The Gutenberg Team
Andrew Duthie
Andrew is a JavaScript Engineer at Automattic, where he currently works on improving the WordPress core software with a new editor experience code-named “Gutenberg”. He has regularly contributed to WordPress.com and the Jetpack plugin, and prior to his time at Automattic had worked in an agency setting developing WordPress sites for clients both big and small. Andrew is co-lead of the weekly WordPress JavaScript Developers chats and is an organizer for both the Cincinnati WordPress Meetup group and WordCamp Cincinnati (2016-2017).
Ella Van Dorpe
–coming soon–
Gary Pendergast
Gary is a WordPress, web and music geek who writes poetry with Automattic. He’s a Core and Gutenberg developer, and has been known to voice strong opinions on a wide variety of subjects. He occasionally writes things at pento.net, and is currently very excited about building blocks.
Grzegorz Ziółkowski
Grzegorz is a passionate code wrangler and open-source contributor based in Oleśnica, Poland. He writes JavaScript at Automattic and helps develop Gutenberg – the new WordPress editing experience. When not coding, Grzegorz enjoys spending time with his adorable wife and daughter. He likes traveling to new places and playing basketball with his friends.
Jorge Costa
Jorge is an Automattician writing Javascript poetry for the new WordPress editor. He is a passionate developer and open source enthusiastic that loves Software Engineering challenges and to use the best tools for the job. Jorge loves to share and exchange knowledge since he was a teaching assistant for computer science courses at Porto University. Now, it is easy to find Jorge in technical events and conferences giving talks or eager to ask some question and discuss some topic. Outside of work you can find Jorge enjoying good wine at sunset, running, or hiking beautiful Portuguese mountains.
Riad Benguella
Developer at Automattic and member of the Gutenberg development team. I am fluent in JavaScript, PHP and WordPress. I live in Oran, Algeria. When I do not work, I code and when I work I code too. I write some blog posts when I’m bored and if I have no internet connection, I go out to do some mountain biking.
Tammie Lister
See bio here.
Julien Melissas
Julien is a developer with a passion for clean, efficient code, and re-doing things until they’re just right. Julien is a co-founder and technical director at Craftpeak where he works on web stuff to support Craft Breweries all over the world. He’s on the Roots.io development team, and loves working on open source. When he’s is not in front of the screen, you can find him in the mountains of Western North Carolina on his BMW GS Adventure Motorcycle or out in the yard with his big dog Wilbur.
Rian Rietveld
Rian is a WordPress engineer who has enthusiastically worked with WordPress since 2009, and has a strong interest in web standards and making the web usable for everybody. She works as a web developer and accessibility consultant for the WordPress agency Level Level and is part of the WordPress Accessibility Team. When not coding, you can find her working in her garden.
Lucas Prigge
Lucas has been working with WordPress for over 10 years. He runs a Dutch WordPress-blog about vegan nutrition at Veganicious.nl. Lucas also uses this experience to help clients at Savvii, Europe’s first specialised WordPress Host. His areas of expertise include speed, security, and business development.
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 high schools, colleges, bootcamps and online learning sites. In addition to teaching, Zac also runs Web Hosting for Students, one of the world’s largest hosting companies dedicated to students and teachers.
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. She has been designing and developing web sites since 1997 and was a professional web site designer fron 2007-2015. She holds a postgraduate certification in internet law and policy from the University of Strathclyde.
Thorsten Frommen
Thorsten is a certified PHP engineer, web development professional and tester. He is working in the web since 2000, and with (and on) WordPress since 2005. Thorsten is a Senior WordPress Engineer at Human Made. Thorsten created several plugins and other projects, and contributed to open source projects. He is an advocate of object-oriented design, and software testing. Thorsten loves WordCamps, where he likes to both gain and share knowledge.
Krešimir Končić
Krešimir is the founder and director of Neuralab, a company that designs and develops complex web applications. Neuralab projects are implemented on LAMP stack platform, providing customers with the service of developing an entire digital platform. Industry experts listed them in Top 5 eCommerce development companies in the world (source: Clutch) and they hold production partnerships with Google, Mailchimp and WooCommerce (gold experts)
Robert Rowley
Robert is the security lead for Pagely and previously DreamHost, with over 10 years expereince in the WordPress hosting and security fields, he has been on the front lines during all of the major attacks against WordPress sites. As a hobby (aside from brewing beer) he does security research in many fields including WordPress and WordPress plugins.
Nathan Kuik
Nathan started his career as a licensed therapist in Seattle, and began working as a software developer after moving to Copenhagen 2015. Nathan’s passion is combining mental health and tech, and he contributes ideas and content to the non-profit Open-Sourcing Mental Illness (OSMI) when not doing development work. He currently resides in Copenhagen, working in a new Robot Process Automation (RPA) department at Denmark’s largest train operator, DSB.
Florian Gottschall
I am working in video and movie business since 1997 and created a great variety of video clips in the past. I am also running my own YouTube Channel as a video blogger. Du to that experience I startet increasing my knowledge about online video and created a plugin for WordPress that enables everybody to produce its own videos like you make your blog or website with WordPress. Next to my main business I am running coaching based on Social Media.
Sherry Walling
Dr. Sherry Walling is a clinical psychologist and co-host of the ZenFounder podcast. She’s the founder of ZenFounder LLC, a mental health organization that serves entrepreneurs. Married to a serial tech entrepreneur, Sherry has a unique combination of psychological expertise and 17 years of experience in the trenches of the startup world. She brings these worlds together on the podcast, as an author, in her consulting work, and as a speaker.
Yvette Sonneveld
Yvette Sonneveld, founder and CEO of Inbound Marketing Bliss and founding partner at Sonneveld & Goeijenbier, works with owners of small and medium-sized businesses who want to use inbound marketing strategies to land more clients who love them for both what they bring to the table as a professional and for who they are as a person.
Daniel Olson
Dan is the COO of DigitalCube, a WordPress product company with offices in the US and Japan. His work focuses on crafting technical solutions using design thinking, building WordPress SaaS products on AWS, and business development where those two ideas meet. Away from the keyboard he enjoys experimenting in the kitchen, tasting all the beers, traveling and helping with the family business, a pet boutique and bakery named, Amelie’s Bark Shop located in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.
Joshua Wold
As a designer turned Product Owner, Joshua has worked on a range of WordPress website projects over the years. Currently he is enjoying the opportunity to help define requirements for enterprise level WordPress site. This gives Joshua the opportunity to have regular interaction with Content Producers, as well as amazing engineering teams. He apples his design background to many of the tickets he’s working on, sketching wireframes and creating prototypes to help bring the tickets to life for their clients.
Andrea Volpini
Andrea Volpini is the CEO of WordLift, a semantic editor for WordPress, an innovative tool invented at the intersection between semantic technologies, natural language processing, and search engine optimization. Andrea has 20+ years of world-class experience in online strategies and web publishing. In 2013 Andrea Volpini kick-started RedLink GmbH, a research spin-off focusing on artificial intelligence chatbots and information extraction.
Lara Schenck
Lara Schenck is an independent front-end and WordPress developer living in Los Angeles, CA. She is passionate about exploring the fundamentals behind web technologies, and loves to share her findings through speaking, teaching, writing, and mentorship.
Lara is an active member of the LA tech community, and co-organizes the Hollywood WordPress meet up, WordCamp LA, and CSS.la. In her spare time, Lara illustrates friendly monsters and roasts her own coffee.
Alain Schlesser
Alain is a freelance software engineer, author and speaker living in Germany, who has recently settled on WordPress as his market of choice. Within the WordPress space, he is part of the WordPress Core Team (Bootstrap/Load Component Maintainer) and CLI Team (WP-CLI Co-maintainer). However, he is just as passionate about Open Source in general, contributing to a diverse set of projects and efforts, and constantly growing his expertise in software construction as a craft to master.
Raffaella Isidori
I create brands and design the communication for businesses around the world and assist companies in their localisation. Besides that I study, teach, take pictures, write, translate & coach professionals on communication & language. Here’s my work. Curious as a cat and in love with diversities, I collect books, fonts & essential oils. I live and work in the country, surrounded by flora & fauna, where I cultivate dreams & push boundaries.
Adrian Roselli
Adrian is a member of the W3C Web Platform Working Group, W3C ARIA Working Group, and W3C Accessibility Task Force. He’s written articles for trade journals, web sites, and participated as an author and editor on five books. In 1998 he co-founded a software development consulting firm before leaving at the start of 2016. 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.
Thierry Muller
Thierry Muller is a Swiss Digital Wrangler writing code and architecting softwares for a decade. He is passionate about web engineering, code quality, open source, community driven projects and building enterprise solutions. He spent a great part of his career building products and web solutions for WordPress as well as driving open source projects. Thierry works at XWP as a Software Architect & Senior Engineer.
Sami Keijonen
Teacher and front-end developer, who likes to learn about web, accessibility and WordPress.
Francesco Canovi
Trained as a biologist (Master Degree) starts working in science communication, then lands to online business consulting. He has now 15+ years of professional experience in the industry. Founder of Black Studio, the company behind the popular plugin Black Studio TinyMCE Widget (6+ million downloads). WordPress enthusiast and WordCamp speaker.
Carl Alexander
Carl Alexander is a PHP developer from Montréal, Canada. He has a website where he publishes articles on a regular basis. It’s his way to help the community with these hard-to-learn topics. It’s also why he’s excited to speak at WordCamp Europe. It’s another way for him to help out. Besides that, he’s been a WordPress Montréal organizer since 2010. He also helps organize other WordPress events during the year. You can find him on Twitter and GitHub.
Giuseppe Mazzapica
A dozen years experience in PHP and WordPress, Giuseppe created his first WordPress theme the week after themes where introduced in version 1.5. After many years of freelancing and an experience in a big european media group, he is now a WordPress engineer at Inpsyde, biggest german WP agency and VIP partner. He’s moderator at WordPress Develelopment Stack Exchange and an eager open source contributor, with a focus on bringing modern development techniques in WordPress libraries and plugins.
Michael Selander
Mike got his current job after bumping into a bunch of Human Made team members at WordCamp London in 2016. He now works there as a senior full-stack developer. Most of his working hours are spent pulling apart project specs and turning problems into fast sites or web applications. Away from the computer, you can find him drooling over cars, planning his next nomadic year, or kayaking.
Maja Benke
Maja studied landscape architecture but soon discovered her love for WordPress and traveling the world. Now she works as a web designer with a passion for UX and accessibility and has a blog for WordPress newbies.
Miriam Schwab
Miriam started using WP over 11 years ago, and has written hundreds of blog posts on WPGarage and illuminea on how to make the most of WP. Miriam founded illuminea, one of Israel’s leading WordPress development agencies; and more recently founded Strattic, a SaaS platform that publishes WordPress website as static making them secure, faster and scalable. Five-time organizer of WordCamp Israel, and speaker.
Christina Varro
For over 15 years, I have worked in web, digital media, and communications. I have also spent nearly a decade running my own business, managing projects for clients, giving creative direction, building websites and crafting digital media solutions using WordPress. I am passionate about sharing my experience and educating others with inspiring and practical advice, to build better websites and run their businesses more efficiently.
Laura Nelson
Laura is the Marketing Manager at Pragmatic – a Brighton-based WordPress agency, as well as being the lead organiser for WordCamp Brighton 2018. She’s been marketing WordPress sites for the past 6 years, and loves creating digital marketing strategies for a variety of different clients. She’s also passionate about shedding the stigma surrounding mental illness. As someone who suffers from anxiety herself, she’s keen to shed more light on this issue in order to help others.
Mauricio Gelves
Mauricio Gelves is a Software Engineer, works as Freelancer Web Consultant and as GoDaddy Pro Brand Evangelist. He’s Digital Nomad since 2015, this activity combines his two biggest passions: Information Technologies and Travelling. Registers all his experiences with articles and videos you can read and follow in the blog of his website maugelves.com.
Morten Rand-Hendriksen
Morten is a Senior Staff Instructor at LinkedIn Learning and Lynda.com with 60+ courses published on WordPress, web standards, design, 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. Morten enjoys playing with his son, reading philosophy and sci-fi, having conversations about the internet and how it shapes our society, and wearing out his shoes on the ballroom dance floor.
Simon Cooke
Simon is the Marketing Director at Pragmatic, a WordPress agency based in Brighton UK. He co-founded Republiqué, an award winning creative agency with focus on design and WordPress development, the agency ran for 14 years and until it merged with Pragmatic in 2016. More recently, Simon co-founded the IWP Awards, a new initiative to celebrate talent in the WordPress community. Simon also loves painting portraits and reading about our solar system.
Alberto Medina
Alberto is a developer Advocate in the Content Ecosystems Team at Google. Computer Scientist by training, he has worked in academic environments, research labs, startups, medium companies (~300M users), and large companies (~1B+ users). Passionate about enabling awesome web experiences for all users.
Noel Tock
Noel is one of the partners at Human Made, responsible for many of the growth activities surrounding future revenue – including product development, marketing, business development and other key sales initiatives.
Tammie Lister
I work at Automattic, where I am an experience designer donated to the WordPress.org project full time. My background is varied and includes psychology, design, front end development and user experience. I am passionate about Open Source and community.
Matías Ventura
I was born in Montevideo. I’m a designer, engineer, film director, photographer, and writer of philosophy. I’ve contributed the 2011 theme to WordPress, worked on the core Calypso team at Automattic, where I’m also part of the developer experience team. I’m currently leading the Gutenberg editor project for WordPress.
Karim Marucchi
Karim leads Crowd Favorite & has been contributing to, the WordPress community for the last 7 years. He is passionate about finding innovative ways to help digital professionals in the midst of hyper-growth or in significant transitions grow in the Open Source Community. HIs career has included founding startups, working for large web agencies. He loves figuring out how to make diverse teams work as a cohesive unit.
Sean Blakeley
Sean Blakeley discovered WordPress in early 2006 and has never looked back. He loved the flexibility it gave him and the control it gave his clients. From those early, simple websites he’s grown to become Tech Lead & Producer on large, enterprise projects for household names. Alongside working with WordPress, Sean spent a decade working in the film industry – working as a sculptor on some blockbuster films including Tomb Raider, Batman Begins, Harry Potter, Prometheus and more.
Adam Silverstein
Adam started programming writing games in assembly code, and eventually a CMS in Java and many websites before discovering and embracing WordPress. He is an active core committer and is helping lead the effort to modernize WordPress core’s JavaScript. Adam is a Lead Web Engineer at 10up where he helps make the web better by finely crafting websites & tools for content creators. Adam loves long rafting trips, playing mbira, travel, taking walks and tending his over-sized garden.
Joost de Valk
I’m the husband of Marieke van de Rakt, father of 4 kids and the CEO and founder of Yoast.
Felix Arntz
Felix is a WordPress freelancer based in Germany, and a backend developer with a major focus on multisite environments. He regularly creates plugins and is also involved in core development, where he has been a component maintainer for Multisite, Capabilities and Post Thumbnails for a while, and became a committer in late 2016. When not doing WordPress stuff, he spends his time producing music and playing the piano as well as soccer. He does all of that while drinking a lot of Mountain Dew.
Marco Chiesi
Master’s Degrees in Software Engineering at the University of Bologna, Italy. 15+ years of professional experience in the web industry, working as full stack web developer and sysadmin. Lead Engineer at Black Studio, an Italian web agency specialized in WordPress services. WordPress enthusiast, Plugin developer, Core contributor, and WordCamp speaker. Author of the popular plugin Black Studio TinyMCE Widget (6+ million downloads).
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. You can find her on Twitter as @catehstn
Marieke van de Rakt
I studied Sociology and Communication Sciences at the Radboud University in Nijmegen. In 2011, I obtained my Ph.D. in Social Sciences. Since then, I worked as a researcher as well as a teacher at multiple universities. I am currently one of the partners at Yoast. My main focus is on Yoast Academy; I develop products that help people to set up their own SEO strategy. I write blog posts and develop online courses. My expertise is in SEO copywriting and site structure.
Maura Teal
Maura is a Software Engineer at Pagely and previously developed for WordPress at scale at Time, Inc. She is an active part of the WordPress community, speaking at WordCamps and meetups.
David Needham
David has been a public speaker since 2008 at various events from WordPress to Drupal camps and conferences, and an entrepreneur since 2000. David is based out of Champaign IL, enjoys photography, and playing board games with his wife and kids.
Libby Barker
Libby joined Human Made as a Project Manager in April 2016. She loves working with clients and development teams to build outstanding projects using WordPress. Before her introduction to the WordPress community, Libby worked primarily in film and television, most notably with The Daily Show with Jon Stewart and the Food Network. In 2014 she and her husband moved from New York City to Vermont where she enjoys hiking, great local food and being involved in the local tech community.
Christie Chirinos
Christie Chirinos is one of the co-owners and the business development lead at Caldera Labs, a plugin company best known for its popular contact form plugin, Caldera Forms. Christie started making websites at the age of 14, and before joining Caldera Labs did everything from selling items on eBay to leading website re-launch projects for major nonprofit organizations. Christie recently received her Master of Business Administration degree and is currently based out of New York City.
K Adam White
K Adam White is a Senior JavaScript Developer at Human Made, where he architects modern front-end applications for enterprise-scale WordPress sites. As a component maintainer of the REST API and a long-time open source contributor, KAdam cares a lot about clarity of communication and making things easy for beginners. When he’s not online you can find him strolling New York City with a camera, enjoying a coffee with friends, or making art.
Ben Greeley
Ben is a lead web engineer at 10up, finely crafting websites and tools for content creators. In his spare time, he keeps active by training for marathons, climbing mountains and exploring the world. He lives in Maine and holds degrees in Computer Science and German.
Nela Dunato
Nela Dunato is a brand designer with over a decade of professional experience. She’s worked at several web development agencies before starting her own business [Nela Dunato Art & Design] (http://neladunato.com/) in 2013. She teaches graphic design as an Adobe course instructor, and runs her own workshops. She helps service-based businesses from all over the world to launch and grow their ventures using the power of human-centered branding and WordPress websites.
Aaron Campbell
Aaron is the WordPress Security Team lead, has been a regular contributor to WordPress for over ten years, and is funded by GoDaddy to work full time on the WordPress open source project. He has eighteen years of web development experience and is passionate about the importance of the open web. He’s been called both a coffee snob and a beer snob, but considers both to be compliments. He enjoys spending time with his wife and son, riding his motorcycle, and reading sci-fi/fantasy books.
Sven Lehnert
His WordPress journey started in 2008 with BuddyPress while building a community website for an internet radio. In need to set up a social network solution targeting the subculture in his hometown he used BP for shows listings, moderator and user profiles. He became an expert in user generated content and frontend posting. Developing WP projects and passionate about BP soon ThemeKraft was founded where he is CEO and leads Development. Providing themes and plugins that are popular all over the world. Most notably known for acclaimed BuddyForms.
Matt Mullenweg
Matt Mullenweg 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 Businessweek, 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.
John Maeda
John Maeda joined Automattic in 2016 as Global Head of Computational Design + Inclusion and previously served as Design Partner at KPCB, a world-leading venture capital firm. An internationally recognized speaker and author, his books include The Laws of Simplicity and Redesigning Leadership. He holds degrees in Electrical Engineering + Computer Science from MIT, MBA from ASU, and a PhD from University of Tsukuba in Japan. He has appeared as a speaker all over the world, and his talks for TED.com have received over 2 million views to date. Maeda is the recipient of numerous awards, and can be found on Twitter at @johnmaeda.
Hajj Flemings
Hajj Flemings was one of eight entrepreneurs selected for the CNN’s Black in America 4 The New Promised Land: Silicon Valley documentary with Soledad O’Brien. During the filming of that documentary, he recognized that a lack of access in the technology space was creating a permanent underclass in communities of color. This propelled him to launch Rebrand Cities a global civic design partnership with WordPress with the audacious goal to get 10,000 businesses online and eradicate the digital divide.
Paolo Belcastro
Paolo is a modern nomad: after Italy, France, and Switzerland, he now lives in Vienna, Austria from where he leads the Automattic/WordPress.com Spectrum teams. Passionate photographer, he also dedicates his free time to the WordPress community through the organisation of WordCamp Europe from 2013 to 2017, and WordCamp Vienna 2015. Working remotely since 1994, managing distributed teams since 1998, he firmly believes that remote work is the key to peaceful coexistence for 10B humans.
Davide Casali
Davide Casali, known as “Folletto”, is a product design director and startup advisor. He has an hybrid background in design, psychology, business, and technology. He designs to change for better people’s quality of life. In his 15+ years of experience he worked for global and local companies across different industries (finance, luxury, fashion, telco, news) in B2C, B2B and enterprise collaboration. In the past 4 years he was involved in WordPress.com and multiple WordPress releases.
David Mosterd
David is a WordPress consultant from the Netherlands and lead-developer of the WordPress plugin Admin Columns. He is passionate about code that strikes a balance between being pragmatic and maintainable with a strong focus on object oriented coding. Loves to share his thoughts and knowledge on managing WordPress projects (and how to code them).