We are proud to announce that we are able to hold a contributors day on premises. That’s right the we will be conducting the this at the Marriott in the the Staten Island Room (see the map below) on Friday, October 30th. Because space is limited and you must register separately for this portion of the event, however there is absolutely no additional charge, so don’t be fooled by those imitators on StubHub.
Now that the speaker announcements are done it’s time to get your tickets so head on over to the Tickets Page to order your tickets for WCNYC 2015.
Round six of WordCamp NYC 2015 speaker announcements
| Panel: Information architecture for the modern age | |
 Marguerite Halley is a digital content strategist at Washington University in St. Louis and a usability/content strategy consultant for nonprofits. She has been working in digital content and design for universities and nonprofits throughout her career. She is passionate about creating digital experiences that users enjoy using. |
 Becky is an independent front-end developer specializing in custom WordPress themes and project management. She is Chicago native and is very active in the WordPress community there, including helping with WordCamp Chicago and running one of its most active meetups. |
 Matt Johnson is co-founder and CTO of Alley Interactive, a full-service digital agency in New York City that works with large media companies and non-profit organizations, where he leads company technology strategy and outreach to the open source community. He lives in Brooklyn, New York. |
 Taylor McCaslin is a Technical Product Manager living in Austin, Texas. He currently works at WP Engine, a managed hosting platform for websites and apps built with WordPress. Taylor speaks at WordCamps and WordPress events around the country. WordPress has been Taylor’s platform of choice for over 5 years. |
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Ryan has been designing and coding webpages for 14 years and has specialized in WordPress custom theme design and development, plugins and other customizations. His skills include HTML, CSS, Javascript, PHP and MySQL. He specializes in cross-disciplinary and cross-platform design centered around creating rich and engaging user experiences and has deep technical knowledge of SEO back-end assessment and implementation. |
We are working diligently to ensure that WordCamp NYC 2015 will have something for everyone!
Brace yourselves for round five of WordCamp NYC 2015 speaker announcements
 Productize your WordPress service Jason provides design and marketing agencies as well as established small businesses monthly development resources for their WordPress websites. Helping them achieve short and long term goals for their business through their websites by being their partner in code. |
 Be a Customer Service Superstar by Customizing WP-Admin Sarah is a principal and technical lead at shines & jecker labs, a web development firm. Her 17 years in web development allow her to empathetically explain technical components to non-geeks so they understand what they’re making a decision about. Behind the scenes, she’s programming and managing the servers. With clients, she starts conversations with her good-humored, energetic approach and brings pragmatic new ideas to the table while keeping client budgets and goals in check. She adores working with WordPress. |
 Typography, Web Fonts & Your Site Jen is a principal and the creative director of shines & jecker labs, a web development firm in Portland, Maine. She has over 12 years of experience in digital design, doing everything from creating original graphic design to writing CSS. Her strength is her ability to master the latest technologies quickly to provide clients with modern, current designs. Jen spends her free time reading, running, and serving on the board for her local library. |
 Intro to the Command Line for Designers Lauren is a front end designer and developer for LBDesign, and a WordPress and JavaScript/jQuery with the Women’s Coding Collective. |
 WordPress, YOUR World, YOUR Data Jack built his first commercial website in 1999 and has been hacking up WordPress since “Stan Getz” (2.2). Jack is a proud Core contributor. One claim to fame he has, Jack built a plugin live at a WordCamp …with Matt Mullenweg in the audience. When he’s not hanging out with a triceratops, Jack manages the web presence and a team of developers for ISDA, a financial organization in Midtown. |
 Content Architecture in WordPress AKA “You Can DO That?!” Jamie is a Web Architect at OhmzTech, a Milwaukee-based custom application and website development firm. She has a background in Information Architecture, Web Development and UX design, but her true calling is having way too much fun doing data and content modeling for all the interesting projects that come her way. She still swears by HAND DRAWN ON PAPER brainstorms, architectures, and wireframes! |
 The Infuriating Four: The 4 Most-common WordPress Site Problems (and How to Avoid Them) Rami Abraham is a developer lead at WebDevStudios / Maintainn. He’s been building with WordPress since version 2.8, with a heavy focus in plugin development, javascript, WebGL, and SCSS. Prior to that, he worked in a few lead roles at traditional web agencies, with a focus in php and javascript application development. He enjoys working with an unending variety of frameworks, SVG animation, and is part of the AffiliateWP.com support team after hours. |
 Data planning and architecture for a better client relationship and smoother development Lindsay has been working as a web designer and developer professionally for the last 7 years and with WordPress professionally for the last 6 years. She currently run her own design and development studio and have worked with both national corporations and small businesses on a wide variety of different types of projects. |
 WordPress for Government Cameron pioneered the blog format in the late 1990s. He’s built web sites for presidential candidates, the U.S. Army, the World Economic Forum and led the migration of 70+ web sites from a proprietary SaaS to WordPress for NJ’s largest public school district. He’s now migrating all 14,000+ U.S. public school districts to WordPress, saving millions of taxpayer dollars. He hails from Northern Michigan and currently lives outside of NYC with his family. |
Brace yourselves for round four of WordCamp NYC 2015 speaker announcements
 More Core Functions You (Maybe) Don’t Know Exist Nicole is a software developer at Alley Interactive, a full-service digital agency focused on news media, where she develops WordPress sites for high profile clients such as Digiday and The New York Post. She also contributes to WordPress as part of the Documentation Team, and has spoken at Detroit area meetups and several WordCamps across the U.S. and Canada. |
 Fighting Censorship with WordPress John is an Enterprise Support Specialist at WP Engine in Austin, Texas. He supports premium and enterprise customers’ wide array of issues and also offers global insight to those trying to reach difficult overseas web markets. John also spent the better part of four and a half years living Singapore, South Korea and China, where he worked as a technical editor, writer, teacher and web developer before coming back to the U.S. |
 WordPress Accessibility: The fundamentals of Web Accessibility Jordan Quintal is a seasoned WordPress Developer, Contributor and Community Member with over 10 years of Web Development experience. He is currently the President of GeniusMedia, the Founder of AgentAccelerate, as well as a Freelancer through JordanQ.ca. Jordan is also a huge Web Accessibility advocate and very active in various #a11y Communities. He has presented and attended dozens of Meetups, Camps, and Conferences across Canada and the U.S. |
 Themes That Make You Go Hmm: Theme Strategies for Designers Elana is the Founder and Creative Director at Design Is Yummy, a graphic design studio based in Montreal, Quebec. She has been passionately communicating brand messaging across web and print mediums for over a decade. Elana brings insight into using WordPress to build profitable websites from the perspective of a designer, project manager, former freelancer and studio owner. She eats way too much chocolate and still believes high fives are cool. |
 Immaculate Consternation Alex is the Agency Principle at DigiSavvy and is also a WordPress developer with 10+ years experience developing solutions for the web. He can’t resist a Hendricks or a good pair of running shoes. |
 Escape from New York Tom work’s his days as a VIP Wrangler at WordPress.com VIP for Automattic. He is also a community moderator at WordPress Stack Exchange, project lead for the WordPress The Right Way ebook, open-source developer via GitHub, and occasional conference speaker. You can follow Tom on Twitter. |
 WP-CLI: Save Time by Managing WordPress from the Command Line Shawn has been developing web applications for the past 20 years. He is currently the Chief Technology Officer at Actionable Books, overseeing a suite of web sites all built in WordPress. A lifelong computer geek, he has experience building applications for clients in government, non-profit and the private sector in both Canada and the United States. Outside of the office, Shawn can be found on the ski hills, at a campground, or occasionally packing a dance floor as a DJ. |
 Building and Leveraging Your Reputation Aaron has over fifteen years of web development experience. He has been a regular contributor to WordPress for the last eight years, and even co-lead the WordPress 3.6 release. He’s committed to writing quality code that is both fast and scalable, and has a knack for translating ideas and goals into functional sites. Aaron has worked with clients ranging from small local businesses to Google, Yahoo, Disney, and Harvard. |
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Multilingual Content and WordPress  Élise rediscovered the pleasure of writing thanks to WordPress and has been blogging (in French!) for more than 6 years. She is a founding partner at Desaulniers Simard, a boutique consulting firm based in Montréal, Québec, Canada. She has trained hundreds of people to use WordPress and has developed dozens of sites. She has been a speaker at all WordCamp Montréal conferences since 2012 and she thinks multilingual sites are to blame for her grey hair.
 Alexandre built his first of many websites in 1998. His browser of choice was Netscape 2.02 and he really liked BBEdit. Since 2009, Alexandre Simard has been making a living as an independent WordPress developer. He has spoken at (almost) all WordCamp Montréal editions. In 2014, he founded Desaulniers Simard with Élise Desaulniers. |
Once again we are working our way through all of the fantastic speaker proposals. While the selection process is still active, we’re excited to have confirmed our third group of speakers WordCamp NYC 2015.
As before you may recognize some of the names from around the WordPress community; others may be new to you.
 Community Spark: How to start a discussion on community engagement. Winstina Hughes is a Master of City and Regional Planning candidate at Rutgers University. She received a B.A. in Planning and Public Policy from Rutgers. Her focus is transit-oriented development (TOD). She’s written about real estate development and transportation for hyper local news, and maintains her own WordPress.com blog on suburban planning and community engagement in the town she lives. Winstina bleeds scarlet, loves hip-hop, and adores WordPress software. |
 WordPress Hooks, Actions and Filters Oh My! David began building HTML websites in high school, breaking in programming classes as they appeared at his school. PHP came shortly after, with the mind blowing ability to make websites more than static entities. Later, early in 2008, David discovered WordPress and has been a proselytizer ever since. As lead organizer of WordCamp Orlando, David regularly speaks, mentors, teaches and trains on best practices with WordPress. |
 Creating Custom RESTful APIs The WordPress Way. Josh, is the owner of, and a developer for CalderaWP, makers of fine WordPress plugins including URL Builder, the visual editor for WordPress permalinks and Caldera Forms, a drag and drop, responsive form builder. He is also a weekly contributor to Torque Magazine, and the community manager and contributing developer for Pods. |
 Make The Logo Bigger: Becoming The Client Your Developer Loves. Michelle is an independent graphic designer, Chicago born and raised, living in Minneapolis. She was formally schooled in design including print, branding, packaging, etc., with additional education in Psychology and Sociology, all tying together in a love of How To Solve Problems. Lately she has been specializing in WordPress websites, infographics, and high-end presentations for her clients. She loves the WordPress community and speaks/volunteers/organizes at WordCamps and events around the country. |
 Lessons from Science Fiction and Fantasy we can use in creating websites. Aaron Jorbin is a polyhistoric man of the web. Currently Technical Architect on the Conde Nast Platform Team and a WordPress Core Committer, he works to improve developer happiness and is dedicated to making the internet usable and enjoyable by everyone. |
 WP-CLI: Oh, the possibilities! Terell is an Operations Engineer at WP Engine (a managed WordPress hosting provider based out of Austin, Texas), a Texas native, and most importantly, a WordPress fanboy. Terell has been using WordPress since 2.7 and is consistently blown away at how it has evolved into much more than a blogging platform since its inception. His day-to-day job is to ensure customer happiness by optimizing support processes and providing technical leadership throughout the WP Engine organization. |
 Modernizing WordPress Search with Elasticsearch. Taylor Lovett is the Director of Engineering at 10up, one of the biggest WordPress centric agencies in the world. Having been involved with WordPress since 2007, he has contributed to WordPress core, authored popular plugins (downloaded hundreds of thousands of times), and spoken at many conferences across multiple continents. |
 Test-Driven Rewrite Rules. Matthew Boynes is a partner at Alley Interactive, where he’s worked on sites such as the Kaiser Family Foundation and the New York Post. The only thing Matt loves more than solving complex problems with WordPress is helping others use and develop with WordPress. When he’s not coding, you’ll often find Matt engaged in some outdoor activity like hiking or skiing. |
 Clear CTAs and the danger of giving users too many options Mendel is an intrapreneurial change-maker, developer, speaker, and teacher. He loves the outdoors, so you’ll usually find him hittin’ the trails between tech events and code-slinging. As a GoDaddy Evangelist, he spends most of his time hanging out with developers, designers, entrepreneurs, and creative people all around the world to make sure their opinions and suggestions are heard. |
| Panel: Modern Style and Design for WordPress in 2015 | |
 Mel Choyce is a Design Engineer at Automattic and WordPress core contributor. She loves big type, cold brew coffee, and printmaking. |
 Sarah Whinnem is a designer and engineer at Betterment, finding ways to make financial data interesting. In her off hours she’s inspired by print design, tattoos, and crafting the perfect margarita. |
 Michael is a designer at Automattic, the makers of WordPress.com. He may be a tad obsessed with CSS (especially Sass) and beautiful typography. He contributes to WordPress Core, Jetpack, CSS Chassis, and WordPress.com. You can follow him on twitter @michaelarestad. |
 Mikel is a 20+yr Technology Leader, USCG Veteran, Brewer of beer, Coffee Evangelist and currently the Director of WordPress Development at Reader’s Digest behind http://rd.com. He is also a plugin author and a part time writer for Huffington Post, Jafdip, Bit Rebels and BSD News. |
We are working diligently to ensure that WordCamp NYC 2015 will have something for everyone!
Once again we are working our way through all of the fantastic speaker proposals. While the selection process is still active, we’re excited to have confirmed our second group of speakersWordCamp NYC 2015.
As before you may recognize some of the names from around the WordPress community, others may be new to you.
 Get More Out of Gravity Forms WordPress Developer for the MarkNet Group in New York where I enjoy creating websites for a large range of clients. She loves the WordPress community and strongly support their “give back” philosophy and is a co-organizer of the WordPress Westchester Meetup Group. Laura also has a blog full of free tutorials at WPDecoder.com. I’m passionate about teaching classes, training people to use WordPress and spreading the WordPress love. |
 War Room Collaboration Across the Internet Canyon Anthony D Paul an interaction designer, researcher, and prototyper. By night, you’ll find me spread across the Mid-Atlantic meetup scenes—evangelizing IA/UX, accessibility, and a variety of open source dev projects. When I’m not doing responsible adult things, I grow the world’s hottest chili peppers, then tear gas my household while making hot sauce. |
 Community Consultation Creates Compelling Content Chrissie Pollock worked as a freelance professional writer for nearly two decades and is still active in a writing group. Now she works for Automattic as a Happiness Engineer, helping people set up sites and drawing readers to them. She also guides users through Writing 101, Blogging 101 and other courses at WordPress.com’s online Blogging University. Chrissie enjoys being a co-organizer for a local WordPress meetup. One of her favorite parts of working with WordPress is tapping into its vibrant community. |
 SEO for WordPress Melissa Cahill is the owner of Panoptic Online Marketing, LLC, a New York City-based agency providing integrated marketing solutions for small businesses seeking to leverage their online presence through SEO, SEM, paid search advertising, email, social media and SMS (text message) marketing. She is also a founding member of the Tadpole Collective. |
 The Enterprise Disconnect: WordPress and the Complexity of Simplicity After a first career as an academic, John‘s been working in digital agencies for the last 15 years, and with WordPress for the last 8. He has been one of the organizers for WordCamp Boston since 2010, and is the CEO of 10up. He grew up in Richfield, MN but now lives in Salem MA with his wife and dogs. He blog is Open Parenthesis. |
 Using WordPress to Bridge Digital Divides Josepha comes from a long line of writers and was raised to be a life-long learner. She has a passion for language and storycrafting, a skill she practices on starsandthemoon.com. Josepha has over a decade of experience using SEO, data analysis, and content marketing to bring success and visibility to clients all over the world. Since 2010 she’s been working in her hometown of Kansas City to increase digital literacy and get more women in technology. Josepha works at Automattic as a community organizer for the WordPress open source project. |
 Gone in 900 Seconds Tom Ransom (San Francisco, CA) is a freelance WordPress developer. Clients include web development agencies around the world, small businesses with unique application requirements, a few Fortune 500 companies and a celebrity or two along the way. Tom has been developing applications for small business since mini-computers were the size of a small desk. |
 Shared Terms of Endearment: An Annotated History of the WordPress Taxonomy Component Boone Gorges is a member of the WordPress core team and a lead developer for BuddyPress. He is a freelance plugin developer and WordPress consultant. He was a New Yorker until the rent got too damn high, and now he lives in Chicago. |
 Designing Websites for Human Beings Morten Rand-Hendriksen built his first website in 1997 and has used the web to further communication between people ever since. He’s a staff author with lynda.com at LinkedIn where he has published 60+ courses on WordPress and front-end development. His WordPress Essential Training course has been viewed by over 100,000 people. Morten also teaches web design and development at Emily Carr University of Art and Design and is a popular guest lecturer and lecturer at schools, events, and conferences. |
We are working diligently to ensure that WordCamp NYC 2015 will have something for everyone!
WordCamp NYC is getting closer, and we’re working our way through all of the fantastic speaker proposals. While the selection process is still active, we’re excited to have confirmed our first group of speakers.
You may recognize some of the names from around the WordPress community, others will be new to you.
 Empowering Users: Modifying the Admin Experience Beth is web developer and co-representative of the WordPress Training Team, an active member of the WordPress TV team, a co-organizer of the WordPress DC Meetup, and am involved with organizing the DCFemTech coalition in Washington, DC. |
 Get your WordPress Site in Shape – a Case Study Hristo has been working for SiteGround as a WordPress expert for more than seven years now. He’s done it all: supported WordPress clients, built websites, designed WordPress themes. |
 Your Website Is Killing Your Business Kathy is a marketing communications professional, specializing in digital marketing and business development. |
 Responsible Premium Theme Selection Lara Schenck is an independent web consultant and teacher in New York City. |
 Learning through Stealing: How to become better at your craft Sara is Partner and Creative Director at Range. She loves design, typography, user experience, and art. She loves open source, her pets, traveling, and WordPress. |
 WordPress 4.4 and Beyond Scott is a Sr. Software Engineer at The New York Times on the Interactive News Team. He is a Core Developer of WordPress and the Release Lead for WordPress 4.4. |
 Providing Inline Help for a Great User Experience. Steve is the CEO of SlipFire, a New York City based WordPress development studio, and a partner in Piklist. |
 Creating March Madness-style Brackets in WordPress Tom is a Principal Software Developer at Alley Interactive where he focuses on big media. |
We’ll be posting more speaker announcements as fast as we can. We promise to have something for everyone!
The team would like to thank everyone who took the time to submit a proposal. The response was, to say the least, overwhelming as we received 200+ submissions and are working diligently to vet each and every one.
Some of the proposals need adjustments before we can make final selections, so we will be sending out a follow-up questionnaire to those of you that we’d like to see more information from to help us complete the vetting process.
We kindly ask that all speakers who receive a follow-up request answer quickly so we can make final selections and announcements as soon as possible. Failure to respond within the requested time frame may result in your proposal being passed over.
Now that the call has closed the team will begin the difficult task of evaluating every submission to craft a well rounded WordCamp. The entire team has pledged to make this a quick process so that we can start announcing very soon.
WordCamp NYC 2015 is over. Check out the next edition!
