I’ve been wanting to attend conferences for developers and on November 13-14 the biggest developers in the Philipines held its second summit and it’s a plane ride away from home—I was on high again.

What I’ve learned from the conference (aside from handshaking and saying to speakers that they did a good job):

• thechangelog.com
• Prepare business cards (lotsa!)
• Constantly talk your ideas
• Why open source prevails? Because human is kind by nature; we’d rather contribute for the goodness than making the cause of someone’s downfall.
• “Great support, great communication that translates your knowledge to the clients.”
• Your dorm mate might be one of the speakers!
• Docker!
• Mantra in development: “Immutability, decomposability, distributed, continuous”

It was a nice experience overall despite that…

Why no WordPress in the dev community lists? We need to seriously step up the community of WordPress in the PH. We’re the 25% u know.

— Dreb Bits (@drebbits) November 13, 2015

On July 27 I officially started working for 10up, a well-distributed digital and strategic consulting agency, and knowing that I am based and currently live in the Philippines proves that they(we) are truly expanding globally!

I’ve been a full time freelancer for almost 3 years and the feeling of getting lonely is inherent in the freelance world eventually, at least in my situation. Over the years, I enjoyed the love and hate relationship with the people that I always got to talk to almost everyday — the clients. They’ve given me the  challenges that brought new learnings and some of them bridged ways to creating plugins.

But ever since I started working as a freelancer or even during college times I knew I would like to be part of something great. In fact I feel grateful when I create websites or help businesses build their online home but the experience didn’t come close compared to sharing the challenges and fun if you are part of a team.

I yearn for that moment when, around making our capstone project during senior year, my team had been maximizing all the resources we could get and poured everything we have for a project. It’s inspiring to see all efforts coming together towards a common goal, and seeing them looking up to each other is another reason to be grateful at what we’re doing.

Working with a team, sharing the same passion, can be a far greater and fulfilling experience anyone can ever have in his lifetime. I truly can’t wait to share my life work with 10up, and to contribute in diversifying the team even more and learn from the talented individuals they already have.

On a usual Saturday, there’s an ongoing amazing talks happening and since Europe is something that I could not afford in many years to come or perpetually, internet saves my day as usual as I  live streaming WordCamp Europe 2015.