At this last regular Meetup of the season, we were very happy to welcome Ayodeji Ogundare, Developer Advocate at Adyen, as our first speaker.
From Hello World to Developer Advocacy
Ayodeji started off by explaining what a Developer Advocate does, by visualizing a story:
Imagine you own a shop. You install WordPress. You have a payment provider. Everything is set up. But you get an error. You’re frustrated. So you look for a solution on Google, ChatGPT, etc. But you can’t seem to solve the problem. Those are the types of situations a developer advocate is aiming for to fix. He helps to maximize the product value.
Next, Ayodeji took us through his personal journey. He explained how he started out as a developer at quite a young age in Nigeria, on a simple Windows laptop his father gave to him. He made his first ‘Hello World’ and felt like the hacker in the hood. In search for more, Ayodeji stumbled upon WordPress.com and started his own personal blog. He got so enthusiastic about building websites, he shared all his newly gained knowledge on the blog.
He noticed in his area that a lot of people wanted to learn these skills, so he started to teach CSS, HTML and Javascript. He was no pro, but ’teaching is the best way to master a skill’, according to Ayodeji. He organized events like the first Open Source Conference in Nigeria and revived the Abuja WordPress Meetup.
Although this was his passion, it wasn’t paying the bills. To sustain himself, he searched for a vacancy. Someone helped him go viral with ‘Let’s get Ayodeji a job’ and the post got noticed by his current Lead at Adyen. He applied and got the job. For over a year now he is a Developer Advocate at Adyen and works at their Amsterdam office.
In conclusion, contributing to Open Source can be a great way to start off a career. A lot of software we use today is Open Source and most of these tools only exist because of its contributors. And the best thing is that everyone can become a contributor, you don’t have to know how to write code, because there are so many ways to contribute.
If you want to connect to the Open Source community too, try these tips from Ayodeji:
- learn Open Source skills
- share your knowledge
- teach your knowledge to others
- contribute to the community
- talk to people about what you do
- visit developerrelations.com and opensource.guide
Discussion on 20 years WordPress
After the break we had a discussion with the audience to celebrate the twentieth birthday of WordPress on May 27th 2023. Jaap started off with a little bit of history on WordPress and some graphics of the worldwide use of our beloved software.
We had prepared some questions and were curious about the answers from the audience.
Why did you start using WP?
- Tried other CMS’es but found WP the easiest
- Clients kept asking for it so I had to
- Developers in my network all used it
- The marketshare was big
- I was told it was the only tool to build websites in
What would be a good advice for WP beginners?
- Get in touch with the community because it’s more complicated than it used to be
What tool or hack made you develop WP sites faster?
- Local webserver software called Local
- Elementor page builder
- Can’t decide, there’s so much good stuff around
What is your best WP trick others may not know about?
- Query Monitor plugin
- ChatGPT
- Stack Overflow
- WordPress Migration Tool
What is your most extreme WP use case?
- A website replicator
- Freebooq plugin for financial administration
- A subsidy system
- A user administration plugin
What is your best WP memory?
- Making money with it
- Getting visitors to my website for the first time
- Being on a contributor day
What is your biggest issue with WP?
- Multilingual websites are too complicated
- Gutenberg editor
- Inconsistency in code and interface all the time
- REST API is a problem
- Canonical plugins would be nice
What WP functions need better documentation
- All?
- wp_video_header
What are your best sources of WordPress inspiration?
- Kinsta blog
- WPLounge
- Yoast blog
- Remkus de Vries newsletter
- Facebook group The Admin Bar
- WP Tavern
- Themeshaper
- Awwwards
Did you ever contribute to WP? If so, what?
- Translations of themes and plugins
- Made a guestbook plugin
- Organized a meetup
- Contributed to technical standards
- Adopted an abandoned plugin
