Earlier this week I gave a talk at Bristol WordPress People, our local WordPress meetup, called “Tales of the unexpected – troubleshooting WordPress at scale”, based on my experience of running, debugging and tweaking the performance of WordPress at scale. It’s been a while since I’ve done a public talk, by which I mean one outside of work. I do some of presenting in my day job, mostly on video calls but sometimes in person too (including on stage in Tulum, Mexico, at WordPress VIP Division Meetup), but either way that’s an audience who are there because it’s part of their job. Standing in front of a room full of people who chose to give up their evening to listen to you is a very different thing.
Real-life local tech meetups used to be way more common. At one point there seemed to be something on most weeks if you wanted it, then they kind of dwindled around the time everyone got really active on social media. Why go out on a cold weeknight when the conversation is happening on Twitter anyway? But social media usage seems to have tailed off amongst my tech peers particularly since Twitter took a dark turn and is now mainly disinformation bots arguing with each other. So maybe it’s no surprise that meeting up in an actual room with actual people is starting to feel worthwhile again.
As for the talk itself, in retrospect it was too long, and what I’d actually written was two talks squashed into one. The first was about how WordPress works under the hood, and where the bottlenecks and scaling weaknesses are, illustrated with my (Claude’s) finest stick figures. The second was the actual “Tales of the Unexpected” theme, built around stories and anecdotes from supporting WordPress sites at scale – the part people really came for, and the part that ended up a bit squeezed by the time I’d finished explaining everything else. Some of these were based on Case Studies from the VIP Learn Advanced WordPress Debugging course that I co-produced.
I’ll probably refine it, split it or trim it down, so that I can give the same talk at another meetup. That’s one of the nice things about the meetup format – you get to road-test something on a friendly audience, find out which bits land and which bits drag, and then do it better next time.
For what it’s worth, though, the talk was never really the main event. The real value was in the social networking before and after – catching up with people, meeting new faces, and having the kind of meandering conversations about work, tech and everything else that just don’t happen in a comment thread.
So if you’ve been meaning to go to your local meetup and keep finding reasons not to, go! And if you’re there and someone offers you the chance to do a talk, maybe say yes – just don’t try to cram two talks into one like I did.