I flew in from Kuala Lumpur. Twenty hours in the air, give or take, and a body clock that spent the rest of the week filing complaints. Then I stepped outside.
Phoenix in August is exactly as hot as everyone warned me it would be. Walking from the hotel to the Phoenix Convention Center felt less like a walk and more like a personal decision I had to defend to myself.
And yet, every morning, that lobby was full of people who looked genuinely happy to be there.
Worth every hour of the flight.
That contrast stayed with me all week. WordCamp US 2026 ran from August 16 to 19 at the Phoenix Convention Center, and it was my 31st WordCamp. You would think the novelty wears off somewhere around number twenty. It really doesn’t.
This one was different for another reason, though. I wasn’t there only as an attendee. I was also one of the organizers, working with the Attendee Communications team.
Seeing WordCamp from the organizer side
Attending a WordCamp and helping organize one are two completely different experiences.
As an attendee, you see the visible layer: sessions, speakers, sponsor booths, hallway networking, evening socials. It feels smooth, and that smoothness is the whole point.
As an organizer, you see the layer underneath. Communication. Coordination. Attendee questions that need answers. Things that change at the last minute and get handled without anyone noticing.
Here is the realization I keep coming back to: a successful WordCamp is the result of an enormous amount of volunteer work that most attendees never see, and that’s exactly how the organizers want it.
I had been on the receiving end of that work for years. Being on the other side of it changed how I think about everyone who gives their time here.
I had a lot of help learning that. Caroline Harrison led the Attendee Communications team and was patient with every question I brought her, which was not a small number of questions.
My second time being an organizer of WordCamp US!
Contributor Day: my favorite way to start a WordCamp
Contributor Day has been my favorite part of WordCamp for years, and the reason is simple. It changes your relationship with WordPress.
Instead of attending a conference about WordPress, you spend a day helping build, document, support, test, or shape it. You stop being an audience member. That shift is small on paper and huge in practice.
The 2026 edition brought together 425 participants, including 29 first-time contributors, across 26 teams working toward specific goals (WordPress News).
425 people who chose to spend a day building instead of watching.
But the numbers are not why this Contributor Day mattered to me. It mattered because of the hackathon.
The Contributor Day hackathon: building something real
WordCamp US 2026 included a hackathon-style contribution experience, where people from very different backgrounds grouped up around concrete challenges instead of a general to-do list. Hostinger took part, and people spread across several projects.
I somehow ended up in a heavily SEO-focused group. Anyone who knows what I do for a living will find that shocking.
Our challenge: how do you make it easier for people building WordPress sites to understand what good site architecture actually looks like?
The problem we wanted to solve
Think about a Service Area Business (SAB): a plumber, an electrician, a cleaning company. Someone who serves customers across a region rather than from a single storefront.
For them, building a website is not a “create some pages” problem. It’s a structure problem. They need to know:
- which pages they actually need
- which services deserve a page of their own
- how those pages should connect to each other
- what supporting pages are missing
- how the structure should reflect what people are actually searching for
- how to avoid ending up with a pile of thin, disconnected pages
Most SEO advice answers none of that. It tells you to “improve your internal linking” and leaves you staring at your menu.
What we built during the day
We worked on an AI-powered tool to help Service Area Businesses design better site architecture.
The workflow went step by step: identify the primary service, then the supporting services, then the closely related sub-services. Group them logically. Decide which ones genuinely deserve their own URL. Skip the thin pages nobody needs. Map search intent to the pages that matter, and flag the gaps.
By the end of the day, we had a concrete workflow for turning a business’s list of services into a proposed site architecture.
The bigger idea is the part I liked most. Instead of handing someone generic SEO advice, help them understand what their website should actually look like.
What we hope to build next
We also talked about where this goes: turning that workflow into an agentic system that can help implement the recommendations, not just produce them.
Don’t just tell me what’s wrong. Help me fix it.
That’s a gap I see repeatedly in SEO tooling, and it stuck with me. To be clear, we finished the day with a concept and a workflow. The agentic layer is the ambition, not the achievement.
The people made the hackathon
Here is the thing I did not expect: the technology was the smaller half of the experience.
I worked alongside Emma Young, Arpit G Shah, Michael Rux, Saniul Alam, and Carrie Smaha, who each brought a very different perspective to the same problem. Some of them I already knew. Some I met that morning.
We argued about site architecture in the most enjoyable way possible. Different backgrounds, different assumptions, different opinions about what counts as a “real” page. We debated, corrected each other, and built something in a handful of hours.
The quality of that day came as much from the people around the table as from the problem on it.
And then we presented the project as a rap
After a full day of AI, SEO, and the finer points of service page hierarchies, our team decided the correct format for the final presentation was a rap. I want to stress that this was a group decision made by adults.
Carrie Smaha helped make it happen. It was probably the least conventional project demo I have ever been part of, and somehow it felt completely appropriate for WordCamp.
The point isn’t the rap. The point is that contribution does not have to be serious and formal to be meaningful. There was room to experiment, be ridiculous, and still walk away with real work.
Meeting people I normally only know online
That’s true of the whole event, not just the hackathon table.
You work with someone for months through Slack messages and video calls. You know how they think. Then you turn a corner in a convention center hallway and there they are, in three dimensions, and the conversation picks up from where it was online.
WordPress is an open source project built on the internet by people scattered across the world. But the community around it is one of the most human things I’ve been part of.
The Yoast photo booth had hats. We were not strong enough to resist the hats.
995 out of 1000, a LEGO Wapuu, and a paintbrush
I took the quiz at the Community Booth, scored 995 out of 1000, which turned out to be the highest score, and walked away with a LEGO set featuring the WCUS Wapuu. Apparently 31 WordCamps finally paid off in a measurable way.
The Community Booth also had a WordPress logo built out of LEGO, which felt like the right backdrop.
Fellow prize winner, equally pleased with the outcome.
It has company on my desk now. I also painted my own Wapuu at the event, and I did not expect that to be one of my favorite hours of the week. No screen, no Slack, no strategy. Just paint and a small mascot who deserved better craftsmanship than I gave him.
Exhibit A. I stand by it.
I walked away from that table genuinely refreshed, which is not a word I usually associate with the middle of a conference.
Air hockey, and the parts nobody schedules
The air hockey competition drew a crowd, which did nothing for my nerves.
I also reached the finals of the tabletop air hockey competition at the Yoast and Bluehost booth. It was a draw and due to time constraints, we did a coin flip and I did not win. But I would like the record to show that I made it much further than my highly questionable athletic preparation suggested.
That’s part of why WordCamp isn’t simply a conference. There are sponsor conversations, games, challenges, and people hanging around between sessions with nowhere in particular to be. Some of the memories you don’t plan for end up being the ones you keep.
Sponsor halls are underrated. Some of the best conversations of the week happened between booths.
What I’m taking home from Phoenix
Contribution can use your professional skills. I don’t have to contribute only by writing core patches. Product thinking, marketing, SEO, AEO, GEO, AI, and SaaS experience are useful to the project too.
Building is different from discussing. Give a mixed group a shared problem and watch how fast the job titles stop mattering. There is a real gap between talking about an idea and spending hours trying to make it work.
Good products start with problems, not technology. We began with the SAB’s structure problem, not with “let’s use AI for something.” The discussion was better for it.
AI needs judgment, not just excitement. Loyal Pyczynski’s keynote, Dreaming with AI: Innovation Lessons from the Front Lines of Disney & Meta, was the session that stuck with me most. Drawing on Disney Imagineering and Meta, he argued for bringing creators and communities in early, using experimentation to make decisions, and keeping human judgment and trust at the center of the work. That reframes the question. Not what AI can do, but what we should use it for, and where a person still has to stay in the loop.
The community is part of the WordPress product. The software matters. But the people who contribute, organize, support, document, and teach are what make the ecosystem sustainable.
And contribution can be genuinely fun. Not obligation. Experimentation, creativity, jokes, and occasionally a rap.
What being an organizer changed for me
Here’s the part I keep turning over. I was helping build the experience and being reminded why that experience matters, in the same week, at the same event.
Behind every email, announcement, schedule, and attendee question, there are people making it happen. You only notice them when something breaks, which means the better they do the job, the more invisible they become. People sign up for that deal anyway.
So a genuine thank you to co-leads Raquel Manriquez and Megan Marcel, who held the whole thing together, and to every other organizer and volunteer who spent their Phoenix week making sure nobody else had to think about how any of it worked. I got to watch a small part of that effort up close. It’s a lot more than it looks like from the hallway.
The people who make a WordCamp work are usually standing somewhere in the background of your photos.
What comes next
Kuala Lumpur to Phoenix is not a casual trip, and being at WordCamp US through the Open Horizons Scholarship gave me more than access to the conference. It gave me the room to contribute, collaborate, and think properly about where my own skills are most useful to this community. Without it, I would have been reading about that hackathon from the other side of the world instead of sitting in it.
So WCUS reinforced something I already suspected. I want to keep contributing, and I want to be more deliberate about it.
That means contributing through product and marketing expertise instead of waiting until I have time to learn a different skill. It means looking for practical contribution opportunities around AI, SEO, AEO, GEO, and product thinking, because that’s where I’m actually useful. And it means bringing what I learn from open source collaboration back into my day job, where it belongs.
The next step isn’t attending another WordCamp. It’s continuing to contribute between WordCamps.
31 WordCamps later
Every WordCamp gives you something different. This one gave me the organizer’s perspective, a hackathon, a real project, new collaborators, old friends, a rap I did not see coming, a hand-painted Wapuu, and a lost air hockey final.
Twenty hours of flying each way, and I would do it again without thinking about it. But if I’m honest about why, it isn’t any of the things on that list.
After 31 WordCamps, the thing that keeps bringing me back isn’t WordPress. It’s the people who keep showing up to build it together.
This. This is the reason.
If you have been thinking about joining a Contributor Day, organizing, or contributing something outside your usual job description, go do it. I would love to hear what you end up building.
This opportunity was made possible thanks to the support of the Open Horizons Scholarship, funded by Automattic.
