Aaron D. Campbell
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. He’s been called both a coffee snob and a beer snob, but considers both to be compliments. When not buried in code, he enjoys spending time with his wife and son, attending or hosting beer tastings, and reading sci-fi/fantasy books.
Speaker profile: aaroncampbell
Twitter: aaroncampbell
Aaron Jorbin
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. He writes regularly at aaron.jorb.in.
Speaker profile: jorbin
Twitter: aaronjorbin
Alex Vasquez
Alex Vasquez 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.
Speaker profile: DigiSavvy
Twitter: alexjvasquez
Alexandre Simard
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.
Speaker profile: brocheafoin
Twitter: qbert72
Andrew Wikel
“Hey! My name is Andrew, and I am a geek. I’m committed to open source values, and love working with WordPress. I fell in love with WordPress in 2008, and have been working with it in some capacity since then. I am a husband, a father, a WordCamp addict, a coffee snob, lover of things shiny, and a California native in Illinois.”
Anthony D Paul
By day, I’m 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. I’d divulge something funny from my past, but these days the Internet does a better job of surfacing our embarrassing moments; find me anywhere by Googling “anthonydpaul”.
Speaker profile: anthonydpaul
Twitter: anthonydpaul
Becky Davis
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. http://www.meetup.com/Chicago-WordPress-Meetup/ Becky loves training and teaching WordPress as well as gardening, movies and biking. She is especially fond of bars with couches and good whiskey.
Speaker profile: bdgardengirl
Twitter: beckyddesign
Beth Soderberg
Beth Soderberg is a developer, design lover, cat mom, feminist, genealogist, herbivore environmentalist, and politico. Her happy place is where code and design intersect and she is obsessive about clean code, solid design execution, and empowering the user. Beth works as a web developer at CHIEF and in her spare time volunteers with the WordPress Training and TV Teams, the WordPress DC Meetup, and the DCFemTech coalition in Washington, DC.
Speaker profile: bethsoderberg
Twitter: bethsoderberg
Boone Gorges
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.
Speaker profile: boonebgorges
Twitter: boone
Cameron Barrett
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.
Speaker profile: cameronbarrett
Twitter: camworld
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.
Speaker profile: c3zh
Twitter: techiefamily
David Laietta
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.
Speaker profile: davidjlaietta
Twitter: davidlaietta
Elana Rudick
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.
Speaker profile: designisyummy
Twitter: designisyummy
Élise Desaulniers
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.
Speaker profile: elisedesaulniers
Twitter: desa_simard
Eric Andrew Lewis
Eric is a web developer at The New York Times and core contributor. He will also be available at the Happiness Bar during the day if you want hands-on help migrating your site to HTTPS.
Hristo Pandjarov
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. In addition to that he’s author of many online tutorials and guides about WordPress. He’s been fortunate to have his passion for all things WordPress and his job overlap at SiteGround, where he develops and implements various in-house performance boost solutions to help make WordPress websites faster and more secure.
Speaker profile: hristo-sg
Twitter: pandjarov
Jack Reichert
I built my first commercial website in 1999 and have been hacking up WordPress since “Stan Getz” (2.2). I am a proud Core contributor. One claim to fame I have, I built a plugin live at a WordCamp …with Matt Mullenweg in the audience. When I’m not hanging out with a triceratops, I manage the web presence and a team of developers for ISDA, a financial organization in Midtown.
Speaker profile: jackreichert
Twitter: jackreichert
Jamie Schmid
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!
Speaker profile: jamieschmid
Twitter: jamieschmid
Jason Resnick
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.
Topic Background: I picked this topic because it was something that over the past several years I’ve worked on within my business. As a part of the WordPress community and as a part of NYC, I wanted to share my path with those that may be along that same path I was and currently am.
As a developer 5 years ago, when I struck out on my own, I took any and all projects. Then 3 years ago I focused solely on WordPress. About 2 years I decided that I needed to pivot that into a recurring based business, but didn’t want to create a theme or plugin.
Most people ask me how I can sell a development service month over month when the projects are always different? Or they want to know how I manage to do custom work, but sell a service at the same price for everyone. I simply tell them “focus in on the need your clients have and completely own it”.
Speaker profile: rezzz
Twitter: rezzz
Jennifer Ecker
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.
Speaker profile: drjecker
Twitter: drjecker
John Eckman
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.
Speaker profile: johneckman
Twitter: jeckman
John P Gamboa
John P. Gamboa 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.
Speaker profile: jgamboa
Twitter: jgamboa
Jordan Quintal
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.
Speaker profile: Jordan_TheGenius
Twitter: GeniusWebMedia
Josepha Haden
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 .
Speaker profile: chanthaboune
Twitter: josephahaden
Josh Pollock
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.
Speaker profile: Shelob9
Twitter: Josh412
Kathy Argyros
Kathy Argyros is an award-winning marketing communications professional, specializing in digital marketing and business development. With over two decades of proven expertise, Kathy helps businesses build their brand, accelerate sales and increase customer loyalty. Prior to Founder and Chief Consultant of her own marketing firm, Exceller Marketing, Inc., she earned various senior-level marketing positions in multi-billion dollar global corporations.
Speaker profile: kargyros
Twitter: KathyArgyros
Lara Schenck
Lara Schenck is an independent web consultant and teacher in New York City. She teaches front-end development to designers at Pratt Institute, facilitates corporate trainings with Decoded, and organizes private classes and workshops. Lara is a dedicated cocktail enthusiast and grew up on a llama farm outside of Pittsburgh (true story).
Speaker profile: notlaura
Twitter: laras126
Laura Hartwig
I’m a WordPress Developer for the MarkNet Group in New York where I enjoy creating websites for a large range of clients. I continually take courses to stay informed about the latest developments in my field and increase my knowledge. I love the WordPress community and strongly support their “give back” philosophy. That’s why I am a co-organizer of the WordPress Westchester Meetup Group and have 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.
Speaker profile: LauraHartwigDesign
Twitter: LHartwigDesign
Lauren Pittenger
Lauren is a front end designer and developer for LBDesign, and a WordPress and JavaScript/jQuery with the Women’s Coding Collective.
Speaker profile: lepittenger
Twitter: laurenpittenger
Lindsay Branscombe
I have been working as a web designer and developer professionally for the last 7 years and with WordPress professionally for the last 6 years. I currently run my own design and development studio and have worked with both national corporations and small businesses on a wide variety of different types of projects.
In my time doing support in within the WordPress community and my personal experiences with my own projects, I have seen a number of problems arise not as a result of a lack of programming knowledge or a lack of understanding WordPress, but from a lack of data planning. I personally find it fun and interesting to help a developer go “back in time” and find the root of their problem and help them rebuild and refactor so that their end result is more efficient and more eloquent.
Speaker profile: LindsayBSC
Twitter: idiot_girl
Marguerite Halley
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. You’ll often find her surrounded by analytics dashboards and post-it notes, wrestling messes of content into easy-to-use, organized websites. Marguerite enjoys learning about what makes people tick, traveling and photography.
Speaker profile: mhalley
Twitter: mhalley1
Matt Johnson
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. Matt has run the development of many large content sites with,including Capital New York, The New Republic, Jewish Telegraphic Agency, Chalkbeat, Foreign Policy Magazine, and Kveller.com. He lives in Brooklyn, New York.
Speaker profile: xmattus
Twitter: xmatt
Matthew Boynes
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.
Speaker profile: mboynes
Twitter: senyob
Mel Choyce
Melissa Cahill
Melissa Cahill is the owner of Panoptic Online Marketing, a full-service online marketing agency in NYC specializing in organic SEO and content marketing for a variety of business clients. She is also a founding member of Tapdole Collective, a worker-owned entity that provides WordPress/CiviCRM development and support services.
I should be speaking at WordCamp because I can explain technical SEO to non-technical audiences and show WordPress users how to get the most “SEO juice” using freely available tools.
Speaker profile: maggiemel610
Twitter: panoptic_nyc
Mendel Kurland
Hey there, I’m Mendel, an intrapreneurial change-maker, developer, speaker, and teacher.
I love the outdoors, so you’ll usually find me hittin’ the trails between tech events and code-slinging. I’ve also usually got my nose in a cup of single origin, Chemex-brewed coffee. As a GoDaddy Evangelist, I spend most of my time hanging out with developers, designers, entrepreneurs, and creative people all around the world to make sure their opinions and suggestions are heard.
Speaker profile: ifyouwillit
Twitter: ifyouwillit
Michael Arestad
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.
Speaker profile: michael-arestad
Twitter: michaelarestad
Michelle Schulp
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.
Speaker profile: marktimemedia
Twitter: marktimemedia
Mikel King
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.
Speaker profile: vizkr
Twitter: mikelking
Morten Rand-Hendriksen
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. In his spare time he co-organizes the Vancouver WordPress Meetup Group, contributes to WordPress core, and wears out his shoes on a ballroom dance floor.
Speaker profile: mor10
Twitter: mor10
Nicole Arnold
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.
Speaker profile: nlarnold1
Twitter: nlarnold1
Rami Abraham
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.
Recently, zsh changed his life.
An organizer of WordPress Lancaster / WordCamp Lancaster, Rami attends and speaks at a variety of conferences, universities, and meetups.
Speaker profile: ramiabraham
Twitter: ramiabraham
Ryan King
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.
Speaker profile: ryancanhelpyou
Twitter: ryancanhelpyou
Sara Cannon
Sara Cannon is Partner and Creative Director at Range. She loves design, typography, user experience, and art. Sara loves giving talks around the globe on web design, responsive design, web typography, and more. A seasoned designer, Sara has done work for clients such as Disney Publishing and Flickr. She loves open source, her pets, traveling, and WordPress.
Speaker profile: saracannon
Twitter: saracannon
Sarah C. Hines
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
Speaker profile: shineyscooter
Twitter: shinesandjecker
Sarah Whinnem
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.
Speaker profile: MadysonDesigns
Twitter: MadysonDesigns
Scott Taylor
Scott Taylor is a Senior Software Engineer at The New York Times on the Interactive News Team. He is a Core Developer of WordPress and will be the Release Lead for WordPress 4.4. Scott lives in Williamsburg (Brooklyn, not Colonial) and really likes Mexican food. Scott is mainly a musician, but he also finds time to code and has contributed in small and big ways to the last 10 releases of WordPress.
Speaker profile: wonderboymusic
Twitter: wonderboymusic
Shawn Hooper
Shawn Hooper 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.
Speaker profile: shooper
Twitter: shawnhooper
Steve Bruner
Taylor Lovett
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. He is a lover of all things open-source. Other than developing web applications, Taylor is a lover of music. He enjoys listening to blues and jazz music as well as playing acoustic fingerstyle guitar.
Speaker profile: tlovett1
Twitter: tlovett12
Taylor McCaslin
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. He even paid his way through college by freelancing as a WordPress developer!
Since then, Taylor has created custom WordPress themes and plugins for a large range of clients from SMBs to multinational corporations. Previously, Taylor helped people find jobs as an Interaction Designer at the world’s largest job search engine, Indeed.com. Before that, he worked as a Product Design Intern at Bazaarvoice. Taylor graduated from UT Austin in 2013, where he studied business, digital art and media, theatre, and computer science.
When not pushing pixels or coding, Taylor can be found geeking out with the latest tech gadget or experiencing the rich Austin, Texas art scene. You can learn more about Taylor at taylormccaslin.com.
Speaker profile: taylor4484
Twitter: taylor4484
Terell Moore
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 it’s inception. His day-to-day job is to ensure customer happiness by optimizing support processes and providing technical leadership throughout the WP Engine organization. Before that, Terell was a member of WP Engine’s esteemed Level 3 support team. He has a passion for providing excellent support that is in line with WP Engine’s core value of “Do the right thing.” Terell is also a recipient of WP Engine’s culture award, an honor that is given to a handful of employees each quarter that live the company’s core values day in and day out. After spending over 4 years supporting end-users in a web-hosting capacity, Terell has racked up tons of experience troubleshooting, scaling, and operationalizing WordPress. He’s always excited when he gets to share the tidbits of knowledge that he’s so proud of. In his spare time, Terell enjoys playing Tennis, soaking up the hot Texas sun, travelling, and petting cute puppies. He sparingly tweets @tee_rail, but you can follow him anyway.
Speaker profile: tee_rail
Twitter: tee_rail
Tom Harrigan
Tom Harrigan is a Principal Software Developer at Alley Interactive, a WordPress VIP partner, focussing on big news media and large non-profits. Over the years he’s worked on properties such as NY Post, POLITICO Europe, Vogue, Digiday and others. Previous journeys include lead WordPress developer at HowAboutWe (acquired by Match.com/OkCupid), and Ninja at WooThemes.
Speaker profile: tomharrigan
Twitter: tomharrigan
Tom J Nowell
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.
Speaker profile: tjnowell
Twitter: Tarendai
Tom Ransom
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. His first WordPress plugin (over 5 years ago ) was a plugin for the company Intranet to manage an employee incentive program that worked like a virtual “piggy bank”. Since then Tom has been a contributor to WordPress Core, BuddyPress, WP-E-Commerce and several other well-known plugins.
Speaker profile: transom
Twitter: wp_plugin_devlr
Winstina S. Hughes
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.
Speaker profile: planningwrite
Twitter: planningwrite