AJ Zane
AJ Zane is a front end developer with a background in interactive multimedia, digital marketing, and east asian studies. When not developing with WordPress, Sass, and Angular, he organizes the FrontEndAuthority.org meetup. He is currently hiding in the San Diego of this timeline from interdimensional robot olms.
He focuses on custom theme and plugin solutions with Zan Atlantean.
Alicia St. Rose
Alicia St Rose began her adventure with WordPress when a UX friend offhandedly suggested using the CMS for a mutual friend’s website. That was nearly six years ago and the adventure has turned into a torrid love affair. Now she is a freelance developer, exclusively powered by WordPress, and has yet to find a limitation in this magical piece of software.
She is owner, principal designer and developer at Intrepid Realist Design, a small agency that employs one. In addition to creating for WordPress, she offers WordPress coaching to WP users who are just starting to flutter their wings.
She currently lives in Santa Barbara, California with her two rambunctious cats, Oscar and Milo. She divides her time between that seaside town and Black Rock City, Nevada.
Oh, and her favorite color is red.
Her talk at WCSD 2015 will be on “Functional Design” (design development).
Perhaps you’ve heard of the this mythical creature called the Unicorn? Not the one that dispenses rainbows, but the techie one, the one who designs AND develops for the web. A one-person agency, so to speak. As a front end designer, you may shudder at the thought of mucking through code and regard it as something akin to Alchemy. Alicia is going to demonstrate that learning a bit of code and where to put it can not only empower you but also give you more freedom and control over your designs. Imagine a magical place where you can cast a spell and get the exact results you were looking for on your front end and back end of your WordPress theme. That place of wonder is located in the functions.php file. Go on a short journey where she will show you why the functions file includes the word “fun”!
Andrew Nacin
Andrew Nacin is a Lead Developer at WordPress, squashing bugs, wrangling contributions, and spearheading 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.
Andrew Norcross
The last time Norcross spoke in San Diego, he showed up as Ron Burgundy and kept it classy. We have no idea what this year will bring!
Andrew Norcross is the founder and lead developer of Reaktiv Studios, an agency focused on solving complex problems with WordPress solutions. After quite a few years in the finance industry, Norcross switched to software development – good news for all of us.
He runs Reaktiv Studios, a WordPress VIP Featured Partner, where he helps top-tier clients with their WordPress development. Reaktiv is also known for their flagship plugin, Design Palette Pro, a plugin for WordPress sites using a Genesis theme. It helps non-designers have great looking sites.
An organizer for WordCamp Tampa, Norcross loves to keep giving back to the WordPress community with free plugins, education talks at conferences, and core contribution to WordPress. Norcross lives in Tampa, Florida with his wife, three kids, and smelly old basset hound.
You can’t write a bio about Norcross without mentioning that he also happens to enjoy coffee. And by “enjoy,” we mean addiction. But a healthy one.
Ansel Taft
Ansel Taft is a San Diego front end developer. He’s still in love with his entry point into web development, CSS, and is currently winning the battle to learn JavaScript as fast as possible. ‘As possible’ is a relative term though. Ansel juggles a schedule around his beloved family of three (soon to be four), full-time employment, SaaS side business, personal projects, and the occasional bit of help for a friend to squash a website issue.
In his free time Ansel helps administer a handful of Facebook groups including Advanced WordPress and WordPress Hosting. It’s a constant challenge to keep thousands of members happy. Some days it’s easy breezy in the neighborhood. Other days would sour professional cat wranglers. Through it all he learned that an admin needs to be patient, empathetic, mindful of members’ interests, and to abstain from injecting one’s feelings into replies as often as humanly as possible. It’s Facebook for crying out loud; let’s have a bit of fun while we chat about WordPress.
Ben Fox
Ben Fox is an entrepreneur and co-founder of SIDEKICK.pro, a guided and interactive help & support platform that easily integrates into WordPress. Prior to co-creating SIDEKICK with Bart Dabek he was a window washer, event rep (read: guy with megaphone outside Best Buy on Black Friday), clothing jobber, marketing client manager and digital agency owner. He and his team are produly based out of the Ryerson Digital Media Zone in Toronto.
Bill Erickson
Bill Erickson is a freelance WordPress developer who gives back. He’s created 20 free plugins, shared code snippets, written tutorials and even made contributions to the WordPress core code.
Bill is also a successful freelancer, based in Texas, and eager to share his insights with other freelancers.
A side note: as one of the original WordPress developers focused on the Genesis framework, he’s had the copy on his website duplicated on thousands of sites around the globe.
Brian Bourn
Brian is a partner and co-founder at Bourn Creative, a full service design studio specializing in brand design and creating custom WordPress websites. He is a designer at heart who leads the UX design and front-end development on all company projects, building the interactions between websites and visitors, and site managers and the WordPress admin.
Brian co-organizes the Sacramento WordPress Meetup, and regularly speaks at WordCamps, Meetup events, and guest appears on several podcasts. When not working, he enjoys exploring the Sierra Nevada of Northern California with his family & collecting Star Wars Legos.
Chris Ford
Chris became a storyteller in the third grade when she wrote and bound her first book. She became a graphic designer in junior high when she was introduced to a proportion wheel and Proper Cropper as co-editor of the yearbook. She became a computer nerd when she discovered the Mac and Pagemaker as a journalism student in high school. When she stepped foot into her first college graphic design classroom she knew she’d found her life’s work in a field that combined all three of those passions. Over the last 18 years the tools and technologies she’s used have changed, but her design philosophy has stayed the same: she helps her clients tell their unique story—the story of who they are and why their customers will love them.
Chris Lema
For twenty one years Chris has been managing high performers and overseeing new product development. He is currently the CTO & Chief Strategist for Crowd Favorite.
He’s a daily blogger, an ebook author,a public speaker and regularly coaches and consults with some of the most well known WordPress companies around.
He is a WordPress evangelist.
Chris Wiegman
Chris is a Senior Web Engineer for 10up and has been working on WordPress since 2008. Before joining 10up Chris built one of the largest security plugins in the WordPress community as well as numerous other plugins and solutions. When not coding Chris loves to teach and has presented at numerous WordCamps and other conferences as well as taught computer security for St. Edward’s University and other University courses ranging from computers to aviation.
Christina Hills
Christina Hills, the creator of the Website Creation Workshop™ , has been passionately teaching non-techie small business owners, authors, experts, coaches and consultants, how to easily create their websites in WordPress so that they can get their message out to the world. She has been running this WordPress training program to an international audience for the past 7 years. She loves to teach WordPress as a creative way to get clarity on your business, your marketing, and your message.
Christina is also a 10-year online marketing veteran, often seen at events as an expert speaker teaching on a variety of topics such as email marketing, membership sites, and ecommerce marketing, all with a focus on WordPress. Before becoming an entrepreneur, Christina Hills worked as a digital artist for the network promotions division of NBC-TV, and then as a senior technical director in the Feature Film Division at George Lucas’s Industrial Light & Magic with film credits for Star Wars, Jurassic Park, and ET the re-release.
While her skills and background are unquestionably ‘technical’, her style is completely ‘user friendly’ and marketing-oriented. She puts the fun into teaching technology and empowers business owners to be in full control of their marketing and online presence. Come find her and ask her anything about WordPress, or about Spirituality and God (her other passion!) She lives near the beach in San Diego, California with her husband and daughter.
Corey Ellis
Corey’s father gave him a Commodore 64 when he was 4 year old; little did he know that computers would prove to be his calling. As he moved through a career, intersecting with the education, leadership development, music management and booking markets, he was always pulled into his employers’ web initiatives. He decided to stop fighting the trend and became a full-time WordPress Engineer in 2011, after working with WordPress since 2009.
Since focusing on WordPress, Corey mostly worked in the entertainment space, building sites for artists such as Motley Crue, The Who, Rod Stewart, Willie Nelson, Martina McBride, and Pitbull, as well as NASCAR great Jeff Gordon.
Corey is a co-organizer of the WordPress Austin Meetup – one of the largest and most active WordPress meetups in the world – and leads the monthly advanced developer group. He also served on the 2013 Austin WordCamp committee, where he also presented.
When he is not creating fast, beautiful and responsive web experiences you can find him at the club…the health club. He teaches indoor cycling 3 times a week and enjoys watching or participating in almost anything athletic.
Dave Jesch
Dave Jesch is the Principal and CTO at SpectrOM Technologies, a web application development firm specializing in systems integration, custom plugins and eCommerce solutions.
Dave had his first paying gig with a CPA at the age of 16. In his 20’s, he developed and packaged his first software product, Win:Probe. This new technology quickly gained popularity among developers and became a huge success.
Backed by 35+ years of experience in software development, Dave has consulted and worked with many large companies such as Disney, IBM and Symantec, specializing in architecting and prototyping 1.0 products.
As a full stack developer with a passion in object-oriented programming, he pushes WordPress to the limit bridging traditional architectural techniques with innovative creative strategies.
Having a great cup of coffee in the morning while putting 0’s and 1’s in various formats is priceless in his eyes. He will geek out between sessions for a donut!
Dave Winter
Dave Winter focuses in WordPress UI Design and WordPress Plugin Development (some have gone so far as to label him a fanatic) but has hands in many other projects, including photography and music. He’s never far from a computer… or an iPad (for testing purposes, of course). If you’ve been to a WordCamp in Southern California, he probably already knows who you are (or maybe not – he’s terrible with names). Dave currently teaches courses in Web Development and Technology Ethics at California State University, Long Beach alongside his small business at dauid.us (and his students think he’s pretty boss).
// end of 3rd person introduction
Most of my professional life has been spent as a teacher, though I’ve always had a hand in some sort of creative design project. Merging code and art to form something entirely unique and usable both tempts and challenges me, and designing for the web is exactly that. Only thing I like better than coding is teaching others how to code (including my wife, who wants absolutely no part in it). Doesn’t keep me from trying, though!
David Sutoyo
David Sutoyo is a freelance designer and developer based in Southern California. He started learning CSS years ago as a means to translate his designs for the web. Since learning WordPress, he enjoys crafting themes that utilize the power of the platform. He can be found blogging about WordPress and front-end development at http://davidsutoyo.com
Outside of work, David enjoys photography, movies, basketball, and tennis.
Evan Scheingross
Evan is a proud native San Diegan who loves the surf, sand, and a good fish taco even more than he loves WordPress!
For the past 8 years, he has run his own web design, development, and consulting business helping his clients establish a successful online presence through the creation of elegant, accessible, goal-oriented websites that are engineered to produce results.
Today almost all of Evan’s websites are developed using WordPress, and most of them are built as completely custom themes. Over the years he’s run into more WordPress snafus and gotchas than he would probably care to admit, and he’s happy to share them with you in hopes of sparing you a few expletives or that feeling where you want to throw your laptop off a cliff.
You can check out Evan’s work and thoughts on all things web-related at evanwebdesign.com or follow him @evanwebdesign.
Heather Baker Steele
Marketing geek {designer, coder, writer, do-it-aller} Heather Steele, owner and CMO of Blue Steele Solutions, really does do it all. Being a wife and mother to two small children hasn’t stopped her from running a full-service marketing firm. Back in July of 2010, she decided she’d had enough of the corporate life and struck out on her own. Heather’s thriving marketing agency, Blue Steele Solutions, helps small-to-medium-sized businesses grow their overall marketing strategy to be able to compete with the big corporations. Tired of seeing of seeing the little guys get muscled out of business because they didn’t have the funds or know-how to market themselves, Heather founded Blue Steele Solutions to give these businesses access to all the marketing services the big boys had, from print to email marketing to websites and everything in between. The fact that she now has more time to spend at home with her kids (and gets to set her own schedule) is just an added bonus.
Heather is also deeply involved in front end WordPress development. All the websites that Blue Steele Solutions develops are created in WordPress using the Genesis Framework. Heather is also an admin of far too many WordPress Facebook groups (Advanced WordPress, Genesis WordPress, WordPress Hosting, WordPress Front End Developers).
Hristo Pandjarov
Hristo is 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. 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.
Jared Atchison
Sometimes people don’t recognize Jared today because they aren’t used to the beardless face. But it’s what he looked like the last time we saw him in San Diego (2012). So we’re looking forward to having him back.
Jared uses WordPress to help businesses and individuals achieve their goals efficiently and effectively. He also maintains plugins available on WordPress.org, helpful scripts on GitHub, and is a core contributor to bbPress and the Genesis Framework. When Jared isn’t knee deep in code he regularly attends and speaks at WordCamps around the country each year.
He’s also a proud Texan.
Jason Tucker
Jason Tucker a WordPress web developer that works for a non profit and loves working with audio and video during his brief amount of spare time. Tucker is the host of WPwatercooler, a YouTube webshow and audio podcast featuring a weekly talk with WordPress devs and designers about various topics.
Jennifer Bourn
Jennifer Bourn is the Creative Director and Digital Strategist for Bourn Creative, a full service design company in Sacramento, California, specializing in custom, lead generation WordPress sites. As a Genesis recommended developer, Bourn Creative works with clients around the globe on on branding, website strategy, web design, WordPress, as well as a wide range of graphic design projects.
With more than 15 years in the design trenches, and almost 10 years pretending to take orders from her business partner, boss, and husband, Jennifer is an award-winning designer with a penchant for writing, marketing, chocolate, and Legos (yes, Legos not logos).
She built her first WordPress site in 2008, fell in love with giving clients the ability to make their own content revisions, and went all in with WordPress pretty much the same day. Now with more than 300 custom WordPress sites under the belt, Jennifer now shares her expertise and lessons learned as a dynamic speaker, an avid blogger, and a co-organizer of the Sacramento Meetup Group.
Justin Sainton
Justin Sainton is the founder of Zao, a web firm based in Portland, Oregon. As a core contributor to WordPress and a core developer for the WP E-Commerce project, Justin believes passionately in the philosophy of open-source software.
Working exclusively with WordPress and an array of other open-source technologies, Justin and Zao have provided creative and effective solutions for a wide variety of companies and associations ranging from Targus to Pitney Bowes to the National Education Association to HTC.
Karim Marucchi
Karim Marucchi is the Founder and Chairman of the VeloMedia Group, the parent of several boutique professional service firms around the world. Over the last twenty years he’s run startups, taken companies public, managed mergers and acquisitions, and led professional service organizations across the globe.
Today he is also the CEO of Crowd Favorite, which continues to grow beyond its current offices in Los Angeles, Denver, Bucharest, Las Vegas, New York, and Rome due to its unique blend of localized project management and high quality digital solutions.
As the first premiere WordPress agency for the Fortune 500, National Geographic, DirectTV, Lexus, the Dallas Mavericks and major entertainment studios count among the company’s client roster.
Konstantin Obenland
Konstantin is a WordPress developer, and Core contributor based in Southern California. After contributing to Twenty Twelve, he was the backup lead and main developer for Twenty Thirteen and Twenty Fourteen, the most recent default themes. At Automattic he’s is part of a team that contributes back to WordPress full time. He enjoys craft beers and good food — sometimes so much that he blogs about it.
Marty Thornley
Marty is a freelance WordPress developer based in Los Angeles. He has been working with WordPress for over 8 years now and from the start has been drawn to pushing the boundaries of what is possible with WordPress. Starting with hacking around on Kubrick, growing to plugin and theme development, Marty finally took the leap of using MultiSite to build PhotographyBlogSites.com, a Website-as-a-Service for photographers.
Matt Cromwell
Matt is the Support Guru at WordImpress. He’s the author of FooThumbnails for Galleries and many other free WordPress plugins, a popular blogger at his website, an admin of the Advanced WordPress Facebook group, co-organizer of the San Diego WordPress Meetup, and a WordCamp speaker and frequent attender.
Mendel Kurland
As an outdoor enthusiast, Mendel loves backpacking, camping, hiking, and tuning his outdoor survival skills. His technology interests include machine insights, data patterns, structured data, and scaled database infrastructure. After learning Pascal in high school, Mendel went on to work in various roles programming in Python, Perl, C++, ASP .NET, and PHP. When he’s not working, you can find Mendel at a local Austin eatery, sipping on gourmet coffee, and/or prototyping new web apps.
From scrappy beginnings as an entrepreneur and Web consultant for local businesses in Iowa, he found his way to corporate America as a developer, marketer, and inventor. These days, Mendel works as the head GoDaddy Evangelist and spends his time hanging out with developers, designers, entrepreneurs, and web pros around the world and making sure their opinions and suggestions are heard. His job is to bring actionable feedback to the GoDaddy organization to help inform innovation within products, services, documentation, and procedures within the company.
As a WordCamp veteran, Mendel has attended twelve WordCamps on two continents and is responsible for creating the “Pretty Pre” plugin. He’s spoken in numerous places including Tippe Strategic Innovation Academy, National SBDC Conference, and WordCamp Toronto just to name a few.
Michele Butcher
Michele is a full time blogger, designer, and all around awesome person. She works for WP Security Lock as their WordPress Security and Plugin Specialist and Speaker/Trainer. Michele started her love for WordPress in 2010 and has never looked back. She is the Lead Organizer for the Southern Illinois WordPress Meetup. When not in front of a screen, Michele enjoys life with her family standing behind the camera.
Mika Epstein
Mika Ariela Epstein is better known as Ipstenu, the Half-Elf Support Rogue. Working for DreamHost as a WordPress Support Specialist and Manager (aka ‘WordPress Guru’), she solves any WordPress problem that comes up, trains everyone from support to marketing in why WordPress makes your life better, and still finds time to slash unanswered WordPress.org forum threads by night and wrangle plugins by day. A self-taught guru on Multisite and .htaccess, she has a passion for writing and technology and blogs about them whenever possible.
The rumor that she has dice in her purse and tinfoil in her hats is in a constant state of Schrödinger proofs.
Natalie MacLees
Natalie MacLees is a front-end web developer and UI designer and is founder + principal of the interactive agency, Purple Pen Productions. She is the author of jQuery for Designers, now in its second edition. She was the lead organizer for WordCamp Los Angeles 2014 and 2013 and organized the first bi-annual Website Weekend LA. She’s also the founder of the Los Angeles chapter of Girl Develop It, bringing affordable and accessible coding classes to the community. She makes her online home at nataliemac.com.
Her talk on Responsive design is about a lot more than screen size. It’s about approaching your projects with an entirely different mindset and a whole new design process. In this talk, we’ll cover a variety of tools and techniques for optimizing your responsive workflow and talk about some best practices for accommodating as many devices as possible.
Nikhil Vimal
Nikhil Vimal is a 15 year-old WordPress developer with a knack for building cool things with WordPress. He’s been heavily involved with the WordPress community for about 2 years. He has contributed to multiple projects including WordPress core and numerous plugins. He can be found tweeting @TechVoltz and blogging at nik.techvoltz.com.
Nikhil will be speaking on “The Magic of Enqueuing”.
What is wp_enqueue_script? What is wp_enqueue_style? Well, if you’re asking these questions, this is the session for you! Nikhil will be answering these questions and helping YOU become a better theme or plugin developer. Developing the right way is not always easy, but with a bit of help, you’ll be adding scripts and styles in WordPress the right way in no time.
Pamela Bey
Pamela Bey is the founder of Be Brilliant Media, a web design and tech curriculum development agency. She is a WordPress trainer, UX designer and mentor for women and children. After working as a WordPress teaching assistant for Girl Develop It Philly, she started a new chapter of Girl Develop It South Jersey. In 2013 she started mentoring high school students in WordPress and since then has help lead her students to win hackathons using WordPress. She is currently developing WordPress curricula for the Comcast and Techgirlz high school pilot program. When not working, she’s trying to teach herself Spanish, French, and Italian, simultaneously.
Pippin Williamson
If you are a WordPress plugin developer, you probably have used or seen one of Pippin’s plugins. He’s written more than 100 plugins and has spent a long time working on improving community involvement on projects by developers / designers. Not to mention contributing to the WordPress core and WordPress Codex.
Rebecca Gill
Rebecca is founder and president of Web Savvy Marketing. She has as a well-rounded business background and over fifteen years of experience in sales and online marketing. Her love for WordPress website design and her strong belief in the user experience is equally matched by her fascination with search engine optimization, blogging, and marketing though social media. Rebecca provides one-on-one coaching, is a WordCamp organizer, and speaks at various WordCamps throughout the country.
Richard Sherman
Rich is a Co-Founder of Grizzly and brings all the pixels to life. He’s a firebrand for the responsive web and blazes mountain bike trails when he’s not staring at code.
Rick Knudtson
Rick Knudtson is the co-founder and CMO at Flywheel, a managed WordPress hosting platform built specifically for designer and creative agencies. At Flywheel, Rick is responsible for marketing strategy and user experience design. Before Flywheel, Rick was a freelance web designer building WordPress sites for clients in the midwest.
Rob Marlbrough
A San Diego Magazine Top Tech Exec Award nominee, Rob started his own web development company in 1997, and today Press Wizards is a leading WordPress services and web hosting provider. He also co-founded Fandom Marketing, a social media marketing agency in 2011, and created Minglestream.com, a Tweetwall service. He also teaches WordPress through the WordPress Web Help Meetup group.
Roy Sivan
I was born and raised in San Francisco and witnessed the growth of the Internet and the companies built on it first hand. I picked up coding at a very young age, and have been a developer in some way for the majority of my life. I have been using WordPress for way too long, I think my first build of WordPress was 0.7 and been a user or developer in some capacity since. Today I like to focus more on what I can build with WordPress that pushes the boundaries of what people think WordPress can do. I also like taking other technologies and finding a way to use them in WordPress.
I also love the community that WordPress has, and am building plugins and web applications which I hope work as tools to help bring the community together. Through ARC(CTRL) we have had the chance to build some great plugins that, as well as web applications like CodingOfficeHours which help people connect and get help from other people in the community.
Russell Aaron
Russell Aaron is the Founder of GravityStyles.com & GeekStreetWP.com. He is a WordPress Enthusiast first and a WordPress Developer/Designer second. He believes that every industry should have at least one theme and 3 plugins in the WordPress Repo.
In 2009, Russ saved a mortgage company from closing their doors by utilizing the power of WordPress. In the same year, he helped 7 realtors start their own real estate company using WordPress. They now have one of the highest grossing agencies in Nevada.
I started out speaking at my local Las Vegas WordPress Meet up Group. After buying the organizer several adult beverages, I started helping plan and speak at the meet ups. I took what I learned in the group and applied it to a real business opportunity. I lived in Reno, NV until the age of 25. I do not just support WordPress. I donate most of my free time to the WP Support Forums.
Russell Aaron lives by a few simple rules. “Anyone can have an idea, it’s how you execute the idea that determines the future” & “The good ones sweat it. Sweating it makes you one of the good ones.”
Scott Bolinger
Scott is the co-founder of AppPresser which allows you to build iOS and Android apps with WordPress.
He recently launched a new SaaS product called Reactor in December, follow his journey from trials to triumphs with real numbers on his blog.
Scott attends and speaks at conferences, writes lots of code, and loves being a new father
Shaimoom Newaz
Shaimoom Newaz is an art, code and bass enthusiast.
As a kid, copying Frank Miller and Jae Lee figures, he discovered an ability to transcribe what his creative core was yearning to express. After years of ink and acrylic renderings of his imagination, he reluctantly embraced the digital landscape. However, he thrived with his fellow creatives at the UCLA Design | Media Arts Program. With time, learning, practice and mentorship, he found myself loving the new possibilities with the digital world.
Shaimoom embraced code like the new girlfriend of his best friend: knowing he should be nice and get to know her, but reluctant to understand her for fear of her disturbing a familiar relationship. It turned out that front-end development was another exciting medium for his creativity. As his aesthetic was changing to more minimalist, color-heavy design, learning CSS and JavaSctipt allowed him to make magic with lines and grids in browsers. Today, he is a designer/developer evangelist who trains young unicorns how to fly.
Bass (as in music, not fish) has been a part of Shaimoom since the teen years. He has DJed for almost 2 decades, so music has always been a part of the equation. Even though he loves songs across the music genre spectrum, bass music affects his core and allows him to find energy when he needs it most, harmony when he’s feeling disjointed and a smile on his face in traffic while everyone else is road raging.
Shaimoom will be hosting the Design Track Panel titled, “What’s Your Workflow?”
The panel will be a Q and A style session with questions coming from both Shaimoom and the audience. Some topics will likely cover:
- Inspiration: In web design, where does it come from? Where do the experts look ti find it?
- Creation: What do we use to create? For both the designer and developer, there are new tools constantly coming out…what are people using?
- Materialization: I have created. Now what? Take your creation and give it value: there are plenty of tools to help facilitate materialization of our creative ideas all the way to bank!
- Contribution: Giving back. Contribution takes many forms: Forums, bug fixes, hacker challenges, meetups, WordCamps, etc. Where can you contribute?
Stephen Carnam
Stephen Carnam is the founder of ServerPress, LLC, a technology firm that creates tools using open source technology for creative web designers and professional web developers. After 20+ years of development for Windows based platforms, Stephen made the jump to cross platform open source based technologies and hasn’t looked back.
He is also co-admin for the Advanced WordPress Facebook group and a co-organizer for Advanced WordPress Meetup. Previously, Stephen held positions as a senior software developer and technology director specializing in interactive graphic engines for 3D game development, industrial applications, and defense simulations.
When not writing code, Stephen can be found in his garage hacking and restoring vintage hardware with his soldering iron, sculpting on his CNC machine, or printing up new ideas on his 3D printer.
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 1100 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 has been in web development for over twenty years; she started making hand-coded HTML websites on geocities with font tags and tables back in 1995. Since then, she has taught herself CSS, Sass, PHP, MySQL, as well as becoming a WordPress expert; evangelizing and presenting at over twenty-two WordCamps across the country and multiple WordPress meetups in Southern California where she resides, about all aspects of building and maintaining sites on WordPress.
Suzette is passionate about WordPress the application as well as the WordPress Open Source Community, and loves to code and teach others the wonders of WordPress. She is a purveyor of lowbrow art, and when she is not WordPressing, she is painting or visiting Los Angeles art galleries to add more work to her growing art collection.
Syed Balkhi
Syed Balkhi is the founder of WPBeginner (the largest free WordPress resource site) and List25 an extremely popular entertainment site with over 1.4 million subscribers and over 200 million video views. Syed’s work has been featured in NYTimes, HuffingtonPost, Yahoo Small Business, Wired, Mashable, and countless other well-reputed online magazines. Syed has worked with some of the largest brands in the industry including but not limited to WarnerBros, Webs, Mercer, and more.
Tabitha Chapman
Tabby works at the University of California in Irvine as an Academic Applications Developer where she has the joy of working with WordPress for the School of Biological Science’s website. She has worked with WordPress since WordPress 1.5 was a shiny play-thing, developing both plugins and themes; Tabby is always chasing after the latest and greatest standards and best practices. She spends her free time, often, creating complex applications and websites using WordPress. And when she’s not doing that, she desperately trying to catch up on all the things she’s missed out on like “TV” and “Books” and “Friends”.
Tomas Puig
Tomas Puig is the head of Labs for WP Engine who currently lives and works in San Francisco.
Tomas’ career started as a junior at NASA Ames research center where he worked on computer security and web development. However he quickly moved to the entertainment and branding side starting in music production with recording such artists as Jack Johnson, Clay McClinton, and Laura Cash. In Advertising after his award winning FuseTV, IFC, and Namco campaignsTomas was recruited by Studio One Films (Part of the A.G. Nadiadwala Group) to become their head of technical / creative in Bollywood. Where he launched major USA based brands in India and directed music videos.
After returning to the states Tomas worked in the digital ad agency industry with well regarded firms including LEVEL, COG1, Rosetta, and Propane. Some of his major clients included Facebook, New Relic, Kaiser, Cisco, NetApp, Namco/Bandai, Square-Enix, and Google. Tomashas directed projects that have won 4 Gold National Addy’s, several Cannes CLIO’s, and festival awards. It should also be noted that he is a giant geek who loves video games (currently playing Bioshock Infinite), Legos, breaking his Arduino set ups, and playing with his dog Éowyn.
WordPress Development Trends in 2015 & Beyond
We all know WordPress is not just for blogs or websites anymore… but what are people building with the world’s most popular content management system. We will take a look at current trends in the WordPress development world, from large corporations to small personal blogs, and the best practices used in building them.
Wes Chyrchel
Wes Chyrchel believes in a strong Work / Life Balance and has worked hard to perfect that in his life. With Web Dev Business Coaching, he teaches others how to achieve that in their own lives. He has been building websites, managing teams, creating business processes and setting client expectations for over 17 years. He has been working with WordPress since 2006 and frequently speaks at WordPress Meetups and WordCamps to give back to the community. There’s no question, the web is a huge part of his life.
Wes is a Small Business Advocate and believes everyone should have the experience of running their own business. He supports Web Developers and is dedicated to making their businesses succeed. Wes has learned a lot in his career, especially, what not to do. He ran his own hosting business, multiple web development businesses and has worked for several web development agencies.
Several years ago he realized, it was his obligation to give back. He wanted to share what he’d learned and to help the industry that had given him so much. Coaching and Speaking has allowed him to do that. Though there are several resources that show you how to build websites, there are even fewer that show you how to run a Web Development Business and successfully work with clients. He really enjoy’s helping people get their business back on track and living the life they want. It’s possible.
William Bay
William Bay is the Chief Flauntreprener at Flaunt Your Site. He’s studied all kinds of SEO goodness, and what makes great web site design. On a typical day, he’ll be immersed in code, or dissecting rankings, or sneaking in a quick yoga session between client calls. When he’s not photographing, SEO’ing, or designing, he’s dreaming about surfing the perfect peeling reef breaks in the Mentawai Islands.
Flaunt Your Site was born out of William’s passion for both photography, website design and SEO. After a few years of doing it solely for his own wedding photography business in San Diego, he began having other photographers request custom sites and SEO done for them. The demand was such that William formed Flaunt Your Site.
While photographers still make up a large portion of Flaunt Your Site’s clientele, Flaunt also works with other small to medium businesses for custom websites and local SEO.
Yaron Guez
Yaron Guez is a full stack developer, professional musician and serial entrepreneur with over a decade of professional experience. He’s Director of Technology at Trestian, an online solutions firm specializing in custom WordPress development as well as a co-founder and Software Architect at Crypteron, providing cloud security solutions to developers. Yaron plays an active role in the WordPress community as a co-organizer of the Advanced WordPress Meetup and Facebook Group. He plays keyboard in the band Royal Heart, is an avid traveler and is happiest coming up with elegant solutions to complex problems.