Pull Quote: The WordPress community give me confidence to talk to people & in front of people.

Building Confidence

I can clearly divide my life in two parts before and after marriage. Before I got married, I was staying in Chapra, a small city in Bihar. I had graduated in Botany, we only had electricity for 5-6 hours a day and no easy access to internet or computers.

After my marriage, I came to Pune, a bigger city compared to Chapra and things changed for me. I was exposed to exciting world of technology, thanks to my husband who was then working at a startup. I had lot of free time so I decided to learn as much as I could just to see what I can do and started by learning MS Office, then Photoshop a bit and in the process I also learned HTML, CSS. I tried but couldn’t get much hang of JavaScript.

Once I got confident that I can write decent HTML, I switched to learning CMS and first one I tried was Joomla, and for me it was very hard to understand, I had more question then I could find answers to. So on suggestion of my husband I switched to WordPress. I was able to quickly figure things out with WordPress and set up a blog for myself.

In 2010, I joined WPoets as QA. In those days I had some free time.

To improve my skills I started looking into old reviews of the themes that were approved on WordPress themes repository.

This helped me understand theme file structures and various criteria to check themes for, I used skills acquired to ensure themes built by WPoets were also following these guidelines.

Sometime in 2011, once I was confident that I have understood the process I joined the ‘Theme Review Team’ and started officially reviewing themes in the repository. This was a proud moment for me.  During my journey as theme reviewer I was helped and guided by Emil Uzelac, Chip Bennett & Edward Caissie.

In 2013, very first WordCamp was organised in Pune and I got a chance to talk about theme review process, this was my first ever public talk, and not being very good with English I choose to speak in Hindi. It was well received and many people wanted to know how they can get their themes approved. Again in 2015, I talked about what makes themes good in WordCamp Pune. Thanks to WordCamps, I got to meet Topher, Mahangu & Raghvendra.

Now a days, as I get less time between work and kids, instead of doing theme reviews I answer questions on WordPress.org support forum.

I’m an introvert and came from a small city so I’m always hesitant to talk to new people but the WordPress community give me confidence to talk with new people and in front of people.

This is a big achievement for me and my family feels proud of it.

In WP community every one ready to support and help to move forward because of this nature I love to this community. I want to emphasize the support that I have received from WordPress community in general and members of theme review team in specific who helped me gain the knowledge necessary to do my work better. I also want to thank all the organisers of Pune WordPress Knowledge Exchange meetup group, and specially Saurabh Shukla who helped in improving my presentation skills for WordCamp Pune.

All these happened because of WordPress community and via HeroPress platform I would like to thank everyone who makes this community rock.

6 Comments

  1. Than you for sharing, Nisha. You’re one of the standout .org contributors from this part of the world, and you make me proud to call myself South Asian!

    Keep doing what you do. I look forward to meeting you again at a WC in 2017. :)

  2. Nisha, what I noticed in your post is how well you composed and explained your life journey. In other words – you write extremely well and I’d like to see more from you in articles or ebooks. Best of luck!

  3. I’m so glad you made this journey, Nisha. I’m also glad that I had a miniscule part in it. I hope with you as an inspiration, a lot of folks here meet new people and make more friends.

    I’ll look forward to your speaker application at this year’s WordCamp Pune too. :)

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