WP Ultimo’s Arindo in Conversation With WPblog
So we are back with another edition of our interview series with another amazing WordPress personality who has done incredible work in the community and has quickly made a name for himself and his product, WP Ultimo.
Today, we have Arindo Duque with us and he will be answering everything related to his WP Ultimo, NextPress, WordPress and his personal life.
Let’s hear it from the man himself.
WPblog: So before we start with the interview, can you introduce yourself… on VIDEO!
WPblog: Arindo, it’s an honor to have you on our Interview series. Como você tem estado?
Arindo: Estou bem, obrigado por perguntarem! Como vocês estão? I’m excited to be here!
WPblog: So what’s your story? Can you give our readers a deeper look into your life (if they don’t already know) and how you ended up creating WP Ultimo?
Arindo: Sure! So, I started to program at a pretty young age. I always loved computers and games, but I was always much more interested in how to create those games than on playing them. In the end, everything seemed like a natural progression.
I started creating games in RPG Maker XP, learned how to do some cool things with their script functionality. Then I moved on to RPGs played on online forums and when I created my own forum, which run on phpBB, I ended up learning PHP.
After that, I discovered WordPress and immediately fell in love. In the end, WP Ultimo was created for a project I had in 2014. After that project died for a myriad of reasons, I decided that the code I had written for that functionality was worth turning into a product.
WPblog: You founded WP Ultimo in 2014. Can you describe in detail what your company does and any big-name clients you’ve served?
Arindo: WP Ultimo is our main product. It is a WordPress plugin that allows you to transform your WordPress multisite install into something that resembles a hosting platform but completely built on top of WordPress. Basically, it allows you to create your own WordPress.com-like service and charge end customers to host their sites with you.
We do have a couple of large corporations running services like this using WP Ultimo. Unfortunately, there are NDAs in place that prevents me from sharing that info. Ask me again in a couple of years 😉
WPblog: You also founded NextPress. What was the motivation behind this company? How is it related to WP Ultimo?
Arindo: NextPress is the parent company behind WP Ultimo. Although WP Ultimo is our main product, we do have a handful of other products that we develop at the same time. All of those reside under the umbrella of NextPress and are not necessarily related to WP Ultimo.
WPblog: NextPress has 4 different products to offer. Which one was the most difficult to develop?, and which one is your favorite?
Arindo: The most difficult product to develop is by far WP Ultimo. It is such a complex piece of software and it has so many moving parts! The fact that it relies on WordPress multisite – a portion of WordPress that doesn’t usually get much love – is also a factor. It is super fun, though, as pretty much every day we have a new non-trivial problem to resolve. It’s never boring.
One product that is also super fun to develop is WP Admin Pages PRO. We get to work with the codebases of different page builders and as a result, we learn a lot about how other well-establish developers in the WordPress space organize and write their code =)
WPblog: Tell me, Arindo, if you were a WordPress plugin, which one would you be and why?
Arindo: I would probably be a boring one, like Query Monitor. I’m kinda obsessed with performance, so that would make sense, I guess.
WPblog: What are some resources or books that you read and communities that you engage in to learn more about WordPress?
Arindo: I love the content Nathan Wrigley puts out on his WP Builds podcast. If you are not a listener yet, I would definitively recommend it.
WPblog: There are so many great CMSs out there; why did you choose WordPress?
Arindo: I think that WordPress is much more approachable, especially if you are a developer just starting out. It has an enormous market share, so there is a lot of content out there focusing on it, from all kinds of points of view. (marketing-focused, development, etc). It is easy to get started, but hard to master, so you can never stop learning.
WPblog: Could you give our readers one great WordPress tip? (Okay fine, it’s for us, but our audience is going to benefit from it as well so it’s a win-win.
Arindo: Delete plugins that you have installed but are not active as even in that state they can make your site vulnerable. If it’s not active, just delete it. You can always install it again when you are actually going to use it.
WPblog: Do you think there is a threat to WordPress from “competitors”?
Arindo: I don’t really think so, at least in the next 2-5 years, especially if the WordPress community continues to push forward with the recent efforts of modernizing the codebase and features.
WPblog: Gutenberg is becoming an old story now, but it’s still important to know: what’s your view on it?
Arindo: I really like it. To be completely honest, I was a bit on the fence when it was first announced, and I’m still not a big fan of how the entire process was carried out, but I do believe that Gutenberg is one of the major elements in this push forward I was talking about in the previous answer.
WPblog: There’s a lot of talk about cloud hosting in the WordPress industry. What do you think is the future of hosting websites? And what’s your favorite hosting solution?
Arindo: I’m old-school, so I like to manage my own servers. There are a couple of management panels that I think are getting pretty much everything right. I’m a huge fan of GridPane and Runcloud on that front.
As for what the future of hosting is going to look like, I think that things like the JAM stack are really going to take off in the next couple of years.
Marvel or DC? Marvel
Dog or Cat? Dog
Game of Thrones or Breaking Bad? Breaking Bad
Twitter or Facebook? Facebook
WPblog: We’re fascinated with how the workspaces of people powering the internet look like. Please show us your work desk. No changes, no cleanups. 😉
WPblog: How about a selfie with your business logo in the background or something?
WPblog: Lastly, who would you nominate for our next interview?
Arindo: Since I mentioned him and his podcast here, I nominate Nathan Wrigley.
So that concludes our interview series for the year 2019. This year we tried to get as many WordPress influencers on board as possible and we wanted it to end it on a high with Arindo.
We have some amazing plans for our interview series in 2020 so do watch this space and if you have any recommendations or feedback for us, do throw it our way.
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