Last month I ventured west to Portland, Oregon to attend WordCamp US 2024. It’s both easy and hard to believe that a month has passed since the event. In addition to helping out at Contributor Day and the Bluehost booth, I gave my first ever joint talk with fellow contributor, Core Committer, and good friend Aaron Jorbin.

Our talk was titled “Releasing a Version of WordPress in 8 Hours or Less.” Here is the session’s abstract from the WordCamp US website:

Last September, a small but nasty bug was added to the WordPress Core code base and remained undetected until 6.4 was released in November.

Once the severity was clear, Core contributors worked around the clock to determine the appropriate fix, getting a new release out to the world in less than 8 hours from start to finish. Let’s examine what happened during this moment in the project’s history before zooming out in a case study of release management. Lessons the project learned will be shared in a way that you can relate to, allowing you to use them in your own work.

This is a joint talk by Aaron Jorbin and Jonathan Desrosiers, two contributors with over a combined 26 years in contribution experience. They have each led multiple minor and major WordPress releases, are both core committers and members of the WordPress Security team.

WordPress 6.4.1 was a release that I’m really proud of. Though it focused primarily on fixing a single problem, there were many contributors involved spanning several areas of the project. It was a shining example of how great our community is when we work together towards a common goal.

The co-talk format was also really refreshing! Instead of working on a slide deck in a silo on my own, I was constantly workshopping ideas to include important details with Aaron. It’s also harder to forget things with two brains instead of one! The most helpful thing that we did to prepare was including speaker queues to start the speaker notes for each slide. This ensured that we each spoke about the same amount, and prevented us from both starting the next slide at the same time.

The talk itself went well and received great initial feedback! We had actually submitted this talk and were declined twice already for WordCamp Asia 2024 and WordCamp Europe 2024. But one positive outcome to submitting 3 times (besides finally being accepted, of course) is that the WordCamp speaker submission form now includes a “joint talk” option. I’m really hoping more people take advantage of this going forward!

Replay

If you weren’t able to attend or catch the live stream, the talk has been posted to WordPress.tv, which I’ve embedded below! If you prefer to view on YouTube, you can re-watch the live stream feed for the “Stumptown” track. I’ve set the link to seek directly to the start of our session.

Featured image: CC0 licensed photo by Hari Shanker R from the WordPress Photo Directory.