Tag Archives: speakers

Speaker: Nikolay Bachiyski

nikolayNikolay is a long-time WordPress core contributor, lives in Bulgaria, works for Automattic, blogs at extrapolate.me, and has a bear.

Nikolay will be sharing his technical knowledge in his presentation “To OOP or not to OOP”.

Some love it, some hate it, few understand it. Some won’t develop with WordPress because it doesn’t use enough of it, some won’t develop with WordPress again if it did. Object-oriented programming is by far the most widely spread programming paradigm, WordPress is by far the mostly spread web publishing system. In this talk we will see how the values of the two align and what can be the place of OOP in the future of WordPress.

Speaker: Miriam Schwab

Miriam-webfriendly Miriam started illuminea seven years ago with a computer shoved into the corner of her bedroom. As a completely bootstrapped business, Miriam and illuminea have seen it all: great successes, horrible failures, smooth delivery and projects that choked all along the way. All that while raising four, five, six and now seven kids.

Today, illuminea is one of the leading agencies in Israel focusing on WordPress development. Since running a small business in this field poses endless challenges and opportunities, Miriam will “open source” the lessons learned at illuminea headquarters, with the goal of helping you learn from her mistakes so you don’t have to make them!

We will discuss common issues that can face WordPress service providers, ranging from how to get more clients, pricing, contracts, project management, staying up-to-date, finding other people to hire or work with, marketing, sales, etc.

Speaker: Ptah Dunbar

gravatar-pirate-mugshot Ptah also know as Cap’n Pirate Dunbar is a WordPress, BuddyPress, and bbPress core contributor and PHP 5.3 Zend Certified Engineer. The Cap’n works with an amazing team at LiveNinja.com, a WebRTC based video PaaS (also powered by WordPress and BuddyPress) for experts to get paid for their know-how. Depending on the season, the Cap’n resides in sunny Miami Beach, FL or in the Grand Duchy of Luxembourg, Europe. He is actively involved in the PHP community supporting local meetup groups and helps co-organize WordCamp Miami annually. You can connect with him on Twitter or Facebook.

At WordCamp Europe he will be talking about “Unit Testing like a Pirate.”

What are unit tests? Why put the effort into writing unit tests? You might say, “Heck, I know my code works because I wrote it, sniff”… Besides, what do sustainable unit tests look like so I don’t have to spend all of my time on them? If this sounds familiar, this talk is for you. You will be introduced to the world of testing, with a focus on testing at the unit level, along with demonstrating practical examples for WordPress plugin development.

WordCamp Europe Speaker List

For the past few months we’ve been wrangling with a huge number of applications for WordCamp Europe. We’ve published bios and speaker presentations but now it’s time to share with you what you’ve all been waiting for: the complete WordCamp Europe speaker list. Watch out on the blog for more speaker profiles, but in the meantime, here are the WordCamp Europe speakers (bar, perhaps, one or two surprises):

  • Vitaly Friedman – Behind the Scenes at Smashing Magazine
  • Adii Pienaar – Lessons Learned from Being First
  • Sara Rosso – Why Big Brands Love WordPress
  • Sean Herron – WordPress as a Platform: Empowering Civic Change through Code
  • David Coveney – Unlocking Enterprise with WordPress
  • Tom Willmot, Remkus de Vries, Arnstein Larsen, Simon Dickson – Running a European WordPress Development Shop
  • Vladimir Prelovac – From plugin developer to running a successful WordPress business: A ManageWP Case Study
  • Frederick Townes – Business Optimization
  • Ptah Dunbar – Unit Testing like a Pirate
  • Andrey “Rarst” Savchenko – Better site stacks with Composer
  • Dre Armeda – Real WordPress Security – Kill the Noise!
  • Brad Williams – Writing Secure WordPress Code
  • Rocio Valdivia – BuddyPress and Multisite Case Study: El Club Express
  • Boone Gorges – Herding Cats with the BuddyPress Activity Component
  • Tammie Lister – The life of a theme
  • Mónica Guerra Leiria – Between Glorified Computer Interface and Ultimate Narcissist: delivering what the client needs
  • Nikolay Bachiyski – To OOP or not to OOP
  • Bram Duvigneau – Practical WordPress Accessibility
  • Hanni Ross – Contributing to WordPress
  • Q&A with Matt Mullenweg
  • Simon Wheatley, Amit Kvint, Frank Bültge – Multilingual plugin stand-off
  • Naoko Takano – Learnings from Growing Local WordPress Communities in Japan
  • Joost de Valk – The Victory of the Commons
  • Miriam Schwab – Learn from my mistakes, don’t make them: The Business of WordPress
  • Mike Schroder & Marko Heijnen – Perfect your Images using WordPress
  • Noel Tock – Less is more, bringing out the best in your websites
  • Scott Basgaard – Help Yourself by Helping Others
  • Kirsten Schelper & Elisabeth Hölzl – Developing WordPress Themes with Git
  • Floor Drees – Working towards great version control for content creators

Watch out for more speaker profiles over the coming weeks!

Speaker: Scott Basgaard

scott-basgaard Scott Basgaard lives somewhere in the mountains of beautiful Southern Norway. Born and raised in New Jersey, he moved there to live with his wife Renate. He loves all things WordPress and organized the first WordCamp Norway in 2012. Scott makes a living under his alter ego, Scotty B, who is a Support Ninja over at WooThemes specializing in WooCommerce. He’s passionate about helping others and recently organized a 24-hour-long WordPress event, which was free for community, called WordSesh.

Scott will talk about “the importance of delivering happiness to your customers and users”.

In this presentation, I’ll discuss growing and building business through customer service and discuss some tools to use along the way.

I’ll also touch on the importance of helping in the WordPress community as well, as a way of giving back and its value to both you as an individual and whatever team you are a part of.

Speaker: Tammie Lister

P1090730Hot on the heels of WordCamp San Francisco, Tammie Lister will be joining us from rainy England. Tammie is a designer who specialises in creating communities. She’s passionate about community design and mixing in psychology with design and development to create sites that make sense to humans. Over the years she’s been lucky enough to create varied projects with great clients under her company logicalbinary.com. She is a contributor to both BuddyPress and WordPress. Tammie spends most of her time living in themes and has a book due out soon about BuddyPress theme development.

Tammie will be sharing her knowledge of themes in her presentation “The Life of a Theme.”

This is a tale of a theme, from its early stages of research through to the first steps into wireframes and the move into a prototype. It’s a tale of joy, sadness and a dash of danger as browsers are fought and code tamed. This is a story that doesn’t include Photoshop but that does include designing in code. It’s a story we all know variations of and this is my version. This is the story of my design process and how I create themes.

Speaker: Andrey “Rarst” Savchenko

rarstRarst is cynical, sleepy, and much into computers. He remembers DOS and the days when the Internet came in nightly dial-up packages. He has brushed through several industries (from airplane engineering to helpdesk systems), many programming languages, and circled back to web development. This time on WordPress platform. You can often find him on WordPress Stack Exchange where he helps out with all sorts of questions related to WordPress.

Rarst will be talking about “Better Site Stacks with Composer.”

This presentation explore gaps in WordPress tool chain for code dependencies, technical organization of whole-site projects, hosting and consuming PHP code. See why Composer dependency manager caught on like wildfire for these tasks in PHP ecosystem and how it can empower more robust and professional approaches to WordPress development.

Keep a better history of a project’s state, manage and easily share different contexts (production or development, stable or unstable), integrate multiple version control repositories with trivial ease, run and own your code hosting infrastructure. Composer all the things!

Q&A With Matt Mullenweg

matt-mullenwegIt’s a pleasure to have the co-founder of WordPress join us for the very first WordCamp Europe. As well as being the co-founder of WordPress, Matt is the founder of Automattic, the company behind WordPress.com and Jetpack, and a principal and founder of Audrey Capital, an investment and research company.

Matt will be doing an hour long question and answer session with the audience. Got a question for him? Now’s your chance to ask. Want to know about the future of WordPress? Want to know what why a specific decision was made? Want to know why 3.6 took so long? Interested in what people are doing with WordPress worldwide? Want to know Matt’s favourite type of BBQ? Bring your questions along and put them to the man himself.

Speaker: Dre Armeda

dreYou must have been living under a Drupal stone if you’re in the WordPress community and haven’t heard of Dre Armeda. The hat-wearing, taco-eating, (actual) ninja, is the CEO and Co-Founder of Sucuri Security and joins us all the way from San Diego. Dre is also the host of The DradCast, the WordPress podcast that hosts with partner-in-crime Brad Williams.

He’ll be sharing his knowledge of WordPress security in a presentation called “Real WordPress Security – Kill the Noise!”

Ever wonder if your site, your visitors, or business is safe on the internet? In this session I will show a demo on how quickly your site can be hacked, and your reputation put on the line. I’ll cover various scenarios that can affect your website like Pharma Hack, SEO Poisoning, and malicious redirects. I’ll then aid you by providing some tips to help reduce risk now and forever. Information Security is everyone’s responsibility, and should be a consideration on any web project, beginning to end.

Awesome! And remember to ask Dre to show you his WordPress tattoo.

Speaker: Rocío Valdivia

rocioWe’d like to welcome Rocío Valdivia to WordCamp Europe. Rocío is a developer at the Spanish development and consultancy, Mecus. Along with the rest of the team, she’s a WordPress Consultant, part of the Spanish translation team at GlotPress, organises the WordPress Sevilla meetup and WordCamp. 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 a consultant and a lecturer at conferences and seminars on WordPress and BuddyPress.

In her presentation, Rocío will be sharing a case study of the Spanish WordPress + Multisite installation El Club Express:

I’ll be sharing a WP Multisite + BuddyPress Case Study on a what’s on guide and magazine for cultural events. I’ll highlight a few of the most interesting features, demonstrating the potential that WordPress Multisite and BuddyPress has. I’ll talk about our successes and lessons learned and how you might apply these in a real world context.