WordCamp Seattle 2017

We’ve got three fabulous panel sessions lined up for your viewing pleasure at WordCamp Seattle this year. We’re bringing together some experts and some big names to lend their perspective to in-depth discussions about pressing issues in WordPress today.

Women in WordPress

A frank and honest discussion with women with different experience levels and involved in different aspects of WordPress – ranging from development to designer to marketer.

Bridget Willard

Bridget Willard started her career with office work, earned a teaching degree, but returned to the office where she carved out a career in social media and marketing and ended up at a WordPress Plugin Development Shop.
Currently, she is the Marketing Manager for WordImpress whose flagship plugin is GiveWP.com — an online donation plugin, co-host of WPblab, and co-organizer of Women Who WP Meetup.

She blogs about social media and, of course, WordPress on her site at bridgetwillard.com

Francesca Marano

WordPress Community Manager at SiteGround, author, educator. Francesca makes WordPress things happen from Torino, Italy: Community team representative, Meetup and WordCamp organizer.

She founded C+B, a blog with an editorial staff of more than sixty authors offering daily advice for Italian female creative entrepreneurs.

Francesca is a passionate speaker and you can find her in Italy and around the world talking about WordPress, community, open source, women in tech, small businesses.

Miriam Goldman

Miriam works for a small digital marketing agency in Canada’s national capital of Ottawa as their development lead. She has worked in a variety of different environments, and has worked with WordPress since approximately 2008-09.

Outside of her development life, she is a sensei at her local karate dojo, and is also a competitive latin ballroom dancer.

Rachel Cherry

Rachel Cherry is 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, she spent over nine years working in higher education and is the Founder/Director of WPCampus, a community and conferences focused on using WordPress in higher education. When she’s not using WordPress to help build the web, she enjoys promoting the importance of accessibility and working to encourage openness, collaboration, and professional development as a conference and meetup organizer. Rachel lives in Pasadena, California but you can find her on Twitter, GitHub, and bamadesigner.com.

Tessa Kriesel

Agency and Community Engineer at Pantheon, Tessa has been a web developer for over 10 years. She enjoys front-end development but also loves to build sites from start to finish. She started in Joomla, moved into WordPress shortly after and most recently has been digging into Drupal. She enjoys teaching others to code, mentoring junior developers and speaking at conferences and youth events. She is an instructor and retired Chapter Leader for Girl Develop It Minneapolis, Community Manager for Women Who Code Twin Cities, WordCamp Minneapolis Organizer and founder of Outspoken Women. Tessa is a northern Minnesota native, but now lives in the Twin Cities with her husband and three children. She loves dogs and enjoys helping local organizations rescue dogs in her free time.

Picture Perfect: Getting Beautiful Images Without Violating the Law

Hear from an image designer, a publication editor, a photographer, and an intellectual property lawyer on how to get great images without breaking the bank or violating the law. They will also offer advice on assessing your image needs, options for acquiring those images, and tips for creating your own.

Christine Winckler

Christine Winckler is an experienced web consultant who specializes in design, front-end development, and WordPress development. She enjoys supporting other professionals and partnering to bring a client’s vision to life. When working solo, she loves being the caretaker for complex websites. Christine spends her leisure time throwing tea parties and wearing funny hats.

Lisa Stewart

Lisa’s previous speaking engagements include such varied activities as speaking on a panel of small retail experts to presenting to non-profit organizations about augmenting their marketing programs. A self-proclaimed eager introvert, Lisa is currently casting her net of speaking opportunities.

Zainab Hussain

Zainab regularly advises bloggers, web designers, and other marketing professionals on intellectual property issues, particularly with respect to US copyright laws pertaining to image use and license limitations, and has negotiated licensing agreements, representing licensors and licensees in equal measure.

Managing Big WordPress Sites

An extremely engaging moderated discussion of the challenges that face large WordPress sites with 100s or 1000s of users. Learn lessons and hear advice on managing user needs and providing tools that make site management easier for everyone.

Grant Landram

Grant Landram is the Vice President of Client Strategy at 10up, passionate about web strategy, design, engineering and project management. Grant joined 10up in the summer of 2013, after running his own web development and design agency in the Seattle area, working with brands such as Nordstrom and Big Fish Games.

As a business and economics graduate, Grant found his creative outlet with the web after college and has been working at the intersection of technology and commerce ever since. Grant has been experimenting with web technologies and how they help solve real-world business problems, from building a Python-based reservation application to replacing bulky point of sales systems, to teaching himself how to develop websites and social applications.

Grant is an active member of the WordPress community, helping organize Meetups and WordCamps since 2012, as well as speaking at conferences around the country.

In his free time, Grant enjoys running marathons, cooking, and spending time outdoors with his friends, family, and pets.

Jeff Running

Jeff is a program manager at Microsoft, where he currently looks after a WordPress site that computer scientists at Microsoft Research use to tell the world about the amazing things they’re dreaming up. Prior to this, Jeff spent time at MSN.com in both editorial and engineering roles. Prior still, he spent several years managing a production and editorial team that ran Microsoft’s corporate blog and news/PR site. In all these roles, Jeff has spent an inordinate amount of time complaining about a CMS he had to use, listening to complaints about a CMS he helped build, or both. Thankfully, working with WordPress for the past year has renewed his faith that it may indeed be possible to build a publishing tool that people don’t dread using.

Rachel Cherry

Why, yes – the astonishing and multifaceted Rachel Cherry is participating in both the Women in WordPress and the Managing Big WordPress Sites panels.

Rachel Cherry is 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, she spent over nine years working in higher education and is the Founder/Director of WPCampus, a community and conferences focused on using WordPress in higher education. When she’s not using WordPress to help build the web, she enjoys promoting the importance of accessibility and working to encourage openness, collaboration, and professional development as a conference and meetup organizer. Rachel lives in Pasadena, California but you can find her on Twitter, GitHub, and bamadesigner.com.

Scott Berkun

Scott Berkun is a bestselling author and popular speaker on creativity, philosophy, culture, business and many other subjects. He’s the author of six books, including The Myths of Innovation, Confessions of a Public Speaker, and The Year Without Pants.

Born and raised in Queens, NYC, he studied philosophy, computer science and design at CMU, was a manager at Microsoft (’94-’03) and WordPress.com (’10-’12), and taught creativity at the University of Washington. He’s also the MC and speaker coach for Ignite Seattle, a finalist in the Amtrak 2014 writer’s residency program, and the director of the short film We Make Seattle.

Bring your thinking caps and lots of questions to these sessions. Panels are always fun and lively and interactive!

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photo credit: skeeze

Lightning talks are exhilarating. They’re fast-paced and super-informative because they have be sharp and concise to get their message across in a condensed timeframe.

There are 2 rounds of lightning talks queued up for you this year.

We’ve got a handful of insightful speakers presenting on Blogging and Social Media:

Jessica Rhae

Jessica has been blogging at You Did What With Your Wiener? – a pet lifestyle blog about hiking and camping with small dogs (Dachshunds) – for over 6 years. She currently makes 1/3 of her income from that blog and has won many awards. In 2015 and 2017, she won “Best Dog Blog” from the prestigious, peer reviewed Nose-to-Nose blogging Awards. In 2015, she also won “Best Pet Blog Design” in the Nose-to-Nose Awards.

Jessica leveraged her blogging experience, and notoriety, into a pet-focused social media consulting business – PetTalk Media. She has written articles for both print and online publications including CityDog Magazine, OutdoorsNW, the Sierra Trading Post, and several small to medium companies. She regularly coaches other bloggers who want to improve their blogs and make money from them – online, over the phone, and in person.

She holds a Masters of Communication in Digital Media (MCDM) from the Communications Leadership program at the University of Washington. She also holds a certificate in social media management.

Kimberly Gauthier

I’m a dog nutrition blogger for Keep the Tail Wagging®, a blog that launched December 2011 and is now earning a regular income that allows me to raise my dogs in the comfort in which they have become accustomed.

I have a bachelor’s degree in Business Administration from Seattle University and I’m a certified Pet Food Nutrition Specialist courtesy of Dogs Naturally Magazine.

Lyndal Cairns

Lyndal Cairns is the Membership & Engagement Director at NTEN: The Nonprofit Technology Network. She manages the team that makes NTEN membership an invaluable resource for people who use technology in their work at nonprofits and curates a lot of cat gifs.

Steve Case

Steve Case is a systems engineer, technologist, and trainer/advocate for high quality customer service, so naturally those are the things he blogs about. He specializes in figuring-out how things work, and then figuring out how to make them work better.

Most of Steve’s working life has been in the tech industry. He has worked for a vertical market startup, GE, an IBM subsidiary, Dell, and now Xerox. Much of what we now know as social media was born while Steve was at Dell, leading him to become SMAC (Social Media and Communities) certified there. During that time he co-founded #NostalgiaChat, which just passed its 5 year anniversary.

Last year Steve was dubbed both one of The Best and Brightest Influencers on Twitter in 2016 and GeekWire’s Geek of the Week.

And then we’re bringing you some fascinating folks focused on different aspects of supporting a site and supporting your business:

Brooke Dukes

Brooke, a west coast native, currently resides in Seattle, WA. After Brooke received a degree in graphic design she learned she was more passionate about people than pixels. Even so, she still can’t pass up a good conversation about design. When she isn’t engineering some happiness you will find her cycling, enjoying vegetarian food with friends and family.

Hilary Fosdal

Hilary Fosdal is an experienced program manager in Seattle. She started building websites while working in the broadcast television industry. While still a news junkie, she loves to talk shop about all things digital. In her spare time, she seeks outdoor adventures that involve mostly hiking and running.

Jacob Wayne Smith

Jacob Smith has more than a decade experience working with WordPress.

As a co-founder of the Seattle based boutique marketing agency, A Brave New, Jacob has as much experience on the business side and the development side.

He is passionate about WordPress development and is excited to share what he has learned with the community.

Joshua Wold

As a designer turned Product Owner, Joshua has had the privilege of working across a range of WordPress website projects over the years.

Currently he’s enjoying the opportunity to help define requirements for enterprise level WordPress site. This gives him the opportunity to have regular interaction with Content Producers, as well as amazing engineering teams.

He applies his design background to many of the tickets he works on, sketching wireframes and creating prototypes to help bring the tickets to life for his clients.

Justin Parra

Justin Parra is the Senior Interactive Producer at PRR (https://www.prrbiz.com/ ) where he leads design and development teams to produce interactive projects including websites, mobile apps, and web apps, for a mix of government, nonprofit, and corporate clients. Current projects include the new Seattle Streetcar website for SDOT, 2 web apps for the US EPA, and a transportation efficiency website for the Washington State Department of Transportation.

Justin uses his 11 years of experience in WordPress development to guide clients in the right direction and drive the development process amongst internal teams. He specializes in breaking down geek speak into plain English. Justin has been working with WordPress since 2006- Version 2.0.3. That’s around 135 WordPress updates!

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If you’re coming to WordCamp Seattle ready to work and make some real shifts in with your WordPress website and your business, we’ve got some really special sessions lined up for you.

I’m thrilled to announce the speakers who are bringing you workshops, hands-on, interactive sessions, and an all-around focus on gettin’ it done.

(Don’t show up to these folks’ sessions empty-handed. Bring a laptop or at least something to take some serious notes on.)

Erin Ewart

Erin Ewart is a career coach who specializes in working with social sector job seekers. Prior to starting her business, Erin spent over 15 years as a recruiter, and she uses this experience to help her clients successfully navigate the job search. She has worked for a diverse set of organizations across the public, private, and nonprofit sectors, including Google and the U.S State Department, and received her MBA from Columbia Business School and her BA from the College of William and Mary. She relocated to Seattle in 2014 from New York City, and is enjoying the different pace of life in the Pacific Northwest, along with the adventures of raising an almost two-year old.

Jennifer Bourn

Jennifer Bourn is an award-winning designer and founder/partner at Bourn Creative, a full service design agency, specializing in premium web design, brand design, messaging, and content strategy services, with WordPress as her platform of choice.

Deep in the design and branding trenches since 1998, Jennifer leads workshops and speaks regularly at both virtual and live events across the country, co-organizes the Sacramento WordPress Meetup, headed up WordCamp Sacramento 2016, and is lead organizer for WordCamp Sacramento 2017.

When not working with clients, Jennifer manages the Bourn Creative brand, writes for several marketing blogs, and has her own personal blog Inspired Imperfection where she shares recipes, family-friendly adventures, and candid commentary on work/life balance.

Kailey Lampert

Kailey has been playing with WordPress since 2008. She loves tiny plugins and WP-CLI. She’s also a dabbler in devops, and thinks everyone should know a little command line.

Kelli Wise

Kelli has been creating websites since the stone ages, or at least in the days before CSS. She creates websites for small businesses and nonprofits and believes in empowering her clients to make changes themselves. Once she discovered WordPress, she knew it was the right platform for her clients. She has extensive training and experience in public speaking and teaching and has spoken at many previous WordCamps. She organizes the WordPress meetup in Olympia WA and helps facilitate the Women’s WordPress study group in Seattle.

Sharon Ernst

Sharon Ernst, MA * Content Copywriter, Consultant and Coach
Sharon Ernst has worked as a freelance copywriter for almost 20 years, writing her first website in 1997 and founding her own copywriting firm three years after that. During that time, she has written everything from a charming drink coaster to highly technical case studies to complex websites. For the past 10 years, she has been blogging for businesses ranging from kitchen cabinet manufacturers to security companies to technical firms. She has also coached small business owners on blogging and conducted clinics to help them get started. Her most recent venture is a switch to teaching, helping people to write better, faster.

Zac Gordon

Zac Gordon is a professional educator, currently working on the JavaScript for WordPress Master Course. Previously, Zac taught WordPress for Treehouse. He has years of experience teaching WordPress and JavaScript at high schools, colleges, bootcamps and online learning sites. In addition to teaching, Zac also runs Web Hosting for Students, one of the world’s largest hosting companies dedicated to students and teachers.

Tickets are on sale now.

Note: All of the workshops and working sessions take place during regular WordCamp hours, but for some of them, if plan to attend, we request that you indicate that when you purchase your ticket so we can get a ballpark headcount to make sure we’ve got enough space and resources available.

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Let’s try this again. We’re re-sending this because yesterday’s post managed to go out without any of our actual speaker bios in it. Gotta love technology!

Have we mentioned lately what a crazy-amazing lineup of speakers and sessions we’ve got for you at WordCamp Seattle this year?

We’ve got your traditional, 30 minute talks-with-slides followed by Q&A.

We’ve got roll-up-your-sleeves, get-dirt-under-your-fingernails, and get-to-work, interactive working sessions.

We’ve got lightning talks so fast and furious your head will spin (not really, but at just 8 minutes each, these do promise to be fascinating, fun, and informative).

And we’ve got some in-depth panel discussions lined up that will blow… your… mind.

Today, I’m so excited to share with you our impressive slate of 30 minute talk-with-slides speakers (of which there are oodles):

Aaron Campbell

Aaron is the WordPress Security Team lead, has been a regular contributor to WordPress for more than ten years, and is currently funded by GoDaddy to work full time on the WordPress open source project. He has over seventeen years of web development experience and worked with clients ranging from small local businesses to Google, Yahoo, Disney, and Harvard. He’s been called both a coffee snob and a beer snob, but considers both to be compliments. When not buried in code, he enjoys spending time with his wife and son, riding his motorcycle, and reading sci-fi/fantasy books.

Adam W. Warner

Adam W. Warner first discovered WordPress in 2005 and has since founded several WordPress-focused businesses that provide education, plugins and consulting services for online business owners. In 2016 he brought his passion for WordPress to join SiteLock as a Product Evangelist. Adam has since delivered his zeal for WordPress to 20 different WordCamps all over the world and presented talks at 13. In addition to WordPress, Adam is passionate about his family, robots and of course, life, the universe and everything.

Amy Fawcett

As the Digital Producer at the Washington Technology Industry Association, Amy keeps the website, blog, and social channels fresh and up to date so their members know what’s going on at WTIA and in Washington’s technology community.

Ben Byrne

Ben Byrne is one of three founders of Cornershop Creative, a web services agency that plans, designs, builds and maintains websites for nonprofit organizations and educational institutions around the country. As Chief Creative Officer, Ben oversees most the design and development work that Cornershop does. His fluency in HTML, CSS and JavaScript have been put to good use implementing his designs on a variety of platforms and systems, but primarily WordPress.

Ben has a BFA in Graphic Design from Iowa State University and has been working on the web professionally for about 20 years. He has presented on the difference between print and web design, web typography, WordPress widgets, high performance front-end performance optimization and other topics at various organizations and events, including several WordCamps. Ben now lives in Santa Rosa, CA but has previously resided in six other states.

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 and riding his bike.

Devon Persing

Devon Persing is an accessibility specialist with Simply Accessible. She provides training and assessment for clients in online retail, finance, travel, information services, and the nonprofit sector looking to integrate accessibility into their product lifecycle. Her work focuses on helping designers and developers understand holistic approaches to creating accessible experiences that benefit everyone.

Devon has more than fifteen years of experience in user experience design, web development, and information science. She has spoken at conferences like AccessU, Elements, and the Grace Hopper Celebration, and has also taught and given talks for organizations like the School of Visual Concepts and Ada Developers Academy in Seattle, and The Designer’s Studio in San Francisco. She holds an MS from the University of Michigan School of Information.

Dwayne McDaniel

I have been working in tech and open source sales since 2005.
I knew as soon as I started working with Java middleware developers I never wanted to work outside of open source ever again. I first started building in Drupal and WordPress when I needed to build projects for the San Francisco Improv scene. I fell in the love the community of developers and then found my position at Pantheon at the end of 2013.

As a Community and Agency Success Manager I have had the privilege of presenting at MidCamp (Drupal), WordCamp Milwaukee, WordCamp Baltimore, Drupal Northern Lights (Iceland), Stanford DrupalCamp and other conferences.

Outside of tech I love producing and performing improv theater. I also love comic books and karaoke!!! Reach out at http://mcdwayne.com or on twitter @mcdwayne

Edward Finkler

Ed Finkler, also known as [Funkatron](https://twitter.com/funkatron), started making web sites before browsers had frames. He does full-stack work in Python, PHP, and JavaScript. Ed is the founder and chairman of [Open Sourcing Mental Illness](https://osmihelp.org), a non-profit 501c3 dedicated to raising awareness and supporting those with mental illness in the tech industry.

He served as web lead and security researcher at [The Center for Education and Research in Information Assurance and Security (CERIAS) at Purdue University](http://www.cerias.purdue.edu) for 9 years. Along with Chris Hartjes, Ed is co-host of the [Development Hell podcast](http://devhell.info).

Ed writes at [funkatron.com](http://funkatron.com).

Gian Wild

Gian has worked in the accessibility industry since 1998 and consulted on the development of the first Level AAA accessible web site in Australia (Disability Information Victoria). She has worked with the Disability Services arm of the Victorian Government for over thirteen years to keep the four iterations of the Disability Services site (Disability Information Victoria, Disability Services, Disability Online and DiVine), Level AAA accessible. She ran the accessibility consultancy PurpleTop from 2000 to 2005 and built the accessibility tool, PurpleCop.

Gian Wild spent six years on the W3C Web Content Accessibility Guidelines Working Group, the W3C Evaluation and Repair Tools Working Group and the W3C Authoring Tools Accessibility Guidelines Working Group. She spent six years contributing to the development of WCAG2.

(more…)

Jamie Schmid

Jamie is a freelance WordPress Developer and Designer. She has a background in Information Architecture, Web Development and UX design, but her true calling is having way too much fun doing content strategy and architecture for all the interesting projects that come her way. She is an organizer for WCMilwaukee and WCPortland, and lives in Portland Oregon.

Jeanie Walker

Jeanie has years of experience delivering corporate presentations, product launch announcements, and marketing training sessions to business partners and colleagues at global and start-up companies.

Jill Binder

Jill Binder is a WordPress freelancer, workshop facilitator, and member of the WordPress.org Training team. She helped organize the first BuddyCamp, for three years she co-organized WordCamp Vancouver, and she enjoys encouraging women to level up their confidence to speak at tech events. Jill was named one of the top 100 Influencers of WordPress in 2014 by Torque Magazine and one of the top 10 Women of WordPress by CloudWays.

Julie Pham

Julie Pham is Vice President of Community Engagement and Marketing at Washington Technology Industry Association (WTIA), which advocates on behalf of the state’s 8600 tech companies. Prior to WTIA, she worked in marketing at Microsoft and Avidian Technologies. She is a Puget Sound Business Journal 2011 ’40 under 40’ honoree and a 2015 German Marshall Memorial Fellow. She earned her PhD in history at Cambridge University as a Gates Cambridge Scholar and graduated magna cum laude from UC Berkeley, where she studied history.

Kori Ashton

Kori Ashton has been listed as one of seven women who run tech startups in San Antonio to watch. She started her first company at the age of 12, and has had an entrepreneur’s heart ever since. She built her first HTML website in 1998, and was instantly hooked on Web design.

In 2012, Kori co-founded WebTegrity – a WordPress-focused digital marketing agency in San Antonio, Texas. She also teaches HTML, CSS, WordPress, SEO and other topics to hundreds of students at schools, colleges, and community classes across the United States. She now has over 1.5 million views from an international audience on her WordPress Wednesday YouTube Channel.

Kori has spoken at WordCamp San Antonio, TEDx San Antonio, Graduation Ceremonies for The Art Institutes, Women Veteran Entrepreneurs, UTSA Small Business events, and hundreds of WordPress Meetups and workshops.

Lorelei Kelly

Lorelei is a user experience designer for the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. Before that she worked with clients of all sizes at a small design agency. She cares deeply about advocating for users and making things that make life better.

If the weather isn’t good enough for hiking in the mountains, you’ll probably find Lorelei knitting or reading a novel.

Matt Perry

Matt Perry is an engineer on the VIP team at Automattic/WordPress.com. In his spare time, he’s a cyclist, devotee of a certain rave-green-colored soccer team located here in Seattle, and amateur cook.

Merrill Mayer

Merrill Mayer is the owner and web developer at Kool Kat Web Designs. She works with designers to create custom solutions for small to medium sized business and non-profits. Merrill began her career studying for a master’s degree in French at the University of Michigan. There she worked on computerizing French demographic data and got hooked on technology.

Michael Nelson

Michael’s experience with software began with university assignments; then work on closed-source Java, Python and PHP; and now consists mainly of open-source work for Event Espresso developing WordPress plugins and contributing to WordPress core.
He enjoys family time (with his wife Amanda, and 4 and 1-year old girls), family history technology, and pizza.
He lives in Shawnigan Lake, British Columbia Canada

Michelle Schulp

Michelle is an independent graphic designer and frontend developer in Minneapolis. Prior to beginning her career, she studied Visual Communications, with minors in Psychology and Sociology. As her work progressed, she also branched into front-end development and user experience design to round our her skillset. This combination of disciplines led her to adopt a strategy-based approach to design, focused on solving tangible problems and achieving real goals based on how people think.

She loves the open source community, and when she is not working on projects she speaks/volunteers/organizes at events and workshops around the country. Her passions are communication and empowerment, and she believes in the power of “Why?”

Morten Rand-Hendriksen

Morten is a senior staff instructor at LinkedIn Learning and Lynda.com with 60+ courses published on WordPress, web standards, design and UX, and future technologies. He also teaches Interaction Design at Emily Carr University of Art and Design, and contributes to WordPress core and community projects.

When he’s not working you’ll find Morten playing with his son, reading philosophy and science fiction, talking to people about the internet and how it shapes our society, and wearing out his shoes on the ballroom dance floor.

Nathan Allotey

Nathan is a web designer and digital marketing strategist based in Houston, TX. He first started working with WordPress in 2009 after taking a position at one of the leading web hosting companies. Since that time he founded inPhocus Media, a web design studio that uses WordPress as a part of their digital marketing strategy.

He is the author of Freelance Jumpstart, a clear step by step roadmap to the business of freelancing for creative entrepreneurs. You can find Nathan teaching on business and digital marketing on his weekly podcast at nathanallotey.com.

Patrick Jackson

Patrick is the owner of Golden Path Solutions, a WordPress development business where he works with teams to create awesome themes and plugins, improve websites, and solve problems.

After graduating with his masters in Computer Science, he headed the IT department for a business specializing in geospatial technology for agriculture. He later transitioned to a project management position at a major agrochemical retailer where he earned his Project Management Professional certification.

At the start of 2013, Patrick relocated to the Pacific Northwest and founded Golden Path Solutions where he continues to pursue his passion: improving people’s lives by making super cool software for the web.

Raven Gildea

Raven Gildea began his design career back in the days of X-Acto knives and light tables. Then the Internet came along, and to his great surprise he fell in love with code. These days Raven splits his time between teaching college web design courses and building custom WordPress sites for small businesses and non-profits.

Saied Abbasi

Saied is web developer based in Los Angeles. In 2012, he founded WpHelp.Co, a web agency offering intelligently constructed WordPress sites.

Tutoring has been an intimate part of his career since the beginning. From 2014-2017, he led and created workshops at DCTV covering HTML/CSS, JavaScript, jQuery, and WordPress.

Currently, he works with Ben Freda Consulting — a NYC-based firm specializing in WordPress and Drupal.

Tanner Moushey

Tanner is a web developer and entrepreneur located in the small town of Granite Falls, Wa. He’s passionate about using technology to promote community. When he’s not tracking down new leads or coding, he loves playing music and spending time with his wife and 4 (soon to be 5) kids.

Teri Shelton

Teri Shelton is a Seattle-area WordPress developer and small business owner. She has been a WordPress developer for 8+ years and a business owner for 10. She is co-owner of River Dog Marketing, a full-service WordPress web design, marketing, and advertising firm. Teri co-organizes the Seattle WordPress Freelancers Meetup and volunteers with WordCamp. Besides WordPress, Teri loves hockey and football, cats, and traveling with her husband.

WordCamp is always fun and we’ve tried really hard this year to make it especially unique and engaging.

Tickets are on sale now.

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photo credit: Pezibear

The WordCamp Seattle 2017 schedule is starting to take shape (and a mighty fine shape it is if I do say so myself). We had an overwhelming response to our call for speakers this year, so I guarantee we’re going to have some top-notch sessions lined up for you come November.

Invitations to speak are starting to go out, but we’ve already locked down one fantastic speaker that we just can’t wait to announce.

One of the themes the Speaker Wrangling team has been (loosely) focused on this year has to do with Community and Contribution. These are two of the core principles that comprise the very foundation of WordPress, and we are over the moon to announce the remarkable Andrea Middleton, Community Organizer at Automattic and the quiet hero behind many a successful WordCamp, as our keynote speaker this year.

To whet your appetite for the awesomeness to come, we interviewed Andrea to mine some juicy ideas and advice she has about becoming a part of the WordPress community: Continue reading “A Sneak Peek at Something Exciting!”

This is the final reminder, last call, point of no return! Continue reading “FINAL REMINDER: Last Call for Speaker Applications”