Here are the stupendous speakers who have agreed to share their stories at WordCamp San Francisco this year.
Aaron Hockley
Aaron Hockley has been a photographer for 14 years and a WordPress user for the last 10. As the founder of WP Photographers – http://wp-photographers.com – he routinely helps photographers and other WordPress users with internet photography topics. He was the founding organizer of WordCamp Portland, and Aaron has spoken at numerous other WordCamps as well as photography and social media industry events.
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Andrea Rennick
Andrea started out as a volunteer in the WordPress.org forums, and now works for Copyblogger Media in customer support for all products. She likes to learn and she likes to help people. Often changing her hair color, she make quilts and entertains her three grandkids in my spare time.
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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. He works for WordPress founder Matt Mullenweg at Audrey Capital, where he is primarily tasked with working on WordPress core and keeping the lights on at WordPress.org. He resides in downtown Washington, D.C. You can follow him on Twitter at @nacin.
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Ben Dunkle
Ben Dunkle is a designer, professor and artist from Buffalo, NY. He has been on the core design team at WordPress.org since 2008. He organizes, mentors and speaks at WordCamps. Ben has designed most of the WordPress admin icons, going back to version 2.7 to the current Dashicons icon font.
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Boone Gorges
Boone is an independent WordPress development consultant in New York City. A former academic, he specializes in plugin development and other WordPress services for colleges and universities. He is a Lead Developer for BuddyPress.
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Brennen Byrne
Brennen Byrne is the CEO and cofounder of Clef, a security plugin for WordPress. He speaks about security across the country with a focus on making security approachable and interesting to non-technical audiences. Modern security requires safer communities, not just safer sites, and Brennen is dedicated to helping the WordPress community protect itself. @brennenbyrne on Twitter
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Chris Lema
Chris Lema has been working with WordPress for 9 years. His daily blog (chrislema.com) covers the WordPress ecosystem from a business perspective.
His day job is as the VP of Engineering for Emphasys Software. But it’s his coaching and consulting that brings him into the community – helping theme and plugin companies with product development and strategy.
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Christine Harkin
Christine Harkin is a consultant who bobs and weaves strategically amongst several pursuits: writing, editing, naming brands, blogging, serving on a non-profit Board, and presenting. She wouldn’t mind reintroducing teaching and acting into the mix, but hasn’t yet found a solution to the twenty-four-hour limit on days. She has two sons who occupy most of her useful brain space and almost all her sense of awe and wonder. She’s been blogging at EditorPlease.com since 2011 and at Naptimewriting.com, where she won two BlogHer VOTYs for her writing, since 2006.
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Cody Brown
Before Cody Brown became a designer at Automattic, he was the founder of scroll kit, a tool to help people tell dramatic visual stories on the web.
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Cory Miller
Cory J. Miller is a former newspaper journalist turned full-time Internet entrepreneur. In 2008, he founded iThemes, which builds easy-to-use software and offers cutting-edge training for thousands of web designers around the globe. Currently iThemes employs over 20 people with headquarters in Oklahoma City. In 2010, he co-authored WordPress All-in-One for Dummies. He also writes and speaks frequently on his passion — entrepreneurship and helping others start and grow their businesses.
Cory is married to Lindsey Miller and they have an adorable baby boy named Caloway, with another on the way this year.
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Dave Martin
Dave has lots of passions, most of them related to the web. He loves clean, usable, bloat-less interfaces. He’s a fan of iterative design, polishing everything until it’s right, and testing changes to see what kind of impact they’ve made.
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Davide Casali
Davide is an experience director and startup advisor working in Automattic with 11+ years of experience and a hybrid background in design, psychology and technology. He led cross-disciplinary teams of designers and developers, working for many global companies such as Nokia, Mastercard, Red Bull, Ferrari, Bank of England, Vodafone and more.
Believing as Leonardo DaVinci reportedly said: “Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication”, he specializes in social experience design, behaviour change and motivation applied to interactive and social systems.
His designs won: Aretê Award, eCommerce Award for Delivery Innovation, Samsung GOLD Prize and was shortlisted for the Compasso D’Oro Award.
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Erick Hitter
WordPress has been Erick’s development platform of choice for more than four years. He previously worked at Oomph, a WordPress.com VIP Featured Partner, building themes for high traffic sites on the WordPress.com VIP Platform. Since joining Automattic, He’s led two teams, the latest focused on actively increasing WordPress’s adoption beyond the 23% of sites already using the platform.
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Guillermo Rauch
Guillermo Rauch is the former CTO and co-founder of LearnBoost and CloudUp, acquired by WordPress.com in 2013. His background and expertise is in the realtime web. He’s the creator of socket.io, one of the most popular JavaScript projects on GitHub and author of “Smashing Node.JS” published by Wiley in 2012. He’s spoken at dozens of conferences all around the world about JavaScript and the realtime web, such as O’Reilly OSCon, QCon and NDC. Originally from Argentina, he dropped out of highschool and moved to the US to pursue his passions in the San Francisco startup world. He’s passionate about open source as an education medium and a mentor of an Open Source Engineering class organized and pioneered by Stanford, with students from Harvard, MIT, Carnegie Mellon, UPenn, Columbia and others.
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Helen Hou-Sandí
Helen is the Director of Platform Experience at 10up, where she is sponsored to work on WordPress full-time. She is a core committer and the release lead for WordPress 4.0. Having earned graduate and undergraduate degrees in piano performance and accompanying, Helen’s artistic side supports the WordPress philosophy that “code is poetry”, with her decade spent as a professional collaborative musician providing a natural foundation for interacting with and wrangling a large contributor base.
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Jeff Veen
Jeff Veen is the Vice President of Product Design for Adobe. He joined them in October, 2011, when they acquired Typekit, the company he co-founded and ran as CEO. In addition to Typekit, Jeff was one of the founding partners of the user experience consulting group Adaptive Path. While there, he lead the development of Measure Map, which was acquired by Google. During his time at Google, Jeff redesigned Google Analytics and lead the UX team for Google’s apps. Much earlier, he was part of the founding web team at Wired Magazine, where he helped build HotWired, Web Monkey, Wired News, and many other sites. During that time, Jeff authored two books, “HotWired Style” and “The Art and Science of Web Design.”
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Jen Mylo
Jen Mylo (formerly Jane Wells) is a community organizer for the WordPress open source project, focused on contributor outreach, diversity, and growing local communities. Prior to this she spent four years as the UX lead and project manager of the core software team.
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Jenn Schiffer
Jenn Schiffer writes code to build web apps using open web technologies for a company that champions open source web development using open web technologies called Bocoup because she likes open source and the open web technologies used in the communities that champion it.
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Jennifer Bourn
Jennifer Bourn is the Creative Director and Digital Strategist for Bourn Creative, a full service design agency, specializing in web design, brand design, and digital strategy. With more than 15 years in the design trenches, 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. Today, with more than 300 custom WordPress sites under her belt, Jennifer now shares her expertise and lessons learned as a vibrant speaker, an avid blogger, and a co-organizer of the Sacramento WordPress Meetup Group.
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Jenny Lawson
Known for her sardonic wit and her hysterically skewed outlook on life, Jenny Lawson has made millions of people question their own sanity, as they found themselves admitting that they, too, often wondered why Jesus wasn’t classified as a zombie, or laughed to the point of bladder failure when she accidentally forgot that she mailed herself a cobra. Her blog (www.thebloggess.com) is award-winning, extremely popular, and she is considered to be one of the funniest women alive by at least three people. Her book, Let’s Pretend This Never Happened ( A Mostly True Memoir), was a #1 NYT bestseller.
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Jenny Wong
Jenny is a web developer at Human Made. Her love for development goes beyond the screen & is an advocate of both the PHP and WordPress communities.
As a WordCamp speaker, PHP North West organiser and PHP Women evangelist, she loudly cheers people on to share knowledge & contribute back to both communities.
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Jeremy Felt
Jeremy is building a central platform around WordPress at Washington State University and has been a contributor to WordPress core for just over 2 years. As his involvement with free and open source software has grown, his appreciation has grown ten fold.
He sees the future of the world as a place where communities talk about their work, silos disappear, and collaboration is boundless.
When not obsessing over this future, Jeremy enjoys standard Pacific Northwest things like homebrewing, the outdoors, and good food.
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Joe Dolson
Joe Dolson is a WordPress plug-in developer and accessibility consultant. He’s the author of several popular WordPress plug-ins, including WP to Twitter and My Calendar. He teaches a course at the University of Colorado at Boulder on developing accessible web sites with WordPress, and is a member of the WordPress Accessibility Team.
Joe has been in web development since 2001, providing web consulting and development services to clients in the US and in Europe. Joe writes and speaks regularly on accessible web development and web standards. Keep up with Joe at Joe Dolson Accessible Web Design.
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John Eckman
After a first career as an academic, John‘s been working in digital agencies for the last 15 years, and with WordPress for the last 8. He is the CEO of 10up, and lives in Salem MA with his wife and dogs. He blog is Open Parenthesis.
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Joseph O’Connor
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Josepha Haden
Josepha is an Analyst at Haden Interactive with nearly a decade of experience managing web analytics, behavioral analysis, and overall site performance. She is active in the tech community in Kansas City and is dedicated to teaching and equipping future generations with the tools to succeed. She has a passion for problem-solving and languages which provides an excellent foundation for her current work. If you ever ask what the best part of her job is, she’ll tell you that it’s working in the cross-section of art and science: helping creative visions be realized through technology and computing.
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K. Adam White
K. Adam White is a JavaScript engineer at Bocoup, an Open Web technology company in Boston, Massachusetts, where he writes web applications, contributes to open-source projects, and evangelizes for the web as an open platform for technology and collaboration. An artist and enthusiast photographer, K.Adam is also a WordPress core contributor, a co-organizer of the Boston WordPress community, and the author of a Node.js client for the WordPrest REST API.
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Kathleen Vignos
Kathleen Vignos is a full stack engineer and leads the engineering team at WIRED. She started out at Accenture and Peoplesoft, programming everything from mainframe/COBOL to enterprise client/server to web applications. She later founded a successful ecommerce website, taught business software programming at the university level, and migrated many clients to WordPress as a freelancer. Kathleen holds engineering degrees from UCLA and the University of Michigan. Editors at WIRED know they can ply her with chocolate and wine to get their WordPress feature requests completed faster. She tweets @kathleencodes.
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Kathy Cano-Murillo
Kathy Cano-Murillo is a writer/novelist, artist and founder of the award-winning site, CraftyChica.com. Her mission is to spread positivity through creativity. Known for her glittery “Mexi-boho” style, she has a national craft product line and is a former syndicated columnist for The Arizona Republic. She has has authored nine books, two of them novels. She has been featured in The New York Times, USA Today, HGTV, DIY Network, Lifetime TV and more. When Kathy isn’t designing, crafting, or writing books, she tours the country teaching classes and giving motivation and business presentations. She is a mom, wifey, and owns five Chihuahuas.
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Luke Wroblewski
Luke is currently the CEO and Co-Founder of Input Factory Inc. Prior to this, Luke was the Co-Founder and Chief Product Officer of Bagcheck which was acquired by Twitter just nine months after being launched publicly. Before he was founding start-up companies, Luke was an Entrepreneur in Residence (EIR) at Benchmark Capital, the Chief Design Architect (VP) at Yahoo!. Luke is the author of three popular Web design books (Mobile First, Web Form Design & Site-Seeing: A Visual Approach to Web Usability)
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Lyza Danger Gardner
Lyza Danger Gardner is a dev. Since co-founding Portland, Ore.-based mobile web start-up Cloud Four (http://www.cloudfour.com) in 2007, Lyza has tortured and thrilled herself with the intricate ins and outs of the bazillion devices and browsers now accessing the web globally. Lyza and co-founder Jason Grigsby are the authors of Head First Mobile Web (O’Reilly).
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M. Asif Rahman
M. Asif Rahman is the founder CEO Of A. R. Communications, a WordPress enthusiast, web entrepreneur, and workaholic.
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Mark Jaquith
Mark Jaquith has been using and helping build WordPress since 2004. He’s a lead developer on the WordPress core and offers freelance WordPress consulting services through Covered Web Services, focusing on security, scaling, and custom plugins. Mark enjoys solving interesting problems and working with curious people.
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Matt Mullenweg
I am a founding developer of WordPress, the Open Source software used by over 23% of the web, including this site. The website says WordPress is “a state-of-the-art semantic personal publishing platform,” but more importantly WordPress is a part of who I am. Like eating, breathing, music, I can’t not work on WordPress. The project touches a lot of people, something I’ve recently begun to appreciate. I consider myself very lucky to be able to work on something I love so much.
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Mel Choyce
Mel Choyce is a Design Engineer at Automattic and community organizer for Boston WordPress. She designs free themes in her spare time.
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Michael Arestad
Michael is a designer at Automattic, the makers of WordPress.com. He may be a tad obsessed with CSS (especially Sass) and beautiful typography. He contributes to WordPress Core, VaultPress, Jetpack, and WordPress.com. You can find him on twitter @michaelarestad
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Mickey Kay
Mickey Kay is a senior WordPress developer at MIGHTYminnow Web Studio & School in Oakland, CA. He specializes in plugin development, mobile first theming, and all things related to the Genesis Framework. Mickey is well versed in “The Art of n00b”. He attended his very first WordCamp (here in SF) just last year. Since then he has authored 8 plugins, numerous themes, and dozens of client sites. When not coding, Mickey spends his time playing wheelchair basketball and spoiling his 3-legged, 18-year-old, deaf cat.
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Morten Rand-Hendriksen
Morten Rand-Hendriksen is a staff author with lynda.com focussing on WordPress, front-end web development, and web standards. He’s also an instructor at Emily Carr University of Art and Design. When he’s not creating learning materials you’ll find him working on client projects for his boutique style web agency Pink & Yellow Media Inc., co-organizing the Vancouver WordPress Meetup Group, blogging about WordPress, web design, and information philosophy at mor10.com, or wearing out a pair of dancing shoes on a local ballroom floor. Before moving to Canada in 2002 Morten grew up in Norway where he studied philosophy and worked as a musician.
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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.
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Paul Clark
Paul is a TEDx speaker, WordPress core contributor, and Director of Recruiting at 10up.com, which is home to 30 Core Contributors and the project lead for WordPress 4.0.
He has created intuitive and scalable solutions for clients including TED.com, The Wall Street Journal, and Automattic’s WordPress.com VIP platform.
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Rachel Baker
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Sam Hotchkiss
Sam was the creator of BruteProtect, a WordPress security plugin acquired by Automattic in August 2014. He now works on the Jetpack team at Automattic, with the goal of bringing killer features and functionality to WordPress blogs everywhere.
Sam travels with his wife, Becky (and, quite often, their dogs, Barkley, Izzy, and Stanley) to WordCamps around the world. He presents on a wide range of topics ranging from big ideas to practical how-tos.
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Sara Cannon
Sara Cannon is Partner and Creative Director at Range. She loves design, typography, user experience, and art. Sara loves giving talks around the globe on web design, responsive design, web typography, and more. A seasoned designer, Sara has done work for clients such as Disney Publishing and Flickr. She loves open source, her pets, traveling, and WordPress.
Find Sara Cannon Around the Web:
- Twitter: @saracannon
- Design Journal sara-cannon.com
- Art Journal: artcation.com
- Original Artworks: saracannonart.com
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Taylor Aldridge
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Tracy Levesque
Tracy Levesque is a co-owner of YIKES, Inc., a Philadelphia web design and development shop located in Fishtown. She is also a WordPress instructor for Girl Develop It Philly. She has been designing websites since 1996 and working with WordPress since 2006. She spends her days building custom themes for WordPress and seeing how much functionality she can add without really knowing PHP.
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Zack Tollman
Residing in Portland, Oregon, Zack longs for the cold, snowy days of his Alaskan youth. He enjoys strumming his guitar, playing hockey, and spending time with his wife and dog. Otherwise, you’ll find him at his computer meticulously spinning lines of clean WordPress code.