Author Archives: Petya Raykovska

About Petya Raykovska

WordPress Polyglots Team Contributor and mentor. Director of Agency Operations @ Human Made I move a lot, travel for music, love carrot cake and make things happen.

WCEU Speakers: Dario Jazbec Hrvatin

Have you ever noticed how many people working with WordPress are also musicians?

This community rocks!

We’re happy to welcome another one of these wonderful hybrids to the WCEU Speakers table – usability expert and musician 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, which helps 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.

WordCamp Europe has a lot more to share. Keep up on  Twitter, Facebook, and Google + . 

WCEU 2014 Speakers: Tony Perez

Welcome to the next speaker in #WCEU 2014 list – Security expert 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.

Tony will be giving a talk on WordPress Security. His talk will move beyond the traditional security presentations and push website owners, of all skill sets, to think of security more holistically. The emphasis will be on what Tony defines as setting effective security through Good Posture.

You can follow Tony on twitter at @perezbox and see his thoughts on security at http://tonyonsecurity.com and http://blog.sucuri.net.

WCEU 2014 Speakers: Noel Tock

Howdy, WordCampers!

Meet our next speaker – designer, product manager and world traveller Noel Tock.

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

After his talk Less is more: The Journey of Happytables as a WordPress Saas at last year’s WordCamp Europe, Noel is coming to Sofia to share some of his insights on productivity, improving yourself within the WordPress industry and working on things you enjoy.

This talk will be a practical guide to doing more with WordPress; developing yourself to work on things that matter, getting in the habit of shipping and finally contributing back to this great open source project. I chose this area because I’d like to see freelancers/agencies in Europe do more with WordPress.

Keep up with WordCamp Europe developments on  Twitter, Facebook, and Google + . 

WCEU 2014 Speakers: Jenny Beaumont

We’re happy to announce that next on the WordCamp Europe speaker list is designer, project manager and WordPress expert Jenny Beaumont from France.

Born and raised in San Francisco, Jenny 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 transposed her skill set to the emerging field of web design.

In 2000 she went freelance, and after spending time in project management, graphic design, Flash animation and UI design, has more recently oriented her work toward front-end development. In 2009 Jenny made the definitive switch to WordPress and started building custom themes for her clients to give them greater autonomy over their content.

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.

Her talk at WordCamp Europe 2014 will deal with the eternal topic of Client Relationships, so for every designer, developer or project manager out there that does client work, make sure you save a slot in your WCEU Schedule for what Jenny has to share.

Stay tuned to WordCamp Europe on  Twitter, Facebook, and Google +  for more announcements.

WCEU 2014 Speakers: Joost de Valk

Give a warm welcome to our next WordCamp Europe 2014 speaker – WordPress developer, SEO & and an Open Source expert 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.

Joost was one of our most popular speakers at WordCamp Europe 2013. Watch his talk The Victory of the Commons and stay tuned for details on his talk in Sofia.

Follow WordCamp Europe on Twitter, Facebook, and Google + 

WCEU 2014 Speakers: Siobhan McKeown

After being an invaluable member of WCEU 2013 organization team, we’re really happy to announce that Siobhan McKeown will also be a part of WordCamp Europe 2014 as a speaker.

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. (Cool, right? Check out the project on Github.)

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.

If you haven’t already, check out her talk “WordPress And The Ten Year Itch” from WordCamp San Francisco 2013.

Keep in touch with #WCEU news and info, Follow us on Twitter, Facebook, and Google + 

WCEU 2014 Speakers: Mark Jaquith

Hey folks!

We’re adding another lead #WordPress developer to the list of WordCamp Europe 2014 speakers.

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!”

Check out his talk Confident Commits, Delightful Deploys at WordCamp San Francisco.

Follow #WCEU on Twitter, Facebook, and Google + 

WCEU 2014 Speakers: Adrian Zumbrunnen

Happy Monday and say hello to WordCamp Europe 2014 next speaker – Adrian Zumbrunnen from Switzerland.

Adrian 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.

His talk at WordCamp Europe 2014 will be about creating distraction-free web publishing experiences that let people express themselves in richer ways. It targets everyone working with content management software, from developers to designers and end users.

Distractions have always been a natural constituent of our lives. But with the rise of technology and all the digital noise, it has become harder than ever to keep focussing on a specific task. It’s our job as designers to bring back clarity to the digital canvas by providing reading experiences that put readers first.

Read more from Adrian on design, user experience and perception fallacies in his blog. And to make sure we don’t just have Swiss and US speakers at this year’s WordCamp Europe, follow us on Twitter, Facebook, and Google + for more announcements this week.

 

WCEU 2014 Speakers: Andrew Nacin

We are happy to welcome one of the lead developers of WordPress Andrew Nacin to WordCamp Europe 2014.

Andrew Nacin 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 is a lead developer of WordPress, wrangling contributions, spearheading initiatives, advising new development, and squashing bugs. He led some of the last major WordPress releases and is also a member of the core security team.

Just as many PHP core developers have with PHP, he and WordPress have a love-hate relationship. If he thought it was perfect, he would find another job. He feels strongly 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 resides in downtown Washington, D.C., with his wife. You can follow him on Twitter at @nacin.

If you haven’t already, read this piece on The qualities of a great WordPress contributor he wrote. Check it out, get excited and join us for WCEU ’14 Contributor Day in Sofia.

Follow WordCamp Europe on Twitter, Facebook, and Google +.

WCEU 2014 Speakers: Karin Christen

We’re happy to welcome swiss interaction designer Karin Christen to the speakers group for WordCamp Europe 2014.

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.

Karin’s talk in Sofia will target designers and front-end developers alike. The focus will be on rapid prototyping, user experience and interaction design. You’ll get introduced to Karin’s workflow and prototyping setup and learn about her on site work with clients and their UX and front-end teams.

Follow Karin on Twitter @karinchristen.

 

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