What happens at a WordCamp contributor day, and why would a hiring manager care? WPwatercooler asked me after WordCamp US 2022 in San Diego, where I’d been a table lead for the Training team. I was the returning guest on episode 429.
🎙️ Episode details
- Show: WPwatercooler, episode 429, “do_action: WordCamp US 2022 Contributor Day”
- Panel: Jason Tuckercolleague, Sé Reedcolleague, Jason Cosperacquaintance and Steve Zehngut
- Guest: me, Courtney Robertson, then a GoDaddy Pro developer advocate and Training team co-rep
- Date: September 16, 2022
- Show notes: WPwatercooler episode 429, with links and a transcript
The captions come from a machine transcript I generated, and I haven’t proofread them yet.
🧑💻 What did contributor day look like?
I’d led the Training table alongside contributors I’d admired for years. By my rough memory of the count, close to 40 percent of attendees stayed for contributor day. The venue’s internet was thin, so teams picked tasks that didn’t need much bandwidth. The Photos team went on a photo walk instead of uploading in the room.
A contributor named Andy, who’d helped me get the core local development environment running at an earlier contributor day, joked that he’d poach me for the core team. My home in the project was still Training.
🎓 What was the Training table working on?
Learn WordPress was gearing up to support a future WordPress certification, so material quality mattered. We started documents comparing how other open source projects run certification and “get involved” pages, with a list of projects AmyJune Hineline recommended.
At the table, one contributor reviewed Learn content for accessibility, an experienced WordPress instructor helped us raise the professional quality of materials, and a contributor from Bluehost worked on our GitHub project tracking, so automation could record contributions that nobody can keep in their head.
💼 Why hiring managers came to the table
At the event, employers stopped me to ask whether I knew anyone for open roles. I couldn’t fill one role that day, but I told the panel the long term fix is a WordPress jobs pipeline: training that makes sure applicants know the languages and WordPress itself.
🧪 What can you take from this contributor day talk?
- First time contributors: pick a table, and ask for a task that fits the room’s bandwidth.
- Employers: tell the Training team what skills you hire for.
- Parents: I’d missed contributor days during my kids’ toddler years, and it was good to be back. I wanted to learn how Kids Camp worked alongside contributor day.
Also, more conversations like this one live in my podcast and speaking archive.
🗓️ Archival note
WPwatercooler’s page is dated September 16, 2022, and this post keeps that date. The publisher’s slug and title say “2002”; the event was WordCamp US 2022. On November 9, 2026, I corrected the title and expanded this post from the show notes and automated transcript. However, I reviewed the transcript, not the recording.