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WordCamp Mumbai 2016 Day 2 Wrap

WordCamp Mumbai 2016 Day 1 Wrap

My favourite talks of day 2 at WordCamp Mumbai 2016, in chronological order:

  1. Naoko Takano (@naokomc) came all the way from Japan (and brought really cool WordPress tattoos for us – you saw a sample in yesterday’s post) to talk about how WordPress became successful in Japan, capturing 78% of the website share. A relevant talk for anyone interested in internationalization and localization.
  2. Michael Eisenwasser (fb/eisenwasser) is the co-founder of BuddyBoss, a company which build products for the BuddyPress ecosystem. Great talk to help us build user engagement using “social tools” on WordPress.
  3. Sakin Shrestha (@sakinshrestha) came all the way from Nepal, where he heads various companies and also manages to host WordCamp Nepal. He introduced the audience to different approaches to developing themes for WordPress, ranging from modifying an existing theme, to building one from scratch, including using frameworks and starter themes.
  4. Darshan Sawardekar (@_dsawardekar) is a Lead Web Engineer at 10up, and a vim enthusiast – to the extent that he is the author of a vim plugin called WordPress.vim. He explained why URLs are important, how pretty URLs/permalinks work in WordPress, what Rewrite rules are, and how we can leverage them to our advantage.
  5. Mahangu Weerasinghe (@MahanguW) is a Happiness Engineer at Automattic, and like Bryce & Sam, I had met him and heard him speak on stage for the first time at WordCamp Mumbai 2015. This time he shared how he, a non-programmer, taught himself to write code on WordPress that lets him do things one step at a time, using action & filter hooks. But beyond just the technique of it, his deeper message was that programming is not only for the math-minded toppers in school – essentially, programming (at least algorithms and high-level programming languages) is language, and similar to any language we speak in with each other – so any person who can communicate well can also code well.

Thus ended my fourth WordCamp and the volunteer stint with it. In the process I had the chance to discuss with great people, some of whom are employees at Automattic, others are business owners in India, some developers, and every one of them a WordPress enthusiast.

Photographs courtesy: Bigul Malayi (@mbigul)

Until the next WordCamp!