News

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.

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Check out our previous speaker announcements:

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

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

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.

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

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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