WordCamp Europe 2026, Krakow, Poland
Let me be honest with you from the start.
There were so many moments in this journey where the reasonable thing to do was stop. Cancel everything. Tell yourself it was not meant to be. Go back to your screen, your routine, your corner of the Philippines, and just watch other people post about WordCamp Europe from the other side of the world.
I almost did that. More than once.
But I did not. And the reason I did not has a lot to do with the people I met through this community, starting with one person from WordCamp Asia 2025 who would end up changing the entire outcome of this trip.
This is not really a story about Krakow. It is a story about what this community does for the people in it, and why I want you to feel it too, in person, at WordCamp Philippines this August.
Where It All Began
I am Alpha Jun. I grew up on Guimaras Island, a small province in the Philippines. And before June 2026, I had never left the Philippines on an international flight.
Guimaras is a beautiful place. But it is not exactly a tech hub. There is no local WordPress meetup. No developer community gathering on a Saturday morning. If I wanted to attend a tech event or a meetup, I had to take a ferry to the mainland, to Iloilo, just to be in a room with people who cared about the same things I did.
That is how much this community meant to me even before I left the island. I was already crossing water just to get near it.
The furthest I had traveled for WordPress was WordCamp Asia 2025 in Manila and Campus Connect in Cagayan de Oro. Those events meant something to me. They showed me what a real community looked like, people who build things with the same tool, who speak the same language of plugins and themes and open source, who stay up too late talking about the internet and somehow feel like family by the end of it.
It was at WordCamp Asia 2025 in Manila where I first met Brady Friedrich.
So when WordCamp Europe opened volunteer applications, something moved in me.
Not just attend. Volunteer. Serve the biggest WordPress event in the world. Be part of it, not just a face in the crowd.
I applied. I got accepted.
And then everything started to fall apart.
Before I go further, I need to properly introduce Brady, because without him, this story does not happen the way it did.
Brady has been working in WordPress for over 15 years and is a full-time manager at Snowflake. When I met him at WordCamp Asia 2025 in Manila, he taught me things I could not have learned from any blog post or documentation.
What started as a conversation at that event eventually grew into something bigger. Brady and I co-founded Bantala, a business based in the Philippines. That is the kind of relationship this community can lead to: not just friendships, but real partnerships and opportunities, built between two people from completely different parts of the world who happened to be at the same conference.
Over the following months, as I worked on getting to WordCamp Europe, Brady became someone I leaned on for almost everything related to this trip. He helped me think through my flight bookings, walking through routes. He guided me through the entire visa application process, what documents I needed, how to present them, what to expect. And later, when things went wrong, again and again, he was the person on the other end of the message at odd hours, helping me think clearly when I could not.
My visa was approved three days before the final flight. Three days. The nervousness I felt during those 72 hours is something I cannot fully explain. It was not fear exactly. It was the feeling of standing at the edge of the biggest thing you have ever done, knowing that everything could still go wrong, and choosing to stand there anyway.
Visa Denied
The denial came without ceremony. Just a letter. Just a no.
I did not cry. I did not spiral. What I did instead was ask myself one question: how do I fix this?
That shift, from feeling the loss to solving the problem, is something I did not fully understand at the time. But looking back, it was the decision that made everything else possible.
I filed an appeal.
I reached out to people in the WordPress community. That is one of the most important things I can tell any Filipino: do not be too proud to ask for help. Explain your situation clearly. Have honest intentions. People will surprise you.
JC Palmes connected me to someone I needed to know. Danyl Marie Noelle Marañon walked me through the process step by step, guiding me on what to do and how to do it. Harcy Joy Dela Cruz helped me prepare the requirements. I explained my whole situation to Brady, and he guided me through organizing the requirements
And then there was Juan Hernando.
When I first saw the name, I thought he was Filipino. He is not. Juan was a lead organizer in WordCamp Europe 2024 and has been a dedicated co-organizer of local events, WordPress Meetups, and WordCamps in Galicia, Spain, including WordCamp Pontevedra and WordCamp Galicia. But he is one of the generous people I have encountered in this entire journey. Juan wrote a support letter for my visa appeal, a formal document explaining my responsibility as a volunteer in WordCamp Philippines, showing that I had roots here, a role here, a reason to come back.
That changed everything.
The Chaos Before the Flight
Even after the appeal was submitted, nothing came easy.
I booked a round-trip ticket. Then the situation in Qatar made the route uncertain and I had to cancel it. I booked again through Finnair. The layover was too long so I changed again. I booked through Lufthansa. Brady was part of these decisions too, helping me weigh the routes and the risks each time.
And then came the worst morning.
At the airport, before my Lufthansa flight, the immigration officers pulled me aside for a thorough interview. I sat there answering question after question. This was my first international travel. They wanted to know if I would come back. They were doing their job. I understand that now.
But in that moment? I was pissed off.
I watched my flight leave without me.
Missed. Gone.
I sat in that airport with the kind of silence that is not peaceful at all. The kind that is just you and the noise in your head, trying to figure out what to do next. I did not cry. I just went quiet.
The first thing I did was message Brady.
He helped me think through what to do next, calmly, while I was anything but calm. With his help I booked another flight. And then I booked again.
I Finally Said: I Did It
When I landed in Europe and walked through immigration without a single problem, I did not shout. I did not take a photo right away. I just said it quietly to myself.
I did it. And the exciting part is just starting.
And then somewhere inside me, with a laugh I could not hold back:
I am unstoppable.
Krakow at 3am
I arrived at Balthazar Hotel in Krakow at around three in the morning. The city was quiet. The air hit me the moment I stepped outside, sharp, clean, and cold in a way that Guimaras Island never prepared me for. It was around 13 degrees Celsius. I was shivering.
This was Europe. And I was really here.
The first full day I walked around the old town. Cobblestone streets. Stone buildings that looked like they had been standing since before my great-grandparents were born. Everything was beautiful in a way that felt slightly unreal, like I had walked into a photograph.
And then the food situation hit me.
There was no rice.
I know how that sounds to anyone reading this outside the Philippines. But if you are Filipino, you understand. Bread is fine. Bread is good. But bread all day, every day, when your body has been running on rice your entire life, your energy disappears. You feel like a phone stuck at 15 percent with no charger in sight.
I started looking for Asian restaurants. Indian restaurants. Anywhere that served rice. I eventually found chicken curry with rice and I ate it like it was the most important meal of my life. Because it was.
Energylandia, the Castle, and the Dragon’s Den
Before the WordCamp events officially began, I had days to breathe and explore, and I used all of them.
I went to Energylandia with friends. Roller coasters. Screaming. Laughing. A kid from a small island province who had never been on an international flight, now riding a roller coaster in Poland, which is a sentence I never thought I would be able to write.
I visited Wawel Castle and went down into the Dragon’s Den. I walked through the park. I wandered through the old town and felt small in the best possible way, the kind of small that reminds you the world is enormous and you have only just started seeing it.
And then came the Picnic in the Park side event. WordPress people. Conversations. Geeks talking about code and community and what they were building. I felt immediately at home, which is strange when you think about it. I was thousands of kilometers from Guimaras Island, surrounded mostly by strangers, and I felt completely at home.
That is what this community does to you. And the funny thing is, you do not need to travel across the world to feel it. You just need to show up to the next event near you.
Contributor Day: 7:45am, Fully Committed, and the Beginning of Something Bigger
June 4. Contributor Day.
I arrived at the ICE Krakow Congress Centre at 7:45 in the morning. Volunteers were given a tour of the entire venue before the day began. I was assigned to help people who wanted to attend the contributor sessions, welcoming them, directing them, making sure they knew where to go.
After my shift, I did what felt most natural. I talked to everyone.
But I also came to Contributor Day with something personal on my mind. I wanted help figuring out how to open a WordPress meetup in Guimaras Island. It was something I had been thinking about for a long time. Back home, there is no tech community to speak of. Every time I wanted to be around people who cared about WordPress or technology, I had to take the ferry to Iloilo. I wanted to change that. I wanted people in Guimaras to have a place to belong without having to cross the water first.
I approached the Community table and asked for guidance on how to get the meetup approved. And there, in the middle of this enormous conference in Krakow, I met Mainul Kabir Aion. He sat with me, answered my questions, and together with Juan Hernando, who had already helped make my visa possible, these two people helped make the WordPress Guimaras meetup a real thing.
I did not expect that kind of generosity. But by this point in the trip, between Brady, Juan, JC, Danyl, Harcy Joy, and now Mainul, I had stopped being surprised by how giving this community is.
That conversation on Contributor Day planted something.
I came to WordCamp Europe as a volunteer. I left with the beginning of something I would bring back home to Guimaras Island.
Later that evening was the welcome dinner. Long tables. Good food. And then someone started karaoke.
I stopped for a moment. Just for a moment. I looked around the room, all these people from all over the world, laughing, singing badly on purpose, talking over each other in five different languages, and I thought:
I cannot believe I am here.
Not in a sad way. In the way that hits you when something you worked incredibly hard for becomes real. The feeling does not arrive loudly. It arrives quietly, in the middle of a karaoke song, when you are not expecting it.
After the welcome dinner, a group of us went to local pubs in the old town. The conversation went deep, about WordPress, about building things, about why we all care about this community enough to travel across the world for it. We got back to the hotel at midnight and I was not tired at all. I was full in a way that had nothing to do with food.
June 5: The First Conference Day
The first official day of WordCamp. I was assigned to the registration area.
My job was to help attendees get their swag bags and badges. It sounds simple. It was not small. Every person who walked up to that table was someone who had traveled to be there, some of them from very far, some of them like me with a story behind the journey. I tried to give each of them a welcome that matched that.
In the afternoon, after my shift, I stepped away from the volunteer role and became just a person at the event. I caught the opening keynote from the CERN engineers, Joachim Valdemar Yde and Francisco Borges Aurindo Barros, who walked through how the organization that literally invented the web is now migrating over 800 websites onto a customized WordPress platform. Sitting there listening to that, I thought about the small websites I had helped build back in Guimaras and felt the full weight of what this platform is capable of at every scale.
Later in the afternoon I found my way into a session on AI and WordPress, specifically around how the new WordPress 7.0 AI connectors were already changing how developers build. The room was full of people who had strong opinions and were not shy about sharing them. That is the kind of session you can only really have in person, where the conversation after the talk matters as much as the talk itself.
Then the Woo Community Meetup. The Glow Party with Yoast and Bluehost. Free food. Free drinks. More conversations. More names I would carry home with me.
I got back to the hotel at 3am.
June 6: The Last Day and the Afterparty
I arrived late on the last day. I will not pretend otherwise.
But I made it for what mattered. In the afternoon I sat in on a session about building and growing WordPress communities, which felt almost too perfectly timed given the conversation I had on Contributor Day about launching the Guimaras meetup. The speaker talked about how the smallest local communities are often where the most meaningful contribution happens, not the big conferences, not the keynotes, but the monthly meetup in someone’s city where five people show up and leave knowing something they did not know before.
I wrote a lot of notes.
Then the volunteers photoshoot. The raffle. The preparations. And then the most awaited part of the entire three days, the afterparty.
The afterparty was everything. Music. People who had spent three days building something together now just enjoying each other’s company without agenda or schedule. I stayed until I had to leave. I got back to the hotel at midnight.
At 4am, I was at the airport.
And somewhere between Krakow and home, flying back over the world I had crossed to get there, I thought about all of it. The denied visa. The cancelled ticket. The Qatar situation. The Finnair layover. The Lufthansa immigration interview. The flight I missed. The three days of nervousness waiting for the approval that almost did not come in time.
Every single obstacle. And how none of them stopped me. And how at almost every single one of those moments, there was someone helping me through it.
What I Want You to Know
This article is not just a travel diary.
It is a message to every Filipino in the WordPress community who has ever thought that the big events were for other people. For people from bigger cities. For people with more resources or more experience or fewer obstacles.
I want you to hear this clearly:
The obstacles do not disqualify you. They are part of the story.
Visa denied? Appeal it. Flight missed? Book another one. No rice? Find the nearest curry restaurant and survive.
Ask for help. Explain your situation. There are people in this community, from the Philippines and from every corner of the world, who will write letters for you, guide you through paperwork, walk with you through the process, and meet you at the same hotel.
Brady, Juan, JC, Danyl, Harcy Joy, Mainul. None of them had to help me. They chose to. And that choice changed the direction of my life.
Think about Brady for a moment. A co-founder of his own marketing business. A full-time manager at one of the biggest names in tech. And he spent months of his limited time helping someone he had met once, at one event, get through visa paperwork, flight rebookings, and a missed flight at an airport thousands of kilometers away. People like Brady are not rare exceptions in this community. They are what this community is made of. You just have to be in the room to find them.
Real conversation in real life cannot be replaced. You can be in the same Slack channel with someone for years. You can comment on each other’s posts, follow each other’s work, send voice notes across time zones. And then you meet them in person and something shifts. Something becomes permanent.
That is what WordCamp does. It makes things permanent.
I am Alpha Jun from Guimaras Island, a small province in the Philippines. This was my first international flight.
I got my visa denied. I cancelled a ticket because of a war. I missed a flight because of an immigration interview. I shivered through Krakow eating bread and dreaming about rice.
And I would do every single bit of it again.
Because on the other side of all of it was a welcome dinner with karaoke, a city made of cobblestones, a conversation that will bring the first WordPress meetup to Guimaras Island, a friendship that started in Manila and carried me through Krakow, and one quiet moment at a long table where I looked around and thought:
I cannot believe I am here.
You do not have to go to Europe to feel this. WordCamp Philippines is happening on August 28 to 29, 2026. It is closer. It is yours. And the same community, the same generosity, the same people who will help you with something you did not even know you needed help with, they are all there waiting for you.
Go. Register. Show up. Ask for help if you need it. Keep going.
The WordPress community in the Philippines is waiting for you. And it is better in real life than you can imagine.
If this post moved something in you and you want to be part of WordCamp Philippines 2026, reach out. You are not too young, too far, or too new. You are exactly who this community is for.
Alpha Jun
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