An Exclusive Interview with M Asif Rahman – WCKTM2019 Speakers

All right, here we have Asif Rehman, member of WordPress, came all the way from Bangladesh, but as he says, he's been to United States more than being in Bangladesh, Bangladesh is a new platform. Let's talk with him directly. Asif, why won't you introduce yourself to our viewers and also lay out how did you enter into WordPress?

Thank you for having me here. I actually started my journey in WordPress very early back in 2004, in the time I was trying to actually make website and I picked Blogger. That was easy. But when I got a little bit deeper then I found out like Blogger is very hard to edit and hard to actually customize. And as the only programming experience I had is like course C and HTML. So then I figured out WordPress, it could be a good platform. I started using it. I fell in love with WordPress very soon and I used WordPress to create a lot of like weird kind of website in everything. And I later got more involved in development. My first success with WordPress was one of the new site. I made the Tech journal back in 2008. At one point we had Alexa rank below 4000. We are having like 20 million traffic per month. So. And later on I. I was also a blogger. So I spoke about my experience in WordPress and the optimizations and security. And later on when the webcams are a thing, WhatCam became like more common. I started attending and speaking at webcams and after a while I also developed few products for plugins for my own use as well. Then we released some of those and a lot of like other smaller companies are being created inside my companies as well. And Right. I would personally say like I'm 100% dedicated to WordPress for 15 years. That's the only thing probably I know properly.

Okay, that's interesting. 15 years of WordPress. What do you think about WordCamp Kathmandu 2019 today. And if you have to compare the events between all other Word camps that.

You have attended, you're asking this question to a person who have attended close to or like more than 100 word camps. So I do not compare what camps. That's the first thing we need to do because like each and every community is very different. I always tell people this story that I have attended a what camp? That we have like less than 10 people in total. So that was also in what camp? And we also attended what camps like Ahmedabad. Their first Word camp has like over thousand people. So what camp, the size and the community could be very different, but Kathmandu and the community In Nepal is very special to me for few reason. First thing is Kathmandu and Nepal community is probably one of the earliest in whole Asia and you guys are doing it for almost seven or eight straight years. So like the community is much more mature. And I'm personally very unlucky in like attending what camps in Nepal because I have tried to come to Nepal few years already. I was speaker in past years that I was not able to come because of the US Bangladesh airline crash in last year. So I was expecting a mature community. But I am completely blown away by the organizers and the kind of passion they have for WordPress and the maturity of the community as well. Like this is the wordcamp I see like a lot of small local communities are much more involved. Like you guys promote like Viratnagar, Pokhara, a lot of like seven other smaller meetups groups as well. So this community could be a role model for a lot of like Asian smaller countries. But I have good experience in going to Indian war camps last year in last year India has 12 word camp, so I have probably attended 6 or 8. I forgot the count. Like I'm attending too much so Indian war camps. Like I could understand like the things that could happen in Mumbai is not probably possible to happen in Udaipur because the community is much smaller. So I do not compare. I do not just Word Camp. I'm a kind of person who just like to hang out with work campers, the organizer or the sponsors. But this is a very interesting experience for me and I do see the Nepal community will move even much further because of the passion you guys have to promote WordPress in general to all parts of Nepal. So good luck to all the ventures you are coming in.

Right. What do you think about the future of WordPress in next five years? Will it be still strongest competitor or CMS platform?

You see, like I get to ask this question a lot and in past year I have did actually three panel on exactly on that topic, the future of WordPress. So I have some very particular opinion about it. And just for the audience, like this is my personal opinion. None from my company or none from the or even organizer as well. So WordPress will be very strong And Gutenberg is something that is actually making WordPress even more compatible to the modern web. How we build content and with the REST API. I'm very excited about REST API and right now we also have a separate build for GraphQL as well. So GraphQL could be a good fit for creating like API as well. So I do feel future of WordPress will be more related to apps, more related to what people build on top of WordPress. So adaptation of Gutenberg would take time. It will not happen in one or two years. It will take like much longer time. Like all the bloggers, all the writers who are building container WordPress, they are not using Gutenberg every day. So why they are not using Gutenberg every day, if you are going to ask that question is because we developer are not building fast enough. And at the same time the core needs to even develop much more. So we all need to actually work together to develop WordPress to be ready for Gutenberg. At the same time the education for the bloggers, education for the people who use WordPress is also very important. So they could adopt Gutenberg and with the REST API, with the GraphQL and the application ecosystem we are building, I think the future in future like all the theme developers, instead of building just a front end based theme, they will create a good experience for us in the backend as well. Because right now we could hack into backend and build React or REST API based application for WordPress as well. So if you're building an event solution, so you are building themes for event or something instead of just building the front end, your solution could have a different kind of backend experience as well. So if I'm using that event solution initially of going to apps add new post, I could have a different experience where people doesn't need to show see all the dashboard elements. So I do think like WordPress will be very strong. We already changing the phase of WordPress. That is not a blogging platform. It's a platform for letting people creating website and things like not only Gutenberg, all the other ecosystem we have built like the Elementor, all the other page builder and those ecosystem, it will also help people to design things in WordPress as well. So our future is very bright. People needs to actually adopt with the teams we are bringing and at the same time probably with the Gutenberg with the React, we need to actually up our developing skill as well. So we could actually go in line with the Future Development or WordPress.

Very nice. My next question was Gutenberg. But as you have laid out your insight throughout the earlier conversation about Gutenberg, I would thank you for that as well. What tips or suggestions you would like to provide to newbies or newcomers that is trying to probably or thinking about coming into WordPress.

I think like as most of the developers, most of the young people already knows like WordPress is very to start with and right now WordPress even much more ready to curate even more younger audience. Because right now our documentation is more complete. Right now we have even much better like development tools. A lot of companies from hosting to a lot of like different aspects, they're investing so much in WordPress so it's very easy to find information. And I do think like for improving somebody's personal skill WordPress has like so many free tools. I even heard a discussion like somebody actually hire fresher in their company and ask them to do like core contribution at the beginning. So people are getting shocked like how I'm going to contribute in a new things that I don't even know about. He said like try to see all the problems they are asking. So those problem already has all those moving parts. So just try to solve those problem, commit. Then somebody who is even much experienced than you, they will come up, they will give you like tips how to solve it even better way so you could get trained by even like world class programmer just by starting to contribute. So I do feel like WordPress is a very good start for any young people who wants to come in. Like just after going back from Kathmandu, I am actually doing a dev conference in Dhaka and I'm having a session for young student that I will actually talk about how you could jump start your career in open source with WordPress because it's easy, it's free. At the same time people are ready to help you out.

Thank you very much Asif. Guys, that was Asif Rahman representing WordPress all the way from Bangladesh and as well as United States states. 15 years of experience guys. Thank you once again Asif. Pleasure to have you over here. Enjoy your time in Kathmandu and all the best.

Thank you everyone.

Hello everyone. We do have Rakesh over here with us today and I would definitely want Rakesh if you can introduce yourself to our viewers as well as talk through us about.