Expanding the Cloud Industry at CloudFest USA in Miami

Adam Weeks:
Hi, this is Adam Weeks from Open Channels and I am with Jonathan Wold, who is also from Open Channels technically, but that’s not actually what we’re going to be talking about today. I am looking forward to an event called CloudFest USA. And Jonathan, I’ve brought you here today to tell me a little bit about your involvement. You’ve been involved in this the past. Could you give me a quick overview of what CloudFest USA is?

Jonathan Wold:
Yeah. So CloudFest USA is part of the broader, like CloudFest world and it’s CloudFest USA has been going for a couple of years now, and prior to this it had been in Austin. I got involved with CloudFest, the European event that takes place in March. It’s in Europa park over in Germany. And I got involved a number of years back. I started out doing like a talk here and there and that helped shape some of the WordPress programming and I’ve been able to serve as an emcee over there. And the CloudFest USA event in Austin prior, I was able to help and contribute some of the WordPress programming and content there as well. But what’s happening now is quite a bit different. The Austin event, of course, it was great, like four or five hundred people or so show up to that. Whereas this CloudFest USA event coming up in November, this time in Miami, is going to be a lot larger than it’s been in the past.

Adam Weeks:
Excellent. So I was recently talking to someone about CloudFest and they said, hey, it feels recently like there’s a lot more happening with WordPress. I’m assuming that you have a little bit to do with that. Tell me about how does WordPress and CloudFest, how are those connected?

Jonathan Wold:
Well, I’d say the extent of my contribution has been encouragement and getting to watch as more and more folks have shown up over the past couple of years at CloudFest. There’s been just a lot more folks from the WordPress community who’ve come out, who’ve made the trek out to Germany and have had a great experience, and some of those same folks have come to Austin. But with CloudFest USA now happening in November, one of the things I love about it and have from the beginning is how much of a compliment it is to WordCamps. It’s a different experience if you’ve never been to CloudFest. It’s quite different from a WordCamp experience and I think it’s great. Like CloudFest is more commercial than a WordCamp. It’s a professional team that this is what they do, they produce events, this is their whole thing. And yet it still has a lot of that open source vibe to it. There’s some great open source projects that come in and get involved. It has a wider reach than outside of just the WordPress ecosystem. But what I’ve loved about CloudFest USA in particular is this conscious embracing of WordPress as a category of their focus. Whereas with the CloudFest event in Europe, it’s just been a growing thing over the past couple of years. CloudFest USA is making it a priority from the outset. So I’m going to just speak to the WordPress piece of this. If you’re in the business of WordPress and if you haven’t been to a CloudFest, I highly recommend coming if you’re in. If like you work in an agency, if you work at a hosting company, if you work as a product company, CloudFest is very business focused. The CloudFest event in Europe and I think I’m expecting to see the same at here at USA is very much about facilitating business conversations. They do a lot to make sure that their space is set up for folks. It to me takes a lot of the best of the of what we’ll call like the hallway track at a WordCamp. They have some great talks and they have things that are educational as well. But it’s much more to me about the networking, the connections, the business context that’s set and people just get a lot of stuff done at CloudFest.

Adam Weeks:
Nice. Now I know you’re going or you’re going to be there, that you’re involved with the organization, but it’s been a tightly held secret that no one really knows. Jonathan Wold, could you break what do you. What’s your involvement at CloudFest?

Jonathan Wold:
What am I actually doing? Yeah, I’d say it’s a tightly held secret.

Adam Weeks:
It’s just going to break news right now.

Jonathan Wold:
Yes. Yeah. So I’m actually quite excited. The thing that I actually get to do this time around is I will be having a fireside chat with Mary Hubbard. So I got to do that at CloudFest Europe with my co host Tammy Lister. We did that together and so this time I’ll get to have A conversation with Mary again. And what we’re covering is still to be determined, but Mary’s fantastic and I’m excited to be able to have another conversation with her and just bring some interesting new perspectives to the attendees, especially folks who might. May not have had the chance to hear Mary before or just don’t have that much context for what goes on in the WordPress space.

Adam Weeks:
That’s awesome. That’s a pretty incredible opportunity. Mary Hubbard, at the helm of the WordPress project, and that’s WordPress is undergoing a lot of different pressures right now from AI and the community and all these types of things. So I think it’s pretty incredible that you get to have her on a stage and be able to ask her those questions. Is there anything that you’re particularly excited about, talking with her about?

Jonathan Wold:
Well, the timing’s interesting. Right. There’s a lot that’s going on with the, with core AI, but like there’s serious development and building that’s happening and Mary is someone who is really excited about product and just. And building things. That’s her background. She’s bringing that into her role in leadership in the project. So I’m expecting us to have actually covered a lot of ground in the project between now and CloudFest us, so we’ll have a chance to get to talk about that, to highlight it, to help catch people up who may not have been following the project closely. WordPress is growing quickly. There’s a lot that’s changing. There’s new energy. There’s new efforts focusing like on the project itself and how do you connect it to all the changes that are happening in the world of AI and cutting through the hype of all that too. And I think we’re going to be able to have a lot to talk about by the time we get to November.

Adam Weeks:
Nice. Yeah, this stuff is happening fast. How we think about democratized web and how AI and, you know, zero click searches and people are concerned, they’re worried, livelihoods are changing, they need to adapt. And to me, that’s one of the big reasons to attend an event like this is because you get to talk with the people in person who are doing the stuff and have access to them, which is, I think is pretty fantastic.

Jonathan Wold:
Yeah. With CloudFest USA, if you haven’t gone, one of the things that I love about it is it’s going to give folks a chance to meet a bunch of new people that they haven’t met. Like you’re going to have the WordPress folks who are showing Up. There’s something to me that’s been really valuable from the first time I attended about this larger context of the Open web as a whole. Right. Like you have big hardware companies that are there, like intel and AMD have been like sponsors in the past and there’s a hardware component that we’re often somewhat disconnected from. Right. But then you have all the way down the stack, you have the hosting companies that are there, you have the software providers. Security ends up being a big focus. These cloud players in the space. And I find it really helpful as someone in the WordPress space to be in this broader context. Right. There’s other CMSs that are there as well. The various Linux folks show up to it also. And if folks are coming from WordCamps and haven’t been to that, I think it just makes your WordCamp experience even richer.

Adam Weeks:
Awesome. Yeah. And I do have another question. Have you been working out? Have you been practicing your server throwing? Is. Is your server throwing ARM ready? Because is that. That’s happening again this year.

Jonathan Wold:
Cool. So, yeah. There is the world Server throwing competition. I am not planning to participate except as an observer of it, but I’ll leave that to the professional server throwers.

Adam Weeks:
Yeah. I think when you talk about hardware, there’s definitely lots of hardware. In Germany, I remember there was. You could race to see how fast you could put together a server. All the different components of a server. Yeah. Hardware, software.

Jonathan Wold:
It actually is a good point. One of the things that CloudFest I think does quite well is they focus consciously on bringing a humor, a fun element to it. Right. Like CloudFest in Europe takes place in a theme park.

Adam Weeks:
Yeah.

Jonathan Wold:
Right. And who knows what the future of USA will hold. But there’s this, this conscious, like, how do we bring fun to this? And I’ve quite enjoyed.

Adam Weeks:
Well, yeah. And I think they purposely call it a festival and rather than a conference that it is. We can have fun and work too.

Jonathan Wold:
Yeah. Which I think, well reflects like hosting this open Web. It’s an odd ecosystem. Right. Like there’s all sorts of company, which is part of what I love and find endearing about it. But there’ll be companies that you’ve never heard of and there’s just so much diversity and variety in the types of companies, the types of people that are involved in these things. So I’m, I’m excited about it.

Adam Weeks:
Yeah. And Miami in November is not a bad thing either.

Jonathan Wold:
It’s better than Miami most other times of the year, at least from my experience.

Adam Weeks:
Oh, man. Well, if you are interested in Cloud Fest us. You want to meet Jonathan face to face? Be there for his talk with Mary Hubbard. Make sure you check out CloudFest if someone wants to find out about what you’re doing be before the event. How can someone find you, Mr. Wold?

Jonathan Wold:
You can go to jonathanwould.com My little, my little site handy. And yeah, I’ll look forward to seeing you guys there in Miami.

Adam Weeks:
All right. It’s going to be good. It’s going to be fun. Miami in November, CloudFest USA. There are tickets still available. We hope to see you there.