Episode 152 – Aditya Kane

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A Conversation with Aditya Kane

Aditya hails from Pune, India, and has been working in WordPress for more than a decade, as well as being a WordCamp organizer multiple times and volunteering at other events.

Show Notes

Website | WordFest.Live

Website | BombayPirate.com

Twitter | @adityakane

Episode Transcript

Topher: Hey, everyone. My name is Topher.

Cate: And my name is Cate.

Topher: And this is Hallway Chats. We’d like to thank our sponsor Nexcess, a Liquid Web brand, and their cool new product, membership sites with WP Quickstart. If you’re thinking of building a membership site like we are, check it out. Our guest today is Aditya Kane [pronounced Kah-nay] from Pune, India. Welcome.

Aditya: Thank you.

Cate: I still read that and thought it was “kayne”. This is terrible.

Topher: This is not Mr. Kane, the famous wrestler. It’s Aditya Kane.

Aditya: Yeah, I’m not a famous wrestler.

Cate: YET. You’re not a famous wrestler YET. There’s still time.

Topher: There’s still time. And then that guy will be like, “Oh, curses! He changed my name.”

Aditya: This is a very weird introduction.

Topher: Wow, this is not a tech talk.

Cate: And we’re very weird people. So we’re good that way.

Topher: So I met you many years ago, and actually traveled to Pune to meet you. Are you a Pune native or did you move there?

Aditya: I moved to Pune, actually, the same year we met in 2015.

Topher: Oh, yeah. Oh, I remember you were in Mumbai before that, weren’t you?

Aditya: Yeah, I was in Mumbai. I was born in Pune but I’ve lived all my life, my school and college, everything in Mumbai. I moved in 2015, towards the end of it, I moved to Pune and became a Punekar or Puneite which is a Pune native.

Topher: It’s been six years now. Which one feels more like home?

Aditya: It’s difficult to say that. But since I’m married and I’m living here, I guess, Pune feels like home but… yeah, I mean, Mumbai is the place where I grew up, so there’s a lot of childhood memories. My dad still lives there. He still lives near my old school and the neighborhood I grew up in. So that sometimes feels like home too.

Topher: That’s cool. Do you go back often?

Aditya: Not since the pandemic started.

Cate: Oh, yeah.

Topher: Oh, right.

Aditya: I haven’t been there since my dad has certain health issues. So we didn’t want to take the risk. But I used to visit every few weeks.

Topher: Oh, that’s cool.

Aditya: It’s not very far from Pune.

Cate: I was wondering, how close are they?

Aditya: About four hours by road. Three and a half, four hours by. And it’s very well connected by train and transport.

Topher: Yeah, they’re both pretty big cities. So how did you get into WordPress? What’s your story?

Aditya: The first time I heard about WordPress was when a friend of mine shared the WordPress zip file with me saying that, “Hey, this is something interesting.” And I said, “What do I do with this?” Very common story. That was I think back in 2007… yeah, 2006 or 2007. I read to find out what WordPress was and I didn’t really find a lot of information that time understandably.

And then the first time I actually started using it properly and a lot was in 2009 when I joined this company called rtCamp just based out of Pune. I was hired to take care of the blog network. And that’s when I first started using WordPress.

Cate: Did you say that was ’09 that you joined rtCamp?

Aditya: Yeah.

Cate: Wow. I didn’t realize that the company had been around that long. That’s really amazing.

Aditya: It’s recently finished 12 years. So it’s been around for a while.

Cate: That’s really cool.

Aditya: It started from a publishing background, so they’re primarily publishers, blogs, basically, and then development.

Cate: So you joined in ’09 and you’re still there. Have you been there the whole time? Have you come and gone a little?

Aditya: I have come and gone a little bit. So I joined in 2009, I left rtCamp in 2016. Yeah, 2016. And I then tried to start my own thing with a couple of friends.

Topher: I remember that.

Aditya: Yeah. Yeah, I think we chatted about a few things. And after that, by… we wrap that up pretty quickly. I think it was just a year that a lot of the people who founded the company had a lot of issues, not work-related or with each other, just a lot of personal issues going on. So we wrapped it up. Then I did some freelancing. And then I joined Automattic as a community wrangler from 2018. And then I was out of Automattic last year, 2020.

Cate: Okay.

Aditya: Then I slept for a couple of months.

Topher: I know.

Topher: That’s great.

Aditya: Then I was doing some freelance work. I kept in touch with Rahul Bansal, who was the founder and CEO of rtCamp. So he basically asked me if I was willing to work. And I started working half time there last year. And then from this year onwards, I’ve been working full time.

Topher: What are you doing there now? What’s your task now?

Aditya: I take care of a few things, but could say the marketing part, like everything to do with marketing in rtCamp to clients, but also potential clients, but also to potential people who would join rtCamp. So hiring. I also, along with a couple of people, we basically run the editorial desk of rtCamp, so everything that is a case study comes out, everything, we sort of come up with that content. And also the internal communication part, which is-

Topher: That’s a lot of things.

Aditya: That’s a lot of things, yes.

Topher: You keep saying, “And also.”

Aditya: Yeah. And also because it’s like everything is [put in? 00:07:51] to say, “This is internal communications,” which can be anything.

Cate: There are things that kind of fit well together too. I’m on the communication sides of most things I’m involved in. And if your marketing team isn’t connected with the communications team, you’re gonna have some real problems. So, yeah.

Aditya: Yeah.

Topher: So do you do stuff with WordPress outside of work? You blog. Do you teach?

Aditya: I did do a bit of teaching. Not really in terms of… So this was basically a voluntary teaching. I thought a bit of WordPress to some people who were new to WordPress just when the pandemic started, just because I wanted to keep my… I mean, I was not going to work, but I wanted to do something.

Topher: Right.

Aditya: So it’s teaching how websites are built to some people. Some kids basically.

Topher: That’s cool.

Aditya: I shouldn’t call them kids. They are about 19, 20, or so.

Topher: Some 30 years younger than me.

Aditya: And half my age.

Topher: Yeah.

Aditya: I mean, I sort of taught them WordPress. I’ve done a bit of outreach with open-source workshops at colleges in Pune in the middle. And yes, of course, I’ve done some freelance work in terms of writing, content writing, and things like that.

Topher: I have a memory of a blog of the Bombay Pirate?

Aditya: Oh, yeah. That’s my personal blog. I used to write a lot on it. I don’t write as much. But I still do write an average of one blog post every three months. So every three months. That’s my thing. I don’t want to go beyond three months without a blog.

Cate: That’s really cool. So, is writing your background? You went to university, was it a writing, journalism communications kind of thing?

Aditya: So growing up, I would have preferred to be a journalist or an economist. Possibly an economist. They have better jobs. Maybe you become an academician or something like that. But like most kids our age and slightly privileged backgrounds, I mean, we’re sort of brainwashed by society—it’s not like my parents did this—into picking up computers, which is why I did a computer degree.

So I have my basics in computer. I started picking up jobs, which are basically customer support and technical support for some outsourcing jobs. There are certain outsourcing jobs that I picked up. And back in 2008 or 2007, 2008, I worked in IBM, similar job profile, which is tech support. It was so boring to be sitting in a cubicle and do that. So I used to go home, and I basically ended up writing on a word document several hundreds of pages. So utter boredom basically turned me out into a writer.

Cate: It’s so true. Boredom has so much value. We hate to be bored but at the same time, it sparks so much creativity and interest. You know, it really drives us to try other things that we might… you know, out of desperation, we have to find something to do.

Aditya: Yeah, yeah. That’s true. I remember reading about this somewhere. I can’t recall where but there was like a research done with people… there’s this YouTube channel Veritasium. It’s a science YouTube channel and it talks about creativity. And there was research done that if you did something boring and then tried to find solutions immediately afterwards… like a certain group was apparently more creative than another group, which was sort of not doing the boring works, apparently. That’s so interesting.

Topher: That’s cool. I’ve heard that there’s a great deal of value in boredom for children. Because it spurs them to play. Like you put some kids in the backyard without toys and they’ll come up with something to do. They’ll make up a game, they’ll invent something. They’ll tear down the house and burn it. You know, something.

Cate: It might be burying their little brother in the backyard. But at the same time, you’re right, there is something to that, you know, where if you’re forced into creativity.

Topher: I’d like to talk about WordPress events a little bit. I first met you because I was looking for some business advice from Indians who had succeeded in a WordPress business. And somebody said, “Hey, WordCamp Mumbai just happened. Here’s a list of the organizers. Go talk to them.” And you were on the list. So you were an organizer for WordCamp Mumbai, right?

Aditya: Yeah.

Topher: It was the second one ever?

Aditya: Second one ever, 2015. I mean, technically the third one, but the first one was not nice. I wasn’t involved.

Topher: So what’s the rest of your career been like as an organizer? Have you organized more?

Aditya: Yeah, yeah. I’ve been always a co-organizer at WordCamp Pune right up to 2016. WordCamp Mumbai, sorry. And then I started being a co-organizer at WordCamp Pune. The WordCamp Pune you attended in 2015 was not when I was an organizer. But because the cities are so close, there’s a lot of commonality. So a lot of people are friends with each other, and they can easily travel to and fro. And the community is sort of mashed up. As in there’s no separation and such.

Topher: I met a lot of Mumbaikars when I was there.

Aditya: Yeah, you did. You met me. [unintelligible 00:15:20] You met me, you met Alex Gounder

Topher: Yeah. Ramya Pandyan.

Aditya: Oh, yeah, Ramya.

Topher: Rahul Bansal.

Aditya: So I’ve been organizing events right through but basically as a co-organizer. I like to be an organizer. I don’t like to sit in the [unintelligible 00:16:02]. I don’t like the name like you participate. I recently organized WordCamp India, which is why I sort of… Yeah, WordCamp India. It was an online event. And I think it was held a few days after the first Wordfest.

Cate: Yeah, it was. I think it was three weekends long.

Aditya: Yes, it was. It was three weekends long.

Cate: I was exhausted for you. After doing just one 24 hour day, I couldn’t imagine three weekends of a virtual event. But well done you.

Aditya: Yeah, it was interesting to have a three-weekend long experiment. Probably not… I mean, if it is up to me, it probably… I was the one who proposed that we do this over three weekends. And I’m happy enough to say that I wouldn’t want to repeat that again.

Cate: Well, I think the virtual event space, you have so many possibilities. And we’ve seen this with Wordfest as we’re doing it again for a second time, and possibly looking ahead to a third one. You have to try these things. You don’t know if they’re good idea until you try them. And they’re kind of easy to try. Like the simplicity of holding a three-week end event online is completely different than trying to get a venue and food for people for three weekends in person.

So you try it, and maybe it works and maybe it doesn’t. But you don’t know until you did. So it’s great to have done it and then say, “You know what? Not going to do that again.” That’s just fine.

Aditya: I mean, the things we did at WordCamp are quite satisfying in the sense we wanted to do something different from having speaker sessions. Like just having speaker sessions, and then maybe a contributor day. And that’s like the classic WordCamp format, which has also been transferred to the online format.

For me, that is not as exciting. I wanted to see if we could do something different. And that’s why we had a workshop day, where we had a few very basic workshops. So an introduction to WordPress, or introduction to WooCommerce. In the workshop day, we started a workshop with an English version, and then the same workshop was done in different languages, one after the other.

That actually got a lot of new people involved. That was the whole idea, and in that sense, it was quite successful. Because the idea was that… that’s just… I don’t have statistics, but I can say that it’s just the sense I get that when there’s an online event, it’s just we are the same people are getting together because we know each other and we’re not sort of getting other people into the community, because we’re not a physical event, which they can go to and sort of hang in the shadows and just get someone in the hallway and have a chat. Which is how a lot of people start taking part and getting into a community.

I think they can’t do that because they don’t know about these events. And even if they go to these events, it’s just a one way conversation because it’s all focused on the sessions, and then all the chats. I mean, we try to make them by having Zoom rooms around but it’s not the same.

So the other way was to not actually have that and just have something completely different, which people can engage with. We got a lot of new people who had never been to a WordCamp and who attended those workshops. And because we had a workshop on the first weekend, and then we followed up, one of the people who actually presented at the workshop became organizer by the time we ended up with the event.

Topher: That’s cool.

Cate: That’s really great. But I loved the idea of holding the same workshop in multiple languages. It’s so hard to figure out how best to meet a global community needs, you know, particularly with online events. And I think that’s a really clever way to have gone about it.

Aditya: Yeah. I mean, it was sort of easy to do in India, because almost none of us have English as a first language and none of us have a very common language. Like I work with people in my team, there are four people and each has… one someone speaks Punjabi, I’m the speaking Marathi, and another one speaks Hindi, and another one I don’t know what he speaks but he definitely speaks English. So we all have our different languages. So it’s not that easy to speak in our own native languages.

So a lot of us are comfortable speaking in English, especially at the level of using WordPress. There are a lot of people who do not know how to… so they understand how to read English and maybe even write in English, but they’re not really good at asking questions in English or listening in English to somebody who speaks very fast.

Topher: Yeah.

Aditya: So if the session is in Marathi, it’s not that they wouldn’t understand in English, but very often it just gives them the comfort level to just ask a question. So that was the aim.

Topher: Something I’ve found with HeroPress is most of the people I communicate with globally, it’s on Slack. And most people who have English as a second or third or fourth language read and write wonderfully well, but don’t speak it that great because speed is an issue or accent is an issue or something like that.

And the whole concept of the difference between understanding a language as written as opposed to spoken is really interesting to me. It’s one of the reasons I’ve started doing translations on HeroPress. I was told early on, especially in India, you don’t need to do multilingual, just do English, we all speak English. And there’s a difference between speaking and reading English and really deeply understanding it, and having… in your own language, it just makes it more comfortable.

Aditya: Yeah.

Topher: That’s what we’ve done there.

Cate: And I really like your point about asking questions in your own language. If I was learning something new, even if I could read it and understand it in the language it was being presented in, it doesn’t mean that I can come up with the right questions, or even… I tend to be more shy in that kind of environment anyway, so I’ve struggled to ask questions at all, let alone questions in a language that I’m really uncomfortable with.

Aditya: Yeah. And there’s a lot of formality to what can speakers and… I mean, not because of anything that the speakers do, but it’s just how the world is. That if you’re put on a podium everybody thinks you’re great. And everyone’s great, but the point is, you know, people think-

Topher: You wouldn’t in the podium if you weren’t great.

Aditya: Yeah. But the point is, you’re not that great and a lot of people assume that you’re like this great expert or something and you need to be God-gifted talented or something like that just to be able to speak on some subject. And a lot of people don’t realize it’s not that difficult. To reach that level of expertise is not that difficult very often.

So there’s a lot of assumptions that “Oh, I shouldn’t ask questions” or “I shouldn’t speak up” or “I shouldn’t connect.” And that happens a lot more in India at least when somebody… or South Asia for that matter. If somebody speaks in English and English is perfect, people feel this person knows WordPress, and in English. So let me not ask a question.”

Cate: Yeah. I mean, that makes a lot of sense. Like, I really see the thinking behind that.

Topher: So I’d like to pivot a little bit, but not too far. Still talking about digital or online conferences. You’re a volunteer for Wordfest just coming up. As volunteer wrangler, I should know what you’re doing but I have no idea. What are you doing for Wordfest?

Aditya: I have no idea myself.

Topher: Awesome.

Aditya: I think I’m a community moderator of some kind.

Topher: Okay. I’ll get back to you on that.

Aditya: I think I’m that. But I know that I’m not doing a couple of things that I signed up for. So I think the other thing, which I signed up for which is moderating on the community.

Topher: What make you… Go ahead.

Aditya: I have not really gone through the Wordfest program. I know I’m supposed to attend sometime in the afternoon, some volunteer greenroom.

Cate: Yeah, greenroom session.

Aditya: I’ve just not had the time to do that. It’s like bang in the middle of the afternoon for me. That’s when my workplace just comes alive. But I’ll find time.

Topher: What made you want to be involved in a global event like Wordfest.

Aditya: I was interested last time round, the first time around because of the fact that they were speaking of mental health and self-care. So I generally like the tone of the Wordfest conference and the things that they put out. So I generally liked the tone of it and certain things that certain people said about it.

And then a lot of people had a lot of fun at Wordfest. I think a couple of my colleagues. I think Imran was there and a very good friend, Yogesh Londhe or Yoge as you might call him. They had a lot of fun. They told me they had a lot of fun. So I wanted to sort of get involved. I didn’t know there was a Wordfest happening—another one.

So I joined the Big Orange Heart Slack group I think a few months ago and then I found out that there was this event that’s going to happen. So I said, “Yeah, I’ll volunteer. I want to be part of it.” Specifically, because they do focus quite a bit on mental health and self-care.

Topher: One of the things that’s unique about Wordfest is that it is a 24-hour event. And so it has like time zone silos where people can see talks in their own time zone. Like nowhere in the world where they have to get up at midnight to watch. I would enjoy your perspective on the value of that. You and I are almost 12 hours off, so we’re pretty different in time zone. Do you view that as a particular value, as opposed to like WordCamp Europe or something, which would be in an awkward time for you?

Aditya: I mean, to be honest, when it comes to big marquee WordCamps, like WordCamp Europe, WordCamp US, sorry to say, as a consumer of that event, I don’t find them all that useful.

Topher: Okay.

Aditya: I might if I end up going there in person. Again, I mean, I might want to attend a couple of events like that but I wouldn’t want to do that. I’m not very comfortable with 3,000 people in some area. I like the slightly more compact WordCamp or something. Like maybe 300 people. I say 300 people, I know that’s still a big number. But in India, if you just randomly stand around on the road, there will be 300 people. Even during the pandemic. So, yeah, I mean, closer knit sort of group of people is something that I get more out of.

Topher: Okay.

Aditya: So the Wordfest thing actually is quite useful, because it has a very specific… I like the fact that there are a lot of speakers from this part of the world will be speaking in these time zones, and so on and so forth. So that sort of allows people to listen to experts from their part of the world rather than people from North America and Europe, who do tend to dominate the narrative and the speaker sessions at all of these WordCamp events, the big WordCamp events…

Topher: Right. That’s cool. That’s exactly what I was hoping for. That’s what I was hoping you would say because that’s what I imagined. This was the benefit that I hoped would occur.

Cate: That was the goal. I was always concerned… like, one of my thoughts was as great as it is to have local speakers and local time zones to shake up the speakers a bit so that you’re getting a sampling of speakers from different time zones. So you get more exposure to new people. Particularly when you can take an event virtual, you have more opportunities to meet someone that you’ve might not come in contact with in-person some time.

For instance, I haven’t been to Pune so I’m not going to necessarily just meet a WordPressor from Pune. So yeah, that’s always the question is do you keep it more local? Or do you mix it up some so that there’s a wider exposure? Which isn’t really a question. It’s just a thought.

Aditya: I think there’s some value to that, to mixing up the speakers as long as we are thinking of the topics that we’ll be covering and if they are relevant. If you’re talking about let’s say SEO and Yoast is going to… yeah, he’s going to be speaking, and if he’s speaking in our time zone, that will be very rare because we won’t get him. We won’t be able to usually listen to him speak in our time zone. So that’s a [novelty? 00:33:35] factor. But maybe having one or two speakers. An example of yours choose very accomplished and very famous. But yeah, it’ll be nice to mix up a little bit and get some… So yeah, you and the audience has connection with people from different parts of the world.

Cate: Yeah.

Topher: Cool. We are getting near the end of our time.

Cate: And it has been a delight talking with you.

Topher: It has. It’s been really good to see you, man.

Aditya: It’s my pleasure.

Topher: I want to point out that you did a HeroPress essay very early in the history of HeroPress.

Aditya: Yeah. That was ages ago.

Cate: It does feel like forever, doesn’t it?

Topher: If people want to learn about what you did in WordPress when you were a young man, then they can go read that.

Cate: Younger.

Aditya: Yeah, they can go back and read the HeroPress essay that I… I think I wrote… I don’t remember what I wrote. I think I wrote about my uncle who is sort of like… that’s the first place where I saw the internet. He was communicating with his sons who were studying abroad. And that’s the first place that I saw the internet working.

Topher: You should go read it. It’s a good essay.

Aditya: Yeah, I remember it for one particular reason. So I wrote it in the morning on a Google Doc and I send it off to you. And I said, “Hey, I didn’t spell check that.” I went back the next day and was about to reach out to you and you reached out to me saying, “Hey, I published this.”

Cate: That is so much my life with him.

Aditya: That was a fun thing to do. I think it was like the fourth or fifth essay on HeroPress. Maybe be the sixth.

Topher: Yeah. Those were different days for HeroPress. I really appreciate your support that time. It was a big deal. Talking about HeroPress, it’s been really interesting. We’ve been having a lot of these conversations about how HeroPress is relevant and why it is relevant in India and how it opened up… I think of it personally as like oral History project, where people come in and say their story, and you have to go back and are able to go through an archive.

In my case, it’s goes back so long that I can actually find something new and what I had written.

Topher: You’re right.

Aditya: I mean, it’s bit like an oral history project. That’s how I approach it. I tend to just read… it’s a lot of wonder in the sense that you read about somebody in South America, someone in Egypt or Middle East, or even parts of India, South Asia, and so many places, even in the US.

And you see a lot of the stories are very similar and yet different. It’s great because those are people who should be… every single of them as the… HeroPress has something that takes a slice of the community or the public of WordPress, because the republic of WordPress will be preserved because we’ll have all the community team and wordpress.org tools to archive that. So yeah, this is something I think the people’s history program. This is how I see it and that’s why I love it.

Topher: I love that term oral history archive. In the last couple years, I’ve come to realize how few people read every essay as it comes out. For a long time, I thought of HeroPress as a publication, like a magazine, or newsletter. When it comes out, you read it. And I’ve come to realize that most people treat it like a library or an archive, and they don’t read every week or whatever. But they’ll go every few months and read five or 10 essays at once.

Or pick a geographic area and read all the essays from whatever, you know, someplace. And it sort of changed how I publish, why I publish, when I publish things like that. For a long time, I was very rigid about publishing every Wednesday morning. And I see my wife nodding. And I don’t care as much anymore. If a Wednesday goes by without an essay, that’s fine. If I publish on a Thursday, that’s fine. Because it’s not about getting it to a person who’s sitting at their desk waiting for an essay. It’s about just attributing, you know, adding more paint to the picture.

Cate: And one of the things we’re hoping to do moving forward is to get it more organized, the archive more organized so that it’s easier to find common threads. So you could search for a topic or… broad enough. We don’t want people to feel spotlighted. There are a number of essays that have some common themes. So that can be really inspirational for people. We’d like to make that easier for them to find.

Aditya: Yeah, good luck with that.

Topher: It makes Topher eyes…

[crosstalk]

Aditya: I’m not being sarcastic about that.

Cate: No.

Aditya: It’s generally saying good luck with that. It’s interesting. I mean, it’s started off as something that Topher just wanted to create a space for people to say something. And there’s a lot of people. I know from where I come, I think there must be like what? Fifty or sixty? I don’t know. Forty essays from India? I’m not sure.

Topher: Yeah.

Aditya: Probably around… It’s still interesting to see earlier on when I was reading essays, it was usually all the people I knew. I had met them somewhere or I knew about them or something like that. And now, I often don’t know the people who are writing on HeroPress and they’re from India. So it’s really nice. It’s really something good.

Topher: I have an impression that I don’t know is right or not. I feel like India is a lot more involved in WordPress than they were in 2015. Is that right? Maybe more on the community. Maybe not so much WordPress, the technology, but just the community.

Aditya: Well, there’s a couple of things that are sort of the larger issues at hand. One of them is that India generally has, historically a better view of open source or open licenses, or considering our colonial past, a lot of that was done through tariffs. And it was not done through conquest. It was done through tariffs and closed sourcing. Sometimes our Indian technology are native technology.

So yeah, I mean, there is historically been always like a social acceptance of an open systems or open standards of world, as we call it. Which is not true for the world. But at least in tech, that thing is catching on. I mean, in India, we think of it more as that part rather than of maybe in the West, where it’s more about personal freedom and freedom of expression. But here it’s more about those things.

Along with that, I think the barriers are a lot less, I mean, India is a very young country. I think half of India’s population is younger than I am. So something like 40% of them are younger than 30. So essentially, India is a very young country, which is having a lot of people coming out of colleges and looking at careers in terms of finding their way around in the internet, on the internet, in publishing in all those places.

I mean, just an observation, maybe probably true, but young people tend to bring in a lot more energy and ready to take a lot more risks in terms of doing new things, or just doing something without even wondering if it will fail or not. And I think that’s something that is… And the WordPress ecosystem in India, essentially are very, very young. Most of them are just out of their teens.

Topher: Yeah, kids.

Aditya: Yeah. Most of them are kids. That’s probably why they’re much more active in the community side of things. Because the technical side is slightly less accessible. Because at times, it’s slightly less accessible. You need to communicate in English, you need to write a proposal, you need to do a lot of those things. And as I said, it is a barrier. I mean, very often I work with somebody and I get this feedback from some of my friends that it was quite easy to just write a [unintelligible 00:44:52] and a proposal. Like, if you know how to code you probably can do this also. It’s not a big deal.

So I think most people do feel scared of getting involved in technical ideas and contributing technically in terms of core and all that, though there are a lot of core patches done by Indians. There are quite a lot of core that’s done by Indians, but not as many regular core contributors from India, at least at this point of time. Regular as in somebody who’s taken care of an entire feature or something like that.

Topher: Right, yeah.

Cate: That’s really fascinating.

Topher: Yeah.

Aditya: That’s something maybe the younger folks can take on. And because it’s open-source, it’s easy to get started with. So a lot of the learning is free and easy to access. I mean, I was just talking about this to somebody that the LinkedIn Learning, when they acquired Lynda, that’s about… I think it’s about $15 per month, the pricing, which is quite expensive for let’s say somebody who is 21, 22 years old. So to learn slightly more complex things, to spend that extra amount of money, especially when it’s… That’s slightly difficult. So a lot of people get into WordPress because it’s just easy to enter into.

Topher: Sure.

Cate: Yeah. Those economic barriers can be just a real problem that we don’t realize. It depends on-

Aditya: Also the economic barrier is one part. But I think people would pay for something if they knew that it would give them something in return. And very often, a lot of things on the internet are pretty useless, even though they’re charged.

Topher: Yes.

Cate: Yes, that’s very true.

Aditya: Especially, you know, they’re charged at times. I mean, that is a barrier that people don’t want to spend those thousand bucks here.

Cate: Okay, exactly.

Topher: Yeah. All right. We’ve been talking for a long time now, relatively speaking.

Cate: And it was great.

Topher: And it is time to wrap it up. We’ll do the outro here real quick.

Cate: So thank you so much for being with us. We do really appreciate it, spending your evening here.

Aditya: Thanks, guys. It was nice getting to know you-

Cate: to know you too.

Aditya: And nice catching up with you. It was fun.

Topher: All right. This has been an episode of Hallway Chats, a part of the HeroPress Network. Your hosts are Cate and Topher. We’d like to thank Sophia for the music, and Nexcess for hosting our network. If you liked the episode, please subscribe and mention us on social media.