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.
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. She opened the day on the power of community and handed the stage to Jeremiah Owyang and Dr. Rumman Chowdhury.
Watch the full keynote on YouTube (8 min) ↗
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.
We cannot just trust a system alone ... you still need people with core knowledge about the tasks at hand.Dr. Rumman Chowdhury, AI Without Fear
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.
My favorite breakout session to produce was the case for selling accessibility as a service, with Chris Hines 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.
The soundtrack
Every project I touch gets a sonic mood board, and it either winds up in the finished product or it fuels the mind behind it. This is everything that played during DE{CODE} 2025.
Between the sessions, we ran the Agency Partner Awards documentaries. Agency Partner Awards 2025 →