Speakers

Aaron Campbell

Aaron has more than twelve years of web development experience, has been a regular contributor to WordPress for the last six years, and is currently co-leading the WordPress 3.6 release. He’s been called both a coffee snob and a beer snob, but considers both to be compliments. When he’s not buried in code, Aaron can often be found spending time with his family, attending or hosting beer tastings, or taking his son drag racing.

Adam McLane

Adam McLane is the Principal of McLane Creative, a San Diego based creative group focused on helping small businesses, start-ups, and non-profits tell their best story. Since one start-up isn’t crazy enough, he is also a Partner at The Youth Cartel, a Christian organization currently instigating a revolution in youth ministry. Lastly, Adam is the co-author of the recently released, A Parent’s Guide to Understanding Social Media.

Andy Stratton

Andy is a freelance WordPress developer from Baltimore, MD. He organized WordCamp Baltimore, leads the Baltimore WordPress meetup and founded Sizeable Interactive, a WordPress co-op. Andy has been working with WordPress for over six years and holds over 15 years experience building websites. To give back, Andy speaks at WordCamps regularly and authors multiple free WordPress plugins.

Anuj Nijhawan

Anuj Nijhawan is a Senior Product Manager focusing on publisher and consumer products at ShareThis. He uses his background in development and design to build sharing solutions for the interwebs. He is also a trained filmmaker and prefers to keep himself busy dreaming about future projects.

Brandon Dove

I’m an official WordPress fanboy who enjoys pushing the platform to its limits. I develop both plugins and themes for our clients at Pixel Jar, a WordPress focused development firm based in Orange County, CA. I’ve attended WordCamps throughout the United States and organized Orange County’s first WordCamp in April 2010. I love sharing my WordPress knowledge with people in the community, so ask away.

Carol Stambaugh

I love my kids, my husband, my dog, and spending time camping in the mountains of AZ. I am a true WordPress fanatic and the perfect example of a WordPress user who does not write software code, but takes full advantage of the open source platform that WordPress has to offer. I enjoy leading the AZ WordPress Meetup group and was honored to serve as the lead organizer for WordCamp Phoenix 2013.

In addition to my work with the WordPress community, I’m also a WordPress mentor at Gangplank in Chandler, AZ and am proud to be a member of the Gangplank community. I am the founder of Tech Tools, LLC, a business dedicated to helping small businesses with websites and technology.

Chris Lema

Chris Lema is the VP of Software Engineering at Emphasys Software, where he manages high performers and oversees product development and innovation. He’s also a blogger (chrislema.com), eBook author and runs a WordPress meetup in North County San Diego (meetup.com/WordPress-San-Diego/).

Cody Landefeld

My name is Cody Landefeld and I am a WordPress Developer, WordPress Designer, and User Experience professional. I have been designing and developing websites since 2000. I work as the principal/creative lead at codyL where we solve business challenges through design and web development.

Dre Armeda

Dre Armeda is the CEO, Co-Founder of Sucuri Inc. Sucuri is a security company that concentrates on malware detection, alerting, and cleanup for websites.

Dre is a 12 year Navy veteran with experience in multiple technical disciplines. After his Navy days, Dre held various leadership positions in the tech start-up world including companies such as Applied Watch Technologies, Secure-i Inc, and Sempra Energy. Dre is a Certified Information Systems Security Professional (CISSP) and studied Computer Science at Capella University and University of Phoenix. Dre also holds various other technical and military training certifications.

You’ll find Dre at the ball fields with his girls in his off time. During the off season you’ll find him cruising the highways on his Harley, or chatting WordPress at a WordCamp near you.

Dre is a proud WordPress contributor and was the organizer that brought WordCamp to San Diego.

Drew Poland

Drew is a front-end developer, WordPress developer and entrepreneur from Baltimore, MD.  With more than three years of freelance experience, Drew consults clients around the world about enhancing performance of their websites.

To give back to the community Drew regularly attends and speaks at WordCamp events and helps organize the Baltimore WordPress meetup.

James Dalman

Entrepreneur. Designer. Status Quo Rebel.

James partners with amazing brands and people to tell their story through design and creative strategies at Dalman Designs. He has worked with billion dollar companies to start ups across the globe.

James blogs and speaks about entrepreneurship, branding, design, and WordPress. He also coaches web designers and developers on how to make their business more profitable and efficient.

When James isn’t creating new projects, you might find him sketchnoting at conferences, chasing tornadoes across the plains, or sending bullets downrange.

JJ Springer

A San Diego resident, J.J. Springer is a graphic and web designer that has worked across many spectrums of media: print, digital, and television. She is currently spending her time freelancing for major clients including BinaryM, Los Angeles Ale Works, and the Southern California Golf Association. She loves setting up, tweaking, and designing WordPress sites so that they shine for her clients.

Joshua Strebel

Founder at Page.ly Managed WordPress Hosting & do’er of things.

Karim Marucchi

Maintaining his duel citizenship between Italy and The United States, Karim has extensive ability in managing international and domestic client engagements/contracts, as well as production teams for Fortune 50 clients, including Disney, Sprint, Porter-Novelli and Sony Pictures, as well as Nissan for which The MetNet Group, a web marketing firm he founded, garnered the first ever award for online projects from the magazine, Advertising Age.

Later, as Director of Corporate Accounts at (US Web/CKS) marchFIRST, Karim led client engagements for The Los Angeles Times, Qualcomm and Toshiba. Then came domestic brand campaigns for Sony, Miramax and Nissan, as well as international campaigns for Nike, Fiat and Barilla. Subsequently, as a board member of Europe’s leading independent marketing communications group, he took FullSix (originally, Inferentia S.p.A) through the IPO process.

Now, as Founder and CEO of VeloMedia, Karim is shepherding this micro-multinational consortium of vertical brands, building a team of leading developers customizing WordPress as an enterprise-level framework for fast and cost-effective development cycles. VeloMedia teams with advertising agencies, full-service PR firms and their clients, as well as internal marketing and IT departments to provide some of the web’s most dynamic WordPress solutions.

Kevin Conboy

I have the incredible good fortune of working on fun and amazing things on the Premium Services team at Automattic, the company behind WordPress.com, Polldaddy, VaultPress, Gravatar, Akismet and more. I live in Denver, Colorado, where the sun shines more than 300 days out of the year, which is good because I’m originally from San Diego. After attending art school for graphic design in the late 90s, I found myself caught up in the whirlwind of the web agency world during the dot-com boom. More recently, however, I spent some time doing interface work for the financial industry and know more about earnings per share than I’d care to admit. Happily married with three kids, I make weird music and have been blogging for more than 12 years at Alternate.org.

Konstantin Obenland

Born and raised in Germany, I moved to Southern California just last year. Here I work from home, enjoy the sun and occasional burritos, while marveling at cultural differences and similarities between Europe and the US.

Michelle Langston

Tar Heel-born-and-bred web designer and developer who built her first site at the age of 14. More than a decade later, she’s still at it. Aside from WordPress themes, Michelle enjoys sunshine, long walks, hiking, choir singing, pondering the mysteries of the universe, and paddling with the local Dragon Boat team. She currently resides in the San Francisco Bay area with her feline partner-in-crime, Harmony.

Mike Bastos

I started learning to program when I was 14 years old back in the 90’s, the very first computer language I got involved with outside of html standards was Perl since that was really all that existed in those days in terms of open example code to look at and get ideas from.

At about 17 I joined the Marines back in 2001 and spent 8 years in the military, it was the best time of my life having gotten out as a Sergeant with 2 Iraq tours under my belt.

I solved some really fun logistical puzzles with code until I got out in 2009 where I decided to go back to school for my Computer Science Degree.

Right around that same time I started looking at getting back into web development and away from Java and C++, that’s when I discovered the early versions of WordPress and decided to learn and perfect my Php skills.

I’ve had the blessing of speaking at WCNYC, WCLA, WCPhx, WCLV and now this will be first time speaking in my home town with WCSD.

I also started the Advanced WordPress Group on Meetup.com and Facebook a little over a year ago with a bunch of great friends in order to create a place for more in depth discussions.

These days I do mostly Ruby and Rails development but my heart and passion is still in WordPress because of the people and support I’ve received over the years.

Mike Schroder

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

Natalie MacLees

Natalie MacLees is a front-end web developer and UI designer and is founder + principal of the interactive agency, Purple Pen Productions.

In 2012 she published jQuery for Designers with Packt Publishing. She founded and runs the jQuery LA Users’ Group and together with Noel Saw she heads up the Southern California WordPress User’s Group, organizing WordPress meetups, help sessions, and workshops. In 2010, she worked as technical reviewer on WordPress 3 Complete by April Hodge Silver. She makes her online home at nataliemac.com.

Steve Zehngut

Steve founded Zeek Interactive in 1995 and he has been the creative technologist behind the Huntington Beach based company since its inception. Under his direction, Zeek has grown from an apartment bedroom to one of Southern California’s leading development and consulting shops.

Steve is the organizer of the OC WordPress Meetup and has helped build the community to over 850 members. He is a frequent speaker at industry conferences and has taught interactive courses at UC Irvine, USC, the American Film Institute, and Cal State Long Beach. Steve has a BA in Film from Cal State Northridge.

Suzette Franck

Suzette Franck is the WordPress Evangelist Lead for Media Temple, a web hosting company in Culver City, California. She has been doing web development for 17+ years, but discovered WordPress four years ago and has used it to create over 200 WordPress sites, ranging from multisite, BuddyPress, membership to portfolio sites, with a variety of different designs and requirements. Suzette is passionate about open source software, loves to blog and teach others on the wonders of WordPress, and is an Automattic fan girl. Suzette’s dream is to bring easy web publishing to everyone with something to say on the Internet.

Wes Chyrchel

Wes Chyrchel has been building websites for 16 years. He has worked with WordPress since 2006 and exclusively with WordPress, since 2008. He is passionate about creating great websites and personal customer experiences for visitors and his clients. Wes loves to talk about the business of web development and is committed to making his clients successful.