 OK, good afternoon, everyone. And thank you so much for coming to this track. Today, we're going to be talking about careers and contribution in WordPress. I'm Maithri Chavan, and currently I'm working at RD Camp as a director of client delivery. RD Camp is a distributed company that is currently providing enterprise-level web publishing and digital commerce solutions using WordPress. So to begin with, I just want to know here, how many of y'all are currently using WordPress? Good. How many of y'all have contributed to WordPress before? How many are yet to contribute or want to contribute? So I hope towards the end of this session, we are able to turn that into a stronger inspiration and get some more contributions out of y'all. All right. So as we must be knowing, currently, WordPress is powering around 43% and above websites over the internet. And it is an open-source project. Given that, you can just imagine that there is definitely a lot for many people to be doing to making WordPress what it is today. We are going to be talking about the different career streams that we could consider if you want to be using WordPress and be a part of the WordPress ecosystem. This talk has been inspired, well, first talk definitely, and this talk has been inspired by my own experience over the last five years, working on various types of projects with multiple teams and seeing the importance of them on these projects. Along with that, we are also, one second, along with that, we are also going to be talking about how most of these streams could contribute to different projects of WordPress and continue improving WordPress as much as possible. So what you see here are some of the common career streams that we often have to choose the moment we are done with our graduation, so on and so forth. We are going to be focusing on some of these career streams, seeing what you can be doing in these streams in the WordPress ecosystem. And further to that, we can also see what kind of contributions you could be making if you are a part of any of these teams right now. So let's begin with engineering. I'm sure none of us know what engineering is, correct? Yeah? OK. So engineering is something that we are definitely in need of at all times, and we need our engineers to help make WordPress what it is and also bring in all the ideas, suggestions that people are making and actually have it implemented. This is an important field that is keeping WordPress what it is today. In this field, you could start off as a junior WordPress engineer, grow on to become a senior engineer, maybe start leading a team, be like a technical lead, then you could grow into becoming an architectural engineer. You could also then explore engineering manager side and maybe grow on to become a director of engineer. In this field, you would be able to focus on any of the technologies that maybe you lean more to us. Maybe it is on the front-end side or back-end side. There are n number of possibilities out here. On the design side of things, if your passion is to provide a better user experience, better user interface, then there's definitely a lot that you can be doing by being a part of the design team overall. You are going to be the bridge that is helping people's visualizations and ideas and actually letting the engineering team know what needs to be implemented. You could, in the design sector, you could be working on website designing or you could be helping with product designing. You can also be a user experience specialist or you can also help with the overall user experience testing and ensure that your website or a product is continuing to evolve, keeping in mind how the end users are receiving it. Now, let's talk about the quality assurance team. I think it's one of the favorite team because it's the one team where you can wholeheartedly focus on finding mistakes without any guilt. I'm sure that is something all the developers definitely enjoy. So in the quality assurance team, you could be focusing on the manual testing side or you could be focusing on the automated testing side here. Being a part of this team is going to help ensure that we are able to deliver the best of best product quality towards the end. On the project management side of things, you could be working with clients and teams across various teams to help ensure that things are working smoothly and all the overall objectives of a project are being met. You could see yourself as a project manager or as a product owner. You could also see yourself as a product or a project strategist and you could grow on to become a program manager as well. I feel that the project management field is one such where they're always bearing the peace flag through it all. So let's talk about the marketing team who run the internet right now. It is them. Everything that we want and the presence that we want on the internet is because of suggestions and the rules and everything that the marketing team can definitely help us out with. From content writing to the marketing researcher or being an SEO expert to a marketing strategist, there is a lot that can be done and there is so much demand for every niche of this particular topic. A lot of products and a lot of solutions have been thought about and built because of the demands that have been here. Just one moment. So that was the marketing team. Let's talk about sales. If selling, negotiating, convincing somebody or analyzing is something that is your cup of tea, then you could be helping a lot of the agencies grow their business model by being a part of their sales team. You could be a lead cultivator or maybe become a client account manager or also be a business analyst in this team. Now, I'm sure that there are some more feels that some of us might be working on. For this session, I thought of covering a few of the common feels that we often hear about and we know. So let's see how these feels could go on to contributing in different projects of WordPress and continue improving WordPress even more. Now, if you are somebody who is either yet to choose what they should be doing in WordPress or you are already in WordPress and you want to just keep up with it, I hope you are able to navigate your career path by ensuring that you are working in an environment that is keeping you very stimulated, that is maybe also driven by some of the passions that you have seen in yourself maybe when you were attending some extracurriculars or you were, what else? Any of your extracurriculars, yes, but any of your other personal passions as well. So I hope that you're working in an environment that is able to grow that more. The other thing that you could be doing is ensure that you're embracing the community that you're currently in. WordPress is a huge community and there is definitely a lot that everyone has to offer. So be like a good sponge that is able to absorb a lot of the information they have and you need to continue discovering and learning on your own so that your own skills, your solution providing skills are something that are kept up to date. It could be that by doing very simple things you could be just subscribed to some podcasts or to some blogs and maybe just read it over the weekend or something that will definitely at least keep you up to date with what is happening. Make you learn something new and that will definitely be very helpful. Okay, let's talk about contributions. Now, first things first, if you're going to be contributing there are three things that you're going to need at all times no matter which project team you end up contributing to. Those would be have an account with on the WordPress.org platform, have a GitHub account and have a Slack account. All these three platforms are useful in communicating with each other. Well, of course, deploying your code as well and ensuring that everyone has necessary visibility to see what the status of issues and ideas are at the moment. Let's start with, let's get to know about a very simple team that we all can contribute to whether or not we are technical or non-technical whether we are a newbie or a very well-seasoned user of WordPress, documentation. This team is currently dedicated towards coordinating all the initial is currently coordinating all the documentation around the initiatives of WordPress. You could contribute to this team without any prior knowledge to most of the areas definitely and you could contribute as an absolute newbie, you could be an end user, you could be a developer, you could be a content writer and that is definitely something that you would, that would be up your alley and you could help improve the overall documentation of WordPress. The, in the repo of, the repo that you can refer to is the documentation issue tracker here. At the moment, the documentation is divided into these three pillars. The third one you're not able to see but the first one would be everything focused on the block editor. The second one is the dev hub which is taking care of all things related to what a developer might need in the WordPress ecosystem and the other one is the help hub which is for people who might be just starting off with WordPress who need to know all the basics. So you could be helping to contribute and increase the knowledge base for any three of these fields. The next one is Polyglots. I think some of us have heard about Polyglots maybe. So if Polyglots is currently a team that is dedicated towards ensuring that WordPress is available to people who may be not English speakers and that is so important so that we are able to increase the reach of WordPress, make it accessible to as many people as we can. If you know a language other than English, this is definitely a team that you can be contributing to. In the Polyglots team, you could help translate the WordPress score, themes and plugins. A lot of information for you is available on the translate.wordpress.org and if you're worried that whatever I translate may not be correct or something, don't worry about it across all the projects and teams that are going to be reviewers who are going to ensure that the best quality is going out. In the Polyglots team, you have the global translation editors and the project translation editors who are taking care of the quality assurance. Next, let's talk about the design. Okay. By contributing into the design team, you will be able to provide your visual design expertise and help improve the overall user interface and the user experience of WordPress. In this team, you could help improve the designs for your block editors, block patterns, WordPress score, WordPress.org related environments, which could also cover some other ecosystem platforms like the foundation, WordCamp website, so on and so forth. An important focus for the design team has been accessibility. You can definitely help ensure that the designs that are being used are accessible to everyone as the end user. If you at the moment are aware about the block editor and have some design knowledge and you want to just maybe explore how these two worlds can come together, you can check out the Museum of Block Art and that is something that will definitely show you what the current block editor is capable of in terms of the visual arts that people are able to create. On the WordPress, on the Gutenberg repo, if you check out the label that is needs design, you will be able to see some of the issues that could need some design related expertise. If that is something that you want to get started off with, you can check that out. Support. Something that I really like that is written in the support handbook is everyone knows the answer to something. Collectively in this room as well, I'm sure that we will be able to answer at least some of the questions that the support forums might be having. We all have some of the other knowledge that we'll be able to help other people out with. So I would highly encourage us to check out the support forums, see what kind of questions people are coming up with. Support forums is a great place for the sales and the marketing team members to be in. Sales team members could get some ideas about what kind of solutions people are looking out for, maybe see if their products or businesses are able to offer that solution, maybe also talk to them about it. They're also able to talk to... The marketing team could also get an idea about what are some common questions that people are asking so that you have a great way of creating some content generation if that is what you're looking out for some new topics. There are, since definitely support involves a lot of the communication, there are some guidelines in terms of how we should be answering and how we should be communicating with the other folks. So there are the guidelines that are available for support, that is something that we should definitely check out before we start communicating. In the testing world, we could be participating in the test project to help ensure that the quality of work that is being delivered is the best. You could help with manual testing or you could also help with automated end-to-end test cases. There are some really easy testing-related issues that you can get started with if you use the label of need testing on the Gutenberg repo. In the development team, if code is poetry for all of y'all, there are many other projects that you could be contributing to, things like the core itself, the meta environment, accessibility, the core performance, CLI, you could help with writing code, fixing bugs, or maybe just participate in the discussions that these teams might be having. You can also help review each other's work and also help review the plugins and themes that people are hoping to add into the directory. You could be a very new engineer or you could be a very seasoned one. That is definitely something that you will be able to explore in the development project. Apart from the projects that we just went through, there are many other projects that we could be contributing and many other career streams that we could all contribute into. Things like the community, if maybe event management is something that you would be interested in or maybe welfare, people ops. Community is a great project that we could help with, contribute to us. On the WordPress TV, where I'm hoping this video will end up going and you all will be able to see all the mistakes that I made, but on the WordPress TV, you all could help contributing to. Training, if teaching is something that drives you, you could help with creating some videos, create some documentation, make it easier for other people to use WordPress, understand WordPress and leverage it in the best of best ways. You can also, if you're into mobile app development, you can also help maintain the mobile apps of WordPress. Marketing, the name says it all. You can also help with the hosting. Apart from this, if none of this is something that you want to get started with, but if you do have some good photos that you could maybe contribute to, you can also submit your photos to the photo directory of WordPress and that's your first contribution itself. Now, in terms of, if you're thinking about contributing, as I mentioned, there will be at least three accounts that you're gonna have to get started with. Does anyone remember them? Get help? Slack? And WordPress Autowagy, correct. So those are three accounts that you definitely need to have and when you're contributing, a few things that you can just think about before you start planning for it is choose the right project for you. I would encourage you all to go through all the projects that we went through. You see something that you closely associated with. It could be something that is related to the current career field that you are in or it could be something that maybe you're planning to shift into. You could have best of both worlds. So check it out and then you should get familiar with the world. Check out the handbook that each of these respective projects have. Know who are the people who are currently managing it. Know who are the people that you can reach out to. What are the right places for you to be contributing for that chosen project? I would then suggest you just attend and maybe see how the first few discussions are happening, be it on GitHub issues or on the respective Slack channels that gets you an idea about how these teams are working together. You get to know what the flows and the processes they are following in actual. And then later on, of course, pick up a small task, something that you feel, oh, this is easy, I can do it. Maybe get started with that task, try to contribute with that. And then continue repeating it over and over again. You never know, you're one of the lead contributors or noteworthy contributor, and we would love to see more people contributing to WordPress. And that brings me to the end of my session. Thank you so much, we are open to Q&A right now. I will also be available at the RT-CAM sponsor deck, and these are my handles on Twitter and LinkedIn. Thank you so much for being here. In the photo directory, if you have any photos which are not at the moment covering any individuals, you can go ahead and contribute your photos. WordPress is currently working on something similar to, let's say, Unsplash, yes. So, exactly. So you are able to contribute your own photos. That was my first contribution, in fact. Last September, I went to Leh. I had a very nice photo, and I was like, okay, let's try it. And I ended up submitting my photo. That was my first ever contribution to WordPress. Yes. Yes, I can share that with you. I'm missed out on mentioning it, but I'll share that with you. Yes. There was one slide, like, to report someone. Yeah. Community, TV, training, and all that. So, my question is that, what is the training is all about? Elaborate later more. So, training would be for people who might be wanting to just start off with knowing how to use WordPress with Block Editor, and either it could be related to development, or how to use WordPress as an end user. So, at the moment, on the learn.wordpress.org, you will actually be able to see a lot of the documentation in terms of how people who are new to WordPress can actually get familiar with it. There are also some videos that people have created in order to give, like, training sessions. So, if that is something that you are interested in, you can work with the training team and increase the knowledge base so that more people are able to quickly get started with using WordPress. So, we have to make people learn about WordPress. Yes. By training them the subject software. Correct. Okay. Anyone else? All right. Thank you so much, everyone.