Speakers

Bigul Malayi

Bigul hails from Kerala and started his web development journey as a PHP developer in 2005. He has been working with WordPress since 2008.

From 2012 January onwards he started to work in OnTheGo Systems (the makers of WPML & Toolset) as QA & Support Analyst.

Bigul credits WordPress as his bread and butter. To return the favour, he frequently educates users about WordPress. He is also the lead organizer of WP Kochi community.

Saravanan Sivaraman

Saravanan is a Happiness Engineer at Automattic, the company behind WordPress.com. He has been associated with WordPress ever since he started a blog in 2008. He first began blogging to post job adverts for his work as a technical recruiter. The blog didn’t go far, but his interest and passion for WordPress grew steadily, and this eventually made him switch from recruiting, to engineering happiness. As a native Tamil speaker, he also contributes to translating WordPress to tamil.

Ankit K Gupta

Ankit K Gupta is a Lead Quality Test Engineer with BuddyBoss.

Ankit loves interacting with beginners and help people by exchanging knowledge. He started his career as a Software Quality Tester in 2013 with rtCamp that worked on WordPress.

His mission is to make sure the WordPress experience for everyone is bug-free and good. This has got him consecutively contributing to the WordPress as a core contributor for every version from 4.0 to the latest 4.7.

Not satisfied with just core contributions, he also contributed to many releases of BuddyPress, bbPress plugins, translation contributor, editor on the Hindi Polyglot team for WordPress, and meta contributor of WordPress as well.

He also has recently started contributing to the WordPress Docs team.

When not working, Ankit spends time in photography, traveling, exploring new places and making new friends.

You can get to know Ankit’s views on ”Manual Vs. Automated Testing” Panel discussion!

Khyati Gala

Khyati is a plugin tester in Tyche Softwares since 2013. She is very keen on finding bugs in the plugins that she tests. A very hard working person.

Apart from her day job, she is a volunteer in WordCamp Mumbai since 2016. She has also moderated a panel in WordCamp Udaipur about Women in WordPress.

She has also contributed to the community by translating WordPress in Gujarati language.

Vibha Tiwari

Vibha Tiwari works as a QA Team Leader with Multidots Solutions Pvt Ltd. She joined the company in December 2016.

She has 6 years of experience in QA & Testing and worked in the various domain with different technologies.

She is a QA because she loves to find issues 😉 As we know To tell somebody that he is wrong is called criticism. To do so officially is called testing.

Apart from work, she is a wife, cartoon lover, reader, listener and plans to learn swimming in 2017.

She travels to different destinations and explores new places, reading books, crazy cricket fan, later in life she has the desire to work with NGO to help people and stray dogs.

Sandeep Raman

Sandeep is the Co-Founder of Hummingbird Web Solutions. He runs the  WPEka Blog and Products which builds and supports WordPress Products for Web developers and Web Designers. He is also a WordPress Core Contributor and Plugin Developer.

He an avid reader, working on converting his theoretical knowledge of Yoga into practice and loves Open Source.

Shailee Sheth

Shailee is a Serial Entrepreneur and a Marketer who has a flair for Technology and Innovation. As an Entrepreneur Shailee’s Top Priorities are Customer Satisfaction and Business Impact. Shailee is one of the few Technologists who puts the Customer ahead of her own Brand, NewVariable.

Born in a Business Family, Shailee realized very soon that if you could help your Customers achieve their Business Impact and Goals, then you have a tactical advantage in the relationship. It’s equally important to not give up mid way in the journey because the real test of character lies in ensuring that you just don’t deliver happy Customers but the fact that you create these referenceable Customers who over a period of time become a “Community of Practice” or “Assets” that start running the front end of your Business.

Shailee is the Founder and CEO of NewVariable, a boutique Technology Consultancy Start-Up based in Pune that operates remotely and she also serves as a Consultant in Technology to several Start-Ups in Mumbai, London and New York. She holds a “Master of Science” Degree in IT from the prestigious DA–IICT, Gandhinagar.

Shailee has worked with MNC Businesses in the HCM Industry and has successfully built and delivered both a Platform and a Product at an Enterprise scale to Global 100 Customers. Shailee loves Traveling and Adventure Sports. Her Bucket list includes cliff jumping and opening her own Restaurant in the Alps serving People’s palate and more.

Makarand Mane

Makarand is a full-time freelancer & WordPress enthusiast, earning his bread and butter using only WordPress from last 6 years. He serves his clients through his personal website makarandmane.com.

Makarand says he learnt PHP, MySQL, CSS and jQuery after he started working on WordPress.

After creating second project in WordPress, he fell in love with it in 2011 and since then he never touched Joomla again.

Makarand is General translation editor for Marathi language and active in the polyglot community.

He also conducts programming workshops in colleges on PHP and WordPress.

Outside of WordPress, he loves traveling visiting new places, trying new things and spiritual practice. He boosts his energy by doing yoga & meditation and helps others to do by teaching it.

Vishal Kothari

Vishal is the Founder & CEO of Tyche Softwares, a leading WooCommerce plugins provider that has carved a niche for itself in the WordPress plugins space. Vishal has been building web solutions since 2001. He has worked on a wide range of platforms like C++, Flash, Symbian & Linux with core expertise in PHP. He is the author of a dozen plugins for WordPress & WooCommerce.

Apart from steering his team through different situations, Vishal has a very sharp focus on Customer Service. He wants to ensure that every client has a delightful experience while interacting with his team.

Tyche’s Booking, Abandoned Cart & Order Delivery Date plugins for WooCommerce are leading solutions in their respective domains. Vishal & his team have their eyes set on these niche plugins. They firmly believe that Tyche Softwares is, and will be the market leader for these solutions.

Vishal has previously spoken at WordCamp Mumbai & been a part of panel discussions in WordCamps in Nashik & Udaipur.

Pratik Jagdishwala

Pratik is a Product Manager by profession and a Geek at heart. He has over 12 years of Hosting industry experience and has worked in Support, System Administrative, Managerial roles as well.

He is a natural problem solver and enjoys talking to people and helping them out with solutions to their problems. Let it be which product to use for their project or which is the cheapest way to achieve this setup. He has been guiding friends and clients and making sure they get the maximum bang for their buck.

Apart from work, he is an avid traveler and loves to learn and read about history of the places he visits. You can follow him on Twitter @pjagdishwala and reach out to him for any help you require with your project.

Tarun Parswani

Tarun is a senior developer with StoreApps, responsible for Smart Manager, Smart Reporter and other plugins. He is a data nerd and loves playing with SQL – and No-SQL!

He has solved some of the most challenging optimization problems for StoreApps customers. He surely has quite a few tricks building high performance WordPress plugins up his sleeve!

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.

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.

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.

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 🙂

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.

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

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/.

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.

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!

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.

WordCamp Mumbai 2017 is over. Check out the next edition!