He is an ambitious WordPress developer with with a shoot-for-the-stars-land-on-the-moon attitude. He loves to take challenges. His projects are a true reflection of innovation and creativity. He has made some major contributions to WordPress. With a vast experience of developing startups into successful business, he has managed to make a name for himself.
Today, we are extremely happy to get Yaron Guez on board. He is currently the Co-Founder and Software Architect at Crypteron, and Director of Technology at Trestian.
Happy reading!
Cloudways: You are a programmer by birth. You made your first program at the age of 8. How was the result? What other programs did you build in your early days?
Yaron Guez: I wrote my first program on an Atari XE using BASIC. It asked the user a set of questions and gave a variety of tailored responses as output. My friends told me that it was the lamest game they had ever played, but I couldn’t get over the fact that I had made it from scratch. I was hooked.
A couple years later, I wrote a program that gave the illusion that I was hacking into the CIA and used it to prank my friends after pre-filling it with their personal details. After a few minutes the program would start flashing red and behaving as if I had been caught. One friend literally ran out of the house thinking the police were on the way.
Cloudways: You have a diversified experience of software engineering including time spent at a reputable firm while living in New York City. What are the programming languages that you have worked on? Have you learnt all this in university or is it all by profession?
Yaron Guez: I studied C++ in high school and then majored in Computer Science at Yale University working mostly in C. My senior project was a 3D first-person walkthrough of the Yale campus done in C#. Most of what I learned in college was theory and abstract problem solving.
At college, we didn’t build large, elaborate applications that required concepts like separation of concerns, agile methodology, or proper documentation. Â Instead, we focused on universal computer science concepts that applied to all programming languages and projects.
Working at Bridgewater Associates right out of college was an incredible experience. They’re a Microsoft shop so I worked with C# and SQL Server. The company had some of the smartest people I’ve ever met and being surrounded by that level of intellect was invigorating.
Bridgewater had a strict set of best practices covering object oriented design patterns, documentation, testability, source control and software development lifecycle. That sort of programming discipline was extremely influential in my later endeavors. I always avoid cowboy coding and quick-and-dirty solutions in favor of well thought out, and clearly commented software architecture. Measure twice, cut once.
Since then, I’ve learned and worked with PHP and JavaScript including WordPress, CodeIgniter, KnockoutJS and AngularJS. I’m a big fan of API driven development. My latest startup, Crypteron, has a .NET RESTful backend and an AngularJS frontend.
Cloudways: You traveled all over the world in the short span of 14 months. I believe it was a life changing experience for you. What were some of those changes?
Yaron Guez: The 14 months I spent backpacking, redefined my priorities and life goals. I’ve always been ambitious with a shoot-for-the-stars-land-on-the-moon attitude. However, too much delayed gratification can often lead to missing out on the present for an elusive future happiness that’s actually a moving target.
I realized that, no matter what I do, I will always be working towards something, and never actually reaching that carrot on a stick. I decided that if I’m destined to run forever, I might as well jog and enjoy the scenery rather than sprint with my eyes locked on the prize.
I have been trying to crack that code ever since: finding the perfect balance between between being ambitious and being present; exercising my brain by taking on challenging and complex problems but only those that I enjoy and find fulfilling; using stress as a motivator but not letting it control my life; and seeking out a form of financial success that will allow me to pick-and-choose endeavors based on their merits (interesting…..  socially conscious…..  challenging….  fun….) and not their potential financial gains.
Cloudways: I came to know that there is an interesting story behind your joining WordPress. With a software engineering background, it must have been very easy to move towards web development. You then relocated to another city. Would you like to share that particular story with our readers?
Yaron Guez: After my trip, I moved to Boston, where I grew up, and started a company called Connected Traveling with Ilan Judes, a fellow traveler and web designer. With a tagline of “Travel Smarter” it served as a way to share the how-to knowledge we had picked up while backpacking that was usually buried deep within Lonely Planet forums and the minds of other travelers. This is what first turned me on to WordPress.
I hadn’t done much web development before then, focusing instead on software, and it seemed like a great way to break into that world. WordPress is a fantastic way to make the leap from software to web development and I quickly fell in love with the plugin architecture, clear documentation, and, most importantly, the community. WordPress developers are some of the nicest people out there.
After two consecutive Winters spent in Israel and Thailand respectively, I found I was no longer cut out for the Winters of New England.  So, after just  a year in Boston, I moved to San Diego in 2011 for the sunshine, beach life, and the holistic and warm hearted people.
Cloudways: Yaron, you know that WordPress security is always an issue for WordPressers. Most of WordPress sites are vulnerable to security threats, such as brute force attack and DDoS attacks. Many users have called for the WP core team to come up with a built-in solution. Don’t you think WordPress core should dedicate a release on WordPress security?
Yaron Guez: Many WordPress developers would be quick to point out that WordPress core itself is relatively secure. Â Most vulnerabilities come from third-party plugins and themes or snippets that inexperienced developers include in their functions.php file. Â While vulnerabilities do come up in core, Â they are usually quickly patched by incremental maintenance releases. Â I think the greatest thing the core team did to address security, was to add the auto update feature for maintenance releases.
Many businesses hire a WordPress developer to build them a website and then don’t pay for ongoing maintenance, leaving themselves vulnerable to future exploits. Â By having automatic updates turned on, they can considerably reduce their exposure to such exploits. Â Plugins like iThemes Security add a high degree of security enhancements to WordPress core and I think it’s worth having a discussion on whether some of those features should be turned on by default by the core team.
A ‘security settings panel’ within the WordPress settings menu would be a great place to add some optional hardening features without exposing all the advanced options that iThemes Security offers.  Keep in mind, however, that there is no real software security solution to DDoS attacks.
Cloudways: You have been involved in the Advanced WordPress Facebook group since its inception. How did you find AWP? How many members were there at that time? Now that the group has 10,000 members, what should we expect next from this group? What’s your opinion about this group?
Yaron Guez: After moving to San Diego, I started taking on freelance WordPress projects to finance Connected Traveling. I started going to different WordPress Meetups and was discouraged by the fact that they focused on online marketing and blogging rather than on coding. Then I stumbled across the Advanced WordPress Meetup run by Michael Bastos.
At the time, it was just a group of 8 or so guys meeting at 3rdSpace, a coworking space in University Heights, once a month. They were all WP developers and knew their stuff. The loose round table format was a great way to share what we were all working on, what we had learned that month, and to discuss the future of the platform.
The group continued to grow, moving downtown to Co-Merge and with its  Facebook Group ballooning in size to over 10,000 members.  It’s been thrilling to be a part of that process and to see other advanced developers come together.
I’ve made some great friends in the process. Managing the growth has been a challenge, especially given the limitations of the Facebook Group functionality. Â It takes a lot of moderation to keep the noise level down. We have plans to try to transfer the best content from the group into a weekly newsletter. The admins have our own group to discuss ways to make the group better and we’re always open to ideas!
Cloudways: You lead a very busy life. They say that developers have no personal life. But, I believe everyone gets some time out to relax. What other activities you love to do in your spare time? Any interest in music?
Yaron Guez: Besides coding, my other passion is music. I play keyboard, sing backup vocals, and co-write songs in a band called Royal Heart. We get a kick out of referring to our music as hip rockin’, reggae, gypsy, blues, funk that you can dance to.
We play shows constantly including performances at House of Blues and CityFest. Â It’s the most fun I’ve ever had and being on stage in front of hundreds of people is an absolute thrill and dream come true for me.
Cloudways: You have extended the freelance work so much and also started Trestian. How do you manage all of that workload? Â How was the growth of the organization in the past few years? What services does it provide?
Yaron Guez: Practice! Like most challenges, time management is just a question of repetition and discipline. It also helps that I love what I do, which is important. Eventually the freelancing took on a life of its own, and overtook Connected Traveling to become a full service, online strategy firm called Trestian that I founded with a close friend of mine and marketing expert, Kevin Pelissier.
Our virtual staff grew to include developers, marketers, designers, content creators, and management gurus all providing their expertise to small and medium businesses. Our client base has followed suit. I’m incredibly proud of how Trestian has grown.
Cloudways: What other projects are you working on in addition to Trestian? Â Tell me about MedAdaptics and Crypteron. Â How did you get involved with those projects?
Yaron Guez: By 2013, our Director of Operations at Trestian, Bryan Mojica, had taken over the reigns of the company allowing me to work part time on a startup called MedAdaptics. We built a cloud platform for connecting cancer patients with their pharmacies in order to coordinate their medication therapy. A mobile app reminds patients when it’s time to take their medication and then collects data on how they’re feeling and what side effects they’re experiencing. This data triggers intelligent alerts to their pharmacies and care teams based on the medications’ package labeling.
MedAdaptics integrates with pharmacies’ existing medical record software and provides detailed analytics on a variety of metrics. Currently the co-founders are in high level talks with a number of pharmacies and healthcare companies.
San Diego has a great startup community that is often overlooked by those flocking to Silicon Valley and the Bay Area. One great resource that brings the community together is SDTechScene.org run by Phelan Riessen. They organize numerous events throughout the year.
At one such event, Startup Bash, I met an engineer and MBA named Sid Shetye who is the CEO and founder of a cybersecurity company called Crypteron. In August of 2014, I joined Crypteron as a co-founder and Software Architect.
Crypteron’s flagship product, CipherDB, allows developers to build secure and regulatory compliant applications in the cloud or on premises without having to worry about data-at-rest or in-transit. By downloading the CipherDB library and adding 4 lines of code, you can add military grade encryption (AES256-GCM) and offsite key management to your .NET / Mono application.
We have a Java version coming soon as well. This type of service would have saved us weeks of development time and headaches at MedAdaptics which had to be HIPAA compliant.
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Cloudways: You have also been involved in your father’s online sales business. What are your core responsibilities there? Are you optimistic about that business to grow, or will you focus more on your development projects?
Yaron Guez: My entrepreneurial spirit comes from my dad, Moshe Guez, a former film maker, who went on to invent a set of formulas for restoring the drums and rollers found in laser printer toner cartridges.
Using a combination of WordPress, Gravity Forms, MailChimp, Stripe and Boomerang for Gmail, I built a robust, custom sales process that helps his company, Rotby Drum Coating, target and close sales in countries all over the world. Â It’s a great way to spend time with my dad who lives in Boston as well as to see firsthand how powerful these kind of tools can be for small businesses.
You can follow Yaron Guez on Twitter.
Waseem Abbas
Waseem Abbas was WordPress Community Manager at Cloudways. He loves to help people with their WordPress worries. He is a self-proclaimed "food explorer".
