We usually interview WordPress experts, entrepreneurs, and developers. Today, our guest is not only a WordPress lover but also love extreme air sports.
Cloudways: Welcome to Cloudways Fabio! Let’s start by listening to your interesting and thrilling story. Please tell us how did you start and what did you want to be when you are still a kid?
Fabio: Since I was a small kid (around 2 or 3 years old) my dreams were with the amplitude of the space: I was a kid of the earth looking to the sky. All my dreams were about flying, floating on the vast and infinite space and being able to overcome gravity.
I’ve managed to learn paragliding when I was 21 years old, in 1996. In 2000 I became the first Brazilian professional acrobatic paragliding pilot, and I have been competing for the world acrobatic pilots ranking – WAPR – of the International Airsports Federation – FAI – and got some nice rankings like 4th and 5th places on competitions of the international paragliding aerobatics circuit, ending that season with a nice 12th general place on that Ranking in 2004.
I’ve stopped competing in 2007 because my passion is to fly, not to compete. Competing is a very stressing environment, every competitor trying to beat the others. I’ve started skydiving in 2011 and some BASE jumping in 2012 when I had the turn-point of my life: I had a very grave accident in 2012 practicing BASE jump, one of the types that most people don’t survive. I have survived, but with severe damage on my lower limbs.
In 2013 after 5 surgeries, I’ve realized that my right foot would not to be any longer useful: I would have to use crutches for the rest of my life. And worse, I would have to stop doing acro paragliding and skydiving, which are my real love in this life. In one hand I could keep my foot but would have to abandon the love of my life. On the other, I could give up on my foot but would be able to keep going with my life in the way I’ve been living it. So I took the very hard decision of amputating my right foot. No regrets here at all.
After 6 months of the amputation I was back flying a paraglider, 4 months later paragliding videos I was back doing my acrobatic paragliding maneuvers, and another year I was back to skydive. In 2018 I’ve moved myself to live at the place I was dreaming for nearly 15 years, Organyà in Catalunya (north Spain), and life goes on the way I’ve planned and worked very hard to build my lifestyle.
Cloudways: It is thrilling to watch your paragliding videos and the stunts you perform amid air. It must have required a lot of practice and hard work. Please share some tips and insights with our readers who want to get started.
Fabio: Like anything in life, its all about the 3 key-elements: equipment, technique, and practice. Paragliding teaches me a lot about life in general, like learning to wait until the right moment for things to happen, dedicate effort on learning the techniques and practicing as much as possible to achieve the results we’re aiming in any project. To start paragliding it’s important to take a proper course with an instructor or a paragliding school and practice a lot, as much as you possibly can during your free time. It takes longer to become a good pilot, but like anything in life, the results are based on proper equipment, technique, and lots of practice.
Like any other flying activity, we have to stand at the security point: crossing that line can be quite dangerous, so it’s very important to be responsible and conscious, develop a solid situational awareness, and always trust and follow the lead of your instructor or more experienced pilots. The experience comes with time and practice, be patient and give time to every learning to become solid, which only comes with the years. To fly is the expression of freedom, try it!
Cloudways: Few are able to pursue their dreams and very few are able to turn them into a profession. What inspired you to be an instructor and what kind of services do you offer to your students?
Fabio: I think it’s about to love something in a way that it plays an important role in your life, as flying plays on my life. My students use to say that my love for flying is visible in my eyes as soon as I start talking about, touching the equipment or just thinking about it. In 2002 I became advanced paragliding instructor and developed my own safety training system, which I call Fly Yoga because I use meditational techniques to calm and train our brains and spirits, promoting a healthy learning environment in which the technique can raise without incidents.
I can teach anyone to paraglide, including foot-amputees, and I can bring any motivated mid-level person to become a good paraglider pilot. My training system teaches paragliding safety by studying and practicing 6 simple exercises, which can bring anyone to really master the flying of a paraglider or a parachute – also called ram-air wings because they maintain their shape by inflating and keeping an internal pressure of air instead of having any rigid structure. I can even teach acrobatics to pilots who have passed all prior levels – learning, safety, advanced.
Cloudways: Extreme sports like Paragliding is considered to be dangerous. Please share one instance in which you felt you went too far and how did it affect your performance later?
Fabio: To live is dangerous. Paragliding can be very safe if we follow all safety measurements, respect the laws of physics and learn to understand the air movements. Isn’t difficult, just needs time and practice, and trusting the instructors and well-known, experienced pilots are the key. I’ve gone definitely too far when I had my BASE accident, and I’m happy and humbled to be alive. On the ultimate scenario, it turned me a better person, more selfless and focused on helping others to find their way to happiness. Working with things we love is the only way to go.
Cloudways: Let’s talk about the other side of your story 🙂 How and when did you first start using WordPress? What challenges did you face while starting out?
Fabio: I’ve ended my University Degree (Bachelor in Social Communications with a license in Journalism) by the end of 1999, and my graduation project was an HTML website, all made by myself. Was the second-ever website on my college at that time and I was approved with an honor 95% proficiency. Since then I’ve continued learning and got my hands on my first PHP CMS with Mambo (later changed to Joomla) in 2004, on which I’ve been deploying a few websites of my own, with different domains for different subjects.
I’ve seen WordPress first time around 2009 and first-used it in 2010 when WordPress 3.x came along. I think this was the first version that WordPress started to set itself as the future for web development: PHP made “simple”, I mean, we could finally have a PHP website running without the need to be an actual PHP code-writer. By the end of 2015, I’ve started to develop my actual website – WP 4.3 “Billie” – to which I’ve imported my other websites and made it one single WordPress site, that’s actually the biggest ram-air wings contents in Portuguese.
The first challenge was to import all my 5 websites and domains into a single WordPress site and then, of course, learning to implement each of the features I wanted to have on it. I’ve also used my personal website as a proving ground to learn how to implement diverse features over WordPress I have on my site – forums, LMS, e-commerce, and memberships. This way I’ve managed to become quite good in deploying WordPress, WP Multisite, WP Multi Network, WooCommerce stores and Paid Memberships Pro membership sites.
I still do not write code, and that’s what keeps me in love with WordPress and the community: I can consult a few rock-solid sources to solve pretty much any need I have in terms of developing new solutions for my needs and my clients. Of course, I keep learning, so today I can find and debug errors in plugins and the theme I use for my sites and my client’s sites, make a little of auditing on the file structure and key-files on WP installs, and report bugs to developers.
Cloudways: You have also participated in several translation projects. Please tell us a little about them.
Fabio: My University Degree allows me to translate to Brazilian Portuguese from any language I’m capable of having a full understanding of the text. I translate from English, French, Spanish, Italian, and Catalan. Of course, I’ve started with a paragliding book back in 2002, which helped me to pay the costs of my first acrobatic competition season that year.
The book Parapente Iniciação was translated from the original Spanish, hired by the author. It was key to my instructor’s formation and helped me to develop the Fly Yoga training system, which has already been learned by nearly a hundred pilots since then. The first edition of the book is currently out-of-stock, and we’re waiting for the second edition to be released.
In 2019 I was hired to translate a book focused on IT managers to boost the execution of their IT projects portfolios, both in time and on better managing costs and human resources aiming the execution of their projects. This book is a Brazilian Portuguese Kindle version from the original book in American English.
On WordPress, since I’ve started my website I had to learn to translate .pot files to make .po/.mo files for pt-br. I’ve translated pretty much all plugins I have on my site, including the theme I use and its page builder, also the new version of the theme with header/footer builder. I translate pro bono for some WP plugins, and some of the developers grant me free licenses for their plugins so I can keep as plugin translation editor (PTE) for them. A few examples:
- WP Rocket Cache – PTE at Transifex
- WP Multi Network – PTE at WordPress.org
- WP Cron Cleaner – PTE at WordPress.org
- Advanced WordPress Reset – PTE at WordPress.org
- Advanced Database Cleaner – PTE at WordPress.org
- Paid Memberships Pro & Add-Ons – PTE at WordPress.org
- WooCommerce Easy Booking System – PTE at WordPress.org
Cloudways: You use WordPress personally and have also written tutorials on the subject. Do you have plans to pursue WordPress as a career?
Fabio: More than anything, I think there’s a great community feeling here. I learn things for my own use or to help some of my clients, but I also love to share what I learn. So, more than the pursuit of a WordPress career, I see as a road to be paved: I dream of having some income from WordPress, but the real pursuit is to learn, understand more, share my learning with other fellow WP users with the same issues. If at the end this turns to be a career, will be pretty much my style: learning by doing, doing by learning.
A good example was my learnings about WordPress Multi-Network: I’ve been trying a SaaS business model using it. So I’ve spent nearly 2 years learning pretty much everything about it: how to make it work, all the culprits of having multiple Multisites under a single WP install. I can see the power of the Multi-Network, but I think the server infrastructure isn’t yet ready
I’m sure its time will come when servers become more powerful and we have DB sharding for different geolocation areas and VersionPress becomes current and 100% compatible with all themes and plugins. But mainly is about how we can manage to have all those different caching systems working properly together. Cache plugins leverage wp-config.php so it’s complicated to have multiple cache layers working fine under Multi Networks. Time will tell.
Cloudways: Being a Clodways customer, what benefits do you get using a managed cloud hosting solution as compared to unmanaged or shared hosting?
Fabio: Cloudways has completely changed my game with WordPress. I started looking for faster servers since my sites were in shared hosting, too slow and many problems. Also, at any issue I would be waiting for days – sometimes weeks – before I could have it solved. I’ve spent one-year learning and deploying my own AWS server, but it was taking me all day long to perform simple tasks like a backup WordPress, upgrading infrastructure… I was spending 10 hours/day…
Then in 2018, I’ve decided that I couldn’t stand any longer working so many hours for such low performance. I don’t like Terminal despite I know how to use it. I have some knowledge on Unix and Linux, but to set up a server was so time-consuming! On Cloudways I deploy and setup a server with a WordPress site in about 15 minutes, against days (and nights) over terminal.
So there’s no way to not fall in love with Cloudways Managed Hosting Platform. The support staff is always there to help, and my issue-solving-timeframe came from days to minutes. After I’ve learned to use it, it’s like a second-nature: I’m now a super happy Server DevOps who can spend most of my time working or enjoying life, instead of suffering on a Terminal window.
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Cloudways: What resources/tutorials/blogs/ebooks do you recommend to a WordPress user or flying enthusiast like myself?
Fabio: I frequently use the most known WordPress resources to find information and solve issues, but my one-stop is the Cloudways Live Chat. I also had good help from the kind supporters at WPMU DEV, who helped me finding and debugging issues. As DNS Services I recommend DNS Made Easy (or their new service Constellix), and for registering and managing my domains I use NameCheap, wich proven to have good prices and outstanding support.
Cloudways: Finally, for our readers please share your favorite picture taken up in the air.
Fabio:
Ibad Ur Rehman
Ibad Ur Rehman is a WordPress Community Manager at Cloudways. He likes to explore the latest open-source technologies and to interact with different communities. In his free time, he likes to read, watch a series or fly his favorite Cessna 172SP in X Plane 11 flight simulator.
