Sridhar Katakam's Weblog

About

I am a 45-year old guy originally from India now living in Melbourne, Australia.

I finished my Bachelor’s in Industrial Production (similar to Mechanical Engineering) from Vasavi College of Engineering, Hyderabad and went on to study Master’s in Mechanical Engineering in USF, Tampa. However, I did not finish my thesis as that was the time I discovered HTML, CSS and PHP. Being able to instantly see the results of an action (typing code) was truly liberating vs boring and abstract theory. I spent countless hours reading everything I could on how people build websites. I used to work in the university’s bookstore and in an Indian grocery store at that time.

I dabbled with PHPNuke, PostNuke, Typo3, Joomla/Mambo, MediaWiki, Tiki Wiki, Drupal and eventually WordPress. Those were the days when the 3-column Kubrick was all the rage.

After coming back to India I worked as a technical recruiter (night job), then as a Webmaster at SumTotal, then as a UI Design Specialist in SAP Labs, Bangalore.

iThemes was one of the early companies to have released a visual builder for WordPress called simply, iThemes Builder. I became proficient in that and started helping out folks in their forum. Soon after, I became the moderator and was hired by iThemes.

After that, I switched to the Genesis framework by StudioPress and started writing tutorials on it at SridharKatakam.com and later added a membership to it.

After Genesis faded away, I moved to Oxygen builder and started a tutorials membership site at WPDevDesign.com. Relocated with my family to Australia around this time.

When Oxygen seemed to be going nowhere, I switched to Bricks builder and that is what I currently use to build websites. I write tutorials on Bricks at BricksLabs.com.

Some projects I am involved with (in partnership with Gagan Goraya/David Browne) are Oxy Toolbox, OxyExtras, BricksExtras and BricksSections.

While I don’t consider myself a solid PHP developer, I have decent skills (most of them with trial & error) at troubleshooting, putting things together, researching, documenting and helping others.

I built a few WordPress plugins and have some on GitHub.

My interests are Mac software, productivity, automation, and learning programming languages.

Many of us in the field of web development are simply at different stages of the same journey. I might know something you don’t and that’s not because I am smart, but rather because I faced the same problem that you are currently trying to figure out and have already solved it.

Always be learning.