Some opportunities find you. This one found me twice.
Back in May 2025, I got a LinkedIn message from Janus Boye. His Ottawa peer group was meeting that week and he was missing a speaker. Could I step in on short notice?
I really wanted to. I couldn’t make it work. I had calls I couldn’t shift, so I had to decline. But I told him I’d be happy to speak at a future one. I meant it, even if I figured it was one of those things you say and nothing comes of it.
Then, in March 2026, another message. They were back in Ottawa on April 8. Would that work?
I happened to be at DrupalCon in Chicago when it landed. (If you’ve been following along here, you know I have a pattern of wandering into communities adjacent to my home turf. A WordPress gal at DrupalCamp Ottawa. A WordPress gal at DrupalCon Chicago. I contain multitudes.) I told Janus I’d need manager approval and would get back to him Friday.
Green light. I’m in.
What I’ll be talking about
Janus asked me to propose an angle. I had two ideas: WordPress vs. Drupal, or decoupled CMS. He picked decoupled, which I think is the right call. It’s the more interesting conversation right now.
My angle is from the implementation side. I work as a Senior Solutions Architect at Pantheon, and I’ve spent a lot of time in the weeds of decoupled systems: debugging Next.js cache invalidation issues, building training content for support teams, helping customers figure out whether decoupled is actually the right call for them. I’m not coming in as an analyst. I’m coming in as someone who has learned some things the hard way.
The talk will cover what decoupled actually means, why teams ask for it and what’s usually really driving the request, when the fit is right, when it isn’t, and what the AI question means for any of this. That last one I’m bringing as an open question rather than a settled answer, because honestly, I don’t have a settled answer yet.
What’s next
The talk is tomorrow, April 8, at CMHC in Ottawa. I’ll write a recap afterward and share the slides too.
If you’ll be in the room, I’m looking forward to the conversation. And if you want to argue with me ahead of time about editor experience, cache invalidation, or what structured content means in an agentic world, my inbox is open.
See you tomorrow.