WordCamp US 2017 Nashville: Speakers Round 10

headshots of the speakers of round 10

We have one more round of speaker announcements coming up after today. Make sure you spread the word and grab your WCUS ticket. You don’t want to miss this event. A huge thank you to our sponsors. Without them, our tickets would cost over $300. They make our event affordable at $40 per ticket.

We should have our speaker and sessions pages with speakers and their presentation descriptions up by this weekend. Look for the exact schedule some time late next week or early the one that follows. We have a preliminary schedule here to help with your travel plans.


Andrew Nacin

Andrew Nacin is a Lead Developer of WordPress. He’s led major releases, mentored contributors, and spearheaded new development. He has strong feelings about the core philosophies of WordPress, among them “decisions, not options” — software should be opinionated in lieu of burdening the user with too many options.

In January 2014, he joined the U.S. Digital Service at the White House, where he works to improve the usefulness and reliability of the country’s most important digital services.

Jonathan Brinley

Jonathan began tinkering with WordPress websites and plugins a dozen years ago, taking the plunge into full-time freelancing shortly thereafter. He has collaborated with the distributed team at Modern Tribe for seven years, and currently leads a team of developers to build delightful and creative solutions on top of the WordPress platform.

When he’s not coding, Jonathan is busy homeschooling his two children and enjoying the beautiful weather of Northeast Florida.

Monique Dubbelman

Monique started working as a graphical designer and engineer somewhere in the 20th century. She discovered the web in the early 90’s and has been online ever since, exploring new possibilities. Her expertise shifted towards marketing, communications and web design.

About 10 years ago, she started selling online and therefore built and designed her own web shop. She works as an entrepreneur in her own company BOE!media since 2011, advising SME’s on their digital (marketing) strategy.

In 2016, she graduated from the Amsterdam University of Applied Sciences as a bachelor in information management. Building websites with WordPress is an important part of her work. When she’s not glued to her phone or computer, she likes to whisper to earth worms on her allotment.

Winstina Hughes

Winstina Hughes views the world through the lens of a regional planner. She’s worked at a state transit agency and in local government on market research, community development, and vision zero initiatives.

She created her first WordPress blog for a Geographic Information Systems assignment, and followed it soon after with another one focused on community development and suburban planning.

Winstina started her company Planning Write six years ago and is a WordPress NYC Meetup Organizer. She bleeds scarlet (Go Scarlet Knights!), loves hip-hop, and adores WordPress software.

 

Zandy Ring

Zandy has been a Happiness Engineer with Automattic for the past 4.5 years. She has worked in forums, live chat, mobile support, tickets. She leads a team of 18 Happiness Engineers from across the globe. Currently, she leads a WooCommerce Happiness team.

Zandy is based in North Carolina and blogs at zandy.blog.

Check out our previous speaker announcements:

Round 1Round 2Round 3Round 4Round 5,  Round 6, Round 7Round 8, Round 9

WordCamp US 2017 Nashville: Speakers Round 9

Headshots of Round 9 Speakers

Here is our latest round of WordCamp US Speakers.  We hope to have our sessions out late this week or early next, and a full schedule to follow.

Gary Pendergast

Gary is a WordPress, web and music geek who writes poetry with Automattic. He likes making large architectural changes to WordPress Core, completely unnoticed.

He can be observed in his natural habitat at pento.net, or usually in Melbourne, Australia.

Mika Epstein

Mika Ariela Epstein is better known as Ipstenu, the Half-Elf Rogue. Working for DreamHost, specializing in WordPress, Mika helps make WordPress and hosting better for everyone.

When she isn’t reviewing plugins she’s speaking at WordCamps worldwide about code and open source technology. A self-taught guru on Multisite and .htaccess, she has a passion for writing and technology, and blogs about them whenever possible.

Mike Schroder

Mike Schroder is a cross-cultural kid, coffee-drinking sailor, and lover of Open Source.

He’s a WordPress Core Developer, WordPress Media component maintainer, and works as Director of WordPress Strategy at DreamHost. You can find him blogging on geeky things at GetSource.net.

Tammie Lister

Tammie works at Automattic, the company behind WordPress.com. She has a varied background including psychology, design, front end development and user experience. She is a contributor to WordPress, and passionate about Open Source.

Yoav Farhi

Yoav Farhi is an Iñtërnâtiônàlizætiønër at Automattic, who works on everything related i18n (that’s internationalization) and l10n (localization) and of course, translation.

A core contributor to WordPress for 8 years now, Yoav works hard to make the web a better place.


Check out our previous speaker announcements:

Round 1Round 2Round 3Round 4Round 5,  Round 6, Round 7, Round 8

WordCamp US 2017 Nashville: Speakers Round 8

We are in the final stretch. We have only a few more speakers left to announce.  Also, be on the lookout for our sessions details later this week.


Jennifer Dodd

Jennifer M. Dodd is a developer at Automattic Inc. She is a contributor to WordPress and bbPress and is part of the forums group on the Meta team for WordPress.org. In the summer of 2016, she upgraded the WordPress.org support forums from bbPress 1 to bbPress 2.

Jeremy Felt

Jeremy Felt is the senior WordPress developer at Washington State University, a WordPress core committer, and the maintainer of VVV. He believes in free and open source software and enjoys being part of the WordPress community. Will encourage you to share your work.

Josepha Haden

Since college, Josepha has gathered together people with similar interests to learn more and create better communities. In 2008 that passion for connecting people spread to technology, and she’s never looked back.

With a training in music, and a background in data, Josepha is a digital literacy advocate who talks about WordPress, the Open Source Software community, and non-traditional paths to STEM fields.

Josepha works at Automattic as a community organizer for the WordPress open source project and can be found on Twitter as @josephahaden.

Tracy Levesque

Tracy Levesque is the co-owner and co-founder of YIKES, Inc. a web design and development agency located in the lovely Fishtown neighborhood of Philadelphia. YIKES specializes in extending the functionality of WordPress through professional design and development. Women and LGBT owned, YIKES is also a proud B Corporation focusing on sustainable business practices and observing the triple bottom line: People, Planet, Profits.

Weston Ruter

Weston has been using WordPress for over ten years, and for the past few years he’s been contributing heavily. Weston is a WordPress core committer, and he is the Customizer focus tech lead. He is also involved heavily in the Customizer and widgets, and most recently the new Gutenberg editor.

Weston works at XWP as CTO, and he lives in Portland, Oregon with his wife and two boys.

Check out our previous speaker announcements:

Round 1Round 2Round 3Round 4Round 5,  Round 6, Round 7

WordCamp Us 2017 Nashville: Speakers Round 7

A collection of headshots of the round 7 speakers

We are back with more speaker announcements. We should have our sessions out by the end of the week.

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.


Aaron Douglas

Aaron was that five year old taking apart appliances and never really grew out of wanting to see how things work. In 2013 he started working remote with Automattic as an engineer focusing on WordPress and Simplenote for iOS. In 2016 he became the lead of one of the mobile teams. Other than software development, Aaron enjoys camping during the summer, running, biking, taking his dogs for a walk around the neighborhood, and pretending to be a storm chaser while sitting at home.

Bob Visser

Passionate about technology and value creation, Bob is often described as a ‘pragmatic tennis-playing geek’. His accent will quickly give away that he’s a Dutchman, who has been soaking up American culture since 2007.

Currently, he is the COO of CoffeeCup Software, creators of the 1st HTML Editor at the dawn of the Web in 1996. Using a crazy pizza combination of skills and technologies, he and his team launched a series of visual design apps that do NOT generated bloated code. These apps are used by thousands of designers, business owners and large companies such as PayPal, Men’s Warehouse and OpenTable to create responsive sites and (email) newsletters.

Bob authored several frequently viewed articles and tutorials such as A website needs to adapt…or die and Designing with flexbox. He speaks at local events and conferences — most recently he captivated his audience at Convergese 2017 with his presentation ‘Liberating Layouts Through CSS Grid’.

His current endeavor is to develop an intuitive theme and website design app for…WordPress!

Before CoffeeCup he did a lot if interesting stuff that he does not want to bore you with.

Brooke Dukes

Brooke, a West Coast native, currently resides in Seattle, WA.  After Brooke received a degree in graphic design, she learned she was more passionate about people than pixels. Even so, she still can’t pass up a good conversation about design. When she isn’t engineering some happiness you will find her cycling, enjoying vegetarian food with friends and family.

Christie Chirinos

Christie Chirinos is both a Partner in and the Business Manager of Caldera Labs, a WordPress plugin company. Caldera Labs is the company led by Josh Pollock behind Caldera Forms, a leading drag-and-drop form builder for WordPress, and a handful of other free and premium plugins.

Christie started selling online at the age of 14. She launched her own ecommerce site, sold on third-party platforms, monetized a blog, and created sites for lead generation for service businesses, eventually focusing on tech for nonprofit organizations before moving on to digital downloads.

Christie received her Master of Business Administration degree with a specialization in information systems management from Florida State University, and is currently based out of New York City.

Shawn Hooper

Shawn Hooper is the Director of IT at Actionable.co where he builds tools to integrate the many systems used in a distributed company.

Hailing from Ottawa, Canada, Shawn has been building web applications since the late 90’s, with a focus on WordPress since 2011. He is a core contributor to the WordPress open source project, and has spoken at WordPress events in Canada, the United States and Australia. Shawn is also the co-organizer of WordCamp Ottawa.

Check out our previous speaker announcements:

Round 1Round 2Round 3, Round 4, Round 5,  Round 6

WordCamp US Nashville 2017: Speakers Round 6

Headshots of speakers in round 6

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.


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 1Round 2Round 3, Round 4, Round 5

Community Spotlight: Women Who WP

“Our group brings together women (and men) who blog, design, develop, and market in the WordPress community. Meetings begin with introductions and a 30 minute pre-determined discussion on a WordPress topic the 3rd Wednesday of each month. We learn over dinner and then everyone takes 2 minutes to share something they’ve learned in WordPress that month.

Since we organized we’ve seen many WordPressers in our local community get involved and develop confidence in their skills and themselves. We’ve witnessed many of our members submit as speakers for the first time and encouraged others to begin their own local WomenWhoWP Meetups (worldwide). Friendships have developed and mentorship has naturally evolved. It’s amazing to be a part of such an inspiring group!”

Find them online: Meetup | Facebook Group | Website

Women Who WP at a glance

Meetup/Month
2016 Year Meetup Established
200+ total Meetup members
1 WordCamp/Year:
WordCamp OC
Established 2009
350 Last WordCamp Total Attendees

Find out more about how your community can participate in our first ever Community Bazaar, and be featured on WCUS.

WordCamp US 2017 Nashville: Speakers Round 5

Headshots of round 5 speakers

Get your ticket today!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.


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 1Round 2Round 3 , Round 4

Community Spotlight: Washington DC

We have 100+ people at the WordPress DC Meetup every month. It’s a great mix of people, with everybody from WordPress newbies to Automattic employees! Developers, marketers, designers and WP enthusiasts make up the community that led to WordCamp DC 2017 being the second largest first-time WordCamp in a city ever (only behind WordCamp San Francisco, the precursor to WordCamp U.S.). Woohoo!

Find them online: Meetup | Facebook Group

DC at a glance

Meetup/Month
2007 Year Meetup Established
3000+ total Meetup members
1 WordCamp/Year:
WordCamp DC
Established 2017
450 Last WordCamp Total Attendees

Find out more about how your community can participate in our first ever Community Bazaar, and be featured on WCUS.

WordCamp US Nashville 2017: Speakers Round 4

Headshots of the round three speakers

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.


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.

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 SPEAKERS: ROUND TWO

A collection of the headshots of the speakers announced in round two

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.

WordCamp US 2017 is over. Check out the next edition!