Mahangu Weerasinghe

Sri Lankan, Automattician, WordPress user since 0.70


Talks

Teaching Happiness: What WordPress Support Can Learn From the Classroom

WordCamp Mumbai 2015 – March 8th, 2015

In this session, I explore how we, as providers of WordPress support, can see ourselves as teachers instead of fixers, and in the process completely alter the dynamic of the support space, creating a more holistic experience for both our users and ourselves.

I show how some of the tools that teachers use to Plan, Manage and Follow-up on their lessons can also be used in WordPress support interactions, and how these methods can help our users become more and more independent.

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Beyond the Blackboard: Building Education Products for South Asia

WordCamp Pune 2015 – September 6th, 2015

After years of teaching in the subcontinent, I know the ins and outs of using WordPress on cost-effective computers and networks with little to no Internet connectivity, and bring some of this experience to bear when I talk about developing Education products for South Asia.

I posit that to really make your learning product work for the subcontinent, you need to Target Teachers, Scale both ways, and Localize. My hope was that this session would result in the Pune WordPress community getting excited about the impact they can have on how things are taught and learnt throughout this part of the world!

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The Jugaad Way: WordPress Code for Non-Developers

WordCamp Mumbai 2016 – March 13th, 2016
WordCamp Singapore 2016 – September 6th, 2016

In this talk, I explore how WordPress is hackable by design, and show, with examples, how easy it is for non-developers to break into WordPress coding. Thanks to WordPress hooks, and how well they are documented in the Codex, it’s possible to begin playing with WordPress code even if you have little or no knowledge of PHP.

The Jugaad Way is just that: using existing resources and a task-based approach to get into WordPress code. It’s an approach that only requires that you know how to cut and paste, and is how I myself got into WordPress code.

WordCamp Mumbai 2016: Download Slides / Get Code Snippets

WordCamp Singapore 2016: Download SlidesGet Code Snippets


Support First: Standing Behind Your WordPress Products

WordCamp Kathmandu 2016 – November 19th, 2016

In this talk, I explore how WordPress developers and agencies can benefit by building their products and services around the support they hope to provide for them, and show how support can be an investment if you think of it as branding through customer service.

Using real world examples from the support space, I look at how you can provide a great support experience for your clients by costing for supportcharging for support and hiring for support.

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About Me

I’m Mahangu Weerasinghe, a Data Engineer at Automattic, the company behind WordPress.com, Jetpack, WooCommerce and Tumblr. Our team is responsible for maintaining our primary Hadoop cluster and providing support to datums across the company.

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