Adam Warner
Since discovering WordPress in 2005 X has been working within the community. Feeding his entrepreneurial spirit, he founded several WordPress-focused businesses providing education, plugins and consulting services for online business owners. He is a true WordPress Evangelist in spirit and personality; his job title when he joined SiteLock.com. Today, he’s the Open Source Community Manager there, while continuing to bring his experience and knowledge of the web, business, and security to many other communities. X is also passionate about his family, robots, and of course Life, the Universe and Everything.
Session: Making Security Make Sense to Clients | Saturday @ 1:40 pm
Alain Schlesser
Alain is a freelance software engineer and WordPress consultant from Germany.
He is the maintainer of WP-CLI and is sponsored by Yoast to work on WordPress Core, where he maintains the Bootstrap/Load component and tries to tackle the architectural pain points of this popular CMS.
Passionate about software architecture and code quality, he never misses an opportunity to share best practices and tries to live up to his educational aspirations through public speaking and blogging.
Read his thoughts on code & other things at https://www.alainschlesser.com or say hello on Twitter under the handle @schlessera.
Session: Embracing Gutenberg In Existing Code | Saturday @ 11:00 am
Alana Lemon
Lemon is an entrepreneur; writing about the blessings in her life. Each experience she’s faced has shown her strength, character, and courage. Born and raised in Maryland, she did not pursue a college degree, preferring to follow her own dreams of becoming a writer and a poet. This road wasn’t easy but determination, meditation, and positive thinking allowed her to reach her goals. Alana will have two books published this Fall: Train yourself how to treat yourself and Failure is the new success.
Alex Buran
Alex Buran – the American entrepreneur of foreign origin. Immigrated to the US in his twenties, started a business while freshman in Brooklyn College. He has been with WordPress since 2008 while it was still a niche blogging platform (no word of content management system yet!). Founder and CEO of Translation Cloud, the company that employs an army of linguists and does language translation services in over 100 languages.
Andrea Zoellner
Andrea is a Content Creator at SiteGround and the lead organizer for WordCamp Montreal. She trained as a broadcast journalist and worked in corporate communications before trading it for a career in tech. Now, she spends her days developing brand messaging, copy editing, and blogging. When she’s not at home in Montreal, Canada, she’s sampling the digital nomad life and documenting her adventures on her travel blog.
Session: Effective Copywriting Tips for Better UX | Saturday @ 10:30 am
Andrew Schulkind
Since 1996, Andrew has asked clients one simple question: what does digital marketing success look like, and how can marketing progress be measured?
A veteran content marketer, web developer, and digital strategist, Andrew founded Andigo New Media to help firms encourage audience engagement through solid-information architecture, a great user experience, and compelling content. A dash of common sense doesn’t hurt, either.
His work touches social media, search-engine optimization, and email marketing, among other components. He is a regular presenter at events including Social Media Week NY & WordCampNYC. His writing appears in both online and print publications.
Andrew graduated with a B.A. in Philosophy from Bucknell University. He engages in a range of community volunteer work and is an avid fly fisherman and cyclist. He also loves collecting meaningless trivia. (Did you know the Lone Ranger made his mask from the cloth of his brother’s vest after his brother was killed by “the bad guys?”)
Session: The Power of Planning: How Site Maps, Wireframes, and Functional Specs Will Make Your WordPress Projects More Effective and More Efficient | Saturday @ 3:40 pm
Anthony Burchell
Anthony is a long time WordPress developer based in Austin, TX. Currently a WordPress Innovation Developer at WP Engine, he spends his time contributing to open source; building new and exciting things with WordPress. He is a Core Contributor and maintainer of the Gallery and Upload Media components of Core.
Session: Gutenberg Block Building | Sunday @ 9:30 am
Carole Olinger
Carole is a former Luxembourgish government agent who went on a four-year sabbatical to take care of her health and to find new professionally enjoyable challenges. Meanwhile, she has become a true WordPress Community-Junkie, a passionate WordCamp organizer and the WordPress community manager for Plesk. She lives in the rural and peaceful German Eifel together with her husband and three French bulldogs. She is also a certified dog’s behavior and health trainer and all-over passionate about dogs. Furthermore, she’s a committed “lipedema fighter” for herself and other affected women with regular appearances in print, online and TV media.
Chloe and Colette Chamberland
My name is Chloe, and I currently work as a customer service engineer for Wordfence. With a few years of customer service and security under my belt, I love helping out the WordPress community and educating everyone on how to secure their WordPress environments to the most optimal degree they can. I am a holder of the Security+ certification along with the CySA+ certification and a pending SSCP certification. When I am not learning about security or helping teach individuals about security I enjoy finding new and unique coffee shops, exploring the globe, and hanging out with all of my furry friends (fun fact: I have 3 hedgehogs, 2 sugar gliders, a cat, and a dog).
Session: How to Optimally Secure Your WordPress Environment | Saturday @ 11:00 am
Christie Chirinos
Christie Chirinos is one of the co-owners and the business development lead at Caldera Labs, a WordPress plugin company best known for its popular contact form plugin, Caldera Forms. Christie started making websites at the age of 14, and before joining Caldera Labs did everything from selling items on eBay to leading website re-launch projects for major nonprofit organizations – on WordPress, of course. Christie received her Master of Business Administration degree from Florida State University, and is currently based out of New York City.
Colin Dowling
Colin is the founder and CEO of RAINCLOUD, a “service as a service” provider of Business Development and Lead Generation solutions for digital agencies. From multinational organizations to small teams of freelancers, RAINCLOUD makes it easy to fill the pipeline with the right types of prospects for your digital business. Former VP of Partner Solutions @ Liquid Web, Former VP of Sales @ Media Temple (a GoDaddy company), Former Enterprise and Agencies Director at WP Engine
Dad to 2 amazing girls, partner to one amazing lady, consumer or wine, player of golf.
Session: Easy Lead Generation for Web Professionals | Sunday @ 9:30 am
Corey Maass
Corey is a full-stack web developer with a love for entrepreneurship and building web apps on WordPress. He built his first website in 1995, his first SaaS app in 2003, and his first WordPress plugin in 2009. In 2015, after 4 years of full-time WordPress development, he combined his passions and launched his first commercial plugin, Kanban for WordPress. He’s spent the last few years growing the business. He currently lives in Saugerties, New York.
Session: More than words: using WordPress for business, productivity, health and more | Saturday @ 1:40 pm
Daniel Olson
Daniel is the COO of DigitalCube, a WordPress product company with offices in the US and Japan. His work focuses on crafting technical solutions using design thinking, building WordPress SaaS products on AWS, and business development where those two ideas meet. Away from the keyboard he enjoys experimenting in the kitchen, tasting all the beers, traveling and helping with the family business, a pet boutique and bakery named, Amelie’s Bark Shop located in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.
Session: Let’s Build a Better WordPress | Sunday @ 1:30 pm
David Wolfpaw
David is a professional web developer focused on WordPress development. He emphasizes helping small businesses, providing ongoing support, and educating users through his service FixUpFox. He helps organize both WordPress Orlando Meetup and WordCamp Orlando.
Session: Building Themes: A Primer | Workshop
Devin Sears
After giving up on his aspirations to play in the NBA, Devin has found his place in the marketing world. As the Field Marketing Manager of Bluehost, he travels the country in quest of the perfect milkshake while working with the WordPress community to help SMBs grow a successful online presence. In his free time he can be found in the middle of a marathon(Netflix, not running), cruising on his motorcycle, swinging from a hammock somewhere in nature or playing ping-pong.
Session: Bootstrap Marketing; Getting in the Game | Saturday @ 9:00 am
Eric Leu
Eric is a Systems Engineer at LiteSpeed Technologies, a software development company famous for its flagship product, LiteSpeed Web Server. Eric has been with the company for about a year; his roles include, but are not limited to, infrastructure management and advanced troubleshooting. As a technology enthusiast, he has a passion for servers, and because of his 4 years of experience in network quality assurance, he knows the key to accelerating the Internet. Prior to working at LiteSpeed, he held a quality assurance role in various software companies, including Synology Inc. Outside of the office, he spends time working on a message bot project to expand his technical knowledge even more.
Session: Essential Steps to a Superior PageSpeed Score | Sunday @ 2:30 pm
Frank Corso
Frank has been working with WordPress since 2009 and is the founder of Markasio, an agency that creates digital marketing software products. He is the organizer of Gainesville’s Digital Marketing Meetup, WordPress Meetup, and PHP Meetup. In his spare time, he also teaches web development both as an adjunct professor at the University of Florida and at IT.Pro TV.
Frank has developed many types of software including Xbox 360 games, mobile phone apps, websites, and AR apps. Above all else, he enjoys spending time with daughter.
Follow him on Twitter or Instagram: @fpcorso
Session: Getting Started with Google Analytics | Sunday @ 9:30 am
Gary Thayer
Gary Thayer is a WordPress Developer at Hall Internet Marketing who specializes in eCommerce websites and analytics tracking. He is an active member of the WordPress community, acting as an organizer for the Southern Maine WordPress Meetup and as Lead Organizer for WordCamp Portland, ME.
Greg Taylor
After working in marketing and business development for over twelve years, Greg decided to pursue his passion for WordPress development and content marketing by starting his own company. Tired of seeing sites that look great but don’t achieve results, he Co-Founded Trinity Web Media & Development to help business owners find the best of both worlds. In addition to leading the company, Greg become well-known in the WordPress community as a speaker and teacher. He has presented at several conferences (including TechPHX, WordCamp LA, WordCamp Phoenix, WordCamp Orange County and WordCamp Vegas), been featured on industry podcasts (such as EOFire, WP Elevation, BusyMarketer and Excellence Expected), and hosts his own podcast The New Marketing Show.
Trinity Web Media is an agency that solves business problems uses WordPress.
Session: Stop Selling, Start Solving Problems | Sunday @ 11:30 am
Hajj Flemings
Hajj Flemings was one of eight entrepreneurs selected for the CNN’s Black in America 4 The New Promised Land: Silicon Valley documentary with Soledad O’Brien. During the filming of that documentary, he recognized that a lack of access in the technology space was creating a permanent underclass in communities of color. This propelled him to launch Rebrand Cities a global civic design partnership with WordPress with the audacious goal to get 10,000 businesses online and eradicate the digital divide.
James Hall
James is the Creative Director of HeX Productions and has over 15 years experience working in the web industry and the public sector. As a self-confessed geek, he is passionate about all things web from working on small independent projects to large local government sites and developing accessible, mobile and social strategies to enable easy access to information on the move.
Session: A little accessibility goes a long way | Sunday @ 8:30 am
Jennifer Brueske
Jennifer started with Iceberg Web Design in October 2015. She has worn many hats including high school math teacher, tutor, bookkeeper, waitress, assembler of things, and administrative assistant. During her previous employment she was asked to develop and manage the company website and rediscovered her love of code. She then decided to pursue web development as a career. She enjoys reading, gaming (board, card and video), sewing, and putting together IKEA furniture.
Session: How to Use Plugins Without Breaking Your WordPress Site
| Saturday @ 9:00 am
Jessi Gurr
Jessi love for website development started back in 1993, when at the age of 12 she learned HTML and secured her first dot-com. Remember Geocities, black backgrounds, lime green text, and the running dog .gif? Man, those were the days…
Jessi started Iceberg Web Design in 2005, and grew the business from two employees in her basement to a full staff of 7 in less than two years.
Jessi lives in Ramsey, Minnesota with her husband and two young boys. She enjoys organic gardening, making candles every fall, and vegan cooking.
Session: Freelance to Agency: Taking The Leap | Saturday @ 10:00 am
Joe Howard
Joe is the Head Buff at WP Buffs, a WordPress technical partner for serious website owners and white-label agency partners. He’s thrilled to be here in The Big Apple to see some old WordPress friends and meet some new ones 🙂
Session: Successes and Failures of Hiring a Remote Team of 11 | Saturday @ 2:40 pm
John Eckman
After a first career as an academic, John has been working in professional services agencies for the last 16+ years, and as the CEO at 10up for the last 4+.
He’s been focused on open source (primarily WordPress and Drupal) since 2006, as one of the organizers of WordCamp Boston and a frequent speaker at WordCamps (US, Ann Arbor, Toronto, New York, Rhode Island, Maine, and Boston) and DrupalCamps (Montreal, Western Mass, Connecticut, Boston). He‚Äôs also presented at many conferences outside of the WordPress community: Gilbane, Confab Higher Ed, CMS Expo, etc.
He received a BA from Boston University, an MA & PhD from the University of Washington, Seattle, and an MIS from Northeastern University.
Sessions: GDPR FTW, or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Privacy By Design | Sunday @ 10:30 am
Judi Knight
Judi is the founder and chief of New Tricks Web Design in Atlanta bringing an unusual wealth of experience to her work with WordPress, as a Ph.D. Psychologist, CEO of software company, and real estate developer. Judi started the Atlanta WordPress Users Group and was lead organizer of WCATL.
With her passion for WordPress and teaching, in addition to building websites for clients, Judi coaches web designers and developers to price, close, build, and deliver effective websites for happy clients and have successful careers.
Session: How to Sail Through the Bermuda Triangle of Web Designer Hell and on to WordPress Pro | Sunday @ 8:30 am
Kari Sletten
I have a degree in Geographic Information Systems, and have always loved the combination of visual and database analytics. I worked extensively in GIS for local government in rural Virginia, and ended up running the county’s IT Department six years later.
In 2009 I relocated to Minnesota, had two kids, taught myself HTML and CSS, and figured out how to make money doing freelance website design for the next six years. Along the way I dabbled with many popular Content Management Systems and came out a loyal WordPress devotee.
The perfect job fell out of the sky and landed in my lap and I began working for Iceberg Web Design in 2016. Surrounded by incredible talent and creativity, I significantly leveled up in my WordPress Development skills and currently design and build custom WordPress websites for customers throughout the United States.
Session: Fun with Forms: Conditional Logic! Dynamic Surveys! Custom PDFs! | Saturday @ 10:00 am
Kaspars Dambis
Kaspars is a professional WordPress developer and core contributor working at XWP (https://xwp.co) from home in Riga solving the toughest web publishing challenges for some of the largest online publishers. He has created many free and paid WordPress plugins, themes and developer tools, and has been blogging about all of that at https://kaspars.net since 2007.
Larry Swanson
Larry is a lifelong publisher and 20-year digital strategist. He hosts the Content Strategy Interviews podcast, gleaning insights from luminaries like UX guru Jared Spool, Lynda.com instructor Morten Rand-Hendriksen, “toxic tech” warrior Sara Wachter-Boettcher, and dozens of other content-strategy experts. He’s always looking out for the interests of small-business owners like WordPress agencies and independent professionals like freelance designers and coders, hence his development of the “DIY Content Strategy” concept. He contributes to WordPress as a community deputy and event organizer.
Session: DIY Content Strategy | Workshop
Marc Gratch
In 2007 I started a brand management agency. The 3 owners were a designer, a web developer and myself as the business director. At our peak we were doing everything wrong. Years later after the company folded and I was managing a solid number of clients I was still doing it wrong. In 2014 I attended my first two WordCamps, sponsored a few and spoke at one. I began attending my local meetup and tweeting about WordPress as much as possible. I learned more in 12 months of being involved in the WordPress community than I had for 7 years prior. This talk will center around that story while educating the audience about how to make the most of the WordPress community, the vast number of resources out there and how to give back.
Mary Baum
Mary Baum is the founder and principal of RacquetPress, a digital consultant to the tennis industry. … Trained as a print designer (there WAS no web) Mary built her first site (wrong) in 1999 and started to learn real CSS and HTML in 2007 — at the tender age of 47. … Today she’s a big fan of design in the browser (after a few thumbnail sketches!) and all the modern CSS the browsers will support. This year she’s finally learning Javascript — really!
Maxwell Ivey
Maxwell Ivey Is known worldwide as The Blind Blogger. He is a totally blind man from Houston Texas who has transformed himself from a morbidly obese failed carnival owner to a respected amusement equipment broker in the best health of his life. He had to learn so much including hand coding his first website in html, recruting clients, setting fees, recording videos, using social media networks, building an email list, etc. People told him how inspiring his story was and encouraged him to share more about what it’s like to be an entreprenur who happens to be blind. That lead to a second website, three self-help book, and a podcast called the What’s Your Excuse? Show. This grew out of the fact that many people have said that if Max can do it then what is my excuse. Max loves to help others achieve their own goals and dreams. And if you have any questions for him, no matter how delicate; just ask. He’ll answer with the honesty, humor, and grace he is known for.
Michael Posso
Michael is front-end developer focusing on developing accessible, multilingual and fast WordPress sites for large organizations. As an early adopter of technology, He has experimented with the possibilities of immersive technologies in WordPress. He also currently works as a manager of digital development at AECOM and also organizes the Latino Web Developer Meetup.
Session: Using Immersive Experiences on Your WordPress Site | Sunday @ 10:30 am
Mika Epstein
Bio very soon to come
Session: TDo No Evil: A Different Kind of Machine Learning | Saturday @ 2:40 pm
Rachel Cherry
Rachel is a freelance software engineer with a background in higher education and other enterprise-level organizations, like Disney. She is the Founder and Director of WPCampus, a community and conferences focused on using WordPress in higher education. She is a strong advocate for the importance of accessibility and universal design. Rachel lives in Alabama but you can find her on Twitter, GitHub, and bamadesigner.com.
Session: How to Create Accessible Websites | Saturday @ 10:00 am
Rick Viscomi
Rick Viscomi is a developer programs engineer at Google working on web transparency projects like the HTTP Archive and Chrome User Experience Report. He is also a former YouTube engineer and the coauthor of the web performance book Using WebPageTest.
Rodrigo Donini
Rodrigo is a nerd, developer, teacher, husband, dad, curious about all the things around him and not necessarily in this order. He is speaker, WordPress evangelist very involved with the community and currently is Toptal Software Engineer living in the south of Brazil.
He works as developer remotely for 8 years exclusively with WordPress, working on different projects from the simplest to the most complex.
Also, he is an organizer of WordPress Meetups and WordCamp Porto Alegre, in Brazil.
Session: Scream and Post – Interact with RaspberryPi | Saturday @ 12:05 pm
Ronnie Burt
Ronnie leads the education and hosting services team at Incsub, the company behind WPMU DEV, CampusPress, and Edublogs. A former educator, wannabe musician, and math nerd, he is a proud Austinite.
Session: Building Your Privacy Policy | Saturday @ 2:40 pm
Sam Hotchkiss
Sam is currently a Gentleman Farmer on his farm outside of Portland, Maine. His day-to-day duties involve riding around on a tractor, visiting with his bees, using cool tools that make loud noises, and hanging out with his wife and son. He also serves as an advisor to two technology companies.
Previously, Sam ran a WordPress agency which created a security product, BruteProtect, which they then sold to Automattic in 2014. He then spent 4 years at Automattic, during which time he lead the Jetpack and Akismet teams.
Session: Lessons on Building Happy Teams and Great Products | Sunday @ 2:30 pm
Scott Wyden Kivowitz
Scott is the Chief Community Officer at Imagely, a father, blogger, photographer and educator. Scott is born and raised in New Jersey, enjoys the comfort of hiking clothing (even while not hiking), is the author of multiple photography books, and often educates photographers about WordPress throughout his blog and the Imagely blog.
Scott believes in sharing his knowledge any way possible and educating without fluff, in a straight to the point easy to understand style. He believes the possibilities are endless in WordPress and that with community the possibilities can continue to grow faster and bigger than ever imagined.
You can find Scott at scottwyden.com, imagely.com, and across social media.
Session: Podcasting in 3, 2, 1, Action! | Sunday @ 11:30 am
Steve Bruner
Steve Bruner is the CEO of SlipFire, New York City based WordPress development studio established in 2007, and a partner in Piklist LLC. where he is creating the most powerful framework available for WordPress.
Timothy Jacobs
Tim is a WordPress developer at iThemes where he works on the iThemes Security plugin. You can find him at https://timothybjacobs.com where he attempts to blog semi-regularly about WordPress development.
Zack Rothauser
Zack is a Senior WordPress Developer at WP Engine. He has worked in web development for the past 6 years, having spent time at several large agencies, freelancing, and now working for the marketing team at WP Engine.