WordCamp Vancouver is gearing up for its fourth year and will be held on Saturday July 26th, 2014, at the BCIT Downtown Campus, in Vancouver. The event’s organization team announced this week that this year’s camp will be a “developer edition,” catering to the area’s tech community.
The day will be focused on topics for designers and developers who build with WordPress. Attendees will have the opportunity to explore tools available within WordPress, as well as third-party technology that can work with the software.
I spoke with WordCamp Vancouver Organizer Flynn O’Connor who explained why they’ve changed this year’s event to be dev-focused:
Part of the goal was to reach out to other devs within the tech community in Vancouver in the hopes we could help reduce some of the detrimental assumptions about WordPress and what it can do that are prevalent in the greater community. When I go to non-WordPress tech conference I hear a lot of ignorance or outdated info about WordPress bandied about and we’d like to combat that.
WordCamp Vancouver has sold out every year and the organizers expect that it will again. The event was born out of a thriving local WordPress meetup which currently has 1200 members. The meetup is so large that they have split it into three “tracks,” including one for new WordPress users, general design/dev, and a developer focused meetup. Flynn said that because the city is so close to Portland and Seattle, they tend to get a fair number of cross-border attendees which has helped to boost their numbers.
The first developer camp they held was in 2011 and it sold out just like the other more traditional WordCamps. WordCamp Vancouver “Developer Edition” 2014 will have a limit of 300 tickets (the same as last year), due to venue limitations. “We have explored other, potentially larger venues,” Flynn said. “But we have a good relationship with our current venue and would prefer to focus on other aspects of the WordCamp experience such as speaker outreach.”
WordCamp Vancouver is situated in a city with a large WordPress community and draws from the entire region’s diverse talent pool, with speakers and attendees shared between events in both Seattle and Portland. This highly-anticipated event is well-known for bringing in a world-class lineup of speakers. WordCamp Vancouver has some generous sponsors who have allowed the organizers to hire a professional video production team, so all of the sessions will be recorded for those who cannot attend.
Tickets for the one-day event will go on sale next week with an early bird special of $20. The seats are limited so make sure to subscribe for updates if you’re planning to attend.