Hailing from Colombo, Sri Lanka, Mahangu first found WordPress when he stumbled upon 0.70 in the dark recesses of #wordpress on Freenode. He has used and provided support for every major release of the software, and is excited about the impact the platform can have on South Asia.
Though once a high school English teacher, his desire to help make online publishing more democratic led him to Automattic, where he now works as a Happiness Engineer. He sincerely believes that stellar support will play a pivotal role in helping WordPress power the next 25% of the web!
Over the past year, Mahangu went from 0 code contributions to 50+ commits. In this talk, he hopes to draw on his experiences getting there and debunk several myths about WordPress programming.
This talk will assume a basic knowledge of HTML/CSS, but nothing further, and will look to draw non-technical people down the rabbit hole of theme and plugin development by showing how you can make WordPress do a lot of cool things without a very deep understanding of PHP or programming in general.