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