Category: Speakers

Find out How WordPress can Change Education with Mahangu Weerasinghe of Automattic

If you were at WordCamp Mumbai, there’s no chance that you escaped being mesmerised by Mahangu’s presentation skills. He’s coming to Pune to discuss Beyond the Blackboard: Building Education Products for South Asia. Whether you are an educator, learner, interested in the social and economic impact of education or education is just your business, he’ll help you see WordPress in a new light, as a simple but powerful educational tool!

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 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 24% of the web!

Customise your WordPress Website with Puneet Sahalot

Puneet is a WordCamp veteran, having participated and spoken at almost every WordCamp held till date. Very enthusiastic about WordPress evangelism and spreading his knowledge, he frequently conducts training sessions and Workshops for beginners. At WordCamp Pune, Puneet conducts a Workshop on Theme Customisation for developers (beginners) and non-developers (advanced users). You’d learn how to change the look and feel of a WordPres website without any specialised coding chops.

Puneet’s first encounter with WordPress was when he started blogging at a then popular social media blog.  Later he started with WordPress development, co-founded a city blog which received great response and became the most popular of all the local blogs.

After more than 5 years of freelancing, he now runs a web design and development agency where all their web projects are proudly powered by WordPress. In between, he tried hands at building and selling WordPress themes and WP maintenance services. These were fairly successful however their main success was in helping him lay a strong foundation for his agency.

WordCamp Pune has little siblings

While we get closer to WordCamp Pune 2015, we’re going through the speaker applications. A lot of times we need to experience a demonstration before selecting someone capable of doing justice to your time. Why do it in private, we thought, if the demo itself can be a session?

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So, we’ve organised something named a Wordex Conference consisting of demos by applicants and rehearsals by selected speakers. Consider it a miniscule WordCamp like arrangement (If WordCamp is a ship, this one is a boat!). Curated over two weekends, this is a great chance to listen to some great speakers and imbibe a lot of knowledge. This Saturday, the 18th of July, we host the first part with the following sessions:

How to create a helpful business website Jitesh Patil
Importing content from other systems into WordPress and WooCommerce Akshay Raje
FOSS (Free and Open Source Software) Licences Shirish Agarwal
Setting up a blog using WordPress with focus on relevant Keywords and A/B testing for beginners Omprakash Gupta
WordPress JSON API Priyanka Goyal
Will add some more here once confirmed.

More details here: http://www.meetup.com/Pune-WordPress-Knowledge-Exchange/events/223895873/

Photo BIG BOAT, small boat by Kevin Dinkel licensed under CC BY SA 2.0.

Shanta Nathwani’s roots are here and so is WordCamp Pune

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Shanta R. Nathwani is a Web Design and Information Architecture Consultant as well as an Instructor in Web Design and CCIT Capstone at Sheridan College, located in Oakville, Ontario, Canada which includes teaching WordPress. The ICCIT program is a joint program with the University of Toronto at Mississauga.

She teaches students and small businesses how to use their websites and social media to increase their online presence leading to increased revenues and improved customer service. She has assisted companies to incorporate social media in the real estate, financial, non-profit, education and technical fields to name a few. She is from Toronto, Ontario, but now lives in Hamilton, Ontario.

Shanta is raising funds for an international WordCamp tour and Pune is one of the planned pit-stops. We had a quick chat with this prolific WordCamp speaker to get more details of her WordCamp Pune 2015 plans.

Why WordCamp Pune?

I did 7 WordCamps last year and my goal this year was to do 10, one of which had to be out of North America. I missed Mumbai, but it’s close enough that I can still see relatives.

Shanta in IndiaWhat do you plan to do at WordCamp Pune once you get there?

I’ve never actually been to Pune, so I want to see the city! My parents have been, but I haven’t. I want to see the memorial to Mahatma Gandhi at the Aga Khan Palace.

(Left: Shanta in India for the first time!)

Anything about India that excites you?

It ALWAYS excites me! I’ve been to India a number of times, but mostly to Mumbai. I’ve seen the Taj Mahal and much more when I was a child. I spent 2 months there while studying for my Microsoft certification. I’ve always wanted to return.

Do you have a message for our community?

I believe in giving back to the community, regardless of the size. We are fortunate enough that the WordPress community is worldwide. I have given back to my hometowns, to the larger WordPress community in my backyard (being the United States), now I want to give back to the world. My father grew up in India, so this is my way of honouring where I came from in some small way.

We’d love to have Shanta at WordCamp Pune and hope that more people, including you, contribute to her campaign on Tilt.com. The best of luck from all of us here in Pune Shanta; for this and the other WordCamps that you plan to attend.

Help Shanta come to WordCamp Pune

Topher येतोय पुण्याला

Translated from Marathi: Topher is coming to Pune

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His full name is Christopher DeRosia; Topher comes from the second half of Christopher. Topher started building web sites with plain html on a VAX VMS system in 1994, and then when PHP/FI came out he started working with that. He built web sites using plain PHP/MySQL until 2010 when WordPress 3.0 came out with Custom Post Types. That changed everything and he hasn’t really built with anything since.He’s been a freelancer, the CTO of a Startup, a super hero with X-Team, and now works documenting Easy Digital Downloads.

He’s married, has 2 teen daughters and two cute little dogs. He lives in the small city of Grand Rapids MI, where it rarely gets above 30C, but occasionally gets below -30C. It’s a very snowy world in the winter.

Here’s an old but interesting list of 25 random things about him.

The Indian WordPress community has had a long relationship with Topher via the HeroPress project with a couple of members like Ramya Pandyan, Aditya Kane having contributed to it. We spoke with Topher to find out more about his WordCamp Pune 2015 plans and this is what he had to say.

Why WordCamp Pune?

I’ve always wanted to visit India. In my youth my imagination was captured by books, and as I grew older and met people FROM India my interest only grew. When HeroPress started I wanted VERY much to go to WordCamp Mumbai, but it didn’t work out. Now having WordCamp Pune so soon after seems like a gift.

What do you plan to do at WordCamp Pune once you get there?

Shake hands with every single person I can. I want to talk to everyone, do everything, and take part in everything.

Anything about India that excites you?

Being in a really different culture. Aside from Canada (which doesn’t really count as different from America) I haven’t traveled internationally before. So it’s all exciting.

We know you’re raising funds to come down to Pune. Anything you’d like to say to potential sponsors?

I couldn’t do this without you. Again, the opportunity to be able to travel to visit people I’ve worked with seems like a gift. I never imagined I could do this.

How optimistic are you? And why?

Quite actually. Since starting HeroPress I haven’t gotten a single bit of negative pushback, and LOTS of positive reinforcement. Many many people have privately said to me “I love what you’re doing, you need to keep it going”.

Also, before I started fund raising I asked around in some Slack chat rooms if people thought it was a good idea, and got an overwhelming YES.

Do you have a message for our community?

You are special and unique, and have an enormous amount of experience and wisdom to teach the rest of the world. Please communicate with us as much as you can, via blog posts, visiting and speaking at WordCamps, podcasts, etc. “The periphery” of the WordPress community is a social construct, one that can be changed by anyone who wishes to change it.

Topher’s funding campaign on GoFundMe.com has been a great success. and is very close to becoming successful. Chances is it’d have succeeded by the time you read this. He’s received the backing of some prominent personalities from the ecosystem including our own Umesh Singla, Alexander Gounder, Harshad Mane, rtCamp and even the Matt Mullenweg, himself!
You can still donate to Topher so he can pass it on to another deserving WordCamp, or you could help another guest of ours who needs your support to come all the way from Canada.

Support Topher’s trip to WordCamp Pune

Call for Speakers Extended till the 19th of July

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We’ve had a tremendous response to the call for speakers. However, we still have sessions left and we’re looking for certain kinds of speakers and specific types of sessions. We’ve also been requested by potential speakers to extend the deadline so they can prepare better proposals.

So, instead of a day or two (as we were requested to), we are extending the deadline by 10 days. The last date is now July 19. So, go ahead and apply, fast!

And no, under no circumstance will we extend it beyond that!

Meet Sagar Jadhav, core Contributor, Photoshop guy and our next Speaker

Sagar Jadhav from Pune is a Product Head with rtCamp. He’s going to speak about Automated Theme Development with Grunt. He’d be speaking primarily in Marathi with a sprinkling of Hindi and English, if needed.

He’s been building, websites, themes and theme-frameworks for six years now and is one of the best front-end developers around.

Looking at his body of work, it’d be hard to believe that Sagar started off as a Photoshop expert and today is a proud core contributor to WordPress 4.2. All because WordPress charmed him and he fell for it!

He loves building modern, user friendly web sites and applications is and hence actively seeks out new technologies that help him stay up to date.

Arun Prabhudesai is who you want to be!

Arun is perhaps the only speaker who was here at the last edition of WordCamp Pune, as well. And boy, was he a powerhouse! At this edition, he’s going to help bloggers achieve what a lot of them dream of – Growing a Blog from a Single Author to a Multi-author Community!

An entrepreneur, blogger and internet addict, after a 12 year stint in the IT Industry across three continents, Arun came back to India to start on his own. His two startups have had mixed success.

He is the founder of Armoks Interactive Labs and the founder-editor at Trak.in. Trak.in is one of the most popular virtual destination for Indian technology news and views. He and a team of passionate writers present insightful and analytical stories on technology, telecom and the startup world.

Find out why WordCamp Pune wants you for Sessions

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We have received great response to our call for speakers. However, there are some topics/ domains for which we’re specifically looking for experts. So, if you haven’t applied because you weren’t sure what you’d do, we’ve made it easy for you. Read on and see if you fit the bill. If you do, do hurry up. There are just six days left for closing applications.

Designers

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We’d love to have you enlighten us about the basic principles of design. So that we may discern good design from bad and never make ghastly websites like the one above. (Ling’s Cars, in case you were wondering!)

There are so many themes and so many designs floating around. There is ample scope of making a mistake and choosing an inappropriate theme. You know how expensive that mistake could turn out to be. We probably don’t. Just head to the application form to evolve our design sensibilities.

Expert Reviewers/ Critics

There’s one thing about WordPress (and with the open source world) that some people love while others hate. There are too many options in the WordPress ecosystem. For every feature, there are at least 2-3 plugins if you’re lucky or dozens if you’re not. For every business there are hundreds of potential themes. And there are a lot of hosting options, OSes, server software, domain name providers and so on.

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You’d be the person who can tell us what’s good and what’s not and why. Maybe you’d tackle the essential and/ or common features or maybe you’d like to take up anything that your audience throws at you. Maybe you just want to select one important and popular product and evaluate it for us. We leave that up to you and we really want you to apply to speak.

Comperes/ Hosts/ Emcees/ Moderators

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You love the stage, you enthrall the crowd and you have the knowledge as well as the tact for moderating discussions and conversations. They can get confusing and haywire faster than you’d spell haywire. Open source is chaotic and we need co-ordinators to bring in some order.

You are either a great blogger or and expert developer. You probably aren’t much interested in the amount of good vibes, karma and connections that come with this role. Quickly fill up our orderly form.

Debate Enthusiasts

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If you love talking about controversial or ambivalent issues and don’t mind debating someone with opposite views, you’d be at home in WordCamp Pune. For a democratic software, difference of opinion is important. Contact us to help the democracy.

Helpful People

In spite of the best efforts of the community, some things are still difficult/ obscure/ slightly complex/ exasperating. At least once in your relationship with WordPress, you’ve needed help and you’ve received help!

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As someone with some experience and knowledge about WordPress, it would be great if you could give back to the community by helping your fellow WordPress lovers. The happier people are with WordPress, the more they’d use it. The more people use WordPress, the better it is for business! How about getting in touch to engineer some happiness?

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Did we tell you that there are just six days left to apply?

Photo credits:

Joe Guilmette is vagabonding to Pune

Joe Guilmette cannot be described in a single sentence. At WordCamp Pune, he will introduce developers to a great deployment process in a session titled, Local, Staging and Production Made Easy.

Originally from San Francisco, Joe is a Bangkok based WordPress developer. He spends about half the year on the road, often working with limited internet connectivity and a distributed team. Coding from airplanes, buses, boats, and cafes around the world, he quickly felt the need for a robust local/remote workflow.

Joe wears many hats, including project management, development, and lead customer support roles for Soflyy, running a small WordPress studio, and co-organising the WordPress Bangkok Meetup group. In his free time he enjoys SCUBA diving, travelling, long walks on the beach, and harassing his roommate’s cat.

WordCamp Pune 2015 is over. Check out the next edition!