 I'm so impressed that y'all stuck it to the end of the day. Woo! I'm so glad I lost, because I do realize I do a lot of work camps every year. And I do realize that it is kind of exhausting by the end of the day. And if you're not tired, I want to know what your secret is, because I'm exhausted. But seriously, thank you for being here. This has been just amazing, and having you all here today has just warmed my heart. And especially some of you, you know, the local people I love always get to see the local people. Some of you have traveled really far to be here today, and for that I really 100% truly appreciate you. I think it's pretty awesome. Marco, I'll hug you again later. Costa Rica, guys. He came from Costa Rica. So this is a panel discussion. This discussion today is about contributing to open source. And all the people that you see here on this day are part of the open source community, as you are as well. And some of you contribute probably as much or more than some of us here. But the truth is that we all contribute in a great way to everything that goes into creating an open source community, the open source project, which we think of as WordPress the software, but I think of as open source community, WordPress the community. And so we all think about the different aspects that go into creating everything that is WordPress, because WordPress is more than software. It's the people that make it. Poetry is code. Code is poetry. I always say it backwards. Code is poetry. There's so much that goes into creating this. This isn't Microsoft where we all buy something every year and we can complain or not. If you don't like something about what's going on, you have a voice to be able to help make change. Every year there's releases. There's top level releases. There's minor releases. There's all kinds of different release squads. And to be on a release squad, you don't have to even code. I'm on a release squad right now and I'm doing marketing because I'm not a developer. I do have a plug in the repository. I'll tell you about that later. Okay. I invited you with that about this much. But seriously, there's so many ways that you can contribute to the open source project. And so what I wanted to do was gather some people that I know near and dear and I know how much they contribute. I don't even know all their stories and how we got started here, but I wanted to let you hear about some of the opportunities and some of the stories about open source and the contributors that are here today. But what I want to start with is I just want to put on the line here. Have everybody introduced themselves to you, what they do with WordPress, maybe where they work, where they're from in the world. And then as they pass the mic back, I want to hear how they got started with WordPress and what their first contribution to open source community was. Hi, everybody. Oh, I'm louder. I'm Nightie Chakrini. I'm a full-stack WordPress developer. So at my full time, I co-op. I'm also one of the make marketing team co-reps. So I can do the marketing. And I also organize a WordPress Meetup monthly for Columbus afternoon. So I am a feedback organizer as well. Hi, my name is Jonathan Burgers. I work at Blue Ghost. I'm part of their commitment to the Fight for the Future program. So I'm just a full-time to contribute back to the WordPress core. I was recently in the 5.8.6.1 release squads as a coordinator. And I'm frequently involved with minor security releases. I'm probably better than Massachusetts. And I am the lead organizer for the WordPress Boston Meetup currently. Okay, fair. Yeah, that's true. Hi. She got it up right. We gave it to the one person who has the longest voice as well. I'm going to do my best. So my name is Shanta. I'm the project liaison manager at Codeable, which is a platform that hires WordPress freelancers. I've been in WordPress since 2010, I think. The first contribution I made was 2012, the first WordCamp I ever attended, which was Toronto. And I gave my very first talk. Since then, I've given over 40 WordCamp talks. I've lost count now. And I am a lead organizer for the WordPress Hamilton Meetup, where I am from. And we're talking about WordCamp Canada. It's not official, okay, Kevin? I promise I didn't say anything otherwise. We are looking at doing WordCamp Canada, and I'm on the lead organizing team there. Hello. I feel like I want to try to pull this way out here because my voice is not quite like yours, but anyway. I'm Kieran. I am a software developer. I have a piece of software called Dragon Teach that helps students, help instructors teach their students WordPress. And I've been doing WordPress stuff since probably 2008 or 2009, maybe, where somebody came to meet us. We were hosting their site, and they were like, we want to do something. I was like, what's this WordPress thing? But yes, I largely freelance or contract my work to do WordPress builds and stuff. Hey, everyone. My name is Marcus Burnett, and I am from the Orlando, Florida area. I am on the community and events team at GoDaddy, the domain hosting company. And so I get to travel to WordCamp and talk to people and share a bit about what we're doing in the WordPress space. I also started a site called the WP World, which was built to help connect the community to each other and to work camps and businesses, to WordPressers and all of that. So building that. I'm also one of the co-reps on the WordPress Photo Directory team. And so if you haven't checked that out, it's a great library of free photos to use for your projects. And so I'm one of the co-reps there and moderators and help facilitate folks being able to share their photos there. And I've been working with WordPress for, I don't know, since 2015 or 2016 or something like that, but not really part of the community until really the onset because it was like the worst time to be part of the community, but it was all online and we got to connect with each other and it's been really great to start to see people in person again. Or it was the best time. Or maybe it was the best time. It was the best time. Any time is a great time. And I didn't introduce myself, which I realized I didn't. If you haven't met me, I'm Michelle Brichette. I am one of the lead organizers of the local Meetup. So if you are in Rochester, we do have Meetup every month. Usually the first Monday of every month from 6.30 to 8.30 p.m. For the last few years, we've been online. We're still online right now, which means that we're getting people attending from all over the world, which is really cool, and learning through the local Rochester Meetup, which I absolutely love. I am the director of community engagement for Seller WP and Liquid Web. We have a whole bunch of plugins that I help on the marketing team and help by going out and talking about. As far as the open source project, I work with Marcus on the photos directory. So if you go to WordPress.org slash photos, you'll see how you can contribute photos to the directory. I'm one of the moderators, so I get to say yes or no without your photo on the zip of the directory. We put most of them in. But it's a fun project. And then I also contribute to marketing as well and community as well. So I do a lot of mentoring of work camps and organizing work camps and speaking at work camps. I think this is my 75th work camp and probably my 50th time speaking, which is pretty cool. Absolutely love it. It's one of those things that I absolutely love. I suggest you apply to speak at a work camp because it is literally what opens doors. I'm happy you're here. I think my first work camp ever was in Buffalo in 2015. And it was, I couldn't believe that I was sitting there learning from like some major people in the WordPress community for 20 bucks. Because in 2015 it was 20 bucks the whole day. And they gave me lunch. And there was a party afterwards. I was like, I'm loving it. It's way. It's way. It was pretty amazing. We have to declare I don't know how much going across the board. That's right. I was like, yeah, but I want to ask you, how did you get started? Well, I did go first. So I came to fame in WordPress as being the editorial director of the Master WP takeover. So that's how a lot of people met me. And we came in pretty spicy for those of you who were subscribed to Master WP. And I've always been a person that believed if I'm going to talk and like complain about something, I'm going to be like, I'm going to be like, I'm going to be like, I'm going to be like, I'm going to be like, I'm going to be like, I'm going to complain about something. I don't want to be a hypocrite. I'm going to have to do something about it as well. So if I had a concern about contributing or, you know, not saying anything for those listening, I would be mortified. It might come to me and say, well, what are you doing about it? And I'm like, so I decided I really want to be a part of the community and also some wonderful people like Michelle say, Rhee Courtney Robertson. They pretty much showed me I was going to be a part of the community. I'm just kidding. I love them, but I had wonderful people who were like, if you want to know, we'll be working hard. Trying to pinpoint the exact kind of to the point, but I remember I spoke at Work Camp Providence in Rhode Island in 2012 and before that I was mainly just building websites and stuff for clients at a small agency and at that Work Camp it was a contributor day and so I really have the curtain lifted as far as how the sausage is made and, you know, this community of people, they're everywhere and they all just kind of fix bugs and it was kind of cool. And I'm always down for challenges or figuring out what an issue is and trying to fix it, which I guess makes a developer in most cases. So I learned at that Work Camp about contributing and I actually just passed my 10-year anniversary of my first props to my first credited contribution to the Work Camp. So yeah, that was kind of that. I'm pretty sure I started there. I'll go since I already got one. Yeah, so I worked as a designer first, somewhat of a developer for an agency in Orlando for over a decade and then I left there and I kind of switched gears in what I was doing. When I left there, what I had done for 10 years was work with agencies or with our agency as a designer developer what I really wanted to do from that point was see how I could help other agencies do the stuff that I was doing and so I started working as a support rep for a company called Skyverge, which was acquired by GoDaddy and I really got that like itch to help other agencies, other freelancers, other developers and designers do the things that they were trying to do through that support rule. I got to find out a lot of the different things that they were struggling with and you know, part of that on top of the things that I already know that agencies struggle with because of working in an agency for 10 years and so I really got the itch there in that support rule to really help be part of the community to help other agencies to help other people in the WordPress space just kind of face some of the challenges that they face day to day and then after being acquired by GoDaddy I kind of moved out of support and more directly into this community and events position and it's allowed me to be able to contribute to the photo directory be able to help other folks like Morgan Robertson that was mentioned is on my team as well be able to help support her as she does to contribute back to the community as well so I feel really lucky and blessed to be able to do that and to be able to help the people that were me when I was working at that agency for a decade. All right. So my first interaction open source was probably like in high school I had a friend of mine who was like, look at this free VSD thing that I can wrote on my computer and it was just like this is all free the whole operating system and it's like he just coughs back just like people just give this product out there and just make the world better in that way and that was really the like you look at it as like I wanted to do that I love developing stuff I love building stuff and if I would totally do it and not get paid for it I kind of can't pay my mortgage unless I get paid for it so there's that but I would totally like give my time to what I consider making the world a better place right and so I know in early 2000s I put a PR into it in on this weird edge of edge case on a communication like a checks on communication thing and you get the greatest response because they did not like the way I wrote it but but it was like it was like I'm just trying to contribute most recently my I have a piece of software that I'm going to use on our videos here that will turn that I wrote and it's up on GitHub and it it turns around the videos it's up on WPTV really quickly so that is I don't know that's sort of WordPress is the money sort of like I'm going to contribute to the community do the thing that I love and hopefully make everybody so my is probably less selfless or yeah less selfless like I said I gave a talk in 2012 and at the time I just started teaching at Sheridan College and so for me I was trying to build my resume I was trying to build my accreditation put myself out there as an expert if I'm supposed to be teaching this stuff if I'm supposed to be whatever I need to put this on my resume and one of those ways is speaking so I went to this I actually got a speaking part in the word camp because somebody else decided they weren't going to sign the media release so they got canceled so there was an open spot and I did a case study but the other part of me is naturally a teacher right I love to impart knowledge I love to help people out in learning how WordPress works or whatever the thing is so yes I did it with the intent of sort of building my own resume but then I realized and someone put it to me it's like well you're actually contributing you mean by getting up here and talking like people are actually going to listen to me and that's contributing and I'm like yeah that actually contributes to the library I'm like oh so I was actually contributing before I really even knew what it was the other way that I would say I'm actually also on the training team I forgot to mention I do it a little less formally than say people like Courtney but she usually puts me on some kind of sort of specialized thing on contributor day it's like I need you to sit there and you sit there and I just pick your brain okay Courtney sure so three times I mentioned Courtney's name does she appear just checking yeah and the last way that I'd like to say that I contribute is that I drag other people into this and Jones is over there somewhere yeah yeah he's over there yeah I drag these people down from Canada and you know just get them to do talks and get them to do things for the community and mine was after I attended word camp Buffalo that year and then I was bit by the bug I attended word camp Toronto where I like to teach Shanta that she snubbed me beautiful she was an organizer she was good to me and I was just like awestruck by all the people there and I thought I want to be involved and so I applied to speak at word camp Buffalo the next year and I was it was the last time in my life I could do that it was the very last time in my life that I ever had a posture syndrome because here I was walking on to the stage and it was a literal stage like this one talking about the hidden elements of word press that aren't really hidden but so many of us don't know about and I was like I've been using word press for a couple of years I'm going to get on this stage and I'm going to talk to people about what I think are the hidden things that I've discovered that they might not know about and they're all going to yell up and yell and posture you know what you think I think about that's not the way it is doesn't work that way and instead what happened was I got off that stage and 12 people followed me out to the happiness bar to ask you more questions and learn more from me and I thought you don't have to have been here since day one to contribute you don't have to have been here since day one to know things to help other people and so I was like well I'm going to want to speak more of that because I kind of like this and I started to try to speak more places and then the next year I suggested that we combine word camp Rochester or Rochester into Buffalo before we even had a word camp Rochester and Buffalo was like no thanks so I was like well now what so instead we started word camp Rochester we started organizing and I helped organize word camp Buffalo I helped organize word camp Rochester and then I started organizing word camp US and then I started speaking more then I got a full-time job and word press before I knew it I had an entire life because of having stepped on that stage the first time and being able to know that the things that I can do even if I'm not a developer can help contribute to other people's success man I was in I was all in and that's what it was for me and that like it wasn't coding it wasn't bugs because I can tell you if it didn't work but I don't know why right that's not my thing but to be able to share to teach to bring other people to lift other voices that's what I think about it and that's where I have spent most of my time in word press so that's why I gave up and just for the record in Canadian fashion I have been apologizing to her ever since and she's married to Ashley so I accept it by the way I could keep asking questions on the panel but I do want to give you an opportunity I mean I will go on until the very better end unless you all have questions I would rather that you ask questions of any one of us from anything you've heard about how we contribute so that we can answer your questions about how to get involved here so if you have a question and can I just say something? Mary Ann, yes I just wanted to say like this is the first in-person work camp I've been to since 2019 and that was the last work camp Rochester we did 2020 online but this is the first time we've done it in person and I just wanted to say how it was wonderful today it was so great and this was really it was such a great day to reconnect with people Thank you and we had so many wonderful people contributing and that's what made it so amazingly awesome great contributions today it was wonderful Thank you Sara, how do you how do you balance your work life and family life with volunteering I don't have a life so I'm going to tell you else I don't know if I have a difficulty it's just me and my husband I don't have too many people and he's a workaholic as well but I actually have I do a lot of work I do I have days and times where I refuse to do any work I don't care if it's an emergency I'm not doing the work because I don't want to burn out and I don't want to be stressed out and that for me is the weekends and that's also my night so I advise people to have like some no some heck no that you schedule where you just not have to work that usually helps me got it and I say I wouldn't say that the balance is really what I have but it's really more of a priority like my family comes first and I'll know when I've been neglecting them long enough that I need to put everything else aside and be able to focus that time on them and so yeah I don't know that I don't necessarily say that it's a balance but it's really just like prioritizing and making sure that like I'm getting stuff done but that I'm getting things done in order of importance to me yeah I so I have two small kids and so it's always you know 4 o'clock to like 6.30 is the time that I always try to disconnect and I've been trying to be more conscious about putting my phone away and not having it around the distraction of you know because you have your phone in your pocket we all do it we all work we all you think it's something you know yeah you pull it out to look up something or we can notice something and then before you know you're on it for 10 minutes right you know when your watch is buzzing all day yeah I do I keep all my devices on silent and I focus modes to really limit the the stimuli but at the same time I recognize that as a more senior contributor leader in the community I do get called on at some points to work and so for example when a release is going out I'm one of the people that's able to actually package that release and get it ready to do well and there's not many people that have the time and that ability to do that and so it's it comes in ebbs and flows and like you said is knowing when to take a break and so there might be days where you know I go I get the kids to bed and then I come back and recently there was a good example of this is there was a security release on a Tuesday and there was some unforeseen ways that people were using blocks in the wild and so people that were well short codes within blocks and so there was an issue with the security fix where certain ways that short codes are being used they stop working and so we got to Thursday and usually we don't do any releases on Thursday or later because they look at the updates about if there's more problems what we do people are giving up their weekends and their time off and it got to Friday and it was very apparent that we had to fix it because the short codes and blue weren't working so people that had stores their carts weren't showing up and it was just it was more impactful than we had thought at first and so it ended up you know it was a Friday night and it was me and a dozen other people and it was much later you know but I think that we finally pushed that release out at 2 a.m. on Sunday morning and so there are times where as a sponsored person I call upon to give that extra time because it's important it's necessary and so I always try to my work is very supportive about all of you work late or you work at a work camp all weekend take a day take a couple of days but yeah it's definitely have those times that you need to you are very concrete about but also be open to flexibility and work with whoever you're sponsoring by or whoever you work with to take time off can I ask a question about sure if you have a 2 a.m. release for core and you know whoever I'll be going to the core or do you have a QA process and I know this is not exactly a QA process with open source like we would for sure that I won't get too deep into it because I don't want anybody else to have a thought with that but with any security release there's a security team and no security fix is going in unless several people thoroughly review it with this one was very very important because we had to make sure we fix the additional bug without reintroducing the original bug that was in the release is going out there's they're called release parties and so in the core slack there'll be people that you know people like me will build a package and say here it is let's test it make sure there's a break there's no fatal errors makes it people will try to explain security like can't do it forget it yeah well in some case most people most of the time they don't know what the issue is and they're much more comfortable with the level of testing we'll find it next time I was going to say I'm going to go back to the original question as far as balance goes in my nine to five job obviously I deal with WordPress itself not as much some of our our actual staff members are the members of the community team I'm on the training team I'm on the diversity team as well as this goes on and on and on and we contribute in different ways and in different volumes again for me a lot of this is very selfless I enjoy this almost every vacation day that I have taken has been off the back of a work camp and let me be clear my job does not require me to go to work camps like some of you guys here right like you have to put up tables and do whatever some of our staff to do work I didn't I took vacation I still wore my codable stuff and yeah I work for codable yeah you want to go and talk to that guy over there for that person I did it on my own vacation because I love doing this so to me I took vacation time even though I wasn't necessarily speaking at these events but I volunteered out or whatever and I got to travel suddenly I said a lot of it comes back to being it's not entirely a selfless act like I just forgot and I would just find out the balance was different for everybody so I don't have kids at home anymore my daughter's 31 she lives in another city I have cats at home who could care less as long as there's food in the dish and so what I do to feed myself is I go out with my camera as I take two digital cameras with me I drive out to self-life refuge I spend an hour driving a mile and I take pictures of eagles and egrets and flowers and birds and insects and I get home and I'm so excited to see what's on that SD card and how can I make these pictures a little enhanced and how can I make sure that okay I'm going to be honest and say my horizons are always crooked but you will never see because of the crooked horizon because I edit those close enough to the crooked thing but how's that crazy long lens that you had work out for you I have seven more now so we'll talk about that I have I spent paid too much money on cameras and I don't have grandkids either so it's all good but so my house looks different for different people but I would say find something that feeds your soul I also have five podcasts that I work on and I will spend a day interviewing somebody over zoom at another part of the world and I'm excited about that and getting that edited and transcripted and posted to the internet makes me ridiculously happy and if that if what looks adjacent to work to you is also what makes you super happy then it's balance and it's okay so I know somebody else will bring her another question yes how do you come up with the subject for your talks that's a great question so how do you guys come up with the subject for your talks here you go first I'm pretty sure this one is like you should totally do a talk on that Shanta tells you it's so I'm going to make that even suggest suggest verbally suggest encourage me I encourage to do a talk on something I've given the grandkids a little one talk and and the way I decided on that one was I just picked the thing that I felt like I knew the most about it was about WooCommerce a lot of my job like I said I worked for a company called Skyverge that was all WooCommerce plug-in support and so I picked something that I felt like I knew enough about to teach somebody something I didn't need to teach everybody everything I just felt like I needed to find a way to teach somebody something sponsored person in the community part of being privileged with that with that blessing is to serve as a community servant and a steward so sometimes what I usually do to the major camps is I'll submit one talk that's I might be less excited about but it's I know it's an important topic I know that it's something that a lot of people benefit from deep and then something that are more shallow and those more shallow things more often will have a greater reach and a much larger effect even the talk here like it was about the plug-in API and hook API and that's something I've been using since I started using WordPress and it's pretty I'm pretty desensitized to it but it's such a foundational part of WordPress that anybody that's newer to WordPress should use and so it's really important to get topics like that out there and then the other talk I'll usually reserve for something I'm more passionate about I've been working on I was I was fortunate enough to speak at Work in Asia about I was one of the main people that migrated all of WordPress organizations testing to get a job so just picking in and doing that work and talking about what I learned and what the challenges at scale of a project that of our size encounters and doing that is interesting right but less people may choose that talk but it's something I have a great value of presenting because I was sort of deeply in the there there are a couple of ways that I come up with the talks one is I was teaching at the same time and so some of the things that I was teaching in classes I thought would translate well into a talk and you know if I give in that WordPress 101 is one of the most typical ones I did and I would go to a bunch of different places and do that same talk so sometimes and then I would find something else or go back the next year and do okay remember I did WordPress 101 last year we're gonna do 102 this year and sort of do that the other part is when I started teaching a slightly more advanced program at a different college I had to come up with a curriculum and so at Sheridan we were teaching them not necessarily to be developers but we were teaching them to respect the developers and to understand their thinking and what not whereas at Mohawk we were teaching them to be web developers so I was teaching these people like they're gonna have to learn about you know at the time you know custom post types and ACS and wait a minute I don't know how that stuff works oh crap I guess I better learn okay so I actually went and I learned how they worked and and I'm like wait a minute it's confusing and I actually had a conversation with some other really amazing WordPress talk people Charles Schult and Dan Beale gotta arrest him and I said I need to understand how these things work I just conceptually and they put it really clear in my head I did a LinkedIn course from Mortimer and Henderson A got a little Canadian and and I learned how they worked but then I tried to teach that to my students at Sheridan they would know that I was talking and I noticed in the WordPress community that there was a lot of confusion so I just did a talk on and I think it was called WTH are CPTs and ACS and and was just explaining in sort of basic English how I did it along with some some of the level of application so some of it is about what I already know and what I think some of it is what I had to learn and what I learned from that and the other part that could very well be depending on when you work in what questions are you getting asked a lot right? you usually write a blog article on it well maybe this should be a little bit bigger than just a blog article maybe that should be a talk Michelle is making me do this so you're like here yeah it's interesting so I have a lot of different interests and my mind goes a mile a minute and my mouth does too and when coming up for my talk I know a lot of people might know of me or might have seen a Twitter rank from me but they don't know exactly what I do and how and why I do it and again my mind works down up crazy I can tie a lot of things together and they make sense which I hope my talk this morning makes sense because I can talk to you all about my grandmother and my family but also my ideas of how to get more people contributing so that's why I chose my talk because I can tie so many things into it but also this was my first talk and I wanted everybody to know who I am and why I do what I do this thing that's interesting to me might be interesting to other people and then I also look for gaps so what are some things that aren't being talked about and I do a lot of talking about DEIB so diversity equity inclusion and belonging I do talks about like hey maybe somebody else wants to learn how to do a podcast so I'll teach her how to do a podcast or hey I learned these new things how can I share that and so and I also do mental health talks because I have dealt with mental health issues my whole life and I want other people to know it's okay and normalizing mental health and conversations around mental health is important so for me that's it I want to interrupt questions and I'd like to go to Jonathan for a second I don't know that everybody knows what it means to be sponsored so could you talk about that yeah so I don't remember which year but at a point in time Matt Malawake the co-founder of WordPress he put out a challenge to anyone that makes money off WordPress or enjoys WordPress or uses WordPress at all to contribute 5% of their time or their resources back to the WordPress program and that could be plugins it could be you know fixing bugs it could be translating different languages and the goal there is to prevent the tragedy of the comments where everybody takes and takes and takes and nobody's replenishing for other people that come after them and so many companies there's a fire compulsion program now if you go to WordPress.org slash the number 5 FDF you can see more about that but essentially it's a way for people involved in the space to give back time through people hours or monetary for sponsoring work camps to help continue to foster a growing project and you know as as the project grows and scales we need more and more of those people to kind of step up and give that give that time and that contribution to help make sure that WordPress is here for my kids my young kids maybe so you have 5 minutes left so what I want to do is start with Marcus Badon and say what's your favorite thing about contributing to WordPress? so I'm on I contribute to the WordPress Photo Directory team and my favorite thing is seeing what other people share like their photography from all over the world I just love hopping in there and part of the moderation process and a lot of it is just really really good and so I love seeing just everyone's contributions and the info from all over the world that's a hard one I just like solving problems and stuff so it's like when I see I see like there's a need for something you know if I can speak and I can you know feel that need or if I can build a piece of software or feel that need that's my favorite thing give me a chance to talk and be a talk that's true yeah no it's not like but you know to what you were saying earlier Mary I'd like to the things talk that I gave was the first live word camp talk that I'd given since Rochester in 2019 and being at a word camp for me it fills my soul okay being the type of personality that I am I just look being around people and so you know the last few years have been a little difficult for me I'm not exactly back up to par with you know people time and everything else well I mean you know as much as I like being around people like I don't like being alone so for me it's about the travel I get to do it's basically an excuse for me to travel you know to come down and do some shopping or whatever but just to do that traveling bit it's an excuse for me even when I was doing it before before I was working for the current company I am I would still take half day off and go to a word camp or you know and it's seen those people right a couple of years ago I got diagnosed with thyroid cancer and I literally got the diagnosis two days before I was set to organize or to do the day of the camp right and I said yeah like I got this and they were honestly concerned this is my friend circle or one of them that to me is the best thing ever for me it's seeing the doors that were pressed opens so you know I've been fortunate I've I've I've never been to Europe I've been to Europe three times now from doing this job and just seeing being able to be a part of that and you never know as a contributor what's going to resonate with someone else my first word camp talk I was talking about was just about plug-in development and I saw someone four or five years later and they said oh I got this thing now this business I'm helping clients and it was all it was all thanks to your workshop that you did and just the way that you explained it just clicked for me and since then I've been I've been running with WordPress and so you never know what doors and what it's going to enable someone to be able to do in their life build a livelihood travel meet people in different parts of the globe I probably would have ever had friends in Australia or Europe or Asia and I have in all of those places I have I have very good friends now and it's just that's inspiring to me and you know I like contributing but that makes it even more and I leave these work camps and I just I can't wait to get home and I know I said I take a day off when I do extra things but I sometimes just want to stick that day and just get back to work and collaborating with everybody and that's definitely my favorite I'm a learner and I am a life-long learner I want to learn doors of life and when you're contributing even if you don't fix the issue of the problems you're learning and that's my favorite thing I've learned more contributing than research in the work-risk community I thought in a way but yes when you contribute you learn a lot you need to learn about the solution or you learn about the person or you're just talking about something you might want to learn even more about and get better at so every time I go in and I get to contribute I get to learn and more enlightened person and also again since it's the end of the conference charity begins at home I opened it with that I love open people WordPress definitely changed a lot of things for me and I want a lot of people from my community it's absolutely the people but also knowing it's not just that there's so many amazing people and I've made so many amazing friends that I get to see them all the time it's knowing that I make a difference and that the things that I do in WordPress makes a difference whether it's I made a really cool tweet and I got used by WordPress.org like that makes a difference to me right or knowing that I raise money and help people get to work camps that makes a difference there's so many different ways that every single one of us can make a difference whether it's small or large and it all works to the good of the whole community and these people here with me today at the stage are part of what makes a difference and every single one of you because you came today are part of what makes a difference and makes this community great and keeps it moving forward so I think we're at time we are one minute over time so I want to say thank you to all of you thank you I'm going to have to appropriate you and my friends that bring you butter charts and comments well yeah there's all the Canadian treats that I was going to say you're welcome