Stories from the road and the work.
Notes on marketing, WordPress, building products and traveling to 55 countries on a Bangladeshi passport.
Mongolia: 600 KM into the Gobi Desert, Under a Sky Full of Stars
Ten days in Mongolia, a visa my green passport could not get alone, a Turkish dinner inside a cave and 600 km into the Gobi.
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A prayer in a mosque that has held prayers for 1,300 years
Country 52, my first in the Maghreb. A road trip from Tunis to Djerba before JCI World Congress and one quiet afternoon in Kairouan.
The Diversity Dilemma: True Inclusion or Statistical Illusion?
Diversity reports count who gets hired. Inclusion is who gets heard, trusted and promoted.

Love Does Not Need Time: Remembering My Amma
My mother-in-law, whom I called Amma, passed away from heart failure. I knew her for only two years, but she made me her daughter…
![Another Blessed Year: My Birthday Reflections & Resolutions [2023] | Afshana Diya Another Blessed Year: My Birthday Reflections & Resolutions [2023]](https://afshana.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/10/birthday-2023-banner-768x384.jpg)
Another Blessed Year: My Birthday Reflections & Resolutions [2023]
As 19th August approaches each year, my inner child brims with anticipation and excitement. For me, birthdays are less about adding another year and…

Power of ChatGPT for WordPress: 10+ Interesting Use Cases To Try Now
You may have already heard much about ChatGPT, which has generated buzz recently. At WPDeveloper, we are delving into the potential of ChatGPT for WordPress and…

WordPress 5.6: An All-Women Release Squad
WordPress 5.6 "Simone" was built by the first all-women and non-binary release squad. Here is what it meant to be on the marketing team…

0 to 1 Million Users From 180+ Countries: The Journey of Essential Addons for Elementor
Wow! We’re so thrilled to announce that, with all of you onboard, Essential Addons for Elementor has reached the milestone we didn’t even dream about when…

Marketing Your WordPress Product for Users, Not Fellow Developers
My WordCamp Iloilo 2019 talk, written up: how to market WordPress products to the people who use them, not to fellow developers.

Marketing Automation to Power Up Your WordPress Website
My WordCamp Singapore 2019 talk at Microsoft Singapore: four marketing automation strategies for WordPress businesses, plus what it taught me six years later.

The Next Version of Yourself: From a No-Code Experiment to Elevyt
In 2019 I built a small self-improvement app without writing a line of code. Seven years later, the same idea is becoming a real…

Women in Tech Who Don’t Code: What a Decade Taught Me
I walked into my first software company as its first marketer, with a business degree and zero lines of code. Here is what I…

This Is How I Want To Spend My Life – Exploring The Existence
I want to explore. I want to belong to myself, not to a place. I would love to live a hundred lives more than mine.

How GDPR Will Impact Your Facebook Ads (In Short)
What GDPR meant for Facebook advertisers in May 2018: the pixel, Lead Ads and Custom Audiences in short, plus what has changed since.

The AI Tools Modern Marketers Actually Use in 2026
The AI tools that keep earning their place in marketing teams today, grouped by job, plus four questions worth asking before adding anything new.

Stay Alive: Things to Remember When Everything Goes Wrong
A note I first wrote in 2018 for anyone who feels everything is going wrong: the tiny reasons that are worth staying for, and…

2017 Year in Review: My First Two WordCamps
The year I found the WordPress community: my first two WordCamps in Singapore and Jakarta, a new website built with Elementor and two lessons…

Confession: Not Having a Personal Website Is a Crime
Platforms rise and fade, change from country to country and differ by profession. A website with your name on it is the one identity…
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