Why Attend WordCamps

While I’m at Vienna for WordCamp Europe I decided to share a few thoughts around what we are all here to do as a way to remind myself and others why we attend WordCamps. Here it goes, in no particular order:

Keep up with emerging trends — Attending conferences is a great way to get practical tips, keep up with emerging trends, and to meet other people doing amazing things.

Networking — You’ll probably find not just WordPress lovers but also Web geeks passionate about everything surrounding the Web. This is a great opportunity to meet new people and perhaps even, who knows, find that co-founder/business partner you’re looking for. It’s ok to skip a few sessions and just hang out at the Happiness bar or in the halls.

Learn — Be introduced to various new concepts and techniques. Various techniques for leveraging even more of WordPress are presented. How to secure WordPress, how to scale, optimize, improve, contribute, etc are covered in the different tracks.

Get Excited — Working on the Web presents many challenges and is becoming increasing more complex and more exciting. Mobile phones and retina displays are among the many things that are giving website owners more concerns they need to address, and discussion is hot right now about what are the best tools and techniques to be used.

Get better and better with WordPress — By end of the WordCamp you’ll probably feel your WordPress knowledge has increased a great deal.

How about you? Why do you attend WordCamps?