DE{CODE} 2025.
WordPress developers' biggest event of the year: virtual, tens of thousands watching. In 2025 I ran it top to bottom, opened it to marketers and agencies, moved product pitches into opt-in sessions. I coordinated with every speaker, wrote every intro and the CEO keynote, recorded and produced every session, and baked in an web design awards program documentary mini-series for good measure.
The work
DE{CODE} was meant to be where professional developers building on WordPress went to get better at their craft. It had drifted into an extended infomercial for our marketing team dressed up as a conference, and years of attendee feedback told us as much. In a year with more eyes on us than usual, not acting on that feedback felt like exactly the wrong move. So the sessions went the other way: what your marketing stack looks like in 2025, accessibility as a core web design consideration, and how to build a separate, siloed web experience for AI agents crawling your content.
This was my final major project at WP Engine and the biggest one the company had run: the sixth annual DE{CODE}, twelve sessions across three tracks, forty speakers, and an audience tuning in from 114 countries. It launched without a hitch, and it was the most-watched DE{CODE} the company had run.
This year's DE{CODE} has been a brain-child of his. From concept to execution, Phil has worked tirelessly on it's production and care for the past 3 months.
He managed a wide array of stakeholders and creative deliverables with vision, passion, and precision.
Phil joined each and every session filming and recording to ensure storylines were all converging into a beautiful narrative that we wanted to tell to the market.
Perhaps the greatest labor of love was the CEO's keynote. We really had to strike a balance after the wild couple of months in national headlines as a company. I went through probably 15 separate drafts of things to say. In the end it was a sermon about community, the open web, and building a group project that truly belongs to all of us. To help continue our motif of rebirth and growth, we filmed in a sweltering but gorgeous Texas garden.
Between the sessions
The other thing I built into this year's DE{CODE} was the Agency Partner Awards. I had spent the year turning that program into a real one, with a scorecard, a jury, and five mini documentaries about the best agency work built on WordPress in the previous year, and the conference was the stage it had never had. The films ran between the sessions, so an audience of tens of thousands watched five agencies and their clients take a bow for work they were proud of. My secret subliminal message to our audience: if WP Engine is where the best work in WordPress gets made, the most convincing way to say so is to spend the biggest platform you own on the people making it.
The talks I keep coming back to
Dr. Chowdhury gave the most level headed argument for optimism about AI at work that I have heard, and it rested on the thing the hype keeps skipping, which is that the technology is only as good as the person holding it. She built the rest of it on a Harvard Business School study finding that a person who knows their work and uses AI outperforms both AI on its own and a person working without it.
Watch on YouTube ↗My favorite breakout session to produce was the case for selling accessibility as a service, with Chris Hinds of Equalize Digital. He made the argument as a business case rather than a compliance one. None of us sits at a fixed point of ability, because you break an arm or you have eye surgery or you simply get older, and at any given moment roughly a fifth of your audience is dealing with something that makes your site harder to use. So fix it and watch your site's performance grow.
Watch on YouTube ↗The product showcase was a true labor of love. We unveiled our new AI Toolkit, which takes all the deep knowledge people have lovingly baked into their websites over the years and turns it into queryable, usable material that can be resurfaced to their own customers in an infinite array of new ways. We invented a visual motif to show that off.
Watch on YouTube ↗