Category: Speakers

Introducing our next speaker for WordCamp Mumbai 2017 – Rahul Bansal.

The session will highlight common mistakes PHP programmers often make when they join the WordPress ecosystem.

There are few PHP functions for which WordPress has its API. One common case is use of PHP’s curl() function instead of using wp_remote_*() functions.

Using WordPress equivalent has its benefits.

Rahul will be highlighting such mistakes, and what benefits WordPress alternatives offers.

He hopes this will help PHP developers become better WordPress developers.

About Rahul Bansal

Rahul is the founder and CEO of rtCamp – the only WordPress.com VIP Partner from Asia.

His WordPress journey began in 2007 when he was looking for ways to customize his blog. Later on, he moved from professional blogging, freelancing to starting rtCamp in 2009.

At work, Rahul plays multiple roles, switching between sysadmin (his favorite), to a salesman and everything else company demands from him.

Over the years, Rahul has contributed to the WordPress community in different ways as a WordCamp speaker, organizer, volunteer, polyglot, theme/plugins developer.

Outside of WordPress, he loves spending time with his son and is a self-proclaimed foodie.

You can tweet him @rahul286

Introducing our next speaker for WordCamp Mumbai 2017 – Aurovrata Venet.

WordPress is in inherently designed to be multi-lingual, given its effort to localise its meta information and documentation as well as providing a complete framework for developers to localise their extensions. However, ironically, it is not able to handle multiple language content in a single installation. To achieve this, a number of plugins are available which uses different approach to manage translations.

This talk reviews one of these plugins, Polylang, which has gained a lot of adepts for its ability to manage translations following the WordPress core approach to content management.

The session will give a brief introduction on a what is a multi-lingual website, and then walk though the various steps required to create a multi-lingual content site using the Polylang plugin.

About Aurovrata Venet

Aurovrata is highly motivated by problem solving task involving new concept and methods. Very good with numbers and making sense of interconnected data. A research background in Astrophysics has given him problem solving tools as well as rationalisation methods that have been highly successful at solving problems may it be in the Financial banking world or the European Space Agency.

He quit his corporate job 5 years ago to start a small consultancy company that concentrates on Small & Medium Enterprises, helping his clients achieve excellence in business strategy and deployment of IT in the business. He uses WordPress in many of his projects to leverage its CMS functionality.

He aspires to serve a resurgent India in the belief that she alone has the depth of awareness to lead humanity towards a new consciousness, united in all its diversity.

You can tweet him @aurovrata

Introducing our next speaker for WordCamp Mumbai 2017 – Anand Thakkar.

Time is money and Unfortunately we have only 24 hrs/day, out of which everyone have some ‘x’ no of Working hours. Being a WordPress Developer/System Admin you need to manage time for Development, Deployment & Management of your WP sites. So, there is a scope of optimizing your time which can save a small bits of your time from repeatable task.

With us, Anand will talk about one such tool, WP-CLI – a command line interface for WordPress. It will help us achieve our goal for time optimization. Sole motto of this tool is to create a way by which anything that is possible via wp-admin should be possible via CLI (Command Line) but through lesser clicks. Moreover, he will also talk about recent inclusion of the tool as the official command line tool for WordPress and further growth of tool & community together.

His talks’ basic out-line will be as follows :

• Introduction
• What is CLI & WP-CLI ?
• Basic Syntax Overview
• General Use full Commands
• Practical Use cases for Different Roles

About Anand Thakkar

Anand Thakkar is a Team Leader working with Hidden Brains Infotech Pvt. Ltd. An Ahmedabad based Web & Mobile Apps Development Company.

He is associated with WordPress development from last 6 years. He even started his career as a WordPress Developer and now works on multiple Web & Mobile technologies. Apart from WordPress Development, he holds great command over Core php, Codeignator, CakePHP, Angular JS too.

Anand also holds a Zend Certification for php 5.3.

Anand is a traveler. He travels to different destinations on the name conferences. 😉 He simply looks for a reason to get away and explore a new city. Apart from traveling, he likes to watch movies and is a big time foodie. It is quite possible that you may encounter him on a food stall next to WordCamp.

You can tweet him @anthakkar08

Introducing our next speaker for WordCamp Mumbai 2017 – Fairy Dharawat.

Communication is an important tool to get things done. Where I come from, there’s a saying – those who can speak, they can sell, thus they can survive. While this phrase is eons old, it’s relevant as ever not yet jaded. So when we come to business writing, why is it so important? Why do we need to hone our writing skill ? In an age of blowing our trumpet, thanks to social media, business writing spills over to your company’s Facebook pages and twitter accounts as well. So in the age of digital revolution, it’s important to know how to play with style and structure across different platforms to get desired results – engagement.

Why business writing is important?
1) It saves time and gets things done.
2) Email etiquettes. How to generate response?
a) By writing in a way the reader responds – Being polite and to the point – the writers I’ve written to have responded 🙂
b) It’s a mixture of persuasion, right words, sentence structure and of course grammar!
3) Using words which help to put across your point. Avoiding jargon. Sharing the list.
4) A blend of longer and shorter sentences. How to use them.
5) Clearly stating your intent as soon as possible.
6) Changing language style for email, and social media (engagement)

About Fairy Dharawat

Fairy Dharawat is a writer by profession who loves to discuss about the technicalities of stories and how to write them. She’s also a professional blogger who tells stories through workshops she conducts.

She currently likes a lot of people since many sweet souls have lent her books. And she has shared her treasured books as well. Her best is 24 books in a year, which she intends to break soon. Also, an unread book is a sad story, so read. If you want to know her list of best books or want to know how to write better, then come to the Mumbai WordCamp this year, and she will most probably tell you to read the books YOU like, and then she will talk some more. So come and say hi to her, she says hi back too 🙂

You can tweet her @verbaldetonator

Introducing our next speaker for WordCamp Mumbai 2017 – Rocío Valdivia.

Do you love WordPress?

Want to pitch in and help out?

Not sure how?

It doesn’t matter if you’re a designer, a developer, a translator, or just someone that uses WordPress on your own, everybody is welcome to contribute to WordPress. 🙂

About Rocío Valdivia

Rocío Valdivia is Community Wrangler at Automattic for WordCamp Central. Spanish web developer that loves WordPress, Open Source, technology, travelling and personal challenges.

WordPress & BuddyPress specialist since 2009, validator of the Spanish translation team at GlotPress, co-organizer of three WordCamps Seville and WordCamp Europe 2015, 2016 and 2017.

Co-author of “WordPress para Dummies” published in November 2012 and the first Spanish speaker at WordCamp Europe 2013 and 2014.

You can tweet her @rociovaldi

Introducing our next speaker for WordCamp Mumbai 2017 – Nirav Mehta.

We all aspire for better life.

Some people want to start on their own – launch a plugin, theme or SaaS… Some want to build a consulting business around WordPress. Many want to be great developers. Most want to become great at whatever they’re doing.

But the path to greatness and fulfillment is full of challenges. So what could keep you going strong?

Sometimes you wonder, if there is a pot of gold at the end of your rainbow… Will you succeed? Is it all worth it?

Join Nirav in this quick retelling of some of his near-fatal adventures in entrepreneurship and technology. Listen to his journey of chasing aspirations and tough lessons.

Did he discover his pot of gold? Would he recommend you go down the path he took?

Find the answers. Do attend this one!

About Nirav Mehta

Nirav is called the entrepreneur geek. A geek turned entrepreneur who still loves writing code 😉

He’s a master storyteller – all his talks at earlier WordCamps were super-hits!

Nirav has built a rather eventful track record over the last 18 years. He launched India’s first electronic magazine, a thriving web agency that went down in 2009, made a heroic return and recovery, then a string of successful product businesses in parallel. He’s a published author of three books and speaks at various tech and business events.

But hey, numbers and all the claim-to-fame apart, what’s most important about him is that he is down to earth, has great knowledge and experience and loves to help. So if you have any questions about WordPress, WooCommerce; starting up, running or scaling a tech business, he’s your goto guy!

Start with following him on Twitter @niravmehta! You can learn more about his WordPress solutions at: http://www.storeapps.org and http://www.icegram.com

Introducing our Fourth Speaker for WordCamp Mumbai 2017 – Sudar Muthu.

In this talk, Sudar will talk about the various developer tools that he uses to increase his productivity as a WordPress developer. Sudar has been developing for WordPress for more than half a decade and over a period of time he has found various developer tools that helps him to increase his productivity.

This will be a talk more about his experience using these tools and detailing what worked and what didn’t work rather than just talking about these tools and giving an introduction.

Tools that he will be covering are the following:

• wp-cli – To efficiently interact with WordPress admin, even over SSH
• phpcs – To quickly catch any WordPress formatting or coding errors
• xDebug – To debug performance and other code issues
• vagrant – To setup proper local development setup
• phpUnit – To run Unit tests
• IDE – PhpStorm and Vim

About Sudar Muthu

Sudar Muthu works as a Senior Web Engineer with 10up, a WordPress based web agency and WordPress VIP partner.

Sudar is involved in WordPress plugin development for more than 8 years and has released about 2 dozen WordPress plugins. Details at https://profiles.wordpress.org/sudar/#content-plugins

Sudar has also contributed to all major WordPress releases starting from 4.3

He blogs about WordPress at http://sudarmuthu.com/blog/ and is available in Twitter as @sudarmuthu

Introducing our Third Speaker for WordCamp Mumbai 2017 – Bhushan Jawle.

One of the greatest strengths of WordPress is its simplicity. It is easy to install, start & keep publishing new content. No wonder it commands almost 27.5% of the web! However that is where most of the site owners stop thinking about WordPress.

And then, one day, you open browser, enter your URL and there is “Internal Server Error”! (HTTP 500).

Do you know someone in this situation? OR perhaps encountered it yourself?

Most of the times, security doesn’t figure out in discussion before, because site owner, just getting started with building an audience, thinks, “He/she is not important enough” to hack.

OR maybe they followed hardening instructions word-by-word and were still hacked!

(Trust me he did that, and was still hacked)

In this talk, Bhushan will share some of his learning in this area. He will cover some such common myths around security. He will also briefly cover 3 common types of hacks/injections along with some free/open source tools you can use to identify, rectify and stay safe.

In summary, Bhushan will walk you through some learning and do’s and don’ts in keeping site secure.

About Bhushan Jawle

Bhushan is a Computer Engineer by education, with over 21 years of professional experience.

He started programming when DOS was the only operating systems on personal computers.

Starting with C, and has worked on various languages including (assembly) C++, VC++, Java, Javascript and PHP and has been working on web development since early 2001 (Sun Certified Java Developer and Sun Certified Web Component Developer).

He has worked on various time critical systems in investment banking domain including algorithmic trading and led a team which was amongst the first to send algorithmic orders in India on NSE & BSE.

Out of his 15 years of experience in investment banking technologies, he has spent almost a decade in Tokyo(Japan), leading to almost compulsive focus on Kaizen (continuous improvement) and speaks conversational Japanese.

Bhushan believes in philosophy of Open Source (“Free as in speech”), and runs a web & mobile development firm Sanganak Technologies LLP, which specializes in WordPress, Yii and React Native.

Apart from technology, he is a father, husband, singer (Kishore Kumar & RD Burman fan), mimicry artist, a Toastmaster, a voracious reader and plans to read 50 new books in 2017.

You can tweet him @bhushanjawle

Introducing our Second Speaker for WordCamp Mumbai 2017 – Mridula Harshvardhan.

Being productive is a choice, but most of us see it as a have to, if we aren’t productive company will throw us out. Or as a should, if we are not productive, we will not grow. All is true, but the moment have to and should come, the choice is gone for a toss, and we are in a driven state of mind. And if anything goes wrong, we are ready with our fingers to point at somebody else.

Basically choice comes from responsibility, but most of us hear Blame in background when the word responsibility fall on our ear. Either we are avoiding blame or taking blame. Zero responsibility, hence zero choice, henceforth all the have to’s and should.

Leaving productivity to chance not choice.

What would happen if you don’t ‘have to’ be productive; instead you could choose your productivity? Would you choose low productivity or high productivity? Most of us want to increase our productivity, we know what stops us, we know how to improve, but we still do not know why we are still under productive. Do you want to know what stops you from being 100% productive in work and life?

I will discuss this and many more dimensions of how Chance makes us powerless and Choice can Empower us, in the session.

About Mridula Harshvardhan

Mridula is Axelerant’s Life Coach. She has 17 years of experience in domains of upskilling, business development, talent transformation, training, and team development. She works with healthy people who want to improve their lives. She helps people get from where they are; to where they want to be.

One of many interesting works she do is to enable people to reach and change the underlying thoughts and emotions that drive habits, routines and actions. She is interested in empowering people to identify and use their own character strengths, wisdom, courage and knowledge to identify and transform things they can; and re-frame what they can’t.

Mridula has travelled extensively and currently resides in New Delhi. She’s been known to escape from work by swimming, singing, writing, reading, and occasionally playing guitar. Later in life, her desire is to work with children and those in need.  Being a life coach for her is t to foster happiness possible for Axelerant team while pursuing personal excellence and milestones.

With 440 volts of continuous learning mode, 880 volts of humility, 1760 of fun, 3520 volts of passion and 7040 volts of life detected in her, it’s her willingness to evolve which keeps her going!

You can tweet her @LifeCoach_Mridu

Introducing our First Speaker for WordCamp Mumbai 2017 – Nagesh Pai.

Nagesh traces his journey in Digital Media and WordPress which began with his community “Radio” website back in 2007. This multimedia site carried audio and video content related to the culture and works of Gaud Saraswats (GSBs) community to which he belongs.

The project began with zero investment and gave all the lessons in blogging, site analytics, remote team and content management and social media marketing. The success of the website as a community medium was widely covered by mainstream media including DNA, New Indian Express and CNN IBN prime time among the national media, and many more local publications too in about a year of it going live.

The overall experience added weight to Nagesh’s resume and gave good career breaks in digital media. Eventually, WordPress and all the knowledge gained became the basis of his freelance venture after a successful spell of corporate jobs.

By using WordPress.com and WordPress.org , Nagesh believes there are remarkable possibilities for anyone to build his or her own medium, and his career too! All this considering the following facts:

1. The community radio site began with Zero investment and then grew gradually to a better platform seamlessly when we had a bit of money
2. The site began with zero knowledge of programming.
3. The site grew along with the user’s gradual growth in awareness and knowledge of WordPress.org.

Nagesh hopes his story will help users create their own site beginning with the free WordPress.com platform if necessary, and then grow towards a self-hosted WordPress website when they gain enough experience running the site.

Apart from the joy of building their own site, this exercise can help build a self-employed career or a dream job where today digital media skills are in much demand.

About Nagesh Pai

Nagesh Pai currently works as a Happiness Engineer for WordPress.com with Automattic Inc. He joined the company in January 2017.

Prior to that he had his own freelance venture – CoreGray through which he made WordPress based websites for small and non-profits business. Before CoreGray, Nagesh worked with reputed corporates in the area of Digital Media and Marketing with employers including HDFC Bank, SBI Mutual Fund, Mindshare Fulcrum, IDG Media. After a successful 4 year of freelancing, Nagesh decided to go back to the roots by joining Automattic.

You can tweet him @nagpai