I had a conversation about JWC with Hugh Douglas-Smith, a contributor for the JED Team, en-GB Team and is in charge of the JWC 2017 marketing. He shared with me an interesting testimonial and I would like to share with the readers of the magazine. 

I don’t work for a large company, I work for myself. That means every penny I spend is something I need to justify, it is income I am not receiving. No big corporate expense accounts and budgets here. So deciding what to spend money on has to have careful consideration.

Attending conferences is not typically high on the priority list, at least not up there with a new screen, new laptop, more disk space, faster server, oh, did I mention the new backup service? There are so many pulls on an ever stretched bottom line that conferences are something of a rarity.

But, perhaps I am looking at this from the wrong perspective? True, there is the attendance ticket, the airfare, the hotel and of course 4 days out of my schedule. The fact that falls across the weekend seems somewhat less important, I work for myself, therefore I work the weekend! In fact, it’s when I do most of my work because the phone doesn’t ring with constant interruptions from clients.

I use Joomla! as the basis for most of my web design projects and with each site I create, my capability and the range of complexity I can cope with grows. Much of this is because I spend so much time online checking the forums, watching the videos, reading the documentation and generally asking lots of questions. Perhaps, put against all of that, spending 3 days with the industry experts, more people like me and generally having my mind opened to new ways to do things might not be a bad idea.

Having been through this cycle with a number of software solutions over many years, I personally now view conferences as a high priority on the list of what to spend both time and money on. The knowledge gained in such a short space of time saves days of effort trying to resolve tricky problems. But there is more, the interaction between people, the connections which are built is the real icing on the cake. Understanding what others have tried, what works, what is not recommended are those nuggets which can never be found through Google, simply because you are getting answers to questions you didn’t know existed. And, from experience of previous year’s Joomla! World Conferences I can confirm that these are high-quality events with industry leading speakers, excellent sessions covering a wide range of topics for all levels and hosted at locations which offer an enjoyable backdrop and place to unwind.

So, this November, expect to see me and many others like me at the Joomla! World Conference in Rome, Italy. Get more details at conference.joomla.org and book a ticket, if you have not been to JWC before, this one is highly recommended.

Hugh Douglas-Smith