge event, it didn’t take long for me to find people I knew. One of my favorite parts about WordCamp is the people. The people I already know, meeting new people, and becoming better acquainted with people I don’t know well or only know online. WordPress really is a friendly community. Probably the friendliest that I know of.

    During the State of the Word, Matt Mullenweg (or is it Mullenburg now?) was very passionate about everyone learning JavaScript. Saying that it is the future of WordPress. After all, there is a LOT more JavaScript powered components in WordPress, a new REST API, and just look at Calypso. All JavaScript.

    This really resonated with me. Before I started working with WordPress full-time 3.5 years ago, I was a JavaScript developer. I still very much love JavaScript, but find myself writing much more PHP code and much less JavaScript as a WordPress developer. I have also fallen behind a bit with all the cool new JavaScript frameworks (Backbone, Angular, Ember, React, etc.) that are powering today’s web sites and web applications.

    So when I attended Contributor’s Day, a day where people of all levels get together and work on WordPress. Instead of grabbing any ol’ ticket (like I usually do), I decided to focus on a component. Given that media is heavily JavaScript, I went there, found a ticket, and created a patch. In addition, I read through a lot of the Backbone code powering the media modal to see how it all works together.

    My grand plan is to continue contributing to WordPress, and apply my efforts to one thing: JavaScript in the media modal. This will help me focus and keep me motivated to contribute. It will also allow me to get my JavaScript chops up to snuff.

    So there you have it. I feel this is the WordCamp that really got me motivated. I’m already looking forward to next year’s WordCamp US, which is going to be held in Philadelphia again!

    And though I had a great time, nothing beat coming home and seeing the excitement on my little girl’s face when I walked in the door Sunday evening. I’ll leave you with this video I tweeted of her learning to say Wapuu in her new WordCamp US onesie.

    Feel free to leave your own experiences and takeaways of WordCamp US in the comments. I would love to read them.

  • Last weekend at WordCamp NYC

    Last weekend at WordCamp NYC

    This past weekend was WordCamp NYC 2014, and I must say, it was a huge improvement from previous WordCamps in New York. It’s no secret that I’ve been a bit critical of New York WordCamps in the past.

    For the record, I’ve only been to WordCamps in two cities: New York and Boston. Until now, Boston was doing it right and New York wasn’t. I’m mostly referring to number of different tracks. In 2012, New York WordCamp was a hot mess with 13 tracks. They literally gave a talk to anyone that wanted one. It was next to impossible to choose which talks to go to and which to skip. I ended up going to a lot of lousy talks.

    Boston WordCamp 2013, in contrast, had 4 tracks, only 2 of which were dedicated to development. So basically, my decision was this or that. I ended up going to a lot of great talks there. New York WordCamp 2014 followed this format of 4 tracks and it was much, much better. Props to the coordinator, Eric Andrew Lewis.

    In addition to WordCamp, I decided to participate in Contributor’s Day the Friday before. There I met Ryan McCue who is leading the effort in the new WordPress REST API, slated be included in the 4.1 or 4.2 release. It felt really good working with him and writing some code for that project. I’ve contributed to WordPress 4.0 by closing the same ticket I opened, but Contributor’s Day is definitely a great environment for the newbie wannabe contributor (like me) to get involved, since there’s so many people to help and support you.

    Unfortunately, I wasn’t able to attend Sunday’s sessions. Being from New Jersey and having a new baby doesn’t really allow me the freedom I once took for granted. I would have really liked to attend Ryan’s talk on the REST API, Helen’s on WP_Query, and Daniel’s on WP-CLI. I guess I’ll just have to catch those, and others, when they become available online.