Speakers

Adrian Zumbrunnen

Adrian Zumbrunnen is a User Experience Designer, Writer, Speaker and Coffee Enthusiast working in the beautiful city of Zurich. He creates memorable product and communication experiences by consequently putting the user in the center of all creative efforts.

He writes about design, user experience and perception fallacies in his blog. Follow him on Twitter @azumbrunnen_.

Andrew Nacin

Andrew Nacin is a lead developer of WordPress, squashing bugs, wrangling contributions, and spearheading 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. He works for WordPress founder Matt Mullenweg at Audrey Capital, where he is primarily tasked with working on WordPress core and keeping the lights on at WordPress.org. He resides in downtown Washington, D.C., with his wife. You can follow him on Twitter at @nacin.

Andrey “Rarst” Savchenko

Andrey “Rarst” Savchenko is a computer techie. Born and living in Kiev, Ukraine. Sometimes WordPress developer professionally. Tea drinker. Cat person.

He serves as community–elected moderator at WordPress Stack Exchange Q&A site. His idea of productive free time are wild coding projects on the intersection of advanced WordPress development and renaissance of modern PHP.

Spends too much time on Twitter (@Rarst) and not enough at his blog (Rarst.net).

Chris Lema

Daniel Kanchev

Daniel Kanchev is a Senior Web Apps Engineer and Migrations Specialist at SiteGround. He joined the company 5 years ago as a junior support team member but thanks to his advanced knowledge about server technologies, geek spirit, professional skills and passion for Open Source apps, he quickly became a senior Web Apps engineer and works on all-things Open Source at SiteGround today.

With passion for WordPress and more than 7+ years of experience with it, he has successfully performed hundreds of complicated WordPress migrations, integrated different WordPress features for geeks for SiteGround clients, worked on the development of a WordPress caching plugin, written many tutorials and helped thousands of SiteGround customers with their WordPress sites. When he’s not working you can find him practicing extreme and not so safe sports or traveling the world.

Dario Jazbec Hrvatin

Dario works as an in-development tester of WordPress plugins. Besides testing the plugins he also runs usability tests.

He’s an in-development tester for OnTheGoSystems, the creators of WPML and Toolset plugins, which helped him to immensely broaden his experience and knowledge with everything connected to testing.

Born in Croatia and living in Slovenia for some years now, from the very start he chose WordPress as his primary development tool and never looked back. After freelancing and spending a few years in a non-governmental sector he started working for a renowned Slovenian marketing agency as a lead web developer. This allowed him to gain great experience on working with clients, online marketing and web developing for different sectors.

He spends much of his free time working with his band Helika in which he is the main author, singer and guitarist, so he’s used to talking and singing to big crowds.

Davide Casali

Davide is an experience director at Automattic with 11+ years of experience and a hybrid background in design, psychology and technology. He led cross-disciplinary teams of designers and developers, created and advised successfully funded companies and has done coaching and training for global and local organizations (DHL, EY, Atos).

Believing as Leonardo DaVinci reportedly said that “Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication”, he is specialised in social experience design, behaviour change and motivation applied to interactive and social systems. He has a specific focus in personal growth and leadership coaching to drive successful teams.

During his years of professional experience he led the design of consumer and enterprise services for more than 2 million users worldwide in different markets, industries and countries. He worked with Nokia, Mastercard, Red Bull, Ferrari, Bank of England, Intesa Sanpaolo, Banca Sella, Unicredit, Vodafone, Telecom Italia, Benetton and more.

His designs won the Aretê Award, eCommerce Award for Innovation in Delivery, Samsung GOLD Prize and got listed in the ADI Design Index 2010, the selection for the Compasso D’Oro.

He is an internationally recognized speaker and lecturer (IxDA, LIFT, Creative Mornings, General Assembly, Social Business Summit, Social Media Week, Frontiers of Interaction).

Graham Armfield

I’m a Web Accessibility Consultant for my own company Coolfields Consulting. I help organisations improve the accessibility of their websites, and work with them to embed accessibility into their business processes. I also develop accessible WordPress websites for small to medium sized businesses and charities. I’m an active member of the Make WordPress Accessible team, and have spoken about web accessibility at quite a few WordCamps. I’ve also led accessibility groups at WordPress contributor days.

When not making the web a more accessible place you might find me playing my guitar and writing songs. I turned my back on the rock lifestyle a few years ago, but I now perform my songs solo at open mic nights near where I live. 

I was born many moons ago in South London, and I haven’t strayed very far from there since – I now live in Surrey with my wife and young daughter.

Helen Hou-Sandi

Helen Hou-Sandi is the Director of Platform Experience at 10up, a WordPress core committer, and the WordPress 4.0 release lead. She believes in WordPress as an amazing publishing platform, and loves working on all aspects of WordPress and cool things with WordPress.

Hristo Pandjarov

Hristo is a WordPress enthusiast who’s done it all: supported WordPress clients, built websites, designed WordPress themes, wrote tutorials, dug deeper into SEO and developed his own WordPress SEO plugin. 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.

Hugo Fernandes

Hugo is a designer that went independent 3 years ago to embrace a new journey in his life. Passionate about interactivity and the human behavior, he tries to touch people with his work and words.

He’s always been fascinated by how our brain processes ideas and how individuals see things, and he’s been deepening his research on creativity, the way how our brain works, and how those two things combined influence our work as designers and developers.

Since then, he’s been speaking about it and also as a motivational speaker in high-schools using creative techniques, which has been a tremendous experience.

Follow him on twitter at @imhugo or read his blog.

Jen Mylo

Jen Mylo is a community organizer for the WordPress open source project, focused on contributor outreach, diversity, and growing local communities. Prior to this she spent four years as the UX lead and project manager of the core software team. She is from Portland, OR, USA.

Jenny Beaumont

Born and raised in San Francisco, Jenny Beaumont moved to France in 1998 where she launched her career with the creation of her first web agency, Global Native. Equipped with a degree in Journalism and strong management experience, she quickly adapted her skill set to the emerging field of web design. In 2000 she went freelance, and after spending time in project management, graphic design and Flash animation, began orienting her work toward front-end development.

It was in 2009 that Jenny decided to hone her professional focus on WordPress in response to the ever-increasing demand from clients seeking greater autonomy over their content. Since then, Jenny has worked with clients in a variety of fields including professional sports, luxury and children’s fashion, photography, tourism, events and entertainment.

An active member of the WordPress community in France and abroad, Jenny was a speaker at WordCamp Paris and at WordCamp Switzerland earlier this year.

Joost de Valk

Working with WordPress since 2006, Joost has a 10 year background in online marketing, more specifically SEO, and has always combined his knowledge of the two. Yoast, which he founded, has grown from a one-man-band to a 16 people agency over the last 3 years, focussing on both reviewing and improving websites as well as building free & premium plugins. His WordPress SEO and Google Analytics plugins are consistently among the highest rated and most downloaded plugins available for WordPress.

Julio Potier

Julio is a freelance consultant and co-founder of WP Media. He’s been working with WordPress every day for the last four years and makes his living using the software. He’s a trainer and an experienced WordCamp Speakers, having spoken at WordCamp Paris every year from 2011 to 2014 and to WordCamp Montreal just a couple of weeks back.

Karin Christen

Karin is a co-founder at required+, a swiss based web company with focus on Interaction Design, Mobile Web and WordPress. As an Interaction Designer she is setting her focus on the user’s perspective. Clients hire her to either work on applications with usability issues or to integrate in teams where they start a project from scratch. In here free time she loves to be in the Swiss Alps with her downhill mountain bike.

Kimb Jones

Kimb is the co-founder of UK-based WordPress agency Make Do. In a previous life he worked in the corporate surroundings of the NHS for over 10 years working in both IT and Marketing. He promises it wasn’t as boring as it sounds (mostly).

He’s been running a local WordPress meetup in Sheffield (UK) for over 5 years and is the main co-ordinator of WordCamp Sheffield. He’s also on the WordCamp Europe co-organising team and has been speaking & involved with WordCamp’s since 2009.

Konstantin Dankov

Front Ender who writes bash scripts to automate deployment. Designer who spends more time in MacVim than a drawing app. Taught Web Design in a local high school, teaching courses in HTML and CSS – very interested in education around technology. Other than that, he talks a lot, a lot we tell you.

Currently he works as a Product Manager at Historypin, a community archive project based in London, UK.

Konstantin Obenland

Konstantin is a WordPress developer, and core contributor since WordPress 3.4. After contributing to Twenty Twelve, he was the backup lead and theme developer for Twenty Thirteen and Twenty Fourteen, the most recent default themes. Today he’s working on improving the theme selection experience on WordPress.com. He enjoys craft beers and good food — sometimes so much that he blogs about it.

Luca Sartoni

Luca Sartoni is a media professional with more than a decade of technical and marketing background. Thanks to his extensive experience in different business environments, from SMEs to large corporate projects, Luca helps companies scale up their business adopting data driven strategies. He does not believe in Santa Claus, magical spells and everything that is not backed up by facts. Luca is a Growth Engineer at Automattic.

Luca will be talking about Growth, exploring different scenarios on WordPress. He will apply a growth funnel to the most common projects in order to increase visits, retention and revenue on any WordPress site.

Mark Jaquith

Mark Jaquith has been working with and contributing to WordPress since 2004. He is one of the lead developers of the WordPress core and offers freelance WordPress consulting services through Covered Web Services with a focus on scaling, security, and custom functionality. Mark likes patches that have more red than green, and his favorite WordPress features are the ones that you’re not even aware of. He eagerly looks forward to shooting down your feature suggestions with, “No, but it would make a great plugin!”

Matt Mullenweg

Co-founder, WordPress; founder, Automattic

Matt Mullenweg is the co-founder of the open-source blogging platform, WordPress, the most popular publishing platform on the web, and the founder of Automattic, the company behind WordPress.com and Jetpack. Additionally, Matt is a principal and founder of Audrey Capital, an investment and research company.

Matt got his start in technology working at CNET Networks as a senior product manager. He went on to found Global Multimedia Protocols Group, an experimental metamemetics company, to develop open data formats. He has been recognized for his leadership and success by Forbes, BusinessWeek, INC., PC World, and Vanity Fair.

Matt is originally from Houston, Texas, where he attended the High School for the Performing and Visual Arts and studied jazz saxophone. In his spare time, Matt is an avid photographer. Matt splits time between Houston, New York, and San Francisco.

Michael Schroder

Mike grew up as a cross-culture kid, spending his early teens in Spain, and learning much Spanish as a result. Now in Los Angeles, he works at DreamHost on WordPress — both on keeping WordPress running as well as possible at DreamHost, and also on WordPress core, as a contributor. While not coding, you can find him hand-grinding and brewing a good cup of coffee, or heading out for a nice sail on a long weekend.

Noel Tock

Noel is a Swiss nomad wandering the globe and one of the owners at Human Made, a WordPress.com VIP partner. There he heads up Product, including Happytables.com & WPRemote.com . If he’s not working on product design, he’s having a gin and tonic. Or more recently, both.

 

Rocío Valdivia

Rocío is a Spanish Computer Engineer in love with Free Software, technology, travelling and personal challenges. She’s the new member of Mailpoet. She specializes in BuddyPress, a tool to develop social networks. She has experience as WordPress consultant and freelance developer. Part of the Spanish translation team at GlotPress, organises the WordPress Sevilla meetups and WordCamps. She has extensive experience with WordPress and BuddyPress plugins, themes development and improvement, and is one of the authors of “WordPress para Dummies”, the Spanish version of “WordPress for Dummies”, published November 2012. She’s currently the new board member of Mailpoet and a lecturer at conferences and seminars on WordPress and BuddyPress.

Sara Rosso

Sara is VIP Global Services Manager at Automattic (WordPress.com & more), and as part of her job with the WordPress.com VIP team, she works at discovering and sharing WordPress success stories with the world. She has worked in technology since 1996 for companies such as Hewlett-Packard and Ogilvy, and she’s been using WordPress since 2006. Sara is also a writer, photographer, technology lover, and business & digital strategist. Originally from California, she’s been living in Italy for ten years and is currently in Rome.

Simon Wheatley

Simon Wheatley is an enthusiast for open source software in business, not least because he runs an open source software business. As co-founder of Code For The People, Simon and his team have developed websites for the Rolling Stones, the UK and Scottish Governments, Stephen Fry, and Oxford University, amongst others. At all times, with all clients, Simon and Code For The People press their clients to work with open source software and to release projects as open source. He has been named as a contributor to every WordPress release (bar one) since 2008.

Simon will talk from experience to show how the more your business gives away, the more opportunities you get back.

Siobhan McKeown

Siobhan McKeown works at Audrey Capital where she writes about WordPress, deals with documentation, and has nightmares about the Codex. She’s currently working on an open source book about the history of WordPress.

She spends her days delving into the brains of its early developers and community members. When she’s not worrying about the finer details of forking and the GPL, she’s helping out with the project’s future by wrangling WordPress’ documentation.

She’s one of the organisers of WordCamp Europe 2013 and is excited to attended WCEU 2014 as a speaker and attendee.

Stefan Kanev

Stefan has been a passionate programmer since forever. He easily gets enthusiastic about all things related to software
development. In his professional life he has shipped code in PHP, JavaScript, Java, Perl, Python, Ruby and even a little bit of C. That makes him rarely qualified to appreciate all the nuances in this chart.

When not working for money, Stefan enjoys dabbling into fancy programming languages, tweaking his development environment and reading software books on assorted subjects. His latest favourite is Clojure, he’s an avid Vim user, he loves his Mac and his hidden weapon is a medium-sized collection of ZSH scripts. He occasionally blogs about programming (sadly, in Bulgarian), he occasionally teaches programming in the University of Sofia and occasionally helps with the organisation on a few small Bulgarian conferences.

Tom Nowell

Born in the UK, and hailing from Manchester, Tom is a developer at Code For The People, a long-time PHP developer, and an elected moderator at WordPress Stack Exchange. Working full time with WordPress, Tom has spoken at several WordCamps in the UK, and sometimes dabbles in computer game AI.

Tom got started with WordPress when his PunBB install collapsed under the weight of AI threads. WordPress to the rescue! After a brief stint running a Cookie Bank tied to an IRC bot, Tom graduated to building WordPress sites professionally.

Tony Perez

Tony is one of the Co-Founder’s and CEO of the globally recognized website security company, Sucuri, Inc. He has invested the better part of 4 years analyzing and assessing the state of security within the realm of websites, with a special interest in WordPress. He travels the world engaging website owners of all levels, beginners to advanced, in an effort to build a bridge between traditional Information Security processes and those that end-users should employ. He strongly believes that the challenges WordPress users face today around security can be addressed through education and awareness.

Yana Petrova

Yana is a marketing person and also an event organiser, foodie and traveler. She’s been blogging about food since 2010 and In the past couple of years she’s been organising local technical conferences in Bulgaria including the biggest Bulgarian event dedicated to free software, free culture and knowledge sharing – Open Fest. She’s also a part of the civic hacking organisation Obshtestvo.bg (Society:Bulgaria) that builds independent online tools to help society be closer to the government and the decision making process.