Meet Ivan Yordanov – an Enterprise Hosting Infrastructure Architect at SiteGround.
What was your motivation to become a speaker at WordCamp Prague 2020?
I think that this will be a great event and I can’t wait to see you guys there. I have never been to Prague before, and having the chance to visit the city affected my decision a lot as well if I should be honest. I am sure that this would be an exciting experience for me to get familiar with the WordPress community there and meet a lot of interesting people that share the same passion as me – working with WordPress.
What will be your talk about? Who can benefit the most from your session?
My talk is about IT automation of tasks related to managing WordPress applications. I think that’s very useful for everyone involved with maintaining one or more WordPress sites and for those performing similar actions on their installations daily. No matter if it is upgrading/installing/uninstalling plugins and themes, making deployments, manipulating files, or running WP-CLI commands – all these things can be automated. This way, we can save our time and pay attention to more critical tasks and avoid doing the same things multiple times in our day-to-day tasks. I would say that the talk is suitable for a little bit more technical people, but of course, everyone who is interested in that talk is welcome.
What are a few takeaways that attendees will get from your talk?
I think that the most useful thing for attendees will be learning how to identify when automation is needed and how it can be performed. From my experience, I’d say that automating things can help you save a lot of time, which makes your daily job a lot more interesting. You can use that time to learn new things and improve your skills instead of wasting it to go through similar tasks over and over again.
What is your role at SiteGround? If I’m not mistaken, you’ve also worked in the senior technical support team. How did/do you enjoy this experience? What do you do nowadays?
Yes, I’ve been working as a Senior Supervisor for the Technical Support team. In fact, for my years at the company (almost 6), I had quite a lot of different and interesting tasks. This helped me learn to work with various technologies and develop my technical skills not only when it comes to WordPress but in regards to the web hosting industry overall. That’s something I appreciate. I enjoy working at SiteGround, and I look forward to being part of the SiteGround family for many more years to come, hopefully. 🙂
Right now, I am part of the Enterprise Hosting team, where we design, build and maintain a highly available, multi-server infrastructures for our biggest clients – sites with millions of views daily, heavy traffic and complex technologies. In fact, that’s how I learned what Ansible is and how helpful it is.
You have spoken at many different WordCamps recently – what do you enjoy about it the most, what is your motivation?
Actually, my first-ever WordCamp talk took place in August 2019 in Singapore, and I loved the experience. I’ve been working with WordPress for so many years, and I was so used to being the person behind the screen. Of course, this is also a way to share my knowledge with the people working in the same industry as me. Having the chance to talk with the attendees in person, share my ideas, and discuss how we can make our WordPress-related jobs easier or more interesting is quite different for me too.
So after my first talk, I got very positive feedback, and I thought: “Hey, it’s not that bad, I think I would do it again!” So I continued applying for speaking to events that seemed interesting to me. I even started thinking about other topics I can talk about at future events, so I still believe that there is something I can give to the community in terms of knowledge, ideas, and best practices.
To what extent is log-driven development used in SiteGround, and in your daily work?
This is a very useful approach to debug or even prevent issues, and we’re using it, yes. I think that this is something that more people should pay attention to in order to make their work easier. It is definitely something worth mentioning, and I encourage devs to adopt and use that method of development for their applications.
What is your background? What should our attendees know about you?
I’ve been involved in the web hosting industry for the last eight years. I’ve gone from being a sales/chat agent to a position where I work with different technologies and complex infrastructures. So today, I’m more into the technical side of things. Although I’ve never been a developer and I am not so good at coding, I’ve always been able to solve the problems I’ve come across and to address our clients’ needs and expectations or to suggest an improvement to a system/site.
What are you looking forward to WordCamp Prague 2020? Why is that?
As I mentioned, I’m looking forward to meeting the people involved with WordPress in Prague, seeing what they do with WordPress, learning new things, and why not finding people that have similar ideas like me and working together on a project. I’d also love to share with the people I meet more information on what we do at SiteGround, as well.
Have you adopted Gutenberg, the Blocks editor? If yes, do you have a favorite use case for it? If not, why?
I would say that I have a positive opinion about it. I believe that it is a step forward. Sometimes people don’t react well to changes even if they are obvious improvements, just because they are used to something. But after some time, it turns out that such innovations are not bad at all!
For how long have you been using WordPress? And why you’ve chosen WordPress?
I’ve been using WordPress for around five years or so. In my days as Senior Supervisor in the Support team, we’ve had different cases with different applications (including WordPress). I think that everybody could agree that the progress of WordPress is evident – a huge amount of websites on the web are based on it. It gives you the flexibility to create a website, regardless of whether you need a blog, news site, e-commerce, or whatever. It has become a powerful application that addresses problems developers are often dealing with.
How do you feel about the WordPress community? Did you get involved in it?
I like the WordPress community, the people are friendly, and you can always meet someone to have a nice talk with. To be honest, before I started going to conferences, I was not so involved, but now I’m starting to see more and more familiar faces, which is, of course, something I truly enjoy.
What is your favorite tool related to WordPress?
I must say WP-CLI – it’s something that makes things so much easier and more comfortable. If something can be done with WP-CLI, that would definitely be my choice of handling the specific case.
What makes you smile/happy?
Well, that’s easy – summertime, sitting on a beach with a Mojito in my hand, but that’s not possible right now in our geographical location. I’m also a big football fan and Manchester United supporter – a good win for my favorite team would also do the job. But since that is not happening a lot recently as well, I’d say that I will be happy if the people attending my talk find it useful and interesting and if I’m able to help someone by sharing my knowledge and views.
Anything else you want to add?
I want to encourage the attendees to bring their laptops to the talk. I’ve created a GitHub repo and wiki where they can review information about different parts of the talk or review the code as I am speaking. I think it would be easier for them to understand the new things this way.