Tag Archives: Speakers

Mahangu Weerasinghe on “Teaching Happiness”

Hello, Mumbai! My name is Mahangu Weerasinghe and I’m a Happiness Engineer at Automattic. I work on the team that provides live chat support to WordPress.com users, so there’s a chance that some of you may have already spoken to me online. 🙂

WordPress is currently used by 23.4% of all websites. That’s a lot of sites.

The question then, is this: in an age where everyone is developing WordPress solutions, how do you make sure that your offering stands out from the crowd?

Support

In an increasingly saturated WordPress products and services market, providing quality support is one of the factors that separates good WordPress solutions from the great ones.

My session at WC Mumbai 2015 is titled Teaching Happiness: What WordPress Support Can Learn From the Classroom.

I realise the topic is a little unusual, but it comes from a very personal place. Prior to joining Automattic, I was a high school English teacher, and as I made the jump from teacher to Happiness Engineer, I realised that there was a lot of overlap between the two roles.

What I Will Cover

In this session, I will explore how we, as providers of WordPress support, can see ourselves as teachers instead of fixers, and in the process completely alter the dynamic of the support space, creating a more holistic experience for both our users and ourselves.

I will show how some of the tools that teachers use to Plan, Manage and Follow-up on their lessons can also be used in WordPress support interactions, and how these methods can help our users become more and more independent.

I strongly believe that support will play a pivotal role in helping us reach the next 23.4% of the web, and encourage you to bring all your support-related questions and comments to this session. I look forward to hearing what you have to say!

Session Link: Teaching Happiness: What WordPress Support Can Learn From the Classroom

Our Last List of Confirmed Speakers!

We announced three lists of speakers for WordCamp Mumbai 2015. Today, I am announcing the final list of speakers.

Here are the seven we are proud to announce.

Roshnikumar Yambem

Roshnikumar is an open-source fundamentalist. He is the founder of Globizs Web Solutions Pvt Ltd
which has been developing websites on WordPress since 2006. They have developed more than 200 WordPress websites along with a few dozen websites for Government of Manipur.

Speaker Session: WordPress Security – OWASP TOP 10 Protection

Akshay Raje

Akshay discovered WordPress in 2008 and has been in love with it since then. He started moonlighting on small client projects and custom plugin development. He subsequently tried to bootstrap a WordPress services firm just to discover that services is not something that he wants to do for a living.

By day, Akshay is a Human Resources professional and heads HR at the India office of Fab.com

Currently he occasionally freelances on interesting WordPresss projects and supports a couple of WordPress plugins authored by him. He aspires to build a successful WordPress product company some day.

Speaker Session: Embedding and consuming external content in WordPress: Requests, Caching, Parsing

Ramya Pandyan

IdeaSmith is the digital doppelgänger of Ramya Pandyan (middle-class Mumbaikar, intrepid train-traveller). As IdeaSmith, she battles obscurity, slays boredom and keeps a lot of people entertained with her stories about Mumbai, men, books and life at large. She blogs, tweets, Insta’s, FB’s, +G’s and Goodreads.

Her verbal performances air at The Idea-smithy and XX Factor. Tweet-bomb her at @ideasmithy.

Speaker Session: The Content Creator’s Life – Challenges, Motivations, Concerns

Raj Mehta

Raj Mehta is an 18-year-old blogger and designer, who is going through the throes of formal education. He got into web design when he was 15 and has never looked back since.

He blogs at “Raj himself“ about his experiences. When not attending college or working, he spends his time playing the keyboard and hanging out with smart folks.

Speaker Session: Typography for WordPress

Jatin Hariani

Born and raised in Mumbai, Jatin Hariani is a developer and designer with 4 years of experience under his belt. From major web applications to simple corporate websites, WordPress has been a major building block in most of the projects he has worked on.

He tweets about WordPress, Web Development in general and a bunch or random things at @JatinHariani.

Speaker Session: Simple WordPress Troubleshooting

Krishna Mehta

Krishna (aka Adaire) is a 17 year old from Mumbai who blogs at Ink on Pixels. She has been taken part in NaNoWriMo 2014 and is a national level TSEC 2014 debator. She has also written a novel.

Speaker Session: WordPress and the Youth!

Vishal Kothari

Vishal Kothari has been working with WordPress for the last 3 years. He is the founder of Tyche Softwares, a company that develops WordPress plugins. Vishal has been working with PHP since last 14 years.

Speaker Session: WordPress Settings API – Settings, Sections & Fields

Hope you are happy with our finalized list of speakers. You can view the entire list here.

So join us for WordCamp Mumbai, tickets are available!

Second List of Confirmed Speakers

Last week we had announced four speakers in our first list of speakers. Now its time to announce the next four speakers who have confirmed participation at WordCamp Mumbai 2015.

Gaurav Pareek

A free software fundamentalist and an avid GNU/Linux advocate, Gaurav started his WordPress journey in 2010. He ran a successful design agency from 2009 to 2014, and built more than a hundred websites using WordPress.

Currently, he works as a Senior Software Developer at Digital Vidya and learns things about digital marketing.

Speaker Session: Better WordPress development with Vagrant

Prasad Ajinkya

Prasad Ajinkya loves to tinker with all things web. He is a co-founder at 13 Llama Studio and works with organizations to solve their business problems through technology.

Speaker Session: WordPress for the Enterprise

Faishal Sayed

Faishal has been in the world of WordPress since past 4 years, and since then has had a great time. WordPress is his hobby, passion and a big part of his profession. He has been contributing to WordPress core along with the handful of plugins released on the official repository.

He is currently working as a Web Engineer at 10up playing full time with WordPress.

Speaker Session: Best Practices for WordPress Development

Bryce Adams

Bryce is a WooCommerce Ninja at WooThemes, who has spent the last several years travelling around South East Asia while developing WordPress plugins and recently handling WooCommerce support. He’s currently based in Bangkok, Thailand and blogs over on bryceadams.com, talking about nomad life.

Speaker Session: The Settings Experience – Why It Sucks

Hope you are happy with our Speaker List so far. We will announce a few more in a couple of days. 🙂

Link: List of Confirmed Speakers

Last Call for Speakers! [Closing 25th Jan 2015]

Note: Speaker Applications are now closed.

We are closing the “Call for Speakers” form on the 25th of January, 2015. We increased the timeframe by a further ten days to allow more local applicants to apply.

So if you think you can talk about WordPress to a bunch of WordPress enthusiasts, do apply. If you know someone who can speak, tell them to apply fast!

What happens after 25th January 2015?

We are already in the process of finalizing some speakers and announcing them on the site. All applications will are being jointly handled by a “speaker review team”.

Based on feedback we got from our local meetups and community at large, we will announce a complete and final list of speakers and sessions.

Hopefully by the end of this month itself, we should roll out ticket sales and you will be able to decide better more or less all speakers being listed.

Then through first ten days of February, we are hoping to announce a complete schedule.

Link: Call of Speaker – Application Form

Our First List of Confirmed Speakers

As our ‘call for speakers’ enters its final week, we have already confirmed a few speakers. WordCamp Mumbai 2015 should be a great meeting point for local WordPress users, enthusiasts and developers to listen to and interact with many experts from around India and also around the world.

We were lucky to get applications from around the world and also a few locally.

Today we are announcing a first list of four confirmed speakers.

Sam Hotchkiss

Sam Hotchkiss has been working with WordPress for the last 10 years. Over that time he worked as a freelancer, built a successful agency, raised venture capital and started a product business, BruteProtect, which was acquired by Automattic in 2014.

Sam now works on the Jetpack team at Automattic and lives in Albuquerque, New Mexico with his wonderful wife and their three dogs.

Speaker Session: Goodbye to /wp-admin

Amit Sharma

Amit is a self-taught designer-developer, who runs a development firm by the name of 13 Llama Studio in Mumbai, who specialize in making WordPress do things that you have probably not heard of. Besides development, he likes to spend his time with music, photography or on a road trip.

Speaker Session: WordPress as the backbone of a mobile app

Konstantin Obenland

Konstantin is a WordPress developer, and Core contributor based in Southern California. After contributing to Twenty Twelve, he was the backup lead and main developer for Twenty Thirteen and Twenty Fourteen, the most recent default themes.

At Automattic he’s is part of a team that contributes back to WordPress full time. He enjoys craft beers and good food — sometimes so much that he blogs about it.

Speaker Session: Building Themes: Lessons Learned from Contributing to Default Themes

Rahul Bansal

Rahul Bansal is founder & CEO of rtCamp. He is using WordPress from 2007 and developing on WordPress from 2008.
These days he is focused on making WordPress sites faster using Nginx through his EasyEngine project.

Speaker Session: Debugging WordPress Performance using EasyEngine

We have confirmed a few more speakers and some final details are being worked out. We will publish a second and possibly third list over the next week.

The call for speakers is still open and if you plan to speak at WordCamp Mumbai 2015 – I advise you to apply fast!

Links: Apply as Speaker | List of Confirmed Speakers