Category Archives: Speakers

WCEU 2014 Speaker: Hristo Pandjarov

We’re happy to announce our next #WCEU speaker – WordPress enthusiast Hristo Pandjarov.

Hristo’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.

Hristo will talk about WordPress optimisation and all the things that can go wrong when trying to improve the performance of your WordPress site. He will cover each of the most popular and widely accepted performance optimisation techniques, how to implement them without breaking your site and how to fix the most common issues with different speed boosters.

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Schedule update and a full list of WCEU Speakers

If you missed the news at the end of last week, we already have the schedule for WordCamp Europe 2014 and we’ve updated it with information about every talk. Click on the talk title to learn more about it.

Here’s a full list of all #WCEU 2014 speakers:

Adrian Zumbrunnen

User Experience Designer, Writer, Speaker and Coffee Enthusiast working in the beautiful city of Zurich.

Andrew Nacin

Lead developer of WordPress, squashing bugs, wrangling contributions, and spearheading new development.

Andrey “Rarst” Savchenko

Rarst is a computer techie. Born and living in Kiev, Ukraine. Sometimes WordPress developer professionally.

Daniel Kanchev

Senior Web Apps Engineer and Migrations Specialist at SiteGround.

Dario Jazbec Hrvatin

In-development tester of WordPress plugins. Besides testing the plugins he also runs usability tests.

Davide Casali

Davide is an experience director at Automattic with 11+ years of experience and a hybrid background in design, psychology and technology.

Graham Armfield

A Web Accessibility Consultant for my own company Coolfields Consulting.

Helen Hou-Sandi

Director of Platform Experience at 10up, a WordPress core committer, and the WordPress 4.0 release lead.

Hristo Pandjarov

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.

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.

Jen Mylo

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
Designer, project manager and WordPress expert from France.

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.

Julio Potier

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.

Karin Christen

Co-founder at required+, a swiss based web company with focus on Interaction Design, Mobile Web and WordPress.

Kimb Jones

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.

Konstantin Dankov

Front Ender who writes bash scripts to automate deployment. Designer who spends more time in MacVim than a drawing app.

Konstantin Obenland

A WordPress developer and core contributor since WordPress 3.4.

Luca Sartoni

A media professional with more than a decade of technical and marketing background.

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.

Matt Mullenweg

Co-founder, WordPress; founder, Automattic

Michael Schroder

Mike Schroder, known as Shredder to most of his colleagues, is a cross-cultural kid, coffee-drinking sailor, and lover of Open Source.

Noel Tock

Noel is a Swiss nomad wandering the globe and one of the owners at Human Made, a WordPress.com VIP partner.

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.

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.

Simon Wheatley

Simon Wheatley is an enthusiast for open source software in business, not least because he runs an open source software business.

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.
Stefan Kanev

Stefan has been a passionate programmer. In his professional life he has shipped code in PHP, JavaScript, Java, Perl, Python, Ruby and even a little bit of C.

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.

Tony Perez

Tony is one of the Co-Founder’s and CEO of the globally recognized website security company, Sucuri, Inc.

Yana Petrova

Yana is a marketing person and also an event organiser, foodie and traveler.

And that’s all of them. Just a friendly reminder, there are very few tickets left for the event, so hurry up and grab yours.

Cheers!

WCEU 2014 Speakers: Konstantin Obenland

We’re happy to greet out next speaker – one of the guys behind default themes Twenty Thirteen and Twenty Fourteen, Konstantin Obenland.

Konstantin is a Code Wrangler at Automattic, where he’s working on WordPress Core full-time. He has a long history of contributing to WordPress, starting out with releasing plugins and reviewing themes as part of the WordPress Theme Review Team, before he focused on bundled themes, co-leading the development of Twenty Thirteen and Twenty Fourteen. At Automattic, Konstantin is also a leading contributor to Underscores, a WordPress starter theme that is featured in the WordPress Theme Development Handbook and recommended by the Theme Review Team.

Born and raised in Germany, he moved to the United States two years ago where he now lives in Ventura, a small coastal city in Southern California. There he enjoys the great weather and sandy beaches, tasty Mexican food, diverse craft beer, and the year-around strawberry season.

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WCEU 2014 Speakers – Daniel Kanchev

Meet our next speaker – SiteGround’s Senior Web Apps Engineer and Migrations Specialist Daniel Kanchev.

Daniel joined SiteGround 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.

 

WCEU Speakers: Simon Wheatley

We’re delighted to announce our next speaker – open source enthusiast and co-founder of British WordPress agency Code For The People 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.

WCEU 2014 Speakers: Mike Schroder

We’re happy to announce that WordPress core contributor Mike Schroder is joining us in Sofia as a speaker at WordCamp Europe 2014.

Mike Schroder, known as Shredder to most of his colleagues, is a cross-cultural kid, coffee-drinking sailor, and lover of Open Source. He currently works at DreamHost, contributing to the WordPress core and community projects including WP-CLI. You can find him blogging on various geeky things at http://www.getsource.net

In 2011, I sent my very first email to the wp-hackers mailing list. I wasn’t sure if it was the right place to introduce myself, but I had to start somewhere. In the years since, I’ve gone from being a tentative new contributor to being one of the release leads for WordPress 3.9. In this presentation, I’ll talk about my journey through the WordPress project. I’ll focus on some of the problems I encountered as a contributor and how I dealt with them. I’ll also look at how, more recently, the project has removed some of those barriers, making it simpler than ever for newcomers to get involved.

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WCEU 2014 Speakers: Stefan Kanev

Next speaker at WordCamp Europe 2014 – programming polyglot 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. This 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 helps with the organisation on a few small Bulgarian conferences.

Stefan will be talking about functional programming and what all the fuzz in recent years has been about. He’ll talk about all the fancy ideas in strange languages like Haskell and LISP and how they can help us in our more “mainstream” environments.

Full schedule is coming soon, so don’t miss any news from WordCamp Europe – follow us on  Twitter, Facebook, and Google + . 

WCEU 2014 Speakers: Kimb Jones

The organising team is happy to welcome fellow WCEU organiser Kimb Jones to the 2014 speakers table.

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.

He’ll be speaking at WordCamp Europe on the experiences he faced starting his own WordPress agency and everything in-between.

WCEU 2014 Speakers: Andrey “Rarst” Savchenko

Welcome back to WordCamp Europe to Andrey “Rarst” Savchenko.

Rarst 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 and not enough at his blog (Rarst.net)

A little about his talk:

At what point answering questions about WordPress goes beyond the making conversation and becomes a driver for professional skills and reputation?

Our proficiency at answering questions spans over our work, our ability to learn, and how we are perceived in community. Yet we are rarely purposeful in learning how to benefit from this skill and improve at it.

We can do better than that — to evolve professionally and personally. Let’s talk about how. 

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WCEU 2014 Speakers: Hugo Fernandes

Hugo is a designer who 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 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.

Right now he’s at his peak point of research and developed his own theories about creativity and our brains, so the timing to present it at WordCamp Europe is perfect.

More than a theoretical and subjective talk, Hugo will provide a full experience with creative exercises that will help everyone to understand their own brains.

At the end, he will show us that all questions have an answer, and that sometimes 1+1=3.

He’s also a #winelover, so feel free to bring a bottle to chat with him 🙂

In the meantime, you can follow him on twitter at @imhugo or read his words at www.imhugo.com.