Today was an eventful day. I mean, January 30 of 2018. I attended my first WordPress meetup ever at Mumbai. #WPMumbai was hosting a WooCommerce workshop for women, and was hosting a speech by Andrew Spittle of Automattic and Artur Piszek of Automattic, on the same day.

I attended the speech sessions and everything I learned over there was incredibly valuable. Andrew spoke on how the customer support team at Automattic works - the company the powers WordPress.com, Jetpack, Simplenote, Longreads, WooCommerce, Gravatar, VaultPress, Akismet and Polldaddy among the most popular names.

Artur Piszek spoke on Jetpack’s Simple Payments module, which allows anyone to get started with collecting online payments. Simple Payments enables anyone to become a seller online and works with PayPal to collect payments. It’s available for use for WordPress.com Premium plan users and above, or for self-hosted WordPress (WordPress.org) sites that are on the Jetpack Premium subscription.

Right after the speech sessions, we had a networking session over snacks and it was amazing to speak with Automatticians in real-life. I spoke to Andrew who gave me an outline on how the hiring process works at Automattic, and clarified a few doubts I had around it.

I also met Karen Arnold at the venue. Karen is the lead of the Happiness Hiring team and oversees the Happiness Engineer applications.

I also got a chance to meet other Automatticians based out of India, Nagesh Pai and Gala Khyati. They’re Happiness Engineers at Automattic. The Happiness Engineer team members are responsible for answering customer support questions and ensure that all users across all the Automattic products have a happy user experience.

I also got a chance to say hit to Alex Gounder who has been a major driving force in growing WordPress in India. Meeting him reminds me of Aditya Kane is a close friend of Alex, and I have worked with Aditya Kane in the past. We used to write at Devils’ Workshop, a tech blog by rtCamp. Aditya is probably the only person I know in the WordPress community, whom I haven’t met yet. I hope to see him at #WCMumbai which is happening on the 17th-18th of March, 2018.

I also met Meher Bala, who is a freelancer WordPress developer and is another major driving force for WordPress’ growth in India.

To summarise, #WordPressMumbai meetup was extremely valuable and I am really glad I went to the meetup. Having been a WordPress enthusiast for over 8 years, I never got a chance to attend meetups and WordCamp events, thanks to school and college days. Now that I have graduated, it’s time to explore the WordPress communities in India better, and this is the only the first step of the process.

2 flights later, it’s time to hit the bed. Goodnight, WordPress!