Yoast Care fund: An interview with Sekander Badsha

Today we’re interviewing Sekander Badsha, who received a nomination for our Care fund from Gobinda Tarafdar. Gobinda nominated Sekander for his role in the Bangladeshi WordPress Community. He arranges Meetups and workshops and was one of the organizers of the first WordCamp held in Dhaka. In addition, Sekander is involved in translating, helps new WordPress users and even created a plugin a while back.

Let’s get to know Sekander Badsha!

That introduction gave us a pretty good idea of the effort and hard work that Sekander puts into WordPress. But let’s get to know him even better, by asking him some questions:

Hi, Sekander, can you tell us more about what you do?

At the moment, I work as a business development manager at a WordPress plugin development company. If you ask me about what I do around WordPress, I am mostly involved with translation management for the Bengali Bangladesh language at the official site. But I also spent a lot of time on the Facebook group called WordPressians, where I share business and user support-related knowledge and help new users with problems around WordPress. I recently shared a post about understanding the correct user base for WordPress products and services and analyzing and replying to tough questions.

How did you get started with WordPress?

Back in 2011, there was an online news portal boom in Bangladesh. At that time, I was working on Joomla but I was looking for something simpler and easy to use. Some of my friends and acquaintances suggested WordPress, and that was actually the beginning of my WordPress journey.

Do you have a WordPress hero?

I consider Tareq Hasan to be my WordPress hero. He put his trust in me and added me to the WordPress Bangla team. He was also the one who introduced me to WordCamp Singapore- my first ever WordCamp and an international one. Tareq was also a regular organizer of Dhaka Meetups. His way of thinking and practicing the true standards and philosophy of open source software encouraged me to embrace WordPress and plan my career around it.

I really admire the way Tareq helps millions of people around the world with his WordPress plugins. He has a really nice collection of code snippets, frameworks, and tools in his Github account.

Who do you consider to be your WordPress mentor?

A lot of people helped me on my WordPress journey. To be honest, I can’t pick one single person as my mentor. Hasin Haydar Bhai encouraged me to speak at WordPress Meetups. But M Asif Rahman also encouraged me to proactively plan my speeches and approach during the meetups and WordCamp plannings. Rupok Chowdhury Protik helped me gain the confidence to hold WordPress Meetups independently without depending on any seniors. Lincoln Islam and Muntasir Mahmud Aumio always encouraged me and helped me plan WordPress meetups and host them online and offline.

What contribution or moment are you most proud of?

I made a plugin a couple of years back. It was a really simple one; it helps people change the “Add to Cart” text on WooCommerce products. I just took the code snippet from WooCommerce Documentation and added a UI to customize the text. It was an effortless and fun project. Surprisingly, it’s got 4,000 active installations. I am very proud that I developed a plugin that helped 4000 people/websites.

What would you love to do in the future?

I want to offer the same level of mentorship to the country’s youth that I have received from the seniors in my community. There’s a feeling of duty to share my knowledge on WordPress products, services, community, and market. I really love the open-source philosophy and the community-driven approach WordPress has, and I will do my best to keep sharing my knowledge with the community.

Furthermore, I am really looking forward to attending a lot of WordCamps in person in the future.

Where may people find you?

You can check my website. You can also find all of my social links there. Right now, I have only attended two WordCamps. But I’m a very extroverted person and I would love to speak at some of the upcoming Asian WordCamps. You can always find me at the meetups hosted in Dhaka, Bangladesh. So if you’re attending one of those, we will definitely meet.

Thank you for this interview, Sekander. And for all of your contributions to the WordPress community! If you’re reading this, and know someone like Sekander who also deserves to be in the spotlight, go to our Yoast Care page and nominate them right away.