Speakers

Aaron D. Campbell

Aaron Campbell is the owner and lead developer at Xavisys, a WordPress focused web development company. He has over ten years of programming experience, and for the last several years he’s been focused on WordPress. This focus has included building sites on WordPress, writing and releasing plugins, contributing to WordPress core, and generally becoming involved in the WordPress Community as a whole.

Aaron will present “Getting Involved: Contribution & Courtesy” on Saturday.

Aaron Hockley

Aaron Hockley is a photographer and blogger who spends a lot of time conversing with others about new media topics. He writes frequent articles and has been cited as an industry source by publications such as CNN and the New York Times. Aaron founded WordCamp Portland and is active in a variety of events in the Portland tech scene. He has attended and spoken at several blogging and social media events including BlogWorld & New Media Expo, a few Ignites, and a handful of WordCamps.

Aaron will present on “IRL FTW! Organizing Meetups and WordCamps

Aaron Jorbin

Aaron Jorbin is an engineer with Clearspring where he works on AddThis and a WordPress Core Contributor. He has spoken to multiple User Groups and at WordCamps in four time zones. When he’s not busy creating and fixing bugs, Aaron helps run an educational simulation conference for over 1500 college students. He’ll gladly toast to the GPL any day of the week and happily will discuss whisky, quality beer, or the upper peninsula of Michigan anytime he can.

Aaron will present “Don’t Repeat Your Mistakes: Writing Javascript Unit Tests” on Saturday.

Andrew Nacin

Nacin is a core developer of WordPress. As a member of the core team, he wrangles contributions, develops new features, and tries to fix more bugs than he creates. He lives in Washington, D.C., and works as a Tech Ninja at Audrey Capital, where he works on WordPress.org and other projects. He prefers decisions over options.

Nacin will present “Debugging in WordPress” and “The Nacin & Otto Show” on Friday.

Andrew Ozz

Andrew is a core developer for WordPress.

Andrew Riddles

Andrew Riddles is Web Architect in the Web Services Department at Carleton University in Ottawa, Canada. He has 12 years experience in web development in the private sector and in higher education. When not working he is writing; when not writing he is listening to opera, getting a tattoo, or getting a tattoo about opera.

Andrew will present “Creating a WordCampus” on Friday.

Andrew Spittle

Andrew Spit­tle is a Hap­pi­ness Engi­neer at Automat­tic where he helps peo­ple pub­lish great con­tent online. When not work­ing he enjoys read­ing, trav­el­ing, and likes to think he can dab­ble in design.

Andrew will be leading the First-Time User Workshop on Friday.

Andy Skelton

Few people witnessed the time when Andy wasn’t a computer geek. He began contributing to WordPress and joined Automattic in 2005. His AFK pastimes include perspiring in the Texas heat and throwing a slimy tennis ball.

Andy will present “Deep Voodoo: How the Innermost Innards of WordPress Work” on Saturday.

Andy Stratton

Andy Stratton is a freelance WordPress developer, principal of web studio Sizeable Interactive and founding member the Sizeable Spaces coworking facility in Baltimore, MD. He specializes in custom theme and plugin development. JFDI is his new mantra, he’s inspired and reassured to continue upon his existing philosophy of “shut up and ship.” He likes good conversation, loves effective action. He believes in context, is a huge fan of art and animals and will almost never turn down a high-five.

Andy will present “Getting Involved: Contribution & Courtesy” on Saturday.

Austin Smith

Austin Smith is a founder and partner of Alley Interactive, a software development firm in New York City which specializes in high traffic sites for news media, entertainment, and higher education. Alley Interactive was founded by ex-employees of The New York Observer, which converted to WordPress in June of 2011 after four years of running Drupal. Austin learned to use WordPress in early 2011 and launched Betabeat.com and PolitickerNY.com for The Observer, and then led the Observer.com rebuild project, which involved migrating 100,000 articles from Drupal, implementing a complex cross-site syndication system, battling chronic performance problems on the database server, and culling plugins which were causing issues.

Austin will be presenting “From Drupal to WordPress: Migrating the New York Observer” on Friday.

Barry Abrahamson

Barry works at Automattic designing and running the infrastructure that powers WordPress.com, Akismet, Polldaddy, VaultPress and others. He has been an Automattician since 2006 and a Texan (the best country in the world). He enjoys spending time with his dog and wife when not dealing with DDoS attacks.

On Friday, he will answer any questions you have about servers, caching, load balancing, HyperDB, scaling, and life. It’s bound to be a blast.

Brad Williams

Brad Williams is the co-founder of WebDevStudios.com, a co-host on the SitePoint Podcast, and the co-author of Professional WordPress and Professional WordPress Plugin Development. Brad is also one of the organizers of the Philadelphia WordPress Meetup Group and WordCamp Philly.

Brad will be a judge in the Security Showdown on Saturday.

Brian Gardner

Self-confessed Starbucks addict. Sarah McLachlan fan. Lover of WordPress. Nomad Theorist. Founder of StudioPress. Partner and Chief Product Officer, Copyblogger Media.

Brian will be on the “Making Money And Having Fun Selling WordPress Themes” panel on Saturday.

Chelsea Otakan

Chelsea Otakan, also known as Chexee, is a web designer and time traveler from Reno, NV. She started blogging with b2/cafelog when she was in high school and spent her early college years crafting a student newspaper’s website with WordPress MU. These days, she can be found wrangling designs for Automattic, contributing to the core UI group, sailing through space and time, and trying to make her puppy famous.

Chelsea will present “Version Control for Designers” on Saturday.

Chris Coyier

Chris is a web designer currently working for Wufoo, an online form building service. He runs the web design blog and community site CSS-Tricks. He co-authored the book and blog Digging Into WordPress. He like banjos, artichokes, and serial sci-fi television shows.

Chris will present “CSS Pseudo Elements for Fun and Profit” an Saturday.

Crystal Beasley

Tiny, fiery Southern girl who, when she isn’t baking pies or telling you what to do, works at Mozilla as a User Experience Designer. Previously she was a LOLcat herder at Cheezburger, Inc.

Crystal will present “Getting to +1: Negotiating UX in Open Source Teams” on Saturday.

Daniel Bachhuber

Daniel Bachhuber spends days and some nights as a freshly-minted Code Wrangler with Automattic‘s VIP/media services team. He likes to run in the countryside, travel, hang out with friends and family, and use WordPress to solve all of the world’s problems. After a year in NYC, Daniel is back living in Portland, Oregon, the best city in the union. His mother says there’s a lot of funny things that can be said about Daniel, but we try to keep those offline.

Daniel will be teaching a segment of the First-Time User Workshop on Friday.

Daryl Koopersmith

Daryl Koopersmith is a man of many hats. By day, he is a nomadic WordPress core developer — he works at Automattic and is jazzed about JavaScript, interface engineering, and the infamous Alot. By night, he dabbles in the dark arts of rhythmic tapping and culinary combinatorics. Koop is currently settling into temperate San Francisco, where he is fueled by burritos and all things musical.

Daryl will present on “Decisions, Not Options” on Saturday.

David Cowgill

David is the founder of AppThemes, a San Francisco-based company that builds WordPress application themes. He’s a passionate WordPress developer and a seasoned Internet Marketing veteran with over 13 years of experience working for cloud computing companies such as Oracle, Siebel Systems, Salesforce.com, Hyperic, SpringSource, and VMware. He is also the co-organizer of the San Francisco WordPress Meetup which meets monthly at the Automattic headquarters. His work has been published in numerous articles and books including WordPress 3 Site Blueprints and Google Blogger for Dummies (ironically) for his previous Blogger business. When he’s not wrapped up in WordPress, he enjoys traveling, playing basketball, scuba diving, and tinkering with the latest gadgets.

David will be on the “Making Money And Having Fun Selling WordPress Themes” panel on Saturday.

Dianne Jacob

Dianne Jacob is the author of Will Write for Food: The Complete Guide to Writing Cookbooks, Blogs, Reviews, Memoir, and More. The first edition won the Cordon D’Or International award for Best Literary Food Reference Book in 2005. The second edition won the Gourmand World Cookbook Award in 2010 for best book in its category in the US. Her blog, Will Write for Food: Pithy Snippets about Food Writing, covers food writing trends and technique. Her posts have been picked up by Publishers’ Weekly, Chow, Eater, BlogHer and the Food News Journal. She started the blog in 2009 as a way to update her book, which features an extensive chapter on food blogging.

Dianne will present on “Killer Food Blogs” on Sunday.

Drew Strojny

Drew Strojny is the founder and principal of Jestro, a Boise-based company most well known for their WordPress themes project: The Theme Foundry. Drew graduated from Duke University in 2003 with an A.B. in Philosophy. Upon graduation the New York Giants selected him with pick number 203 of the 2004 NFL draft. He retired from the NFL in 2007 and founded Jestro with his wife Jennifer that same year.

Drew will be on the “Making Money And Having Fun Selling WordPress Themes” panel on Saturday.

Ed Celis

Ed is the founder of TableTracker, a startup that is being built in the tradition of Victor Frankenstein, MD. He hopes to inspire you with his talk about how you can create a better monster building with cloud-based tools, open-source parts and a lot of heart and sweat. TableTracker has already achieved a couple of unique “firsts” using WP and BuddyPress, which Ed will be showing off as part of his talk. He has written a book, attended a number of film festivals in exotic locales, and once dove into a pool with no water.

Ed will present “Building a Better Frankenstein: WordPress + Others to Create Tabletracker” on Friday.

Estelle Weyl

Estelle Weyl is a front-end engineer who has been developing standards-based accessible websites since 1999. She is the author of Beginning iPhone Web Apps: HTML5, CSS3, and JavaScript for WebKit, and co-author of HTML5 & CSS3 For The Real World She writes two technical blogs pulling millions of visitors and speaks about CSS3, HTML5, JavaScript and mobile wed development at conferences around the world, including OSCON, CSS Summit 3,
Open Web Camp, jQuery Conference, SXSW, and Women’s Day of JS.

Estelle will present on “CSS3 Features: Making Snow (in the Summer) without JavaScript” on Saturday.

Greg Veen

Greg Veen is a co-founder of Typekit, where he’s working to enable beautiful and effective typography on the web.  Before Typekit, he developed Measure Map, a blog analytics application acquired by Google in 2006. While at Google, he redesigned Google Analytics and designed and developed new features in Gmail and other apps. Earlier, he led a front-end development team at Tickle Inc, building a suite of social media products acquired by Monster in 2004.  He has consulted for companies including Twitter, Adaptive Path, Mule Design Studio, and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.

Greg will present “Web Fonts for Developers” on Friday.

Hanni Ross

Hanni is a hyperactive, happiness engineering, runner. She wears pink socks, lives in the south of France and is slipping over to the lawyer dark-side. Life as a rosbif comprises running, sampling the local cuisine, breaking far too many of her possessions by mistake, and fitting into ovens. Otherwise, ever since the b2 era Hanni has enjoyed breaking her websites in an attempt to improve them. These days, as part of the Happiness Team at Automattic she loves trying to help WordPress.com users solve their problems, enjoy their blogs, and break them more safely.

Hanni will present on “Top 5 Ways to Break Your Blog” on Sunday.

Heather Gold

Heather Gold is an innovative artist, comic, speaker and talk show host best known for her ability to work the room. She’s a web veteran with geek cred from Apple’s webcast pioneering team and the start- up that birthed some of the iPod/iTunes experience. She mixes up Net ideas and performance flow and DJs the people formerly known as the audience in her shows. Heather shares her insights on tech, social engagement and authenticity as the host of Tummelvision.tv and in popular keynotes at places like Google and Web 2.0 and YLE, Finland’s BBC. Heather’s written for Alan Cumming, shared the stage with Margaret Cho and  baked over 50,000 cookies in her interactive solo show Cookie was named the Best of the Bay and won Curve Magazine’s national lesbian theatre award. Heather often appears in media like NPR, Wired and TWIT.tv. BoingBoing calls her “one of our favorite comedians.”  You can follow her work at heathergold.com or on twitter @heathr or join her at one of her UnPresenting workshops on 8/17 (http://bit.ly/oWgtFP).

Heather will present “Tools for Tummelling (in Light of Google+)” on Sunday.

Ian Stewart

Ian Stewart works as a Theme Wrangler at Automattic. He’s had a hand in creating some of the most popular WordPress themes around — most recently the new default theme, Twenty Eleven — and it’s highly likely that he’s thinking about WordPress themes right this very minute. Either that or he’s thinking about how to survive another winter in the frozen Canadian waste he calls home.

Ian will present “Awesome Up Your Boring Theme: WordPress Post Formats” on Saturday.

Jane Wells

Jane will be talking about Bendywords. You should be excited.

Jeff Veen

Jeff will be present “How the Web Works” on Sunday.

John James Jacoby

Having feasted on Wisconsin’s finest beers, brats, and cheeses for a majority of his life, John James Jacoby is currently traveling the world experiencing food groups he didn’t know existed. He works for Automattic, is the lead developer of both BuddyPress and bbPress and has been contributing to WordPress since 2007. He is an alliteration alchemist, musical mixologist, and cannot stop using the Oxford Comma.

John will present “BuddyPress – Complementing Communities” on Friday.

John Kleinschmidt

John Kleinschmidt is the technology dude for CURE International where he pushes cure.org to its limits. When he is not building new features for CURE, John keeps busy mountain biking, playing hockey and loving his 3 kids and wife.

John will present on “WordPress for the Greater Good (CURE)” on Friday.

Jon Cave

Jon will be a judge in the Security Showdown on Saturday.

Jonathan Davis

Jonathan is the lead developer of the Shopp e-commerce plugin for WordPress. He began e-commerce site development in the late ’90s with open-source platforms, started using WordPress in 2005, then in 2008 developed and released Shopp. He is an ardent student of best practice design and development, loves elegant expressions of “code poetry,” and is an advocate for the WordPress platform.

Jonathan will be presenting “WordPress and E-commerce: Navigating the Minefield” on Sunday.

Kevin Cheng

Kevin is an independent product and user experience advisor exploring new ways to improve the world. Previously, he was a product manager at Twitter, leading the redesign of the website, the Director of User Experience at the gaming social network Raptr, and the designer of Yahoo! Pipes. He also co-founded the user experience web comic OK/Cancel, and is working on his upcoming book, See What I Mean: How to Use Comics to Communicate Ideas. He blogs at kevnull.com and tweets as @k.

Kevin will present “See What I Mean: How to Use Comics to Communicate Ideas” on Saturday.

Lance Willett

Lance Willett is a web craftsman specializing in front-end web development. By day he wrangles themes for Automattic, and by night he is Launcelot du Lac, Knight of the Round Table.

Lance will be moderating “Making Money And Having Fun Selling WordPress Themes” on Saturday.

Mark Jaquith

Mark Jaquith has been working with and contributing to WordPress since 2004. He is one of the lead developers of the WordPress core and offers freelance WordPress consulting services through Covered Web Services with a focus on scaling, security, and custom functionality. Mark likes patches that have more red than green, and his favorite WordPress features are the ones that you’re not even aware of. He eagerly looks forward to shooting down your feature suggestions with, “No, but it would make a great plugin!”

Mark will present “Scaling, Servers, and Deploys — Oh My!” on Friday, and will be a judge in the Security Showdown on Saturday.

Matt Mullenweg

Matt is the founding developer of WordPress, the open source blogging software that runs millions of sites around the world. In 2005, he started Automattic, the company behind WordPress.com, Akismet, Gravatar, bbPress, IntenseDebate, and BuddyPress. Matt lives in San Francisco and has a crush on Audrey Hepburn in Breakfast at Tiffany’s.

Matt will be giving the annual “State of the Word” on Sunday.

Michael “Mitcho” 芳貴 Erlewine

mitcho (Michael 芳貴 Erlewine) is a linguist, coder, and teacher in Cambridge, MA. He is the developer of the popular Yet Another Related Posts Plugin and HookPress, developed ShrimpTest with Automattic (the company behind WordPress.com), has spoken at WordCamps around the world, and is a founding organizer of WordCamp Boston. He has previously worked at Mozilla and has been a Fulbright scholar in Taiwan. He is currently a PhD student in linguistics at MIT.

Mitcho will present on “Building Custom CMS applications on WordPress” on Friday.

Mike Adams

Rising from the depths of the Quantum Information halls of Caltech, mdawaffe has been using WordPress since 2004 and a Contributing Developer since 2006. Enjoys late night conversations about obscure code, long debugging sessions on the beach, and candlelit security reviews.

Mike will present “Secure iFrame communication in a pre-postMessage() world” on Saturday.

Nikolay Bachiyski

Nikolay is a long-time WordPress core contributor, lives in Bulgaria, works for Automattic, and has a bear.

Nikolay will present on “Unit Testing Will Change Your Life” on Saturday.

Otto Wood

Samuel Wood, better known to the WordPress community as “Otto”, lives in Memphis, Tennessee, the Birthplace of Rock and Roll. Otto is a Tech Ninja at Audrey Capital, Matt Mullenweg’s investment and research company. When not hacking away at WordPress or the WordPress.org website, he spends his time homebrewing or scuba diving or searching out the best BBQ he can find, which he will always say is in Memphis.

Otto will present “The Otto & Nacin Show” on Friday.

Pete Davies

Pete works at Automattic as a Business Engineer, where he spends a lot of his time with the Akismet team, seeing more spam than you’d care to read about. Before Automattic and WordPress, Pete has been a BBC journalist, a grad student, and a General Manager at a startup.

Pete will present on “Vikings, Viagra and Versace: a brief history of spam” on Friday.

Sara Cannon

Sara Cannon has a love for WordPress, design, and typography. Intersect these things and you’ve found her passion. She loves keeping up with the latest trends in technology that we can use make our WordPress sites beautiful. Sara is a WordPress core contributor working with the UI group and works as interaction designer & developer at Scout Branding Company in Birmingham, AL. She has spoken at many WordCamps across the US and is absolutely thrilled to be speaking at WordCamp San Francisco. You can find her on twitter @saracannon or on her blog sara-cannon.com

Sara will present on “Responsive Web Design” on Saturday.

Sara Rosso

Sara is a business & digital strategist, writer, photographer, and technology lover living in Milan, Italy. She works in VIP Services at Automattic (WordPress.com & more) and has been working in technology for 15 years. She has many WordPress sites, from food & travel at Ms. Adventures in Italy to tech topics at When I Have Time to a grassroots fan celebration of Nutella Day. All of them can be found at SaraRosso.com. She tweets at @rosso.

Sara will present on “Intro to the WordPress Ecosystem” on Friday.

Scott Taylor

Scott Taylor is the lead PHP developer at eMusic and is architecting their transition to WordPress as a CMS platform. He resides in New York City and has been developing with WordPress since 2009. When not programming, he is the lead guitarist of Goodbye Picasso and a lover of gourmet Mexican food. He wrote a WordPress theme that builds his blog for him over at http://scotty-t.com. Scott spoke at WordCamp NYC in 2010.

Scott will present on “WordPress in the Enterprise at eMusic” on Friday.

Shannon Smith

Shannon is the founder of Café Noir Design, a boutique Montreal web design company specializing in multilingual web development. She support things like making the web accessible for everyone, using open source software, helping organizations find greener more sustainable ways to operate through online technology and helping non-profits with online community organizing. She also builds professional, custom-designed Web sites for businesses and non-profits. Shannon holds graduate degrees in psychology and journalism and her freelance articles have been published around the world. She speaks English, French and Italian. Read her blogs at chroni.ca and breastfortheweary.com

Shannon will present on “Taking WordPress to the World : What Are Your Options for a Multilingual Site” on Friday.

Sheri Bigelow

Sheri is a designer, developer, and photographer currently living in Saratoga Springs, NY. She earned a Bachelor’s in Business and a Chemistry minor from the University of Utah before spending eight years managing websites for Myriad Genetics in Salt Lake City. She has always considered herself a WordPress evangelist, and now her endlessly positive nature makes her a perfect fit as a Happiness Engineer at Automattic.

Sheri will present on “Top 10 Features You Aren’t Using (But Should Be!)” on Sunday.

Steve Zehngut

Steve will present “How To Hire and Manage a Developer” on Friday.

Sujan Patel

Sujan Patel is an intrinsically motivated entrepreneur. Sujan, with more than 10 years of Internet marketing experience, is the founder and president of the SEO consulting agency Single Grain. Before starting Single Grain, Sujan developed and managed several successful in-house SEO departments and teams for multiple companies. Sujan knows the “ins and outs” of Internet marketing including SEO, social media marketing, and link building. With his knowledge and experience, Sujan increases organic rankings, traffic, brand awareness and ROI for his clients.

Sujan will present on “SEO for WordPress in 2011” on Sunday.

Teru Kuwayama

Teru Kuwayama is a photographer from New York, and the founder of ww.lightstalkers.org, a web-based network of photographers, filmmakers, journalists, and complex emergency operators. His work over the past decade has focused on Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Kashmir. He was the 2009–2010 Knight Fellow at Stanford University, a 2010 TEDGlobal Fellow and a 2010 Ochberg Fellow at the Dart Center for Journalism and Trauma. He received a 2010 Knight News Challenge Award to launch Basetrack, an online social media project that chronicled the deployment of a US Marine battalion in Afghanistan from 2010 to 2011.

Teru will present on “Basetrack.org: Taking WordPress to War” on Sunday.

Willo O’Brien

Willo O’Brien has made a career out of creativity. As a self-employed illustrator and designer for over a decade, her work appears everywhere from the lovable Brizzly Twitter application bear mascot to concert venue sites powered by Ticketfly and WordPress. Willo uses her trifecta Art/Biz/Tech expertise for good by consulting entrepreneurs, coaching small business owners and speaking at events around the country. Recently she launched WilloToons Connect, a video series dedicated to “Inspiring Creative Sustainability in Life & Business.” Say hello on Twitter: @willotoons

Willo will present “Leveling Up with Video” on Sunday.

Zach Berke

Zach will be speaking about a heavily customized WordPress install, built for Unicef and targeted at some pretty atypical WordPress users: rural Ugandans without Internet Access. Zach and his team of designers and engineers at Exygy use WordPress as one of the key pieces of their technology toolkit. WordPress has enabled Exygy to empower hundreds of changemakers and innovators fast and cost effectively. Zach is a SF based geek and entrepreneur who has spent the last 10 years building and working with startups and non-profits around the world. Zach migrated from Movable Type to WordPress in 2004 and never looked back.

Zach will present “WordPress for the Greater Good (UNICEF)” on Friday.

Comments are closed.