In February of this year, I travelled to Manila to attend WordCamp Asia. I have been lucky enough to attend every WordCamp Asia since its inaugural event in Bangkok, Thailand back in 2023. For the last two years, I have attended as a speaker to developer the same workshop – The Block Developer Cookbook.

The concept of the workshop is that attendees can vote on which “recipes” they want to work on and we work on them together. I really love the idea because no two instances of the workshop will be the same. It’s all about who is in the room and what they want to learn.

This year, the conference organizers decided to allow pre-regisration for all of the workshops and I am proud to say that mine sold out very quickly.

Not only that, I was told that there were 192 registrations for 85 spots! If my math is correct, that’s approximately 13% of all conference attendees – many of whom are not developers at all.

My workshop was the first session on day one of the event and so the general atmosphere in the room was great as everyone was excited to be at the conference and ready to dive into it. Unfortunately, the WiFi was not great and it took most of the first day for the tech team at the venue to get that sorted out. This could have been disastrous for a workshop that relies on the internet for both voting and running npm commands but everyone was able to tether to their phones and we moved forward. Once we got moving, things went really well. The attendees asked great questions and we focused on some of the more advanced recipes.

I created some keychains for the event that I used to bribe attendees to sit in the front row (no one EVER wants to sit up front) and gave them to anyone that asked a question. These were a hit and I ran out quickly.

A takeaway from this conference was that while I brought a USB key with a local development environment on it for those that were not set up locally, I needed to provide a fully configured set up so that attendees can just start.

Overall, this was a great experience for me (and I hope the attendees) and I’m looking forward to deliver this workshop again – maybe at WC Asia 2026 in Mumbai!

If you’re intersted, the final voting for the recipes can be seen here.

I’ll leave you with some photos from the day.