Karachi hosts second edition of WordCamp 2019

WordCamp, the flagship conference for the Wordpress community was held in Karachi for the second time on August 24, 2019.

The event, held at NED University of Engineering and Technology featured a number of informative sessions about WordPress, the world's most popular CMS. Speakers were invited from a diverse range of backgrounds, from developers to designers, to content writers to budding entrepreneurs with one specific goal. How to harness the power of WordPress to transform your business and form deep-meaning collaborations. Bohra Developers was honored to send its representatives to the conference to learn and gain more experience.

As WordPress continues to evolve from a basic blogging platform to powering 34% of the internet, the recurrent utterance from the speakers was staying up to date with the direction WordPress is heading. 

Mashood Rastgar, founder of Sastaticket.pk talked about how WordPress can be decoupled with React, the popular JS library on the frontend that fetches content from the WordPress backend using a REST API. He explained that the rationale behind this was when WordPress founders felt as developers were moving towards more component-based paradigms to deliver products they also needed to keep in line with the latest trends in the development cycle.

Mohammad Saad, an SQA engineer at VentureDrive spoke about the importance of quality assurance even for a simple website built on WordPress. He lamented that a lack of seriousness from developers over quality code was the root cause of many bugs in projects. He gave compelling real-life examples of how the lack of an efficient QA affected major projects worldwide costing billions of dollars. He revealed that software bugs cost the United States economy $59.7 billion annually.

Maham Ismail, a graphic designer at WonderTree explained the Design Thinking  Methodologies.

Zohair Yousufi, a Pakistani-American working at Automattic, the parent company of WordPress gave a comprehensive introduction to Gutenberg, the new content editor built on React-based components. He stressed that even though the overall reception was negative, Gutenberg is here to stay and is expected to become a more prominent feature of WordPress in the near future. 

Perhaps the most incredible part of the whole conference was when he revealed WordPress as an open-sourced and powered by contributions, if all of WordPress-related services were developed in-house it would take 112 years and 400 million lines of code to reach the level it is now.

Noman Rizwan, Tahir Shehzad, Fahad Rafiq spoke on Wordpress security, WooCommerce hooks, and filters, SEO and plugin development respectively. Mr. Rizwan stressed the need for keeping all Wordpress websites updated with the latest version.

The conference was concluded by Adeel Raza who gave a basic introduction to WordPress plugin development.

Here are the five key points we learned from WordCamp 2019

• Hire a QA engineer who has technical and business acumen as well as soft skills
• Developers need to change their mindset and accept the flaws found in their creation.
• Embrace Gutenberg and assimilate it into projects for clients.
• Update! Update! Update!
• Never stop learning and build close ties with the community for long-term benefits.