About me and DoInWP.com

Hello,

I’m Edgars Abolins – a WordPress developer from Latvia and the founder of the DoInWP.com website. Knowing how hard it is sometimes to find good solutions for problems, I’ve created this project as a helpful reminder for me and (hopefully) a useful resource for other web developers out there who seek answers to questions about how to properly drive a WordPress website – what solutions to put in place to make it fast, stable and SEO friendly.

On this website you’ll find:

Tips on how to improve WordPress performance and security
Answers to popular questions about how to properly host and maintain a WordPress based website
Interesting techniques on how you can improve SEO rankings and User Experience
Useful resources and tools for productive web development
Various solutions to problems related to WordPress, hosting, and web development in general.

Goals and objectives of DoInWP

One of my personal goals here is to provide quality content and do it with a special kind of approach – post articles about different kinds of topics and keep them updated with precise, actual information that is based on substantiated facts. Objectives – mainly it is just a sport of some sort to see how useful this website will become for others. The other thing that I like about it, is that at the same time while running this, I see DoInWP as a tool that will help me to constantly focus and keep myself updated about all the important topics and innovations in the field.

My own personal story

2003 – 2006: School years with “cuban” Internet and the passion for Macromedia Flash

2003 was about the time when I got my first PC. With internet connection being so luxury that only the “rich kids” had it, regular ones like me had their own – cuban style of “Internet” – with school backpack contents mainly consisting of floppy disks and a bit later – CDs. These was our methods of exchange and distribution of games, software and of course – you know what :D… Since I was a big fan of the “flash” games, I spent one summer to learn how to make my own animations, later games and even websites on Macromedia Flash. Managed to make each kind of those. It was a lot of fun with friends drawing the characters by hand, me scanning, converting them into vector graphics afterwards and animating them – everybody liked to be a part of the process. Flash-based websites were also a good way how to earn extra buck and the market was thriving – there were almost no specialists who knew how to work with Flash and everybody wanted them because of animations and effects plus there were no alternatives at that time – HTML5 was not yet born. Later on, since I already had a bit of portfolio, it helped me to get my first job.

2007 – 2009: Beginnings of my career: Developed my first web CMS, created my own PC trojan virus as an experiment;

I started my career early in the IT as a computer technician and a part-time junior web developer (Flash/XHTML/CSS/JS/PHP/MySQL/). By learning core web development languages I even managed to build my first web content management system which I used to run client websites. In my free time I enjoyed a lot of hacking and fiddling with computer security in general – created my own trojan virus as an experiment and submitted it right after into the virus database (no PCs were harmed :D), which got registered with a funny name of “Trojan.Happy” because of the caricature it added as a desktop wallpaper.

2010 – 2014: Work as as a computer technician and a lot of experiments in hardware automation and web development; Created my second web CMS;

My regular job was a computer and electronics technician, although I continued to take some web development jobs from time to time, it was more like an enthusiasm driven thing. In these years I learned a lot about electronics, hardware automation, wireless network security, a bit of cryptography and IT forensics. Some of my most interesting free time projects included: voice control implementation, a PC driven doorbell, laser alarm and a motion sensor (early attempts of home automation, just before the commercial solutions started to appear widely in the market). I also liked to experiment with web-driven API technologies – created my own SMS server and web analytics for incoming calls. Tried out my luck with game servers and affiliate marketing. Also the second version of my own web CMS was born which I later on used on some of my own web projects.

2015 – 2018: Co-founded company; Start of the WordPress journey and web hosting business; Created an antivirus app for WordPress;

On 2015 things started to get serious with coding. I slowly shifted away from computer repair jobs and co-founded a web development company together with one of my close friends. Bespite being a fan of self-coded solutions I quickly learned about powers of open source. This was also the start of my – now never ending journey with WordPress along with the web hositng business. At the end of 2015, just as a coincidence – many WordPress websites were suffering from a serious security issues. A lot of sites got hacked because of weak passwords, the use of “nulled” themes and plugins, security exploits or improper server configuration. Since many of the clients asked for help with cleaning up the mess and properly securing their websites, I quickly created my own web-based WordPress antivirus solution (with advanced stuff like pattern matching, scoring system, recognition of unnatural encoded strings, file hash comparsions, etc) to make the cleanup jobs more efficient.

2018 – 2020: Transitioning away from my own business to a senior web developer role; First experience with team leading and large scale projects;

With realizing that it is too much to handle for me with driving my own business, managing the client base and being a web developer at the same time, in these years I transitioned away from my own company in favor of a senior / lead web developer career – just to do the things I know (and what I like to do) as best as I can. Some highlights of the time: First experience with team leading, large scale projects, payment systems and ecommerce.

2021 – 2023: Thriving years of innovations, pure knowledge and experience

Three of the most productive and most intensive years as a lead web developer – the time at which I’m now. In the best terms I would describe it as an opportunity to “close many unclosed books” – fine tuning of my existing knowledge and finally finding a large enough space for many new things. A lot of changes, innovations and experience gained and a lot more to come, from some of which you’ll can read and follow here – in DoInWP 🙂