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