Adrian Roselli
Adrian is a member of the W3C Web Platform Working Group, W3C Accessible Rich Internet Applications Working Group, and W3C Accessibility Task Force. He has written articles for trade journals, web sites, and participated as an author and editor on five web-related books. Back in 1998 he co-founded a software development consulting firm before leaving at the start of 2016 to start all over. Some may recognize Adrian from his days helping to run evolt.org, one of the first communities for web developers. Adrian has been developing for the Web since 1993.
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 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://alainschlesser.com.
Alexandra Draghici
Alexandra handles product development at CaptainForm, WordPress form builder launched in 2015 by 123ContactForm. Previously, she worked in project and product management at the same company and developed a deep interest in analyzing user behavior and building solutions tailored to their needs.
She believes that each market comes with a beautiful and unique user typology, that simply needs to be understood and addressed in a specific way. And the WordPress world is the closest to her heart. In 2016, she spoke at WordCamp Bratislava, WordCamp Belfast and WordCamp Bucharest.
Alexandra is also very fond of teaching and has founded the most popular platform for learning English in her home country, Romania. She asks “why” probably 100 times a day and she likes to do any type of puzzle, ride her bike and play tennis.
Andrea Middleton
Andrea Middleton has worked with WordCamp organizers since 2011, helping people plan events that inspire people to do more with WordPress, connect the WordPress community, and contribute to the WordPress project. A wine enthusiast and avid reader of science fiction, Andrea lives in Portland, Oregon with her husband and two kids.
Andrew Nacin
Andrew Nacin is a Lead Developer of WordPress. He’s led major releases, mentored contributors, and spearheaded 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. In January 2014, he joined the U.S. Digital Service at the White House, where he works to improve the usefulness and reliability of the country’s most important digital services.
Boone Gorges
Boone Gorges is a Core Committer for WordPress and a Lead Developer for BuddyPress. His consulting firm, Hard G, focuses on WP and BP development for universities and non-profits. A former academic, Boone has a special interest in the dynamics of free software communities, and the ethical implications of FOSS and the processes by which it’s created and maintained. He is a mediocre jazz pianist, a very good crossword solver, and an exemplar of various Dad tropes.
Caspar Hübinger
Caspar Hübinger has a fundamental interest in people and how they interact.
As a self-taught post-dotcom web developer, he got introduced to WordPress “Billy Strayhorn” and has stayed ever since.
His involvement with the WordPress Community has included co-organizing local Meetups and related events, as well as volunteering and speaking at WordCamps.
He works as a support agent at WP Media.
David Lockie
David is the Founder & Director of Pragmatic – a WordPress specialist agency. He has experience building a WordPress business from the ground up having grown his agency from one freelancer to over 40 full-time employees over the course of 5 years.
David is looking forward to talking at WordCamp Europe so he can share his in-depth expertise on growing and running a thriving WordPress agency. David hopes his talk will inspire others with the knowledge and confidence to successfully grow their own WordPress business.
Dmitry Mayorov
Dmitry is a Moscow-based web designer and web developer. He runs a theme shop called ThemePatio, creates custom themes for his clients and helps local WordPress community in Russia to grow by co-organizing meet ups and WordCamp Moscow.
Dwayne McDaniel
I have been working in tech and open source sales since 2005.
I knew as soon as I started working with Java middleware developers I never wanted to work outside of open source ever again. I first started building in Drupal and WordPress when I needed to build projects for the San Francisco Improv scene. I fell in the love the community of developers and then found my position at Pantheon at the end of 2013.
As a Community and Agency Success Manager I have had the privilege of presenting at MidCamp (Drupal), Twin Cities DrupalCamp, DrupalCamp Colorado, WordCamp Milwaukee, WordCamp Baltimore as well as leading BOFs at several other events.
Outside of tech I love producing and performing improv theater. I also love comic books and karaoke!!!
Heather Burns
Heather Burns is a digital law specialist in Glasgow, Scotland. She researches, writes, publishes, consults, and speaks extensively on internet laws and policies which affect the crafts of web design and development. Her writing and blogging can be found at https://webdevlaw.uk.
Heather has been designing and developing web sites since 1997 and has been a professional web site designer since 2007. She holds a postgraduate certification in internet law and policy from the University of Strathclyde.
She recently helped to co-found Web Matters, a startup industry body for web professionals in the UK.
John Maeda
Global Head, Computational Design and Inclusion of Automattic. Formerly Partner at Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, President of Rhode Island School of Design, Professor at the MIT Media Laboratory.
Joshua Strebel
Joshua Strebel is the Co-Founder and CEO of Pagely, the first-to-market Managed WordPress Hosting provider.
Throughout Joshua’s career he has only known the path of an entrepreneur, leading teams in creative web services, and Web hosting at the companies he has founded. Never having a ‘real job’ after college Joshua is a self taught professional in design, development, marketing, and business.
Beginning in 2003, Joshua and his and wife Sally co-founded and grew a boutique web design agency to a modest level of success in Scottsdale, Arizona.
From 2008 on he transitioned that company away from web design and development services to the hosting space focusing exclusively on WordPress. Headquartered in Tucson, Arizona, Pagely has grown into a multi-million dollar operation supporting such brands as Visa, Disney, and Time Inc. to deploy, manage, and scale their WordPress applications.
Joshua has never been listed on a “Top X of Y list” or a “# under # list” or been honored as “Top X of the Valley”. However, he has successfully bootstrapped an innovative, culture first, 100% remote, web application hosting company generating several million in annual revenue fueled by the simple philosophy that “business is personal”.
Off the clock Joshua is a husband and father, automobile enthusiast, aging snow sports participant, and connoisseur of single malt scotch.
Julka Grodel
Julka Grodel is a Senior Software Engineer at AddThis and has been working with CMSs for over 10 years. She is passionate about writing easily maintainable and extendable code and is on a mission to make it simple to use AddThis’ social tools on single page apps and within a dynamic DOM. Julka spends most of her time on open source projects that integrate AddThis tools for various CMSs and JavaScript frameworks and is the primary developer on AddThis’s WordPress plugins. When not working, she spends her time volunteering with the Junior League, in a pilates studio, or doting over her blind cat Batman and his BFF Robin.
K. Adam White
K. Adam White is a senior web application engineer in Boston, Massachusetts, where he writes 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 WordPrest REST API.
Marina Pape
What makes people tick, take action, and become loyal is always on Marina’s brain. Educated in Cape Town in English and Psychology, she did further studies in Marketing then worked in advertising and for an NGO before joining the startup that became South Africa’s leading eCommerce store, Yuppiechef.com. After five years at Yuppiechef, Marina made a move to London and joined the WooCommerce marketing team. Marina currently leads the half of WooCommerce’s marketing team responsible for demand generation and retention, and spends her days storytelling, launching products, talking to customers to find out how we’re really doing, and writing poems about the sea.
Mark Jaquith
Mark Jaquith is a Lead Developer for WordPress core and has been working on WordPress since 2004. He makes his living providing WordPress consulting and coding services.
Matt Mullenweg
Matt is the co-founder of the open-source blogging platform, WordPress, the most popular publishing platform on the web, and the founder & CEO of Automattic, the company behind WordPress.com, WooCommerce, and Jetpack. Additionally, Matt runs Audrey Capital, an investment and research company. He has been recognized for his leadership and success by Forbes, Bloomberg Business Week, Inc Magazine, TechCrunch, Fortune, Fast Company, Wired, University Philosophical Society, 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 Arestad
Michael is a designer at Automattic working on Jetpack and WordPress.com. He contributes to the WordPress project and is the most active on the design team. Michael has also been running monthly WordPress meetups in Denver for the last three years. He may be a tad obsessed with CSS (especially Sass) and beautiful typography.
Miriam Schwab
Over the last ten years, Miriam and her team at illuminea have built compelling WordPress websites and applications for hundreds of technology, healthcare, e-commerce and non-profit organizations. Miriam is an active member of the WordPress community, having organized WordCamp Israel five times, contributed plugins to the repository, and written hundreds of WordPress tutorials that are published on her blog, WPGarage.com.
Miriam recently founded Strattic, a platform for publishing WordPress websites as static sites, thus increasing security, speed and scalability.
Morten Rand-Hendriksen
Morten Rand-Hendriksen is a senior staff instructor at LinkedIn Learning and Lynda.com with 60+ courses published on WordPress, web standards, design and UX, and future technologies. He also teaches Interaction Design at Emily Carr University of Art and Design, and contributes to WordPress core and community projects.
When he’s not working you’ll find Morten playing with his son, reading philosophy and science fiction, talking to people about the internet and how it shapes our society, and wearing out his shoes on the ballroom dance floor.
Otto Kekäläinen
Otto Kekäläinen is the CEO of Seravo Oy and also works for the MariaDB Foundation. Otto has been using Linux and other open source technologies for over 15 years, and has been advocating open source for almost as long. Otto’s first blog in 2004 was made with WordPress, and since the inception of WP-palvelu.fi and Seravo.com Otto has been deeply involved with WordPress.
As a software developer Otto has insight into the technical side of open source, and as a CEO and entrepreneur he also knows how to use open source in business successfully. Otto likes to share his experiences on how to use open source to its full potential and how the world can keep increasing the benefits of open source software and its methodologies.
Petya Raykovska
Petya is a Senior Project Manager and event manager at Human Made and the community lead for the WordPress Polyglots team. Petya helped organise WordCamp Europe 2014 and WordCamp Europe 2015 and lead the team that organised WordCamp Europe 2016 in Vienna.
Pirate Dunbar
Ptah Dunbar is a self-taught digital architect, internationally renowned speaker, educator and serial entrepreneur with over a decade experience creating software and contributing to open source. Ptah speaks 10 languages, teaches students how to code, and is on a mission to create software that empowers a trillion people over the next decade.
Rian Rietveld
Rian is a WordPress engineer, specialised in web accessibility. She works for the WordPress agency Human Made and is part of the WordPress Accessibility Team. If she’s not coding, you can find her working in her garden.
Sarah Semark
Sarah Semark is a designer, developer, and world-traveller. After running a business for eight years, she now works for Automattic designing and building WordPress themes. She has visited over fifty countries, and she has built things with WordPress in most of them.
When she’s not busy making things, Sarah likes obsessing over typography, collecting impractical footwear, and exploring new places.
Sasha Endoh
Sasha is a web strategist, front-end developer, and multidisciplinary designer. She runs an interactive design studio in Montreal, Canada that specializes in creating WordPress websites for NPOs, cause-based organizations, and other do-gooders. Her goal is to make a lasting impact through amplifying the voices of those who are working towards meaningful positive changes. She enjoys spreading her passion for coding, design, and social change through public speaking and educational initiatives like Ladies Learning Code and Girls Learning Code.
Lightning Talk Speakers
Alice Orru
Alice was born in the beautiful island of Sardinia, Italy, and always dreamt about travelling abroad and fight insularity.
After living in different Italian cities, in France and in Barcelona, she now lives in Genova, Italy.
She’s a long-time blogger, an avid reader and a language geek.
She’s a polyglot for the Italian WP community and has been working as a multi-language customer support agent for WP Media since September 2015, her first experience in an IT company. But since she loves embracing new challenges, she’s been studying WordPress a lot, taking PHP classes and improving her tech-skills: at the end, this is exactly like learning a new language, isn’t it?
Alice Still
Alice does copy and content strategy at Unramble. She’s also a co-organiser of Brighton WordPress meetups, one of the co-founders of Brighton Digital Women, and lead organiser of WordCamp Brighton 2017. She uses content to create and build brands – on websites, via social media and at events – and has a particular interest in using tone of voice, content strategy and copywriting as tools to increase inclusiveness. Outside of work, Alice loves to stroll along Brighton’s seaside (especially in summer), play with her dog, Bear, and hang out at local cafes.
Borek Bernard
Borek is a developer from Czechia, passionate about best practices, proper tooling etc. He is part of a team that is working on VersionPress and when he’s away from keyboard, he enjoys time with his family the most. You can find Borek on Twitter as @borekb.
Dario Jazbec Hrvatin
Dario Jazbec Hrvatin is a documentation manager and usability consultant with OnTheGoSystems, creators of WPML and Toolset plugins. With a web-developing background, he’s been a huge WordPress fan for years, using it for every single project since the very start.
In recent years he has specialized in writing documentation and is involved with usability testing. He firmly believes that simplicity and ease-of-use, of both documentation and products, is of utmost importance for making a great product.
Ivelina Dimova
WordPress developer working at CrowdFavorite where we create web solutions for big enterprise companies. I am more focused on back-end development and passionate about version control systems, deployment and server administration tools.
As many developers are searching for better solutions to automate their workflow, I believe that my advice can be useful for the audience.
Personally some of my interests are yoga, travelling and photography, I am always excited to travel around the world to visit WordCamps, learn new things and spend time with the awesome people at the community.
Jen Miller
Jen Miller believes in the value and power of the written word in sharing truth and story, in life and in business. Combining her journalism background with a passion for customer service and marketing, Jen built NeedSomeoneToBlog.com, a blogging service focused on delivering highly-targeted, local search engine optimized blogging and page content primarily for real estate clients.
As the business grew, Jen discovered areas that could further develop authority, garner trust, and build engagement for her clients online. Her agency NeedSomeoneTo.com combines these services to share engaging messages of community and industry knowledge with their clients and followers. Jen also hosts a weekly podcast, Be Seen Blogging, delivering website content tips in under 10 minutes.
Jen Miller believes in the WordPress Community which is why she founded WomenWhoWP.org, a nonprofit dedicated to encouraging women in their WordPress journey. She also founded a specialty Meetup to accomplish the same goal.
Serving as a volunteer blogger for WordCamp Los Angeles in 2016 and 2017 and as Content Organizer for WordCamp Orange County 2017, Jen is active in the local WordPress Community. She presented at WordCamp Orange County in 2016 on Creating and Maintaining Sites While Mobile.
Jenny Wong
As a conference speaker, community conference organiser and Open Source evangelist, Jenny loudly cheers people on to share knowledge and contribute back to Open Source projects. Her love for development goes beyond the screen and she is an advocate of both the PHP and WordPress communities. She is based in the UK but you can find her making typos across the world.
Marco Calicchia
Marco was introduced to WordPress community and its WordCamps, whilst at SiteGround, as their Community Manager. He was accepted as a speaker at WordCamp London 2017. Marco attends numerous WordCamps around the world building relationships with WordPress community members. In his free time, apart from being an active Ethereum investor and adviser, Marco frequently travels to his family and friends, around the globe.
Monique Dubbelman
Monique started working as a graphical designer and engineer somewhere in the 20th century. She discovered the web in the early 90ies and has been online ever since, exploring new possibilities. Her expertise shifted towards marketing, communications and web design. About 10 years ago, she started selling online and therefore built and designed her own webshop. She works as an entrepeneur in her own company BOE!media since 2011, advising sme’s on their digital (marketing) strategy. In 2016, she graduated from the Amsterdam University of Applied Sciences as a bachelor in information management. Building websites with WordPress is an important part of her work. When she’s not glued to her phone or computer, this mudface likes to whisper to earth worms on her allotment.
Oleksandr Strikha
Oleksandr is a technical leader of WordPress projects based currently in Oslo, Norway. He has designed and led the development of some of the largest content platforms and startups within Scandinavia. In his spare time Aleks works on new ideas of products in the latest technology, or working on internal development routines to make building of the projects fast and effective. Is a contributor of WordPress community in Kyiv, Ukraine and organiser of meet ups and conferences there.
Pascal Birchler
Pascal is a student and Core Developer based in Zurich, Switzerland. He’s been working with WordPress for half of his life and passionate about helping other people and cooking. Most recently he’s been improving updates and i18n in WordPress.
Rahul Bansal
Rahul is the founder and CEO of rtCamp – the only WordPress.com VIP Partner from Asia.
His WordPress journey began in 2007 when he was looking for ways to customize his blog. Later on, he moved from professional blogging, freelancing to starting rtCamp in 2009.
At work, Rahul plays multiple roles, switching between sysadmin (his favorite), to a salesperson and everything else company demands from him.
Over the years, Rahul has contributed to the WordPress community in different ways as a WordCamp speaker, organizer, volunteer, polyglot, theme/plugins developer.
Outside of WordPress, he loves spending time with his son and is a self-proclaimed foodie.
Syed Balkhi
Syed Balkhi is an award winning young entrepreneur with several 7 figure online businesses. He was recognized as the top 100 entrepreneur under the age of 30 by United Nations. His work has been featured in Forbes, Inc, Washington Post, FoxBusiness, Entrepreneur, Wired, and many top publications.
In 2009, he created WPBeginner which is now one of the largest free WordPress resource site on the web.
In 2011, he created a site called List25, an extremely popular site that within 3 months of launch was receiving 5 million page views per month. List25 has over 2.1 million subscribers and 470 Million video views on Youtube.
In 2013, he launched OptinMonster, the best lead generation software that helps businesses grow their email list. Every month, OptinMonster forms are viewed billions of times and help convert millions of abandoning visitors into subscribers.
Aside from these, Syed is also the co-founder of Soliloquy, Envira Gallery and the founder of WPForms, and MonsterInsights.
Thabo Tswana
Thabo is a freelance web designer from Harare, Zimbabwe. He has a hunger to constantly grow and evolve as a web designer and he has a genuine passion for website security. He is also an open source junkie (die-hard Ubuntu user!) and has been using WordPress for more than three years. Thabo was the primary organizer for the very first WordCamp Harare and is a co-organizer for Harare WordPress Meetup. He is hoping he can remember the French he studied at O Level so he can put it to good use in Paris.
Tom Greenwood
Tom co-founded Wholegrain Digital with his wife Vineeta back in 2007 with the aim of helping good people benefit from good design.
A fan of open source and WordPress, it is his job to set the vision for the company and ensure that everyone is healthy and happy.
In his spare time he has an unhealthy obsession with natural health and likes to run around the woods with bare feet.
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, he works hard to make the web a better place.
Contributor Day Speakers
Aaron Campbell
Aaron is the WordPress Core Security Team lead, has been a regular contributor to WordPress for more than ten years, and is currently funded by GoDaddy to work full time on the WordPress open source project. He has over seventeen years of web development experience and worked with clients ranging from small local businesses to Google, Yahoo, Disney, and Harvard. He’s been called both a coffee snob and a beer snob, but considers both to be compliments. When not buried in code, he enjoys spending time with his wife and son, riding his motorcycle, and reading sci-fi/fantasy books.
Adam Silverstein
Adam started programming in assembly code and wrote Java applets when Netscape Navigator ruled the web, eventually embracing WordPress and core contributing. He is a Lead Web Engineer at 10up, a WordPress core committer, and lead developer of the REST API Backbone JavaScript client. Adam loves long rafting trips, playing mbira, travel, taking walks and tending his over-sized garden.
Cate Huston
Cate has spent her career working on mobile and documenting everything she learns using WordPress. Now she combines the two as Automattic’s mobile lead. She co-curates Technically Speaking, and admins the New-(ish) Manager Slack. You can find her at cate.blog.
Corey McKrill
Corey has worked full time as a WordPress designer and developer since 2009. Currently he is a member of the WP Meta Team, and focuses on WordCamp.org and the Meta Environment. Corey was born and raised in Alaska, and he lives in the American state of Oregon, which is a good place to enjoy hiking in the mountains, watching winter storms on the coast, and drinking good beer.
Daniele Scasciafratte
Daniele Scasciafratte, the Open Source Multiversal guy, he should work in his web agency, Codeat in Rome, and in the rest of the day collaborate in many opensource projects.
During the office hours for the WordPress world is a Core Contributor, plugin developer, project translator editor and WP Roma meetup co-organizer.
He fight with the superpower of a Mozilla Rep for an open web, is co-leading the participation team of Mozilla Italia and sometimes is an Italian gestures speaker.
David Aguilera
David is a co-founder of Nelio Software, a startup focused on developing WordPress plugins. He leads the analysis and design of their services and takes care of customer support. He loves DIY projects, 3D digital printing, and strong coffee. He contributes to the WordPress community by participating in meetups and translating WordPress to Catalan and Spanish.
Dominik Schilling
Dominik Schilling is a Web Developer at required and a WordPress core developer with a strong passion for WordPress. He led the WordPress 4.6 release, is the technical lead of the Polyglots team and lead developer of GlotPress, a collaborative, web-based software translation tool. Since that’s not enough he also takes part in the WordPress.org meta and security teams to make translate.wordpress.org more awesome and WordPress more secure. Dominik is mostly known as @ocean90.
Felix Arntz
Ian Dunn
I’m a full-time contributor with the Meta and Community teams. My primary focus is building tools to support the WordCamp program, and I also help maintain the Meta Environment, which is a project focused on making it easier for developers to contribute to the Meta team.
John Blackbourn
John is one of the WordPress core developers, a member of the WordPress security team, and was the release lead for WordPress 4.1. He works as a senior WordPress engineer at Human Made in the UK.
Kelly Dwan
Kelly Dwan is a Cambridge-based Code Wrangler at Automattic. She has worked on everything from small business websites, to higher education, to enterprise and big media. In her spare time, Kelly develops WordPress themes and contributes to the WordPress community.
Lorelei Aurora
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.
Pascal Birchler
Pascal is a student and Core Developer based in Zurich, Switzerland. He’s been working with WordPress for half of his life and passionate about helping other people and cooking. Most recently he’s been improving updates and i18n in WordPress.
Pascal Casier
Pascal (@casiepa) is a Belgian based in Italy, missing the beer and the chocolate but loving the coffee and food. Started with WordPress only in 2013, but fell in love immediately. He is currently a Polyglots team mentor and WordPress.tv moderator. As plugin author he found back his PHP roots from many many years ago.
Tom J Nowell
I’m a developer from the UK and a VIP Wrangler at Automattic. Prior to that i’ve had 5 years of experience at agencies building and maintaining websites.
I run multiple open source projects, have plugins in the .org repository, and was elected a community moderator for the WordPress Stack Exchange where I’m in the top 20 high ranking users.
Growing up I found the idea of public speaking scary, but now I speak when I can, initially to get me out of my comfort zone, but now for enjoyment and to raise awareness.
I strongly believe most developers are missing information that’s presumed and assumed, and that with the right knowledge they can make leaps and bounds
Zac Gordon
Zac Gordon is a professional educator, currently working on the JavaScript for WordPress Master Course. Previously, Zac taught WordPress for Treehouse. He has years of experience teaching WordPress and JavaScript at colleges, high schools, code schools and workshops. In addition to teaching, Zac also runs Web Hosting for Students, the world’s largest hosting company dedicated to students and teachers.