Author: Laura Byrne

Are you keeping up with WordCamp US on social media? Use the hashtag #WCUS to help us spread the word. Tell a friend about the tickets, and find us at the following locations.

Twitter: @WordCampUS

Instagram: @wordcampus

Facebook: WordCampUSA

 

Don’t forget to follow our latest group of speakers on social media.  The links next to each of their names connect to their Twitter pages.

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Andrew Roberts

Andrew is the CEO of Ephox, the company behind TinyMCE. TinyMCE is the online editor in WordPress and tens of thousands of other applications and used by millions worldwide.

Originally from Australia, Andrew started several web technology companies straight out of the University of Queensland in the late 1990s. By 2000, he had launched one of the first online editing tools and was a recipient of a Young Australian of the Year award for science and technology. Since then Andrew has based himself in Silicon Valley and has grown Ephox to 45 staff in Australia, Sweden, and the United States.

David Laietta

David has been a professional web developer for well over a decade, with the last nine years being focused on WordPress development. His focus is on helping small businesses, providing ongoing support, and educating users. He helps organize both WordPress Orlando and WordCamp Orlando.

Joe McGill

Joe McGill lives in St. Louis, Missouri, where he works remotely as a Senior WordPress Engineer at Human Made.

Joe is a Contributing Developer to WordPress and helps maintain the Media component. Find him on online at https://joemcgill.net at on Twitter as @joemcgill.

Katherine White

Katherine is a Solutions Architect with a proven track record spanning over 15 years of client-facing technology leadership, strategy and development team management. As an experienced cross-functional team leader and full-stack web developer, she guides project teams while serving as a solution focused, trusted client partner. Katherine has provided technology project leadership for clients ranging from small businesses and high-growth startups to global business and consumer divisions of Fortune 500 enterprises.

Katherine’s technical expertise is focused on open source content management in both WordPress and Drupal, and she is a passionate advocate for universal accessibility, rewarding user experiences, and future-proof development methodologies.

Meg Delagrange

With over 22 moves between New York and Tokyo, Meg currently finds her home in the always-beautiful Denver, Colorado. She is a partner and Marketing Director at Urban Southern where she is strategically building a strong brand presence both online and offline.

Born into an Amish family, she has embraced her heritage with a unique approach to life and business. After hours, you may find her painting in her studio or sharing heart to heart thoughts on Instagram.

Check out our previous speaker announcements:

Round 1, Round 2, Round 3, Round 4, Round 5

There are so many ways that people use and contribute to WordPress. Our aim is to find speakers that appeal to a wide range of interests. We will announce more speakers tomorrow, Friday, and then we’ll be back with a full week of announcements next week.

Have you checked out our GoWCUS Google Hangout? Each week we cover a different topic connected to WordCamp US. This Friday at 2:00 CT we will be talking about how to submit a great speaker pitch.  We had over 500 submissions to speak at WCUS this year.  Join us to find out what makes a pitch stand out.

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Alain Schlesser

Alain is a freelance software engineer and WordPress consultant living in Germany.

He started out as a government agent working in prison administration in Luxembourg, and has recently made the switch to self-employment to enjoy productive work without the bureaucratic hurdles.

He has worked with numerous platforms and programming languages for the past 25 years, and is now trying to settle down on modern web development with the WordPress platform. He is passionate about software architecture and code quality, and he never misses an opportunity to share best practices.

He offers his WordPress services and expertise through his company Bright Nucleus, while you can catch some of his more personal ramblings at https://www.alainschlesser.com.

Brianna Privett

A passion for the web as a medium for art is the foundation for my twenty-year long career in web development and UX design. I’m the founder of TechnoSiren, and I help web users become web creators.

Francesca Marano

Francesca is a WordPress professional, author, and educator who makes WordPress things happen from Torino, Italy.

She is the founder of C+B, a blog for Italian female creative entrepreneurs, with an editorial staff of more than 50 professionals offering advice to women who work on their own. Additionally, Francesca is the author of 3 books for freelancers about business planning, productivity, and websites.

Francesca is a passionate speaker who can be found not only in Italy, but also around the world talking about WordPress, community, open source, women in tech, and small businesses.

K Adam White

K. Adam White is a senior web engineer in Boston, Massachusetts, where he writes complex web applications, contributes to open-source projects, and evangelizes the web as an open platform for technology and collaboration.

A veteran of the data visualization consultancy Bocoup, K. Adam is also an artist and enthusiast photographer, a WordPress core contributor, and the Design Lead for the WordPress REST API.

RC Lations

RC is the lead developer at the Institute for Nonprofit News, where he works to help others democratize publishing using WordPress.

 

Check out our previous speaker announcements:

Round 1, Round 2, Round 3 , Round 4

Our WordCamp US speakers are a diverse group.  Some of them are speaking this weekend at WordCamps in Providence, Portland, Salt Lake City, and Wilmington. If you are going to any of these WordCamps, let our speakers know you’re looking forward to seeing them at WordCamp US, tell fellow attendees, and  buy your ticket today.

We will announce more speakers tomorrow and Friday. If you haven’t already, make sure you subscribe to this site (located at the bottom of this page) so you don’t miss future announcements.

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Felix Arntz

Felix is a WordPress freelancer based in Germany, where he has been implementing client solutions and plugins for several years now. He is a Back-end developer with a major focus on Multisite environments.

Aside from occasionally creating open-source plugins to give back to the WordPress project, he is also involved in core development, where he has been a component maintainer for Multisite and Post Thumbnails for awhile, and he became a committer in late 2016.

When he is not doing WordPress stuff, Felix spends his time producing music, playing the piano, and playing soccer. He does all of that while drinking a lot of Mountain Dew.

• Contributing to WordPress core: Techniques and expectations for successful long-term contributions

Kathryn Presner

Kathryn Presner thrives on helping people get the most out of WordPress. After a career designing and building websites for clients, she joined Automattic as a Happiness Engineer in 2012. She’s currently Theme Whisperer on the Theme Team, where she helps folks with customization, configuration, and troubleshooting.

Kathryn is also a member of the WordPress.org support crew and enjoys spreading her passion for WordPress and encouraging new public speakers at WordCamps, Girl Geeks, Ladies Learning Code, and other grassroots events.

Non-WordPress obsessions include vintage Pyrex mixing bowls and growing garlic.

Marc Benzakein

Hailing from the Great State of Wisconsin, Marc is the Operations Manager of ServerPress, LLC, a software development company focused on products and services pertaining to the WordPress Community. He has spoken, organized, and worked as a sponsor for several WordCamps over the past four years, and he believes strongly that the Community is what makes WordPress so powerful. He has spoken on topics ranging from Business, Marketing, Development, to WordCamps.

Marc lives in Milwaukee with his wife, nine children, three cats, two dogs, his son’s snake, and a bunch of fish. In between times with the family and work, he enjoys his photography and working out. OK, that working out part isn’t true. Marc actually hates working out. He does it anyway.

Mel Choyce

Mel is a Boston-based Product Designer and a WordPress core contributor.

She loves big type, cold brew coffee, and printmaking.

Nathaniel Schweinberg

Nathaniel is a Systems Engineer living in sunny Vacaville, California. He manages Human Made’s server infrastructure and fights to keep all the chaos monkeys at bay. He has the cutest kitty ever.

When he’s not working, you can find Nathaniel spending time with his friends around a board game or off on a hike in the hills.

Check out our previous speaker announcements:

Round 1, Round 2, Round 3

WordCamp Us 2017 is going to be an awesome event. We are excited to announce the second round of fantastic speakers who will be with us December 1-3, 2017 in Nashville.

You don’t want to miss out on this event. Make sure you buy your ticket today. Even better, tell a friend who has never come to a WordCamp before, or who doesn’t regularly come to a WordPress Meetup.  Let them know what the WordPress community is all about.

Brian DeConinck

Brian DeConinck is a front-end designer and developer with NC State University’s Office of Information Technology. As part of the OIT Design team, he builds custom WordPress themes and plugins for academic and administrative units on campus, helps run campus Multisite environments, and advises campus clients on their content strategy. In all of his projects, Brian is committed to universal design principles of accessibility, usability and user empathy.

Brian is also co-host of the WPCampus Podcast, where he gets to talk to interesting people about the interesting things they’re doing with WordPress in higher ed.

Philip John

Philip John has been working with WordPress since (almost) the beginning. He spent most of his career as a freelancer before joining the WordPress.com VIP team as an engineer, looking after some of the most high profile, interesting and challenging implementations of WordPress on the web.

Apart from WordPress, Phil’s other big passion is politics. He’s a contributor to an open source manifesto and co-founder of a political party in the UK, and sees these two passions as inextricably linked.

Rian Rietveld

Rian is a WordPress engineer who has enthusiastically worked with WordPress since 2009, and has a strong interest in web standards and making the web usable for everybody. She works for the WordPress agency Human Made and is part of the WordPress Accessibility Team.

When not coding, you can find her working in her garden.

Ryan Markel

Ryan engineers happiness for WordPress.com VIP from St. Louis, and loves helping others have great experiences. He’s been blogging in some form or another for a very long time, eventually learning and loving WordPress.

He enjoys the study of games and helping his wife (try to) control his five children.

Sonja Leix

Sonja is a location-independent Web Designer and Digital Strategist. She’s an active member of the WordPress community, contributes to various teams, and co-organizes WordCamp Europe. She helps businesses create unique online experiences that connect deeply with their customers.

If you missed our first round of speaker announcements, check it out here.

We had hundreds of amazing applications for WordCamp US this year. It’s clear that the WordPress community has lots of talented people who are passionate about sharing their experience with others.

A huge thank you again to everyone who applied. WordCamp US would not be a reality without you.

After we have announced all of our speakers, over the course of this week and next, we will launch the overall schedule so you can see the exact dates and times that each speaker is presenting, as well as full details about their talks.

Without further ado, let’s hear it for the first round of WCUS 2017 speakers:

Andrea Zoellner

Andrea is a freelance copywriter and digital content creator at Automattic. She trained as a broadcast journalist and worked in corporate communications before risking it all for a career in tech. Now she blogs and develops video tutorials for WordPress.com. She’s also a WordCamp Montreal organizer. Andrea loves wordplay, coffee-shop-hopping, and blogging about how to pack the ultimate carry-on. When she’s not at home in Montreal, Canada, she’s sampling the digital nomad life and documenting her travels on her blog capsulesuitcase.com.

Josh Pollock

Josh is a WordPress developer and educator. He is Founder/ Lead Developer/ Space Astronaut Grade 3 for Caldera Labs, makers of awesome WordPress tools including Caldera Forms — a drag and drop, responsive WordPress form builder.

Also, he is a WordPress core contributor, the author of two books about WordPress development and a member of The WPCrowd.

 

Patrick Garman

Formerly a WooCommerce extension developer, WooCommerce Ninja at WooThemes, a developer at WebDevStudios & Maintainn, e-commerce specialist at ColourPop Cosmetics, and now Managing Partner at Mindsize… Patrick has a unique set of skills and experience in e-commerce, product development, enterprise WordPress development, and scaling of WordPress & WooCommerce.

Susan Walker

Susan is the unofficial “Department of WordPress” at Rutgers-Camden, which hosts more than 200 sites in its multisite installations as well as a number of standalone sites. She develops plugins and themes, administers the WP ecosystem and manages web content and social media for OIT-Camden. She became a full-time university web developer in 2003 and joined Rutgers in 2011. Previously she was staff writer and city editor for a daily paper and later a public information officer. Susan is a graduate of Lamar University (mass communication) and the University of Oxford (computer science). She is a co-organizer of the Philly WordPress meetup and WordCamp Philly 2017.

Tessa Kriesel

Agency and Community Engineer at Pantheon, Tessa has been a web developer for over 10 years. She enjoys front-end development but also loves to build sites from start to finish. She started in Joomla back when it was 1.0.x and worked her way into WordPress and Drupal about 7 years ago. She enjoys teaching others to code as well as speaking at conferences and youth events. Tessa is a northern Minnesota native, but now lives in the Twin Cities with her husband and four children – three boys and a baby girl. She loves dogs and enjoys helping local organizations rescue dogs in her free time.

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Check back soon for the next round of speaker announcements! And if you haven’t yet, get a ticket to WordCamp US!