We have some first class speakers lined up this year. Take a gander…
Aftaab Gulam
Aftaab began his career as a photographer, travelling to south east Asia, Europe, Africa and the Americas photographing people and their environments for magazines and newspapers. He has also worked on the web, earning a Webby nomination competing against the likes of CBC Radio and the Huffington Post for his work on a citizen journalism website. Currently he is focused on developing websites, apps for smartphones and photography. He describes himself as a creative, a problem solver, a listener and unconditionally curious.
Andrew Taylor
Andrew currently works for Pantheon helping agencies and giving back to the WordPress community.
As a former web developer, Andrew spent his time on large scale projects for clients such as AMC Networks, Frito Lay, National Van Lines and more. With over 8 years of web development experience, specializing in WordPress, he is a seasoned veteran.
Andrew Villeneuve
Andrew is a security consultant, free software enthusiast, and progressive activist who has been working with WordPress since 2006. His security consulting practice specializes in unhacking and securing compromised WordPress sites. He has been involved in the Seattle WordPress community since 2011 as a speaker, volunteer, WordCamp organizer, and meetup participant. Andrew is active in progressive politics and created the Northwest Progressive Institute to raise our region and nation’s quality of life through insightful research and imaginative advocacy. His interests include hiking, travel, and photography.
Andrew Woods
Andrew Woods is a seasoned Web Developer, and a conference speaker. He’s been
making websites since 1999, and is an active member of the Seattle WordPress
community. He currently organizes the Seattle PHP User Group (@seaphp) and
Pacific Northwest PHP conference (@pnwphp). He’s an advocate for the open web,
and values accessibility and design.
Bob Dunn
Bob Dunn, known as BobWP around the web, has been using WordPress since he first discovered it in 2007. Since then, he has built scores of sites. But his true passion over the years was teaching thousands of users about WordPress and blogging through conferences, workshops, one-on-one and online training. Currently Bob and his partner Judy push out massive content to help WordPress users via their blogs at bobwp.com. He is also the host of the weekly podcast The WP eCommerce Show.
Catherine Bridge
Catherine is a front-end WordPress developer and co-owner of Rocket Lift Incorporated, a web agency in the beautiful Pacific Northwest. She spends her days keeping the Rocket ship flying, loves learning new things about SASS and Git, and makes evil-sounding noises when she solves a CSS problem.
It was an unexpected blessing that Catherine stumbled into the tech world, but she believes firmly in self-reliance and expanding her own skill set, and is proud to add one more LGBT voice to the tech community.
Catherine is a Licensed Massage Therapist and avid Zumba enthusiast! She is also an accomplished mezzo-soprano soloist and recording artist living in Portland. She performs choral masterworks with Portland Symphonic Choir and spends her summers making magic with the Shakespearean company, Oregon Adventure Theatre.
Chris Lema
Chris Lema coaches companies building commercial products in the WordPress ecosystem. He’s also a daily blogger, a public speaker, and product strategist. He helps companies leverage WordPress, and helps WordPress companies find leverage.
Christina Varro
Christina owns and operates a creative design and commercial photography studio called Varro Creative based in Calgary, Canada. She has over 15 years of experience in graphic and web design, and has primarily focused on WordPress based projects for her web clients for the past 6 years. She is excited to collaborate and share knowledge with others in the WordPress community.
Devon DeLapp
Devon is the owner and principal of DeLapp Design, a boutique design agency founded in 2011 and located in Seattle. DeLapp creates brand identities, marketing materials, and custom-built websites. WordPress is the CMS of choice for their web projects, and their clients include Microsoft, COJK, United Creations, and Environmental Defense Fund. When off the clock, Devon can be found raising his two children, riding his bike, or letting people know he has a pilot’s license.
Eric Amundson
Eric Amundson founded IvyCat in 2002 and is the team’s lead web strategist and user-experience designer. He began developing with WordPress in early 2005, and had found his niche, loving the software and especially the community.
Eric co-organizes the Seattle WordPress Docs Sprint and the South Sound WordPress Meetup, and stays active in the WordPress Community in the Pacific Northwest by sponsoring, attending, and speaking at WordPress Meetups and WordCamps.
Gaelan Lloyd
Gaelan is the Web Systems Manager for Winshuttle, a global software company headquartered in Seattle. He’s in charge of the company’s entire international web infrastructure, which he built from the ground up in WordPress using careful planning and 30,000 lines of code. Gaelan loves everything it takes to run a web site, from provisioning Linux servers and writing deployment scripts, writing custom code for the CMS, all the way up to designing branding, page layouts, and crafty CSS declarations to get things to look right.
James Hipkin
James is an accomplished, forward-thinking marketing professional with 25+ years of multi-disciplinary experience in marketing and marketing communications companies serving high-profile, global brands and B2C clients in consumer packaged goods, durables, transportation, telecommunications and financial services. He has been involved in digital for more than ten years, first as President of a direct marketing agency in San Francisco, where he led the evolution of the agency from traditional direct marketing to digital. Clients included Apple and Wells Fargo online bank. And then as the head of a mid sized agency’s interactive group, with Toyota as the main client. He joined Red8 Interactive, a long term vendor, as an owner and managing director, 5.5 years ago.
Jeremy Felt
Jeremy Felt is the senior WordPress developer at Washington State University, a WordPress core committer, and the maintainer of VVV. He believes in free and open source software and enjoys being part of the WordPress community. Will encourage you to share your work.
Jocelyn Mozak
Jocelyn is the Founder & Owner of Mozak Design, located in Portland, OR. Born and raised on the East Coast, her education includes Cornell University, graduating with a Bachelor’s in Electrical Engineering and Stanford University, where she obtained a Master’s in Electrical Engineering.
While her education in engineering certainly refined her technical skills, she found that it’s her passion for what she does and the people that she’s helped (and continues to help) that makes her a skilled web designer.
When she is not busy coding CSS or reading PHP you might find her chilling at a coffee shop, getting a pedicure or heading out for a run.
Jonathan Kay
Jonathan has over 20 years experience as a Linux systems administrator. In recent years, he has run a lot of WordPress servers. Following the age-old sys-admin adage of “If you have to do it more than twice, automate it,” he has built a lot of scripts and tools for managing WordPress servers, for both sys-admins and developers. In 2015, he released WP Stagecoach, a plugin that creates WordPress staging sites with one click. When he’s not playing with server hardware or automating his regular tasks, you can find Jonathan hiking in the Pacific Northwest with his standard poodle or instructing with various car clubs at the race track.
Julie Kuehl
Julie Kuehl is a WordPress developer from Moorhead, Minnesota. She enjoys coding custom themes and websites. Julie’s outside passions include cars (Mustangs especially), motorcycles (Harley-Davidsons especially), dive bars and science fiction.
Kelli Wise
Kelli Wise is a web designer at Pint Sized Sites and blogger for small business owners trying to make sense of websites and online marketing. She has been developing websites since 1997 and made the switch to WordPress in 2009. She is active in the WordPress community is an organizer for the Olympia WordPress meetup. She lives in Olympia WA with two long haired cats who have failed to master the qwerty keyboard.
Kimberly Gauthier
Kimberly is a dog nutrition blogger for Keep the Tail Wagging, a blog about raw feeding and raising dogs naturally. She started blogging in 2009 and was introduced to WordPress in 2010. Keep the Tail Wagging is nearly 5 years old and earns a steady income from affiliate marketing, sponsorship, freelance writing, and ebook/product sales. She has lived in the Pacific Northwest her entire life and currently reside in Marysville, WA with her boyfriend and our four dogs and one cat.
Kristin Kinnamon
Kristin Kinnamon has 20+ years of experience communicating with the public in print and online – first as a journalist, and then as a Public Information Officer, website content and communications manager for local government agencies. Her UX consulting business, Kinnamon Communications, works with local governments and nonprofits to assess and improve their websites and online tools.
Her first project after getting a graduate certificate in User-Centered Design from the University of Washington was a new WordPress website for a local nonprofit . She also manages a community bike shop’s WordPress.com website.
Mark Root-Wiley
Mark Root-Wiley makes WordPress websites for nonprofits and mission-driven organizations as MRW Web Design in Seattle, Washington. With over a decade of web design and development experience and six years of WordPress experience, Mark loves sharing his knowledge with others, speaking at local conferences, meetups, and on his blog and Twitter (@MRWweb). When not pixel-pushing or WordPressing, Mark is on the pitch playing pickup soccer or cheering on the Sounders.
Mika Epstein
Mika has been a member of the WordPress.org Plugin Directory team for over five years and has a pretty close personal relationship with not just plugins but the repository and its ins and outs. While the needle for improving the directory moves slowly, there are things everyone can learn that will make the experience better for users and developers alike. Understanding how your plugin fits in with the global use of WordPress can be daunting. Overwhelming even. But there’s something glorious about being part of the phenomena that is WordPress, and there’s something to be learned about how to work with everyone, everywhere, every when.
Morgan Kay
Morgan is a WordPress developer for Range. She loves using WordPress to make people’s lives easier, whether they are managing a big business, small business, or a personal website. She has released over a dozen WordPress plugins to the public.
When she isn’t obsessing over the latest coding puzzle, you can find Morgan hiking in the forests of the Pacific Northwest, or with her nose buried in a book.
Nate Reimnitz
Nate is a certified expert WordPress developer working for Codeable.io, Clarity.fm, LinkedIn ProFinder, and GoDaddy Pro. He is a full-time freelancer.
Nichole Betterley
Nichole is a WordPress Designer/Developer who works with coaches and solopreneur service providers to create unique, powerful websites that grow their unique businesses. She loves walks on the beach, reading by the fire, and WordPress tutorials. She lives in Sammamish with her husband, daughter, and the obligatory, work-from-home cat. She has been volunteering at her daughter’s school teaching art to elementary kids for the past 5 years.
Tammy Finch
Tammy Finch is a website designer, social media consultant, and the founder of Web Services, Inc. in East Peoria, IL. She has been designing websites for over 17 years.
Tammy and her team currently manage and host several hundred WordPress websites and social profiles for her clients. A strong asset she provides is Online Reputation Management. Online Reputation Management is incredibly important to any industry and she shares tips on this topic on her blog and book.
She is an active member of the WordPress Chat Meet-up in Peoria, IL. Thankfully, she listened to her fellow WordPressers and she converted her website business from HTML sites to all WordPress about 5 years ago.
Tiana Cameron
Tiana Cameron fell in love with WordPress about eight years ago. Starting in graphic design almost 13 years ago, she worked both sides of the coin, as an in-house Creative Director for an email marketing company and as a freelance web designer. Did we mention this was AT THE SAME TIME?
Crazy and hectic as it sounds (and it was at times), the combination of learning WordPress with digital marketing was mind blowing and revealing. The power! The flexibility! She found herself more excited about sharing all that she had learned with others and watching their lightbulb, a-ha moment happen than actually creating the websites for them!
In early 2016, she joined a booming Meetup group called Tech-it-Easy-with-WP, a cool group of (women!) WordPress Theme and Plugin Developers dedicated to helping business owners learn, navigate and build their own company website.
These days, she has traded her freelancer hat for a co-founder hat, starting a digital marketing fulfillment agency for mid to large size companies. She also volunteers, give presentations and works one-on-one with folks needing WordPress help. 🙂
Tim Sisson
Tim loves WordPress and enjoys leveraging it to meet businesses needs. He leads the Customer Community Team at BoldGrid where they write content and act as subject matter experts for WordPress.
He’s an avid outdoorsman who loves the crisp air of the Virginia mountains. When he’s not tinkering with WordPress he spends his time on adventures with his wife Lisa, three daughters Autumn, Stella, and Petra.
Tyler Golberg
Tyler is a Minnesotan that loves biking and playing with his son, Sullivan. The time in between he is passionate about tinkering with WordPress and helping businesses find a home on the web with CYBERsprout.
Val Scrivner
Val is a WordPress Developer/Designer building small business websites at local startup Marketeering Group. She has a passion for clean design, good user experience, and helping clients achieve their goals for their websites and digital traffic. When she isn’t playing in WordPress she is watching sports, doing math for fun, playing outdoors in the Pacific Northwest no matter what the weather is and/or enjoying a well crafted beer.