Guest post by Tessa Kriesel, Agency and Community Engineer at Pantheon and Panelist on the Women in WordPress panel.
We are all looking forward to getting the chance to speak on the Women in WordPress Panel at WordCamp Seattle. We figured it would be fun to share a bit about ourselves before WordCamp starts!
Meet Rachel Cherry
How were you introduced to WordPress?
Hi! My name is Rachel Cherry. I’m a Senior Software Engineer for The Walt Disney Company with over ten years experience in back and front-end web development and digital design. Before Disney, I spent over nine years working in higher education and am the Director of WPCampus, a community and conferences focused on using WordPress in higher ed. I also enjoy promoting the importance of an accessible web.
I got started with WordPress in January 2011 when I accepted a job at The University of Alabama. Within six months I had to learn WordPress, undergo a complete redesign, develop themes and plugins, setup a multisite, and migrate all of the existing content for the college I worked for and its seven academic departments. I was the designer, the developer, the QA, everything. I was thrown into the deep end and have enjoyed every minute.
In fall 2015, I founded WPCampus because, while WordCamps are great, the issues I encountered in higher ed were often overlooked. Higher ed is a unique and challenging space because it often requires delivering enterprise solutions with a much tighter budget. We needed our own space to share, discuss, and learn. Our community is special because our members have a bond and dedication beyond their love for WordPress: to further the vitality and mission of higher education. WPCampus has an active online community as well as annual virtual and in-person conferences.
I live in Pasadena, California but you can follow my adventures in life and code on Twitter, GitHub, and bamadesigner.com.
Tell Us a Fun Fact About Yourself
A fun fact about myself? I was once featured in a Slack ad. I tweeted about how much I loved Slack after they sent me some swag to give away at a conference. Months later, they messaged me to ask if they could have an artist draw something based on my tweet and use it in an ad campaign. Soon, I saw my tweet featured in a full page ad in The New York Times, Forbes, Fast Company, and more. You can see the ad here:
When you have to stop at the hotel shop to buy @nytimes because @SlackHQ bought a full page ad featuring your tweet. pic.twitter.com/G8L8Bh1FeM
— Rachel Cherry 🍒 (@bamadesigner) December 14, 2015
Meet Tessa Kriesel
How were you introduced to WordPress?
I was already doing Joomla development and someone needed a WordPress site so I started digging in and loved it. However, the story of how I got involved with Joomla, and open source, is quite interesting.
Back in 2007, I was obsessed with Guitar Hero. I wanted to setup a site where people would be ranked and could compete against one another online. The site would need user account capabilities and a way to enter scores to validate against the other player and rank them in a bracketed hierarchy. I figured out that I could get most of the way with a CMS, and Joomla had recently been founded and seemed promising.
I had never worked with PHP or MySQL and was still fairly new to web development in general, but I dug in and was able to get 90% there. I recruited a fellow gamer that was a PHP developer to help me complete the rest of the bracket system. Somehow, users started coming in, very quickly. I wish I could remember the number of users we had by the time I walked away, but I know it was well into the thousands.
The best part was that Activision recognized our mission and asked us to start posting our tournaments in their online community. I was stoked. I never imagined the site would get as far as it did, and then to be recognized by ACTIVISION, the creator of my favorite video game! They were super supportive and sent me tons of GH swag like guitar stickers, pins, sweat bands and more.
After having my first child, I no longer had time to maintain the site or play video games anymore and I stepped down. The site has since been drastically changed and renamed, but you can still find a few of the original posse over at http://ghshredders.com.
You can follow me on Twitter at https://twitter.com/tessak22.
Tell Us a Fun Fact About Yourself
I have always been a bit of a tomboy. As a child, my family’s weekend hobby was mud-racing, which I later ended up doing myself when I was 16. I can fix a car, enjoy four wheeling, being outdoors and shooting archery.
Meet Miriam Goldman
How were you introduced to WordPress?
It was 2008, and my friends and I were starting a band for a local church. They wanted some young people to help lead their worship time. The job fell to me, as the web developer of the group, to develop and design a website, as we had ambitions to branch out.
Knowing that I wanted to go with a CMS, I did my research. I came down to Drupal and WordPress – and WordPress won out, for the ease of updating the templates, and adding the plugins. I ended up tinkering around with it over the next few years in my spare time, and then got lucky enough to be hired by a company that used it exclusively, in 2012. Since then, it’s been my main specialization in my day job.
Tell Us a Fun Fact About Yourself
I’ve played clarinet since I was 13, and saxophone since I was 15. From 2009-2014, I was part of the pit orchestra for local musical theatre productions – in where I almost got taken out by a rogue dodgeball that fell into the orchestra pit during a production of Hairspray.
Meet Bridget Willard
How were you introduced to WordPress?
Hello! I am Bridget Willard and I came to WordPress (dot) com from Leo Laporte in 2007, the same year I heard about Twitter. In 2013, I attended my first WordCamp when my Twitter friend Pam from Pam Ann Marketing said she wanted to meet at WordCamp Orange County in 2013. I began to attend all of the WCOC’s with my BFF/Blogging Buddy Carol Stephen and in 2017 I was on the organizing committee. I built bridgetwillard.com in April 2015 — my first self-hosted WordPress site and started working for GiveWP.com in December of 2015.
Tell Us a Fun Fact About Yourself
Most people don’t know that I was the second string nose guard for the 8th grade flag football team.
Meet Francesca Marano
How were you introduced to WordPress?
Buongiorno! My name is Francesca Marano and I am the WordPress Community Manager at SiteGround. Before that I was a freelance websites creator, an executive assistant, a factory worker in a kibbutz. I loved every job I had in my life and learned something from each one of them.
I live in Torino, Italy but I feel at home in every place where I can connect to the wi-fi and sit down to write my next talk submission with a good cup of tea (Countess Grey from Fortnum&Mason is my current favorite).
When my son was born I joined a group that would forever change my life, both professionally and personally. You will never guess how my involvement with WordPress started – I became a member of a knitting club. No coding classes (although I almost graduate from a Coding, Art & Multimedia curriculum in Italy, I dropped out, three exams from graduation, when I realised my professors didn’t know who Jeffrey Zeldman was), no WordCamps: all the ladies of the knitting club had a blog, why didn’t I have a blog? So I got one. And I started tinkering with it. Soon I found myself helping other people setting up their blogs and websites and my new career was born.
In 2015 a friend told me about contributing to WordPress without being a PHP developer, I couldn’t believe I could make a difference without writing one single function. I started contributing to the Polyglots team and then became more involved with the Community team. I help other communities grow through mentorship, organize meetups and WordCamps in Torino and take part in many other WordPress events worldwide.
Tell Us a Fun Fact About Yourself
I love to knit, dance, sing in the car at an awfully loud volume even though I am completely tone deaf.
Don’t miss out on what promises to be a fun an informative panel at WordCamp this year. It’s happening on Saturday, 11/4 @ 2pm!!