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.

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.