Category Archives: Speakers

Want to strike it rich with your WordPress plugin business? M Asif Rahman will teach us how!

Posted on by

M Asif Rahman’s talk is titled “Making Millions in WordPress Plugin Business But Not Being Evil”. This talk is a must-attend for all rising WordPress developers and agencies who are keen to combine their passion with business acumen, without compromising on ethics.

Asif has been a long time WordPress enthusiast, serial entrepreneur and technology evangelist. He is the CEO of a prominent WordPress product company called weDevs, in Dhaka, Bangladesh. A veteran of WordCamps, Asif has appeared in more than 40 WordCamps around the world.

Since weDevs was founded in 2013, Asif’s company has launched dozens of plugins, with both free and premium add-ons/versions. These plugins have clocked over 500,000 downloads, and fetched more than $1 million in sales.

Asif will share his experience on how his organization was able to bootstrap their business with plugins, and finally build a team of around 35 people working from a swanky office today.

The points that Asif will cover include:

  1. A brief discussion on do’s and don’ts.
  2. The moral background for business decisions.
  3. Choosing a pricing model: Add-ons, Pro versions or SaaS.
  4. Satisfying your free users.
  5. Making the most from the ecosystem around WordPress.

Chathu Vishwajith will help you toughen security measures for your WordPress site

Posted on by

SECURITY! That word brings to mind frightening stories of SQL injection, data loss, web page defacements and other breaches.

Here’s announcing Chathu Vishwajith, who will guide us on this subject with real world examples, through a talk titled “Hardening WordPress is an art”!

For every WordPress plugin, theme or client project you accomplish, it is important to have in place the best security measures to defend your work from being ruined by the bad guys. Chathu’s talk is sure to help you upgrade your website’s security.

The speaker Chathu is an Auth0 Ambassador, Co-Organizer of Colombo JS Meetup and Organizer of Sri Lanka Unity Developers User Group. He is also the co-founder of a software development startup. He brings with him the experience of hardening security for over 20 WordPress websites. He has successfully handled massive DDOS attacks as well.

 

How can WordPress help with sustainable development? Attend Samantha’s talk to know more!

Posted on by

Here’s announcing Samantha Pathirathna, our next speaker on the subject of “WordPress for Sustainable Development”!

Samantha is an award winning entrepreneur, and began his WordPress journey as the Chairman and Managing Director of ECO TREATS TOURISM (PVT) LTD.

After having donned multiple hats as researcher, consultant, trainer and scholar, Samantha is convinced that WordPress can be leveraged to play a major role in achieving sustainable development goals. To learn more about sustainable development goals, do check out the United Nations page on the subject.

The subject of protecting our planet’s natural resources is more important today than ever before. Don’t miss Samantha’s talk that will throw light on WordPress’ promise to make a difference in this arena, and be prepared with your questions!

 

 

Dwain Maralack will speak on his journey with WordPress turning him into an engineer

Posted on by

The word ‘engineer’ is derived from the Latin ‘ingeniare’ which means ‘to contrive or devise‘. Dwain Maralack, our next speaker, is going to tell us exactly how WordPress helped him become an engineer, and we all can learn from his example.

While WordPress is loved the world over for its ease of putting together websites, there is no end of opportunities to skilfully engineer complex solutions.

Dwain’s will describe his life’s rocky journey from being a beginner to where he stands now, as an engineer and a developer. He will talk about how WordPress has helped him learn more about software engineering and design patterns, and how the platform has exposed him to other technologies as well.

Furthermore, Dwain will throw light on the opportunities for developers to learn more about the inner workings of WordPress.

Dwain Maralack is a developer at Automattic, and describes himself as a servant, husband, programmer plus an all round fun-loving guy. He hails from South Africa and has spoken at WordCamp Capetown in the past.

Redefine problem solving with Harshadewa’s talk on design thinking

Posted on by

Problem solving techniques have been through many years of evolution.

Traditionally, we would split up a problem into multiple parts and solve each one before trying to integrate every solution into a final one. Design thinking is different, and Harshadewa Ariyasinghe will explain why, with practical examples you can take home. His talk is aptly titled “How Design Thinking can Change Everything”.

Design thinking aims to spark creativity by channeling your energy towards empathy, visualization, building working prototypes and more. It is often marked by a series of activities, and it promises to rewrite the entire approach to problem solving.

The speaker Harshadewa works as Consultant, Product and Tech, at Yonder Music Inc. He leads the product integration work with the telco counterparts in Sri Lanka & Maldives. Before joining Yonder Music, Harsha has worked at Cambio where he led the Business Analysis and Product Design function.

He has also worked at JKCS and E-Solutions where he designed solutions for multiple domains ranging from Aviation, Middleware, Insurance and E-Commerce. Harsha has over 11 years of experience in both solutions design and software engineering. He got his bachelor’s degree from London Metropolitan University and an MBA from PIM – Sri Jayewardenepura University .