Profiles

WordPress, Aviation, Artificial Intelligence, Web Development, Web Designing, UX Design, Customer Success, Customer Experience, Leadership, Community, Open Source

I was 12, sitting in Kanpur, India, wondering how websites were made. Unlike a lot of middle-class Indian kids, my parents never pushed me towards engineering entrance exams. They let me explore, and honestly, that made all the difference.

It started with HTML. I taught myself to build a basic webpage, immediately wanted to put it online, and Googled “how to make a free website.” I landed on webs.com, spent hours in their WYSIWYG editor, and quickly realised I couldn’t customise much. I had no idea what domains or hosting even were at this point.

So I built a small site locally, showed it to my dad hoping he’d fund the hosting, and somewhere along the way discovered CSS. Two weeks of w3schools and YouTube later, I could change fonts, play with colours, and finally felt like I had some real control. But I missed the easy content management that tools like webs.com offered. I wanted both: the control of hand-coded sites and the simplicity of a CMS.

That question led me to Google one more time, and the answer was WordPress.

I was hooked.

Over the next few years, I worked on a ton of WordPress sites for small agencies, freelance clients, basically anyone who’d let me build something. Then in 2016, I applied for my first job, while still in school, at ThemeIsle. Got the job, worked part-time (three hours a day, because I had to manage my studies alongside), and eventually went full-time.

I never went to college. I finished school, and instead of following the typical path, I applied to Automattic. I got in at 18, making me their youngest hire at the time. That still feels surreal to say out loud.

Around the same time, the WordPress community in Kanpur was basically non-existent. So a few of us decided to change that. We organised WordCamp Kanpur 2017, which was Uttar Pradesh’s very first WordCamp. I was the co-organiser and a speaker. We brought it back the following year with WordCamp Kanpur 2018, and the community only grew from there. I’ve since spoken at WordCamp Bhopal and WordCamp Udaipur, volunteered at several others, and stayed active in the meetup scene.

My career at Automattic has taken me through WordPress.com and WordPress VIP, across support, development, UX, and team leadership. I went from IC to manager and back to senior IC, because I realised I just love being close to the actual work. Today, I help some of the biggest publishers and brands in the world run their sites on WordPress at scale.

Looking back, I think about what my parents did right. They didn’t push me into engineering. They let a 12-year-old kid chase his curiosity. That freedom is the reason I’m here.

If you’re a parent reading this: introduce your kids to WordPress, to open source, to whatever lights them up. Then step back and let them run with it.