WordCamp Canada 2025 Retrospective (Part 1)

I went to WCEH in Ottawa from Oct 14-16 and had a goddamn blast. I have so much to write about, strap in folks.

I was OVER THE MOON when the organisers announced that there would be a Contributor Day before the conference and that I could be there. Last year I absolutely blundered and missed a lot of wonderful extras because I didn’t factor those into my trip-planning. Mad props to the organisers for making this happen (amongst other things, but I was most excited about this).

My, Um, Contribution

TL;DR for the Contributor Day: I spent four hours yapping and managed to make one comment.

The longer story here was that I got a deep-dive look into the bowels of WordPress, which, as it turns out, has a number of dusty skeletons in the closet. Given that it gets very awesome, very regular updates, sometimes it’s surprisingly to remember that WordPress is old enough to drink. And on this contributor day, I happened upon a piece of dusty code that was written really quite a long time ago: the site language settings function.

I picked the ticket because it seemed easy. I thought, I could write unit tests, no problem! Then I can get this 10-year-old bug patched! Turns out, it was hairy enough that I had to have both Paul and Jonathan talk through the logic with me and realise that the chunk of code being unit tested could not be unit tested. I lucked out too — as soon as I told Paul what I was trying to do, the alarm bells went off in his head and he sat me down. If it was anyone else I might have been stuck for a lot longer. Jonathan also pointed out that the patch might not work as intended. Paul and Jonathan discussed at length the best way to patch the bug, patiently helping out my inexperienced butt.

First of Many AI Conversations

I also spent like half the time setting up my local environment, breaking it, nuking it, then setting it up from scratch again. During that time, Chad and I sat down with Jeff Paul and talked to him about AI.

The developments of the core-ai team is certainly very exciting, though the stuff I prodded Jeff about were about shaping AI for the future. (You’ll see that this is a theme.) We talked about not just the ethics of using it, but the very grey area of contributors using AI — vibe-coding and all that set of issues aside, if a contributor uses AI, can their code still be licensed under GPL or MIT?

For myself, I wouldn’t say I am a convert, but I did use AI to generate some code (for NationBuilder, so I don’t have to think about the legal repercussions right now). I still have massive reservations about it, and we haven’t addressed the “ladder pull” that AI is doing to a shit ton of industries across the board. But using AI to generate a set of pretty decent boilerplate unit tests is too good to pass up. Certainly, it’s too good to tell new coders to never use because it’ll do them a great disservice.

And now Telex (unveiled a few days before WCEH kicked off) can make you some swanky blocks to throw into your WordPress site. The code that I’ve seen is decent enough that you could ship it with some tweaks/clean-ups.

I also sat in on Jonathan’s Intro to Contributing session to kick things off. A couple of nuggets there are:

• No doesn’t mean never
• No could mean a plugin instead
• Contributing doesn’t mean maintaining; if you want the added responsibility of maintaining, that’s great, but you don’t need to take that on

Second and Third AI Conversations

At the Volunteer Gathering that evening, I chatted with Paul, Jonathan, and Konstantin about, you guessed it, how AI is going to impact the tech industry, not just in numbers but in terms of quality.

Of course AI is creating efficiencies (see exhibit A: using AI to boilerplate a bunch of code), and of course as senior devs we can get away with a bit of vibe-coding. As long as we know enough to give it a proper prompt and to clean up the resulting code, I can see it speeding up workflows and all that good stuff.

But what about someone fresh out of community college? What about a grade 12 graduate? If they aren’t getting as much experience reviewing other people’s code, stumbling through docs and stackoverflow and error messages, how do they prepare themselves to code-review their own vibe-code?

Note that my question isn’t necessarily about an individual’s ability to choose to hone their own coding and critical thinking skills. (Though I did do a sneaky ask for advice for new grads, in preparation for my grad speeches in 2026.) I wanted perspectives about how to keep the industry healthy and attractive to intelligent, thoughtful young people. We talked about trends, education, habits, screens, social media, and lots of stuff I’ve since lost track of because there were drinks and food and so many groups to float around and talk to.

I closed out the night chatting with Shanta, Kiera and Courtney about 3D printing, drone flying and other WordCamps. By then it was 10:30 ET and I was crashing. So I went back to my solitary confinement room at Saintlo Jail Hostel, put in my headphones for a bit, and passed out.