WordCamp Europe 2016 (#WCEU) took place over the weekend (June 24-26th) in Vienna with 1952 attendees. Three days of talks, meetups, community, and much more. It was not only the largest WordCamp ever but also our first WordPress event, and we must admit that it couldn’t have been better!

Here’s an overview of the most memorable moments for us of this amazing weekend.

Development talks

Unfortunately we did not get the chance to watch all the talks we wanted, but these are some of the ones we attended and thought they were most interesting:

1. Moving forward with a mature platform by John Blackbourn

Listening to this Core Developer talk about the future of WordPress was certainly a great start of the event. He shared his insider vision and thoughts about the development of the WordPress Core. The two things that impressed us the most of his talk were:

The lack of direction and leadership in the project.
The difficulties of evolving a project that has to be backwards compatible (7% of the WordPress sites are still running on PHP 5).

You can find the slides of this talk here.

2. The making of Calypso: a team perspective by Davide ‘Folletto’ Casali

As one of the product team leads for WordPress.com, Davide explained how a completely distributed team works using the example of Hyperion, one of Automattic’s teams, and showed us the driving principles of remote working. The slides are available here.

3. The ultimate REST API talk by Joe Hoyle

Joe is the co-founder of Human Made, a WordPress development and consultancy company. During his talk he provided an interesting look at many areas of the REST API and application development.

4. Using the REST API and JavaScript to create better WordPress interfaces by K. Adam White

The Web Engineer at the Open Web technology company Bocoup talked about the new WordPress era and interfaces powered by the REST API. Check out the slides of this interesting talk here.

Interview and Q&A with Matt Mullenweg

During the first day of WordCamp we also had the opportunity to see an exclusive interview with the WordPress co-founder Matt Mullenweg by Brian Krogsgard, Editor of Post Status, and a Q&A session with the audience. You can watch the interview below or on WordPress.tv.

If you do not want to watch the full video, Sarah Gooding (WP Tavern) and Marie Dodson (Torque) go over the main takeaways and key messages from the interview and Q&A on their respective posts. Check them out.

Amazing crowd before going on stage at #WCEU earlier https://t.co/dYLpv8kKzV pic.twitter.com/SSzJ4dNVMk
— Matt Mullenweg (@photomatt) June 24, 2016

Closing remarks

During the closing remarks, organizers announced that WordCamp Europe 2017 will be held in Paris (France) at Les Docks. It was a really exciting moment for everyone.

We’re excited to announce that WordCamp Europe 2017 will be in Paris. #wceu pic.twitter.com/Ry7trltvaZ
— WordCamp Europe (@WCEurope) June 25, 2016

We would like to thank all the speakers, volunteers and organizers of WordCamp Europe for making it possible. We had a great time and met wonderful people.

Photo by Florian Ziegler

You can find more amazing photos of the event on the following links:

And if you miss a talk at #WCEU all the live stream feeds are now available here.

See you next year in Paris! ❤️