As we countdown to WordCamp Asia 2024, each week we’re inviting you to go behind the lineup and get to know the folks who will be taking to the stage. In today’s post, we chat with Robert Li, APAC Automator in Chief & currently Principal Solutions Engineer for WP Engine.
Q. Firstly, welcome to the lineup! We’re so glad to have you here. Can you start by telling us a bit about yourself? Where will you be joining the event from, and what does your day-to-day look like?
I come from Brisbane, Australia. Honestly, I have a pretty regimented day. Typically it starts at around 5am, where I normally go for a run before anything. Then I’ll either commute or work from home 2-3 days a week. I go to the gym after work 6 days a week and then I’m promptly to bed at 9-10pm.
My work day typically consists of morning meetings with my US colleagues before a morning stand-up with my team locally. Throughout the day think of my responsibilities in 3 buckets:
BAU—This is crunching reports to help our sales team with their customer accounts, doing health checks and providing architectural or optimization recommendations
Internal Projects—This is working on tasks in support of our platform and engineering teams, whether that’s helping with tooling, product management, or fact-finding the better understand our customers
Special Projects—These are personal projects that I will be working on ad-hoc, case in point, the upcoming presentation for WordCamp Asia 2024!
Q. We’re lucky to be welcoming a diverse range of speakers to our program in 2024. What interested you to apply to WordCamp Asia as a speaker?
WordCamp Asia is the premier regional WordCamp in our region, so I am honoured to be selected to speak.
Taiwan is also a particularly special place for myself and my partner. My partner was born and raised in Fuzhou which is literally only a couple hundred kilometers away from Taipei and so she and I have a great affinity with the food and culture here.
We are particularly big fans of fried taro balls from the Ningxia night market. That’s why I applied to speak at WordCamp. So I could eat fried taro balls at night.
Q. What can audiences expect to learn from your talk/s? Are there any advance sneak peeks or knowledge bombs you can offer us?
My talk will give a high level overview of generative AI and LLMs, as well as how I believe the capabilities of these LLMs will be eventually integrated with WordPress, content editorial workflows and development practices.
But, probably most interesting to attendees is, I’ll also be giving a brief demo of an end to end proof of concept from exporting data from your WordPress site to creating a retrieval augmented generative chatbot or form fill where you can query that data using a large language model with an accompanying Colab Notebook so attendees can follow along after.
Q. What are you most looking forward to at WordCamp Asia 2024? Is there someone you’re looking forward to rubbing shoulder with, or a local delicacy you’d like to sample?
I love meeting all the different people at WordCamp, some of the brightest thinkers and biggest influences on the ecosystem. I love learning about upcoming developments and I love fried taro balls.
Q. Tell us something about yourself that we might not know. Party tricks? Secret hobbies?
You’re going to see this in the presentation but… I’m an avid baker. I have a 200 year old sourdough starter and apparently my sourdough loaf is pretty good.
Q. Lightning Round!
Most-visited website: Duckduckgo, otherwise shoutout to MarkTechPost.com.
Must-have gadget: Logically it’s my Pixel phone, but… I have a soft spot for my Anbernic RG405v. I just realised I could do Steam Link with it and play Death must Die on it!
Most-read book: Three Body Problem by Liu Cixin.
Go-to podcast: Hard Fork.
Find out more about Robert’s appearance at WordCamp Asia 2024 here.