Meetup: ⚡️ Organising WordPress + DigitalOcean Meetup Lahore

Hey, folks 👋 Last weekend (August 20, 2017), I helped Ahmad Awais (WordPress Core Contributor) organize a fun WordPress + DigitialOcean meetup. And I am excited to tell, you guys, the whole story.

He approached me on August 11, 2017, and asked that if I wanted to help organize a DigitalOcean + WordPress meetup? How could I say no to such an exciting opportunity? So, I told him that I would be glad to help.

He combined the meetup of DigitalOcean with a local WordPress meetup due to the shortage of time. Because of the Eid holidays which were right next week at the time of the event. In short, it was all arranged very quickly.

📢 Announcement

The first phase was an announcement. We announced the event to be on August 12, 2017. Limited spots were available due to the size of our venue. Unexpectedly, we received an overwhelming response from the audience. Within 48 hours, all of the spots got filled.

✅ Confirmations

In the second phase, we had to confirm the seat of our participants. So instead of confirming them via emails, we called them to tell that we were looking forward to seeing them in the meetup. This method proved very helpful. In this way, we were able to make place for the late comers.

⚡️ Event

The third phase was the event itself. The commencement time of the event was 12:00 noon. So naturally, we reached the venue a little early for arrangements. Our venue was a local coworking space called G47. The staff of this place was cooperating. They also helped us in making this event a success.

Everything went smoothly. We started the event with introductions. Well, it was a meetup, not a talk. We began with the topic of self-hosting WordPress sites using DigitalOcean and EasyEngine. Slides are available at this link.

Please note that the slides

• are best viewable at MacBook Pro 15.6
• were built for width: 1280px; height: 720px;

Unfortunately, we were not able to record live video, but Ahmad Awais made a quick video on how to make an account on DigitalOcean. And then install WordPress with the help of EasyEngine on DigitalOcean droplet.

Then there was a Q/A session and discussions on a lot of topics including Full Stack web development, WordPress API, Progressive Web Apps (PWA), Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP), etc. We also served refreshments during this session.

This whole event took more or less 5 hours to complete. But in the end, it was worth its time. We spent time socializing and getting to know about each other. There were bloggers, system engineers, full stack, front/back end developers.

🎁 Takeaway

There is one particular takeaway from this event that I want to share with everyone. That takeaway is your ability to read code. As a developer, this particular skill is beneficial in making situations easier. Maybe, you will be able to get some inspiration in the process too. Peace out ✌