Beautiful Belgrade

In September, I had the joy of visiting Serbia again. It’s been a minute for me – WordCamp Europe 2018 – so I was really curious to see the city again, see what changed, and most of all get to meet the Serbian WordPress community once more.

Unpolished and beautiful

I vividly remember how I felt the first time I came to Belgrade eight years ago: it was thrillingly exotic yet still clearly a European city. The contrast between old turn-of-century buildings and Soviet brutalism has a certain charm. My sister-in-law likes to complain about some cities being “too polished”. I like polished, but when in Belgrade, I get what she’s talking about. It is rough and unapologetic, and lovely. It has character. 

So this time around, after barely surviving my taxi ride to the city centre, it took only a couple of minutes until inspiration struck. I’m always an ambitious wannabe-photographer. But in Belgrade, I had the urge to roam around the city and take photos. Actually got back into using the excellent Halide app while I was there.

An unconventional WordCamp – in the best way

Let’s get to the actual WordCamp. Obviously, it was bilingual (my Serbian is 100% non-existent). But the organising team had an interesting approach on how to manage their bilingual conference schedule. The default would be, to have a track per language, so there’s always an English talk and a talk in the local language available. Belgrade had other plans. The two days we split: first day Serbian only, second day English only. 

For international guests that freed up the first day for sightseeing and networking. I was really curious beforehand. It could have easily ended up with just the international guests present for the second day – I’ve seen it before. But after seeing everything playing out, I would call this approach a roaring success. (It’s also cool, that we can have proper multilingual WordCamp sites now.)

Another unconventional twist: the actual WordCamp schedule started incredibly late in the day with the Opening Remarks at 11am on both days. There were some very practical reasons behind this, but I have to say: it’s a charming approach. You get to do some stuff in the morning (like roam around the city to take photos) and still enjoy a full day of talks. On the flip-side, this also pushed the closing remarks to 7:30, so it’s also a late end.

Talks Talks Talks

I’ll be very ignorant of the Serbian talks from day one. Sorry ’bout that. 😅

But on the second day, I had the honour to talk about Cyber Resilience Act in the very first slot after the Opening Remarks. First slot on day two is usually a bit of a tough one to fill. People are still hungover sleepy from the night before and many start the day a bit later. But with everyone starting the day a bit later, that wasn’t really an issue this time.

After travelling all over Europe to talk about CRA for more than a year now, I got to have one final blast on the big stage. It was a perfect storm – a pretty sweet venue, a super engaged audience and lots of great questions. I’ll update this post, once the recording is online, for now, the one from Porto earlier this year will have to do:

And while I’m usually not big on sitting in talks myself, I got my fair share of them in Belgrade this year. Which I want to be understood as a compliment to the organising team. Brilliant line up of speakers! Here are the ones I caught:

Ivelina Dimova is a former WordCamp Europe lead organiser, and overall brilliant person. Her talk was about “AI with Boundaries: Implementing Guardrails and Evals in WordPress” drawing healing from her day job at Awesome Motive.

Marcel Schmitz is a well-known software engineer in our community and will be on next year’s CloudFest Hackathon mentors team with me. He spoke about the shifting focus of what it means to be a WordPress developer “Code is cheap, judgment is not: the WordPress developer’s new core skill“.

Anne-Mieke Bovelett on stage is always a good time. She’s one of the most prolific accessibility folks in the WordPress ecosystem and a dear friend. So I wasn’t surprised that her talk “Selling accessibility has suddenly gotten a lot easier, even in B2B” was a banger.

Vassilena Valchanova was a new face for me. But if you talk to her, it’s clear pretty quickly that she’s an absolute pro. A marketing and content brain, paired with a captivating stage presence. “Nobody Knows What You Know (And That’s Your Problem)” focused on personal branding and somewhat accidentally aligns pretty well with my thoughts around this website.

The Serbian Community 🥰

I don’t know when or how it happened, but to me Serbian folks in the WordPress Community became synonymous with a. a good time, and b. getting shit done. And the local community did exactly that. They organised a near-perfect WordPress event with limited resources, and were nothing but nice and welcoming. Thank you all and thank you Nemanja and Milana for inviting me.

And a special thank you to my friend and honorary member of the Serbian community Steve Mosby. He was emceeing day two and made us all feel at home on stage.

I’ll be back.