Speakers

List of speakers for WordCamp Mumbai 2016

Karthikraj Magapu

Karthikraj is Co-Founder and Chief Explorer of Hummingbird Web Solutions, which builds and supports products for Web developers and Web Designers. WordPress is a big part of what Hummingbird does – WPeka

He also teaches Yoga, enjoys solving variants of the Rubik’s Cube and loves Open Source.

Sakin Shrestha

Sakin Shrestha is a technology entrepreneur based in Nepal. He got into WordPress in 2007, and started creating and reviewing themes in 2012.

He is the founder of Catch Themes, Catch Internet and Theme Palace He also started Acclaim Technology (an umbrella organization of seven successful IT companies), and is co-owner and reviewer at ThemeReview.Co.

He is actively involved in the WordPress community, organizing WordCamp Nepal since 2012, and speaking at events in Nepal and abroad. He also contributes regularly to WordPress themes, plugins, accessibility, and the core.

Fairy Dharawat

Fairy Dharawat is a professional blogger who’s been a writer for more than 4 years. She chose humour as a chosen topic for WordCamp as in her personal experience, her humour posts have worked well in connecting with her readers.

She performs stories at Katha Kosa and poetries at open mics. Some of her stories and poems are published in online e-books.

You can connect with her on her twitter id @dharawatf.

Darshan Sawardekar

Darshan Sawardekar (@_dsawardekar) is a full stack software engineer with a keen interest in Test Driven Development. A relative newcomer to WordPress having only started out a few years ago with the 3.1 release he particularly enjoys working with the Plugin architecture of WordPress.

He is currently a Lead Web Engineer at 10up where he works on some amazing projects and helps scale very High Traffic WordPress installations.

Darshan is also an avid Vim user and plugin Developer. He built the WordPress.vim plugin which brings advanced IDE functionality like Auto-Completion, Syntax Highlighting, WP CLI integration to Vim.

Bryce Adams

Bryce Adams is a nomadic coder (currently based in Melbourne, Australia) working for Automattic on the biggest WooCommerce store in the world –WooThemes.com. He has spoken about WordPress at several events, including WordCamp Europe, WordCamp Kansai & WordCamp Mumbai 2015 and WordCamp Nepal. He loves open source software, building useful products and interacting with the community! In his spare time, he’s either traveling the world and attending WordPress events or building small products that try to push the boundaries of everyday development.

Sam Hotchkiss

Sam has been developing sites with WordPress for over 10 years.  He built and ran an enterprise-level agency, then built a plugin business around BruteProtect, a security plugin which was acquired by Automattic in August of 2014.  Sam now leads the Jetpack development team, working on the Jetpack plugin in use on millions of WordPress sites across the internet.

Shilpa Shah

Shilpa joined the WordPress party a little late but has been completely enamored by the WordPress community since then. Shilpa co-founded Hummingbird Web Solutions in 2011 which nurtures a number of popular WordPress products ( SlideDeck, CyberChimps , WPeka Club, WPAuctionSoftware and SurveyFunnel amongst others)
She was bitten by the travel bug pretty early on and was lucky enough to have a job (in her earlier corporate avatar) that took her to various countries , meeting some truly wonderful people everywhere !
Enjoys dancing in the rain, trekking , camping in the wild.
She has been ‘learning’ to play the guitar for 5 years now – hopes to play an entire song properly some day. Soon.
Connect with her on Twitter @IdleGazer

Kshitij Patil

Kshitij is a self made entrepreneur who started his journey by selling computer parts during the first year of his college for pocket money. From there he went on to form Zetabyte Solutions Pvt. Ltd., a Web Development Company along with his school mate. Here he sold websites to clients from all stratas of the Indian business from Shopkeepers to MNCs. He has recently diversified into starting a News Media website kshitijpatil.com to provide daily content from multiple verticals.

Twitter: @thekshitijpatil

Rahul Bansal

Rahul Bansal is the founder & CEO of rtCamp. He started using WordPress in 2007. He evolved into multiple roles with WordPress namely blogger, developer, designer, entrepreneur, translator and also as a WordCamp speaker & organiser.
In last 8 years, he has been part of many WordPress projects and his current favourite is EasyEngine which is making managing WordPress sites on Nginx Easy.

Twitter: @rahul286

Naoko Takano

Naoko Takano is a Globalizer at Automattic. She is a part of Team Global, which facilitates internationalization and localization of WordPress.com and other products.

She has been involved in the Japanese WordPress community since 2003, contributing in the areas of translation, documentation, community including meetup and WordCamp organiziation.

Blog: http://en.naoko.cc/
Twitter: naokomc

Ramya Pandyan

Ramya Pandya (aka Ideasmithy) as a content creator, sees her communities as the people who read and engage often with her content, some of them content creators themselves. Hear her talk about how these communities collaborate merging communities or even new communities being created at WordCamp Mumbai.

Ramya has been a long time blogger. 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.

Tweet-bomb her at @ideasmithy.

Michael Eisenwasser

Michael is a BuddyPress enthusiast, with experience designing and building themes and plugins.

He is co-founder of BuddyBoss, a company that helps entrepreneurs to create successful BuddyPress communities. He previously managed the development and growth of SongLyrics.com, one of the most highly-trafficked websites in the world with over 100 million annual visitors. He has spoken at WordCamp Pune, WordCamp Miami, BuddyCamp Brighton (UK) and several universities about BuddyPress and web design.

Mahangu Weerasinghe

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!

Saurabh Shukla

Saurabh writes code and other stuff (insert your preposition here) WordPress. He also likes to talk about it. A former teacher and developer, he’s recently shifted his focus to WordPress education and education with WordPress.

Raghavendra Peri

Raghavendra Satish Peri brings more than 5yrs of experience to the table in the niche area of Digital Accessibility; has worked with various clients ranging from Travel & Hospitality, ecommerce, Entertainment & Media, Banking & Finance etc. currently he works with Deque Software as Digital Accessibility Consultant, actively engaging with various clients in handling and tackling web accessibility & mobile accessibility challenges.

When he is not busy with his day job He spends his free time blogging, training for marathons, listening to audiobooks, traveling & attending conferences/local meet-ups. Currently he is focusing his energy on enabling the wider design & developer community in India to understand Digital Accessibility & why Digital Equality is important. You can read more about Raghava on his personal blog or understand more about accessibility at Digital A11Y Blog.

Nirav Mehta

Nirav is on an entrepreneurial journey for last 17 years – creating a series of successful (and impactful) businesses on the way. He started India’s first electronic magazine – while still in college, founded a top notch web services company, localized Linux and OpenOffice to Gujarati, authored two books, and took a business from 0 to six figures in two years. And then he ventured into WordPress.
Store Apps – his company – is one of the top WooCommerce extension developers. Icegram is their freemium WordPress plugin for visitor engagement, lead capture and call to actions. His team has developed 49 WordPress plugins, with 80000+ active installs and 5500+ paying customers.

Vijay Nallawala

Vijay Nallawala is a Digital Storyteller who helps people build their Personal Brands

Author of ‘A Bipolar’s Journey – From Torment to Fulfillment”, Speaker and a Mental Wellness Facilitator

He is a pioneer with leadership qualities in many ways…

The first to build an Online Community by a Bipolar afflicted for Bipolars in India, first Indian to document his journey in a Book and has now taken this initiative offline in the form of Peer Support Meets. Workshops are in the pipeline too.

A fortnight column dedicated to Mental Health Awareness on DNA Web Edition is his new outreach to his community spread across India and beyond.

An avid learner, writer, blogger, photographer, Vijay is a deeply spiritual person.

His tagline appropriately says,

“Let’s Walk Together”

WordCamp Mumbai 2016 is over. Check out the next edition!