 So Hello So this is five years of word camp grand rapids. Did you know that? Magic five. I missed one year so far. It was not on purpose. I just didn't know that word camp grand rapids was happening that year I don't know how that happened. I just didn't have any idea that it was going on and so My name is John James Jacobi and I have had the pleasure of Using wordpress pretty much full-time in my career for about ten years or so I've been consulting building websites much like most of you and we heard Chris before I started building websites for folks mostly for free mostly to learn and Spending way too much time Doing way too much work all by myself and so over the course of ten years. I have learned how to not do that I'm not talking about that exactly today We could talk about that at any other time and so the suggestion for This talk tonight was originally to be the future of wordpress Which other people do that talk all the time Matt mostly one of the co-founders of wordpress every year at word camp us does a future of wordpress Talk and so that is for Matt to do I think and so my Twist on the idea is to maybe think a little bit farther and maybe a little bit Different directions. We're gonna we're gonna go sideways a little bit too and so Raise your hand if you know what video game that this is Isn't it like one of the best games ever? Yes, so Monument Valley if you've never played Monument Valley you should play Monument Valley I get this is like just a personal endorsement. I'm not getting like a kickback for that Or anything. It's very soothing. It's very beautiful But I thought it was fitting because the future can be scary and sometimes You feel very alone and so for me I actually really enjoy this game because you are very isolated. It is very alone Most of my favorite video games are the games where you are sort of alone in the world when you're playing Monument Valley Metroid if anybody knows me from tweeting stuff online Tomb Raider games where you're sort of in the world solving puzzles and it is probably no mistake That when I write code I sort of prefer to do that alone also Which is part of the reason why I think I was really originally attracted to wordpress is because of the independence of it The Jolly Roger of it if you will or you are Enabled and allowed to install it for free run it for free Write code and learn from everybody else for free if you want to and take it as far as you are willing to take it And so I would had already known how to write PHP And so it was fun for me to learn wordpress in the super early days and mostly not really like it all that much but the community was so inviting that it made it really easy to contribute a little bit and have everyone go Okay, sure Go on in and so you do that a little bit at a time and eventually it became a career And so here's me. Oh, no, so this is a wordpress is great Is my is my my beginning of this if Benjamin Franklin knew about wordpress. He probably would have said that and so If you haven't figured this out yet, I'm definitely a crazy person Wordpress is a piece of software that nobody pays any money for that I want to work on all the time and So how do you do that right like that is one of the first questions for people that are not into wordpress when they say Like it took me a long time for someone to go that I don't know that doesn't really know what I do or why I do it to go How do you make money? How does wordpress make money? How does any of this happen with software that doesn't cost any money? And really it is events like this. It is the community that is behind it It is all of us that help make wordpress a bigger and better thing and so This is gonna be a little bit weird. It's kind of twist on things, but this is sort of the I'm gonna play a video for you, but I don't normally do there's no audio. So you don't have to be frightened There's a video that I found on the internet. We're all friends here. So I'm gonna do what friends do I'm gonna share a funny video with you But what I think is interesting about this is anybody seen this use anybody already know what I'm gonna show you okay, so Mike knows And so watch this happen. It's not that long and so here's what I love about this The lion that fell Did exactly what we all do when you trip on something you go? Well, I didn't mean to fall and then you just give up kind of He just goes up. Well, I'm gonna fall He commits to falling Oh Okay, and then like in the universal language of life His friend is legitimately concerned about what happened to him, right like with no words being said these two Creatures are able to communicate with one another concern worry Safety without anybody communicating anything with one another, right? And so I think that this is really an interesting thing Because what we do as people is use words to communicate all the time We use WordPress to blog we use BB press to post things in the forums We use WooCommerce to sell things we write code with words all the time But the universal language of all of the things that we do can be done without words And so in a lot of ways by using words We really intentionally have to do the total opposite of what nature has shown us works no matter what We completely miscommunicate and over communicate everything using millions of words all the time That causes a bunch of miscommunication. It causes a bunch of Problems big companies small companies online on Twitter people fighting whatever else and so the thing with this that I thought Really applied to I mean word-pressing what we do in this talk and what I'm about to say is that Words are really hard Because we invented words Right, I mean it sounds really stupid to say but we invented them We press them all day right every day with code with WordPress with everything else And we could totally get by without any of it But we are here today Because of the impact that it has made or will make on our careers on our families on our lives with each other And so on and so on and so on so we have built up over millions of years depending on where you are and what you think how important it is to kind of evolve beyond just the natural communication and instead Think a little bit more deeply and philosophically and use your words and your mental capacity To not just use body language, but to actually get the thoughts out of your head in a way that everybody else understands and so It's hard to talk about the future of word-press with a future of anything without mentioning Gutenberg And this is the first and last time that I'm going to mention it In the next half hour or 45 minutes that I've got if you do not know what Gutenberg is You should go find out what Gutenberg is somewhere on the internet because you cannot Step it around the stage of the corner without having somebody talk about it. It is the future of word-press You need to learn what Gutenberg is and how it works if you plan to have a career in word-press for the next 10 years That is my disclaimer at the beginning of all this It is super important that whatever you do for clients for plugins for themes affiliate marketing I don't care what you do Gutenberg is gonna own it and so Learn what it is and how it works And be a part of it if you can That's it. I'm done. So first on my checklist of things that The future of the future of word-press is growth And what I mean by that is that everything? naturally and Lions being the king of the jungle Has a tendency to grow Everything does we perceive that growth is healthy Things that are bigger are for whatever reason perceived to be better Aaron talked earlier today about longer passwords being better Every time that you see something that is growing it is sort of perceived to be good word-press itself Growing the code base growing in theory. That's better It might not be but there is an enormous amount of growth that is happening in the word-press community in every single direction There are more plugins being released on wordpress.org than there ever have been before Someone else can find the charts and graphs, but I promise you it's true Same with themes more themes are being reviewed more quickly than ever before more people are writing more and more Solutions to things than has ever been happening In addition to that There are more companies sort of created being created every day more companies are hiring more people more people are using word-press Wordpress market share is growing still 33% and up and so if that is a number that matters and is important to you it is to me Then growth is all across the board. I don't know what it means when growth Stops or when that momentum starts to slow down. I think everyone freaks out It says well wordpress is dead or whatever they're gonna say But I don't think that that's necessarily true and we've kind of talked about that throughout the day and stuff today But with growth Will typically come added complexity It's hard to build more things and have it be simpler and this is like as a software developer I am guilty of this many many times over where you think that the solution to something is Building a plug-in that introduces lots more functionality or code to solve a problem that Only exists because there is something that's already there in the first place and so every new piece of code and No offense, but again including Gutenberg is going to add in insane amount of complexity To the wordpress that we all know and love Not just complexity for users, which is the obvious sort of use case here But for the developers that work on wordpress core their entire way that they have used and built and maintained wordpress is Now a hundred percent different Up to and including when you pull down the latest version of wordpress like if you work on wordpress the software It does not work the same way that it worked two weeks ago Because they've rearranged where everything lives and works and all of these things Recompile wordpress into the wordpress that gets shipped out to everybody else And so all of the ways that I have helped build wordpress for the past ten years are completely gone I mean not all of them But most of them are a hundred percent different than they were two weeks ago Because javascript and processes and compilers and build processes have taken over all of it And it's all stuff that needs to happen on servers all over the place when before it used to just be like Done and so every time with every new release wordpress is only going to get more complex Which for me in my own sort of personal opinion Is a little scary actually Because wordpress has always been known and has a reputation for having a very low barrier to entry And being super easy to use and so if wordpress stays easy to use But the barrier to entry keeps getting higher and higher to make wordpress better It doesn't doesn't seem like we're doing the right thing all the time doesn't seem like we're going the right direction But it's hard to make wordpress better or the word or the web better without also growing it and making it more complicated at the same time and So the one thing that complexity brings is Solutions the glass is either half empty or half full, but it's actually both So someone who says that you're a pessimist or you're an optimist You're probably both at any given time about any given dumb thing And so we are pretty fortunate that with the community that we have the businesses that we have the contributors that we have Aaron is here from the security team There are other people from all areas of that work on core or in the community There are hundreds of word camps around the world every single year We are sort of a community of Problem solvers that are offering solutions to the problems that come up with every single wordpress release with every single customer That we have with every lead that we get and so on and so on and so solutions generally come in the form of of plug-ins But that doesn't necessarily mean that they need to be I Think when I think of services most of the time the things there are solutions what I think of is Services of which there are like again more and more and more coming out at any given month people are Focusing their lens like liquid web is focusing on mu commerce Automatic used to be focused pretty heavily on wordpress.com and they're like VIP platform But pivoted a long time ago to focusing pretty much on jetpack as like their future as an organization And so the future at least a small chunk of it a small profitable chunk of it Really exists in providing services that rotate around wordpress If you're unfamiliar with kind of how all the pieces fit the easiest way for the most Recognizable service that kind of rotates around wordpress or that wordpress is a part of is hosting That's like the obvious one because you don't really get to use wordpress on the web unless it's hosted somewhere for you Most people are not running up a spinning up their own droplet Starting up their own linode doing all those kind of things You're mostly relying on a blue host a dream host a liquid web a page of a pantheon Somebody else to get your wordpress website up into the world, but we've had services for a really long time. We've had Acismet comes with wordpress that is a service that comes inside of your wordpress that you have to turn on Gravitar what it's worth is a service that comes built into wordpress to put a face on your stuff And without that thing you would have to figure out a way to somehow get your picture on somebody else's blog There are all these sort of services that have been around for a long time that you don't really think of as a service Because they've sort of been somewhat you ubiquitized with being packaged with everybody's wordpresses all over the place But the obvious service is jetpack But there are less obvious services that are specific or really help wordpress like CDNs like cloudflare or Domain services like name.com or hosts that allow Sort of one-click installs of wordpress because that was always a really big deal back in the day But I think we're going to watch the services space like heavily evolve And I think the writing is on the wall a little bit with this Like I think everyone is sort of openly telling us that this is what they're doing Without us really identifying that this is exactly what they're doing Which is really smart for wordpress in a lot of ways But also really challenging in some ways and so for example one of the things that made wordpress really popular originally was Being able to import and export your blog data from one platform to the next and so if you wanted to move off a blog Or a movable type or whatever else Export it in or export it out import it in Everything came over Like it was kind of amazing to see everything just all your images and everything come from one website and into the other And that really helped wordpress get a lot of popularity and and sort of win back in the original days However, if you want to move your WooCommerce site to easy digital downloads or back and forth We don't necessarily have that yet We're not there with being able to make all of these pieces of data super portable If you want to move your the bulletin forum to BB press we built those importers a long time ago Those are all in there. There's 20 too many of them and it works pretty okay and For what it's worth again Even though it's not a ton of installs BB press has almost 400,000 installs, which for forum software Is like the market share. It's not just 33 percent. It's like 62 percent of all forums are running BB press But you wouldn't know that Because nobody's really paying attention to forums the way they pay attention to wordpress or anything else And so what you'll see in services in the future of wordpress is web hosts really truly doubling down on owning one very specific piece of that pie There are folks very brilliantly focusing on WooCommerce because there is a huge install base there There's an economy there There is dependency for other people's businesses to use WooCommerce So being the person that is the foundation for all these companies is a really smart strategy. I think There's no reason why someone couldn't do that for BB press forums or buddy press cut communities or Podcasting sites. I know that folks are sort of working on podcasting like there's a site somewhere I don't know the name of it somebody's working on that But you will see people that just own that space on purpose Their their whole wordpress installation process will be a hundred percent dashboarded to be a WooCommerce we're gonna set you up and hook you up and it's gonna be super dope experience Because that's where they believe that the future of wordpress and things are going to go But that is what people are sort of been doing for a while And in the way that history sort of repeats itself People used to do this with cPanel Like just white label it make it their own they'd have their own install It was just cPanel, but it looked different You click on different things, but it's kind of the same thing You're gonna see people doing this just using wordpress as the as the interface to get a website up and running With their fancy flashy bits all bolted on to it And a lot of this is really difficult to do Without partnering up And so at some point somebody probably smarter than me had said something that I have latched on to that's hard for me to let go of Which is You can do the best work of your life or you can be successful You can't really do both Right like if you want to be successful you've got to Not be alone anymore. You have to partner with other people to be successful You might like what you're doing But the best work that you'll ever do in your life will probably be the stuff that you have worked on By yourself in the corner as a hobby That is the the best nicest looking thing But no one's gonna really know about it or care because they're not as invested in it as you are It's hard to take this thing that you did on your own. It's unrealistic to expect For that thing that you built on your own to suddenly just get As popular and get the passion behind it as people have specifically with wordpress. I think and wordpress in a way Kind of has that early success syndrome where Popularity spiked and I know dug has seen me show this before where For in the early days of wordpress and bb press when bb press was a different piece of software They had the same number of installs They you would instead both were the graphs were all the number of people installing wordpress Were the same as people installing bb press And then movable types which their license and wordpress skyrocketed and bb press kind of stays the same And so what you're going to see are People partnering with one another in order to get their Idea across the finish line or at least move the ball a little bit because you can't do that by yourself It takes other people It takes people behind what it is that you're trying to accomplish and for partnerships You will see like does anybody have a hero? Does anybody it's by ero routers that have at home? So I I got I felt I fell victim to like the podcast advertising It totally ditched my apple routers at home and bought heroes But they partnered with one password they partnered with VPN I forget what encrypt dot me and other folks. They just like I paid for era I have this physical hardware in my house But I paid them an extra hundred bucks a year To have one password and the VPN service for free And so they partnered to provide value That I will pay for on a annual basis And I think that that's really smart It's weird that it's a router that's partnering with other people But I think that that's sort of how we Get along with these recommendations and these partnerships to go. Okay. Well If you like me these are my people and you will like them too because you trust me so you could trust them also And it seems pretty obvious But sometimes when you're working on stuff or when you're enjoying your independence It's hard to remember that you need to partner up with people in order to get the things done that you want to get done And conversely to that Depending on glass half empty or half full This is going to be and it has been for a while, but this will continue to be a hugely competitive space Not because the market is in any way shrinking but because As everything gets bigger and as sort of people partner up The the bigger get bigger And the smaller gets smaller And so people start competing pretty heavily for wordpress installs Porting insights from one host to another Moving your site from WooCommerce to Freemius or back and forth or whatever it is that you're trying to accomplish We are going to see an insane amount of kind of competition from all directions. I think Which I think is a healthy thing for wordpress and the community insights at large and all of it Uh, but it's always sort of been friendly Competition because we've always been part of the wordpress community and in it for the democratizing publishing and open and free web and all those kind of things But we're also watching the open and free web be taken from us And we are sort of watching bigger companies. I mean for the better. I think Investing more time into wordpress go daddy has full-time employees Many hosting companies have full-time folks Consulting agencies have full-time people working on wordpress And so there's competition for Influence on the software. There's competition for economics on the platform. There's competition between plugins trying to gain users There's all sorts of competition for independent designers and developers to Get attention drawn to them for the cool stuff that they're doing or to get a patch into wordpress core Or an on and on and on and on and on and on And so the more contributors and the more sites and the more people that there are Is the more competition that we are going to have Which sort of means you have to be your most awesome best self like all the time, which is not there's a little tiring it's a little exhausting but With some of this is the topic that I have talked about in the past People are going to start deciding that they want wordpress to do something different than what wordpress does And wordpress.com has sort of always been my best example For doing that and having done that for a very long time and found huge success in doing so wordpress.com and and folks and I helped work on wordpress.com for a number of years Is largely wordpress the way that you all use it and have always known it to be but It is different in tiny little ways That make it a separate version of wordpress truly it lives in a separate repository That has different little bits and hacks in it or on it After I left automatic those hacks got slowly taken out so that it was easier for everyone to deploy wordpress.com to 4,000 servers all around the world But it's always been a fork for what it's worth And so when a company like pantheon Needs to deploy copies of wordpress out into all of their sites They sort of have a choice to make Are they pulling it directly from wordpress.org or are they Pulling it from a fork that they maintain So that they have some control over how their internal deployments work I don't know for a fact But my guess is that they're maintaining a fork of it because it is easier and more reliable. They get to handhold it It's their platform Their systems team wants to know what it is that's getting run On their own servers. It's the best thing that they can do to keep their things safe But eventually that vanilla deployment of wordpress May come with jetpack by default And it may come with WooCommerce by default Uh as these flavors and forks of wordpress start to come out You will start to see different versions of wordpress being deployed to people And so that's good and that there is growth and it is helps the economy and It makes the it drives solutions and it makes things better And it's scary in that it is not portable yet people get locked in a little bit It's a little bit harder to support and maintain if you want to move someone from one flavor of wordpress to the next People that have been doing this everything from switching yabuntu versions or linux versions Email addresses from switching a host from one place to the next If you have a gmail account you're not hosting your gmail account on yahoo's servers But if you make your own email address email was designed to be a portable platform And there are ways to take it and move it from one place to the other and so wordpress is kind of falling into a similar pattern where uh It started off as being super portable and really easy to get in and out of but we're going to For the sake of growth and trying to solve problems and build solutions Going to start walling these gardens off a little bit on purpose I think in order to build better WooCommerce sites in order to build a better web In order to get people talking with one another and so on and so on and so I'm sort of an advocate for Like healthy forks. I think that it's a good thing for projects to have an alternate direction and voice it's also A little weird that wordpress hasn't had a legitimate fork yet Because a lot can get done when you're not encumbered by all of the The weight of what everyone else is trying to do sometimes you need to You know blitz up the middle. It's sometimes you got to end around and so to have both I think works And we've only had one So to have more than one I think is actually really helpful And so one of the things that I have been deep into for The past six months, but also way in the early days of working on buddypress Are I mean databases And this is one of those things that We always sort of knew what the right answer was But just because it was right didn't mean it was best and so Around wordpress 3.0 is when custom post types were like formally introduced And you could have made a custom post type at any time before 3.0. You just had to know how Uh, and the idea with a custom post type is instead of a post or a page You have whatever you want you can name it whatever you want give it its own icon You are in control of what that thing is but eventually That database table where posts live Is not enough for you anymore And so when we moved bbpress, which is a completely different sort of type of software than what a blog is Forums are relational heavily Blogs are less relational. They're top-down title content onto the next thing Uh, we took bbpress from a standalone piece of software and made it a wordpress plugin that used custom post types syntax on a means and it was technically Not the most efficient for forums But it helped make bbpress a better piece of software And so it was the wrong thing to do Technologically speaking But it was the right thing to do for wordpress.org support forums. It was easier for everyone to understand and work with Uh, and it helped grow bbpress as a platform and a piece of software for people that wanted forums And so we took 150 000 bbpress installs that turned into almost 400 000 installs by porting it to being a wordpress plugin that used custom post types It is less efficient it is More taxing on a database all throughout And in many ways sites like or plugins like will commerce edd and so on are not Super efficient because they use wordpress's core database tables And so this is sort of a weird wordpress philosophy Of don't make your own database tables It's sort of just use what wordpress gives you because it's convenient easy And that has been what we have preached for a very long time And I think that for most cases that is probably true if you're starting out that that is the easiest way to ship something prototype it proof of concept It's works. It's done cool But eventually everyone learns the same lesson which we learned with buddypress in 2008 Which is if you actually want this piece of software to scale You cannot do it that way if your goal is to do 2 000 card entries a minute on a WooCommerce site You suddenly go. Oh, well, this is this will not work Period end of story in order to do this over here We have to offload a bunch of stuff over here and this other solution that we built ourselves Custom database tables schema queries offloaded over here We'll push it back over here when we're done But for now we need to do something else And so the weird thing about wordpress and I love it for what it is Is this a version the custom database tables has really stymied a lot of growth for a very long time Because lots of the stuff that you would want to do with wordpress. You just cannot do The way that you would want to do it you want to do recurring dates on a calendar You will not store that in post meta because you will never be able to fill a calendar with start times and end times from month to month And query it in a way that doesn't break a server down whenever you have more than a thousand events in it It just will not work We see that with BB press for what it is, which is not even really that that taxing of an application Because it uses a lot of metadata and we query things in weird ways because we are stuck In that database schema and so plugins more and more are going to go You know what we have a million users And their sites are suffering because it's the way that we built this thing And it's time to move on not to move on outside of wordpress, but to own it in a way Where they can make it scale make it fast And and make it work in a way that their users expect for it to And so the rest of the world Does not care how many database tables that you have on a server Even if you installed v-bolton 15 years ago v-bolton became like a hundred database tables for the dumbest things ever but Because they this doesn't matter If you install if you have an iPad and you install iBooks and you download a book dug and I were just talking about this today You install a book in the iBooks app, which will eventually be renamed books, which I guess whatever But that book is just a database as zone tables for managing your notes and how you tag stuff and highlighting And line or note to whatever else If iBooks or if any app wasn't able to make its own database tables to store the stuff it was trying to do They would never be able to accomplish any of the things that you're doing You wouldn't get to space in a rocket without being able to have a couple of database tables that you needed to make on your own If you had to shove them all on this same one old thing You would never be able to get anywhere and so you're going to see Added complexity in terms of plugins adding and using their own database tables to get the job done Which means you have to relearn a little bit about how they work It means you have to dig a little bit deeper in order to understand how they've chosen to do these things But we're going to see this happen. We're going to have to there's going to be impossible to get any bigger or faster or better without it And in order to do that that I almost wrote server lists on here because I know that like that's supposed to be a thing But it's really a thing Because you have to have servers in order to get anything done I think it's a dumb word, but You're going to see Servers doing what servers are supposed to do Which is process information without you knowing or caring that they're doing it Jetpack is already doing this in really unique and kind of clever ways with like what chris talked about with photon With jetpack comments and likes and all these things Even vault press and backups servers should do what servers are supposed to do We talk about servers like your web host and your web server doing its thing But we're going to see services and solutions that are going to be using Many web servers for multiple things for many different reasons And so in the original way that wordpress sort of supported all of these servers was horizontal database scaling You have a bunch of databases or you clone your database all across all these separate servers so that Reading the database is super fast and writing to the database is super fast Uh, and wordpress sort of supports that eternally by default But it doesn't really know how to do that for comments or for forums or for your buddy press install your woocommer site or so on And so we're going to see wordpress just sort of Behind the scenes using many more computers and machines In order to get the things done that need to get done crunching images serving downloads from a woocommer site It's how handling in Person fulfillment from stuff that you sell through a woocommer store You're going to offload all of that To some other server to get the job done the same way that you do that with payment gateways and everything else Here we're going to have to say if we have a super active site Someone else handles our caching someone else handles our databases someone else is going to handle our comments Uh, and so on that might come back into your wordpress install for you to see it manage it and moderate it But it's just going to get bigger and span across multiple servers That will be more and more common as the years go on And with all of these things, uh, we will see more companies acquire other companies This has happened a few different times with a few kind of big deal companies in the wordpress space uh that Either their investments their original investment is up and Or their original investors want out or someone's unhappy with something or someone's super happy with somebody else that they've met And they want to figure out a deal however those things work Uh This I think in my opinion is sort of the sign of a healthy growing wordpress economy Every other company that you see on the news for good and for bad Uh, eventually acquires a company that Sort of fits the thing that they're not doing very well Uh, sometimes it's things where you're like, oh, I really wish That AT&T and Spectrum weren't going to do their thing Sometimes you're really excited that two companies partner up or somebody buy something apple bought There was like a app company that did uh weird automation like uh workflow stuff and uh beautiful ui and Apple bought them and they're rolling that into the next version of ios for seri commands and stuff And so sometimes you're like, oh, well that makes total sense. This was beautiful and it totally fits Uh, but we'll see more and more of these things the fact that microsoft just bought github Like blew my mind because a github was like a company that I didn't think was a purchasable company Like if someone is if if it if it was like somebody buying microsoft They'd be like no way did that happen and then sure enough microsoft bought github and I was like wow That is a big big deal And so we'll see more of that happening in the wordpress space and so companies will continue to In you know for healthy Absorb and support other companies iThemes was the one that kind of is big on my mind that kind of helps draw attention to this And studio press with the genesis theme They've been a smaller separate part of Copy blogger for a while working on genesis specifically and now they have Support through wp engine to continue to grow genesis as its separate thing Uh, this is good. I think these people move the move the pieces around a little bit and sort of make sure that things that Have huge install basis genesis. I think has 600 000 installs for a theme It's like an insane number for one very specific theme And so to know that they've been able to pull this off with a team of like five developers And now they're going to pump more energy into making genesis a bigger and better part of wp engine's Suite of offerings is really really nice. I think it's really good for everybody And with that then something that we haven't really seen happen yet But will eventually happen is An actual merger An acquire an acquisition that feel like is a little different chris will correct me But an acquisition is mostly just a talent We're taking talent and product and going merger is like at&t at spectrum where there's big pieces That go okay. Well, we're both so big The gravitational pull of both of us. We can't help but bounce into one another And so eventually you think okay, we're gonna we're gonna figure something out and so that might be So it could be something crazy that you would never think of on a left field. It could be Go daddy and somebody else that could be automatic and somebody else feel like oh Why and then you look at it you go just makes total sense We haven't seen big company mergers in the WordPress space yet But I think all of these big companies are Realizing how big they are now like wp engines started with a few guys Automatic started with matt and donica and ryan boran was three people And so it's 760 employees now And so these companies are growing it is getting bigger And we will see these companies that have a huge amount of investment in wordpress continue to merge Or start to merge And I this is based on I don't know anything So don't look at me like I actually know something but it just seems like this is the natural progression of things in any space They just they just happen this way And so I think we can predict that these things are going to Are going to happen And what that means is lots of money like big dollar deals that I mean, I've worked on some decent sized wordpress sites, but these we're talking like big money deals are going to have them which means Companies that are already and have been sponsoring word camps for a really long time have also been Sort of pumping a lot of money into word camps and sponsorships for folks Big and small I was really lucky for a couple years to have hosting companies Sponsor me to work on wordpress core and security. It wasn't a lot of money, but it was enough to get by and so you'll see more The economics of all of this Explode I think in lots of different directions not just the small stuff like selling Gutenberg themes and blocks like Small shops and independent folks might make decent money doing that There are people on theme forests that make a surprisingly decent living selling You know relatively popular, but in my opinion probably not super high quality stuff But uh, but it's okay. That's I'm not it's the point is that we're seeing more and more Available funding for the projects and the things that people are interested or passionate about Uh And that's important for an open source project. I mean for a long time people look at wordpress as being uh, automatics But the reality is that automatic has stepped back pretty far to let other companies Influence the direction that wordpress is deep enough where Could or should go Uh, and that again is sort of good or bad, I guess Depending on which side of the lion pond that you're falling into or not because the uh If you are I lost my train of thought I had a thought and that's gone I don't know where I was going with it But my point is in general we're going to see lots of Economic stimulation in the in the wordpress space. I really wish I knew where I was going, but I lost it so Aaron talked a little bit about this on the security side of things But we see this uh Every day with your access logs. You see this with Wordpress security stuff. We see it on the news all over the place Uh, but we are going to run into folks that are bad actors Uh, and by that they're sort of not not good folks. I guess And the general my general if I'm allowed to have one concern Uh, since we're talking about companies and influence and money with wordpress as a piece of software and I means a lot to me because Sort of aligns with my personal beliefs of freedom and democratizing publishing empowering people to publish to the web have a voice Make a living build the software the way they want to For free or no money so that anyone of any economic background or Anything is able to start from sort of the same place Those are things that are important to me But in an open community that kind of is inviting and really open arms to anyone It's possible that eventually we may run into somebody who doesn't have the same or best interest in part for the community Or the software Or anything else and so we are pretty lucky I think to have not really encountered that yet But that doesn't mean that Someone from an organization or a company that is sponsoring word camps or is going deep into it Doesn't feel like they have influence over the software to take it into a different direction We've been pretty good for the past 15 years of wordpress where we've built something really great We have a great community. We have a great piece of software um, and we're pretty good I think about sort of course correcting and self policing if Someone violates a code of conduct if somebody's uncomfortable those kind of things But if someone comes in that has more money or influence or power over something else We may not know for a while We haven't had that happen. I don't think but it is one of those scary things that could happen in our uh in our future And since I'm close to running out of time And generally try to leave some time for q and a because I Talk very deep and philosophical about a lot of different things uh, given The weekend that it is Wordpress hopefully forever will maintain its independence The nice thing about wordpress is that it is Wordpress and it is ours to be whatever we want for it to be we get to Patch bugs we get to build features we get to decide the direction that we want to take the web and wordpress sites And a long time ago it was let's let comments happen Let's let people make comments on blog posts. That seems cool And then it was let's let people categorize their blog posts. That seems cool Let's let people build plugins and themes and turn this into something bigger and give a little bit more control To people to make their wordpress sites however they want And so on and on we've built The things that we all together think that wordpress or the web or the the tool that we use to build websites with should be and Personally, I really enjoy that freedom and independence To let us build the web that we want All of us want instead of The web that we believe wants us to have or somebody else we're able to sort of build it the way that we want it to be and so With that I will have two minutes left and I will say Thank you for having me. Uh, and if there are questions, I would love to uh To answer any questions that anybody has anything at all No wrong questions Joe has a question What? Oh, yeah, moha. Yeah, yes No Don't if you use your laptop or your machine for actual work And you do not plan on helping apple make mojave Do not install macOS mojave Don't do it ios 12 is okay. The beta there is so far pretty good Do not install mojave though. It broke virtual box. So just nothing works a bunch of kexts are broken and so like Homebrew doesn't work. Yeah, it's not good. Don't do it. If you install xcode That's broken and it won't install the command line tools correctly. It's don't do it stay away from mojave I like that. That was like your own. I should start an apple blog myself, right? Like Why haven't I done that yet? Uh in the middle. I'm sorry go ahead So forward press dot tv the question is what is the future of word camps? and it's interesting having watched word camps evolve to what they are because uh The nice thing about them originally was that they were always really small and intimate and those are my favorite camps That's why I enjoy coming to grand rapids is because 150 people seems to me like the sweet spot for a word camp Whereas word camp europe is 2,200 people and it's so you see Some people and you're like totally overwhelmed with everything that's happening and then you come and then you go and you're like I don't know what just happened and then As an experiment, uh, I a couple of years ago did a word camp in little old east joy wisconsin And uh, we had 35 people and so What's nice about word camp still is that we're able to experiment like this is I mean my favorite But like being plug-in and tool sort of specific like there's word camp for publishers is happening in chicago in august There's a different kind of event for a different audience And so we're big enough now where I think there is some value In finding your people within your people Like i'm into publishers or i'm into big media or i'm into forums or i'm into plugins or whatever i'm into And we're lucky to have that growth where we can on purpose discriminate Who we want to be with at that period of time Uh And that's healthy again. I think what's that's all of these things that we're talking about is the future of word camps I think uh, but the other side of it and we see this again with Events like this one and definitely at word camp east joy Uh is there was so much Sponsorship money from global word camp sponsors That the local contributions and tickets like they were a fraction of the overall budget for any of that and so It's the the amount of support that we have is really impressive But a lot of that support isn't as localized as it used to be a lot of it is microsoft and you know You're getting like big sort of gold level type sponsors. And so I think the future is all of those things But we get to decide Which I think is nice. So it's probably a non answer, but that's my best answer I have zero minutes left. So I guess if someone else has a question I'll fit one in because if anything i'm known for like delaying everything and going way over budget in time So is anybody else have anything? Okay, nothing. So thank you again. Have a good night. Enjoy the after party And uh, congratulations on five years. Woo five years. Yay Good night