Year in Review – 2023

Here’s to the new year, 2024! 🥂 

As we start, we look forward to our annual retreat and WordCamp Asia. There’s a lot more that has us excited, but more on that soon. 🤞

This, is our customary yearly roundup. To look back, reflect and celebrate the Good Work by our teams at rtCamp in 2023.

Client Projects

We love solving business challenges with open-source solutions, primarily WordPress. However, 2023 also presented us with the opportunity to enable a new path for the web itself. Let’s dive right in.

We helped increase leads by 49% for Ready Logistics through WordPress VIP migration & more. 

Our design team refreshed the UI/UX, enhancing the user experience for incoming prospects. For marketing teams, we automated workflows with Gravity Forms-Salesforce Integration. This reduced human error and sped up turnaround times. Additionally, migrating to WordPress VIP improved the overall performance & security of the site.

We built a pet-finder solution for Waldo’s Friends with WooCommerce and Next.js.

We used WooCommerce to create a seamless workflow for shelter owners to list pets and for users to apply for adoption. A tailored dashboard for site owners, allows for quick approval of listings and applications. With Next.js front-end, we delivered a fast and seamless experience for users.  

Our partnership with Google to address the ongoing third-party cookie deprecation. 

By the time this post reaches you, 1% of Chrome browsers have already deprecated third-party cookies(3PCs). By the end of 2024, third-party cookies should be fully deprecated from Chrome, to address privacy concerns on the web. This change has wider implications for how the web works.

We have been building the Privacy Sandbox Analysis Tool, in partnership with Google, to help you understand the current cookie usage, and the modern alternatives replacing 3PCs. The Chrome extension for the tool is currently in its pre-release version 0.4.1.

Additionally, we launched the Privacy Sandbox consultancy and analysis service to help your enterprise tide over the change with confidence. 

New Services

We expanded our offerings to two new extremes last year! — Managed Services and Artificial Intelligence. 

We used to offer Managed Services for our clients, usually after a large migration. 

However, with news of layoffs and recession fears dominating the first half of 2023, we felt that many enterprises using WordPress may need reliable partners for regular upkeep and growth.

We launched our Managed Services as a packaged version of all the activities required by an enterprise to get the most out of their WordPress sites — with support for training, maintenance, and growth ambitions. 

Artificial Intelligence being the flavor of 2023, we saw a lot of interest among enterprises. We didn’t say FOMO. Did we?

We have been working and exploring AI applications for a while. However, our Artificial Intelligence service focuses on consultancy, to help you ask the right questions and get the most out of AI & Gen AI in the enterprise context.

In line with the same, Rahul, our CEO, presented how WordPress can leverage Gen AI for content creation, community moderation, SEO and accessibility, at INMA’s India Study Tour. 

Key hiring/L&D Updates

To keep up with our vision 500 goals, our hiring, and training programs ran full steam throughout 2023. 

First, we brought back our Open Campus hiring program, allowing students all over the country to apply with their Github profiles. Second, there was no way we could have enough people to shortlist the large volume of applications we were anticipating. So we built ourselves an in-house AI-based application screening too called Chitragupta, to go through each applicants’ GitHub and Stack Overflow profiles. 

We reached out to 479 colleges, and received 72380 registrations. With Chitragupta, we interviewed 1303 candidates and finally offered the job to 64 candidates. This turns out to be ~5% conversion rate, much higher than the previous 1% conversion rate, reducing our cost of hiring by 80%! Moreover, the experiment has generated more data for us to tweak our model to aim for a 10% conversion rate. 🤞  

In 2023, 43 engineers successfully completed the training program, led by our Learning & Development team. 

Giving Back to the Community

All the Good Work ultimately enables us to support our employees and strengthen the open-source ecosystem. 

We started the year with WordCamp Asia as sponsors, volunteers, speakers, and organizers. We participated as sponsors in WordCamp Mumbai, spoke at WordCamp Vancouver and attended WordCamp Europe and WordCamp US. 

As WordPress turned 20, we celebrated a contributors’ week at rtCamp. Our developers contributed to each major WordPress release, with WordPress 6.4 being the 29th consecutive release with our contributions. 

We updated our open WordPress course with videos and content refresh. The course continues to be under CC0 license, to be freely used by the community. 

Expanding our work in the open-source ecosystem, we have been making strides with Frappe, mainly for our internal use. Recently, we launched Frappe-Manager to create and manage local Frappe installations with just one command effortlessly.

Looking back, we grew our conviction in open-source with each new project, opened new ways to serve our clients, moved closer to vision 500, and enabled community contributions. 

We hope to do more in 2024.