ASEAN Tech Interviews
After living one year in Thailand I had the chance to meet very interesting people in the tech community, not only in Thailand, as well in the other countries of the called ASEAN.
In these series of posts every month we will interview tech people of ASEAN countries. Of course, the first interview must be somebody from Thailand, the country where I live and work.
Thailand @ Oh
I always remember the first conference I attended at Bangkok, it was the Google IO Extended Review, the amazing main room of the Siam Paragon was the venue. The number of attendees was around 1000, I was impressed for the enthusiastic Thai developers and it was the first time I saw Wittaya Assawasathian -Oh- orchestrating with his team everything behind perfectly like a swiss clock.
Leading and managing communities is not easy, I was involved in GDG Mallorca and very close to GDG Barcelona, can be a nightmare engage people, find venues, budgets for the food and keep everybody moving in the same direction. That’s why is very cool to see communities like GDG Thailand where besides to be a reference for Thai developers, is organizing conferences with international Speakers being a reference in Asia.
Let’s get to know Oh better:
สวัสดี Oh, thank you for being the first of these interviews, Can you tell us a little bit about you?
Hi! My name is Wittaya Assawasathian — Oh. I start Apppi — Digital Solution Agency since 2012 with my friends and we working on many projects for clients and partners across the regions. I work also a volunteer Community Manger for Google Developer Group Thailand since 2010.
From where comes your passion of Technology and Organizing events?
I love to learn coding, my first coding project was HTML website while I was studying grade 3. That’s the first time I learn to code and program machine. In college I study Computer Engineering at Kasetsart University, our department has many internal tech conferences and we start Barcamp Bangkhen in 2010 and in that year Google has DevFest at Kasetsart University. I knew GTUG from that event and joined the team with Ohm who is GTUG Bangkok founder.
How is the tech community in Thailand?
Today, tech and startup scene in Thailand are really promising. We have very strong tech community and companies that always support developers. But we also facing some challenge, I do concern about Thailand’s economic and transparency. We can’t build or implement innovation from non-sustain platform here.
Which event do you feel more proud?
Almost 7 years, I help grow developer communities from GTUG to GDG. One of very first big scale event organized by GDG is DevFest Bangkok in 2013. We had 1000 developers attending the event and some of attendees and speakers were from Cambodia, Laos, Philippines, Vietnam and countries in SEA and it was my pleasure to have Nelson Mattos to be keynote speaker when he was VP for Product and Engineering for Europe and Emerging Markets at Google. The event was very successful with help from Google, GDG, GSA and community partners.
What are the puzzles you find when you organize events?
It’s the way to balance things. How to make sure the content is well deliver and the event duration won’t too long? Will it work to run hackathon in 2–3 days with limited resources but passionate speakers and mentors.
Last year we have seen different conferences and events in the capital on diverse technologies, Firebase, Thailand Web, Agoda Tech Meet Up, Droidcon, React Native, Tensor Flow, Thailand Kotlin… Do you think Bangkok is living his Momentum?
Tech communities in Bangkok are very active. I can say that we are one of top 5 of the most active tech scene in the world. We have lot of events and meetups in the same frequency as SF. Only different is most of them will be deliver in Thai.
Thai developers are involved in a lot of conferences, and very active in libraries/blogs articles, Which is the role of the university/education?
Education is the problem that everyone wants to solve. For statistic, more students graduated from university in Computer Science and Computer Engineering each year but the number of new grad developers who able to code are less than the year before. Most of good Thai programmers learn by themselves.
One of the things that call my attention is GDG Thailand acts as a whole, by country, not as locally, can you describe us what are the benefits?
We used to work a lot with government to help educate STEM in school and university. Believe it or not.. named GDG Thailand is help us a lot than GDG Bangkok when it comes to work with government. At that time we were GTUG Thailand and we wrote an email to Developer Relation team at Google to continue to use GDG Thailand on their brands and the team understand our circumstance even they believe the name doesn’t matter.
What are your thoughts about the startup ecosystem in Thailand?
Bubble? The success rate for a startup is low compare to normal business. I am afraid that success rate for Thai startup will be much lower than global average.
Which Thailand Startup we should follow?
On the other hand, there are some of perform well and leading Thai Startup industry. I recommend Jitta which is one of very first Thai startup and they have their unique key value and lot of user base.
What are your future plans at short-mid term?
We start Devcamp — a developer playgroud as a spin-off from Apppi, it’s now in beta and we got a lot of really good feedback from partners and developers. We want to empower and grow developer community in a sustainable way.
At the end, I want to ask you, what is your favorite dish of the Thai food :)?
Pad Thai, Absolutely.
Thank you very much Oh.
