WordCamp Sofia 2017

Presenting you Ivana – a digital marketing consultant with over 10 years of experience. She is working with clients on managing their internet and social media presence and providing services for creating and implementing digital marketing strategy. Ivana is an active member of the WordPress community and part of the organizing team of WordCamp Europe 2018. In her talk, Ivana will share her tips and examples on how to write good, well-targeted blog posts that provide value and help both your clients and yourself in getting exposure and success you strive for. But first check this interview to understand when was her first encounter with WordPress.

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Hey Ivana, please introduce yourself. 
Hi, my name is Ivana and I’m coming from Belgrade, Serbia.

What’s your specialty? 
My specialty, among other things, is digital marketing, meaning everything that’s involved around it. From strategy, editorial and content plan and creation, copywriting, SEO, Social Media management and some 🙂

How many languages do you speak? 
Other than internet language, you mean? 😉 Native in Serbian, fluent in English and ex-Yu languages.

What was your first encounter with WordPress? 
My very first encounter with WordPress was in 2007-2008 and it didn’t go quite well. Back then, WordPress (for me) didn’t have the stuff and features I needed when starting working on my first website, so I made poor choice to go with Yoomla. Few years later, WordPress made bold move to represent itself to me again, this time in 2013, and that’s when all magic happened and we began our solid friendship till this day.

What is the best WordPress advice you have ever received? 
Give it a try, you’ll love it. And they were right. It’s been an adventurous ride ever since.

What is your motivation to speak at WordCamp Sofia 2017? 
Like in any other WordCamps in general, I like to meet new people, pick up new things, share the knowledge and to trully give back to the community. I was introduced to the local WordPress community two years ago and, ever since, loved every moment of it so being a part of new WordCamps is something I find to be very valuable and useful, both to me and the overall community.

How did you you choose the topic of your talk? 
Well, it is a part of my training program, where I teach people how to properly use blog as valuable content marketing tool and it is something that is still being neglected, especially in the IT industry. That’s why I wanted to share specific tips and tricks as well as the reasons why I think it’s important to include blogging in the overall business strategy. No matter if you’re a freelancer or a company, everyone needs a blog.

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Want to make sure you don’t miss all these insights? Get your ticket for WordCamp Sofia 2017 today!

Say hi to Mirela – a web developer starting a new life in Bulgaria. She will share with us the unexpected advantages of being a WordPress developer when trying to have a better life in an unknown country and how knowing WordPress helped her to find support, new friends and a wonderful community in rural Bulgaria. Read this interview to find out how did Mirela choose the topic of her talk, what is her speciality and favorite activity:

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Hey Mirela, please introduce yourself.
My name is Mirela, a very musical name in my native language (Mi-Re-La ). But my new Bulgarian and English friends call me Ela, as it’s easier to pronounce it correctly. I was born and raised in Bucharest, the capital city of Romania, and I lived there until this spring, when Imoved to Bulgaria, in the lovely Palamartsa village.

What’s your specialty?
Javascript, PHP, Liquid, HTML and CSS help me make Bootstrap, Shopify and WordPress projects a success. I also have a long-standing love affair with Python, as it was the programming language that converted me into becoming a full time developer for good, and the one I usually develop my hobby projects in.

How many languages do you speak?
Romanian is my mother tongue. One of the least known things about me is that I am an English and French to Romanian certified legal translator and that I followed a two-year Translation Studies programme for English, German, Spanish and Catalan. Unfortunately, this doesn’t make me a competent speaker, though; depending on some circumstances, I could be a capable speaker or a very lousy one. Fortunately, I’m almost always a brilliant reader and more than often a decent writer in these languages.
As for my Bulgarian, for the moment I’m quite happy that I know my Cyrillic letters and I partially understand what my Bulgarian neighbours and friends tried to tell me after I come back home and keep repeating their words in my head for some time.

What was your first encounter with WordPress?
By the end of 2006, I was working on a translation project for a French accounting firm, and I was looking for an easier way to make my work diary read and commented by the other members of the team and the project manager at the firm. I don’t remember very clearly how I came to choose a blogging platform solution and WordPress in particular. I do remember that I began playing with PHP and not liking it very much. But in February 2007 my work diary blog was up and running and turned the translation project into a fruitful programming one. One of the most rewarding parts though, were the water cooler gossip and jokes about the new blog posts and the identity of some of the commenters – we had lots of fun with these. Nice happy times…

What is the best WordPress advice you have ever received?
I am not sure if it is the best, but it was definitely the most useful until now. Always keep the presentation and the functionality separate, „don’t lock your clients into your themes, lock them into your skills and services“. I received it from a PHP developer I used to chat and passionately argue with on a mIRC developers channel some years ago. I still wonder what made me took his advice in the first place and apply it; usually I was remembering only the fights we had had. Nevertheless, it saved my clients’ happiness and my business many times since then.

What is your motivation to speak at WordCamp Sofia 2017?
To share, to pay it forward and to express my gratitude.
*To share my experience of moving to a new country in unusual circumstances and the way a particular skill set you thought would be less valuable there could change your life in a surprising way.
*If only one person in the audience will become more courageous and inspired to use their WordPress knowledge with more confidence and creativity and this will help them to improve their life, then I will be paying forward a part of the support I received from the wonderful Bulgarian and English people I met here.
*I have never contributed to an open-source project, but I benefited every day from the talent, work and time others dedicated to these projects and I found myself feeling tremendously grateful for that. Next year, my talk proposal should be about how I contributed with my share of time and work to the WordPress community.

How did you you choose the topic of your talk?
A friend in my home country asked me what made me keep my inner peace and manage to navigate the bumpy road that brought me here without shattering myself into pieces. After I explained in a lenghty talk what I thought were the answers, another question came back: „Yes, but what actually made the difference?“. Several days after that conversation a new friend from the village asked me the same question and after I answered, he concluded: „But something made the difference“. I thought for quite a while to their remarks and asked myself what really made the difference and one day I heard myself saying „Lucky me,I know WordPress“ and I began to laugh because I realised that this is what simply made the main difference: friendly people, knowledge, and my WordPress skills.

What is your favourite activity?
Listening to, reading, writing, coding and living as many different stories as I’m able to. I don’t want to repeat myself again and again in my very old age, when the time to only tell them will come.

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Want to make sure you don’t miss all these insights? Get your ticket for WordCamp Sofia 2017 today!

Meet Nikola – lead developer and owner of Paiyak Development. He has been working with WordPress for 7 years and is passionate about the WordPress community and developing in general. Mentoring — informally in the office and formally with clients — has been a big part of developing his own skills and knowledge base. What’s the best advice he ever got and how he chose the topic of his talk, find out in this short interview!

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Hey Nikola, please introduce yourself.
My name is Nikola and I was born in Varna, Bulgaria but currently live in the small city of Gabrovo.
What’s your specialty?
Goofing. 🙂 On the professional side of things though, I focus on building out custom WordPress solutions and mentoring people to help them get to the next level in their journey.
How many languages do you speak?
Bulgarian and English are the languages that I use most often. However I have a very, very rusty Russian, and know just enough Turkish words to be able to order at a restaurant.
What was your first encounter with WordPress?
I think it was in 2010, when I was helping out a friend with his website (at that point I had no idea what I was doing).
What is the best WordPress advice you have ever received?
If you’re not sure how something works, look at the source code. Being able to quickly trace and read through a piece of code (whether it’s WordPress, a plugin or a theme) in order to understand how it functions has been an invaluable tool under my belt. Sometimes going that route is faster than looking up a solution online (and you get to learn some code internals)!
What is your motivation to speak at WordCamp Sofia 2017?
I would like to introduce more people to mentoring, what it is, how it can benefit them and how it can benefit the community. I hope to inspire people to give mentoring a try.
How did you you choose the topic of your talk?
Mentoring is something that I’ve enjoyed doing for a very long time and, so it seemed like a natural choice for my first ever public talk.
When was the last time you pulled an all-nighter?
Ha-ha-ha… Well as of the time of writing this, it was 2 or 3 days ago. If I were to look into the future, at the time of WordCamp Sofia, I’m pretty sure it’s going to be during one of the days leading up to the WordCamp 🙂

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Informal education such as mentoring is an important aspect of web development culture — for both the mentor and mentee. Unfortunately, in Bulgaria, the topic of mentoring is not often explored. In his talk How Being a Mentor Turns You Into a Better Developer Nikola will address the ways mentoring benefits the mentor and common pitfalls they may encounter. Want to make sure you don’t miss all these insights? Get your ticket for WordCamp Sofia 2017 today!

Today we’re introducing Milen Petrinski, whom you may know as Gonzo – a front-end guy who’s swimming in familiar waters when it comes to WordPress. He is one of the Bulgarian WordPress enthusiasts that have attended every WordCamp Sofia event!

Read this short interview to find out how did he first encounter WordPress and how would he react in a stressful situation!

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Hi Gonzo, please introduce yourself!
My name is Milen Petrinski, also known as Gonzo – a nickname that stuck on me in high school and that has nothing to do with football. I’m from Sofia, Bulgaria.

What’s your specialty?
My strongest fields of expertise are HTML and CSS. I consider myself more of a front-end guy, although I feel pretty comfortable fiddling with PHP and WordPress. Most of my current projects involve creating custom WordPress themes and plugins or front-end work as part of a bigger teams.

How many languages do you speak?
My mother’s tongue is Bulgarian and I’m also fluent in English. I studied Russian in school, but even though I can still recite Pushkin or Lermontov, don’t expect me to communicate in Russian.

What was your first encounter with WordPress?
It was 2007 as far as I remember, blogging was the thing, and the agency I was working at had the task to build a blogging platform for the journalists of a major newspaper at the time. Since I was following a lot of blogs that used WordPress or were hosted on wordpress.com, I decided that we should try WordPressμ – this was long before Multisite became part of the core. Then I started blogging and playing with WordPress more, and when I quit my daily job to become a freelancer, WordPress became the hammer to hit all nails.

What is the best WordPress advice you have ever received?
I don’t know, over the years I have read so many extraordinary articles and listened to so many excellent talks, that I’m not sure there is one single advice that stands out for me. Maybe the idea of site-specific functionality plugins is something that changed the way I do projects with WordPress.

What is your motivation to speak at WordCamp Sofia 2017?
Almost everything I know about web development and WordPress I have learned from other people sharing their knowledge in articles and talks. So I feel it’s time for me to give back.

How did you you choose the topic of your talk?
At the beginning of the year, I was part of a team of volunteers building a non-profit website, and while looking for a theme to base our work on, I discovered that a lot of theme authors don’t bother with providing the necessary bits to utilize the power of responsive images. And since I believe responsive images are the single most effective tool to make websites load faster on mobile devices while still looking great on big screens, I thought why not share what I already know, and learn some more in the process?

What would you do you if you hail a taxi and in the middle of the trip you realize that you’ve forgotten you money, documents and phone at home?
Well, this has actually happened to me 🙂 I would ask the driver to turn back, and go home to get mu stuff while the taxi waits for me. Or, if I’m going to meet friends, borrow some money from them.

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Hear Gonzo speak about Responsive Images and WordPress – get your ticket for WordCamp Sofia 2017 now!