Speakers

Speakers confirmed so far include:

Silvan Hagen

Joe Hoyle

Joe Hoyle is the Co-founder and CTO of Human Made, dealing with (breaking) all things technical. Projects of note include Happytables, WP Remote and the WP API. He currently lies in New York, but couldn’t miss the opportunity to return to the homeland for this year’s WordCamp London.

Jon Buchan

Jon started his own business at age 17 and ran it for 5 years before selling up and moving to London in 2006. Since then he’s worked at some prestigious digital marketing agencies across the capital, eventually starting & heading up the social media department at iSpy Marketing and consulting for brands such as Links of London, Dunhill, Superdrug, and The Mayfair Hotel.
In April 2010 he handed in his notice and founded Render Positive with his brother, Gary. We are approaching our 5th birthday soon. We have a diverse range of clients including Angels Fancy Dress, Symantec, ITNSource, HP, Absolute Radio, Channel4 and Everreach – a virtual phone number provider.
Rather than complete a bunch of tasks to pay the bills, Jon wants to do marketing that matters.
A glutton for punishment, and as if running a business wasn’t enough, Jon has recently started writing poetry, a novel and is getting back into boxing training.

Mike Sales

Mike Sales is a software developer at Newcastle University primarily working in Java and PHP. He’s a long-time WordPress enthusiast, always looking to put it to use in new and interesting ways!

Ann Thanaraj

Ann is an a law academic passionate about the use of technology to enhance student’s learning experiences. She enjoys software development and most recently, using WordPress, she and Mike Sales have developed a virtual clinic for using with clinical students, aiding experiential learning and ethical sensitivity across different subject disciplines.

Sam Hotchkiss

Sam Hotchkiss has been working with WordPress for the last 10 years. Over that time he worked as a freelancer, built both a successful agency and a product business, BruteProtect, which was acquired by Automattic in 2014.

Sam now works on the Jetpack team at Automattic and lives in Albuquerque, New Mexico with his wonderful wife and their three dogs.

Becs Rivett

Becs is an experienced email marketer who’s worked in beauty, fashion and more recently, financial services in Leeds. She’s just about to start working for MailPoet as their marketing manager and also provides consultancy to small businesses who need help understanding email marketing.

When she’s not thinking about email marketing, she’s usually thinking about her next meal, which leads her to blog about food on her blog Lay the table.

Henry Scowcroft

Henry spent four years at university studying biochemistry before realising that the laboratory life wasn’t for him, and going to work for a science journal instead. From there, he went on to do a Masters in Science Communication and, after a brief flirtation with science journalism, in 2003 he started working for Cancer Research UK. He manages the charity’s news feed and science blog.

Harry Metcalfe

Harry is an entrepreneur and occasional campaigner. He’s interested in the way technology and new ways of working can help the world to be better. He believes that the information revolution has barely begun, and that technology – in particular, the web – will radically change the way society works.

Sara Rosso

Sara is VIP Global Services Manager at Automattic (WordPress.com & more), and as part of her job with the WordPress.com VIP team, she works at discovering and sharing WordPress success stories with the world. She has worked in technology since 1996 for companies such as Hewlett-Packard and Ogilvy, and she’s been using WordPress since 2006. Sara is also a writer, photographer, technology lover, and business & digital strategist. Originally from California, she’s been living in Italy for twelve years and is currently in Rome.

Lily Dart

Lily is the Head of Service Design for dxw, an agency specialising in public sector digital. Her background is in front end development and user experience design, and she loves using her technical knowledge and design expertise to solve problems.

Annabel Kaye

Annabel Kaye started her career with a brief stint in PR at the British Red Cross Society, before joining the Consumers Association (Which?). She left the Consumers Association to become HR for Bastable Advertising and Marketing and also worked for Bastable Personnel Services where she worked for numerous trade associations and corporate clients before leaving to found Irenicon Ltd in 1980.

Since then she has continued to work with individuals and businesses – large and small – always offering a fresh perspective.

In 1989 she also founded KoffeeKlatch – devoted to exploring and supporting the way we work today in a freelance and global online economy. www.irenicon.co.uk | www.koffeeklatch.co.uk

Vineeta Greenwood

Vineeta co-founded Wholegrain Digital in 2007 with the objective of doing great work for good people.  It was Vineeta’s idea to specialise exclusively in WordPress and Wholegrain was the first in London to do so.  Her belief was that the agency should choose the CMS best tailored to the needs of clients and then focus on it exclusively.  It was a gamble that paid off and Wholegrain Digital now has a portfolio of clients including M&S, Ecover and Jamie Oliver.

Dave Coveney

Dave Coveney is an aged developer turned businessman, shifting his company in 2006 from a one-man enterprise software development consultancy into one specialising in WordPress development and employing other, smarter, people. 13 of us currently working at interconnect/it which is quite scary, really. A strong egalitarian and believer in equality of opportunity I can come across like something of a left wing libertarian communist. That’s part of why I got into open source software and discovered WordPress. Can ramble on when drunk, so it’s a good thing I drink less these days.

Ilona Filipi

Ilona Filipi is a Managing Director of UK based WordPress Agency Moove. She brings over 10 years experience in the digital media field having delivered web solutions on projects for brands such as the BBC, Waitrose, GAP, Lexus and Heathrow Express to name but a few. She blogs at ilonafilipi.com.

David Lockie

Dave’s a WordPress geek and founded Pragmatic in Jan 2012 because he thought that having a limited company would help him to pay less tax and charge higher rates. It did. Pragmatic’s now Brighton’s top* WordPress agency, delivering a full suite of WordPress-centric services to local, national and international clients. (*Highest above sea level, if by no other measure)

Tom Willmot

Co-founder & CEO of Human Made. Also Happytables, WP Remote & BackUpWordPress. Long time WordPress user & developer with a passion for the Open Source community. Scarf enthusiast.

Rachel McCollin

Rachel is a WordPress developer who writes books, articles and tutorials about web design, with a focus on WordPress and on responsive development. She runs an agency in Birmingham and has published three books on WordPress, including WordPress: Pushing the Limits, an advanced resource for WordPress developers.

John Blackbourn

John is a WordPress developer at Automattic. He’s been developing with WordPress for ten years. He was featured as a Recent Rockstar in WordPress 3.3 due to his ongoing contributions to core, and has been on the contributors list of WordPress for most releases in recent years. He led the WordPress 4.1 release cycle.

Dave Redfern

A digital designer at iWeb (www.iweb.co.uk) with over six years experience, specialising in designing and building responsive websites. Co-founder of Staffs Web Meetup (www.staffswebmeetup.co.uk), a monthly event hosting guest speakers and lighting talks in Staffordshire. Occasional speaker (http://lanyrd.com/profile/daveredfern/) of topics including design, user experience and front-end development.

Kirsty Burgoine

Kirsty is a web designer / developer living in Shropshire, UK. She has been working within the web industry in one way or another for ten years and running her own web business. for nearly 5 years. She specialises in building bespoke WordPress websites for clients large and small.

A self confessed geek, she is am also one of the founders of Shropgeek, organising events for geeky people in Shropshire. And in the wild, she can often be spotted in coffee shops appreciating good, fresh coffee with her laptop or excitedly discussing all manner of geeky things.

Lance Willett

Lance Willett is a web craftsman specialising in client-side development (PHP, HTML, CSS and JavaScript). He blogs about web development at simpledream.net and develops themes and customisation projects at Automattic. He loves WordPress themes and most recently contributed to the Twenty Fifteen default theme in core.

Adrian Zumbrunnen

Adrian Zumbrunnen is a User Experience Designer, Writer, Speaker and Coffee Enthusiast working in the beautiful city of Zurich. He creates memorable product and communication experiences by consequently putting the user in the center of all creative efforts. Formerly at iA, he’s now attempting to create a new editing experience for the web with a new tool called FrontKit.

Mark Wilkinson

Mark is a Freelance WordPress developer working from home in Lancashire as well as part time secondary school teacher of Computing. He builds both large and small WordPress sites for clients and agencies across the UK and blogs about WordPress at markwilkinson.me

Miles Stewart

Miles is a contract developer who specialises in WordPress & PHP! He’s been developing commercially for just over 8 years now. He’s a lover of WordPress, clean code, live music, food (especially cakes) and football.

Tom Greenwood

Tom Greenwood is the Managing Director of Wholegrain Digital, which was London’s first specialist WordPress agency. Started as a husband and wife business, the team has grown over the years and has worked with brands including M&S, Jamie Oliver and Ecover.

A fan of sustainable design and WordPress, it is his job to set the vision for the company and ensure that everyone is healthy and happy.
In his spare time he has an unhealthy obsession with natural health and likes to run around the woods with bare feet.

Franz Vitulli

Franz works as Product Marketing Specialist for Human Made, the WordPress agency – and WordPress.com VIP partner – behind Happytables, WP Remote and BackUpWordPress. He’s responsible for Happytables user support and training, documentation, social updates and other marketing activities.

Originally from Italy, he’s been living in UK for three years. When he’s not in front of his laptop, he’s either playing one of his bass guitars or brewing a good cup of Earl Grey tea. Follow him at @franzvitulli.

Tom Nowell

Born in the UK, and based in Manchester, Tom Nowell is a VIP Wrangler at Automattic, a long-time PHP developer, and an elected moderator at WordPress Stack Exchange. Working full time with WordPress, He’s spoken at several WordCamps in the UK and Europe, and dabble in computer game AI.

He got started with WordPress when a PunBB install collapsed under the weight of AI threads. After a brief stint running a Cookie Bank tied to an IRC bot, he graduated to building WordPress sites professionally, and the rest is history

Julio Potier

Julio is a freelance consultant and co-founder of WP Media. He’s been working with WordPress every day for the last five years and makes his living using the software. He’s a trainer and an experienced WordCamp Speakers, having spoken at WordCamp Paris every year from 2011 to 2014, even in Sofia 2014 and WordCamp Montreal 2014 too.

Fabio Torlini

Fabio Torlini is MD for WP Engine. Based in Tech City, his main role is helping WP Engine launch their services into Europe. With over 15 years’ experience in the hosting & cloud industry he has a thorough understanding of all aspects of IT B2B marketing, Branding, PR, Channel and Management. Most notably in his career, Fabio helped build Rackspace to what it has become today – a leader in the cloud industry with revenues of $1.5B.

Luke Wheatle

Luke Wheatle is a Platform Owner at News UK, based in London. He’s responsible for building and maintaining our scalable WordPress environment on Amazon AWS. He’s a Digital Technology graduate from the University of Hertfordshire and a web developer at heart. He ‘tries’ to take the acorns of ideas and creatively implement them into fully fledged ‘productionised’, resilient, scalable oak trees. 😉

Ben Furfie

Ben is a web designer and front-end developer specialising in building lead generation websites for businesses. He has been involved with designing, developing and writing for websites since 2002.

Before making the leap into full-time web design and development, Ben worked in the technology sector in roles ranging from an IT magazine editor to a marketing manager for an IT company.

In 2014, after years of charging flat rates based on a guesstimate of how many hours a website would take, Ben made the leap into value-based pricing – doubling his revenues in the process – and hasn’t looked back since.

Brad Williams

Brad is the co-founder of WebDevStudios.com, a co-host on the DradCast podcast, and the co-author of Professional WordPress (1E & 2E) and Professional WordPress Plugin Development. Brad is also one of the organizers of the Philadelphia WordPress Meetup Group and WordCamp Philly. Brad blogs at http://strangework.com and tweets at @williamsba.

Tiago Noronha

Tiago is a theme developer at WooThemes. Shortly after finishing
school, Tiago started building static web templates that he sold at
the old SitePoint Marketplace. One day he stumbled upon WordPress,
immediately falling in love with its power and ease of use. Since late
2008 he has been working with WooThemes where he had the chance to
work on various projects, further developing his passion for theming.

Joel Bronkowski

After living in the same 10km for the first 23 years of his life, Joel Bronkowski decided to take on a new adventure and help launch a non-profit in Cape Town, South Africa. Towing the line most of his life between non profit and the business world Joel is now enjoying the entrepreneurial challenge of pioneering WooCommerce partnerships with global ecommerce services and the developer community. He is currently working nomadically in 2015 following his wife around the world as she gets experience in the field of museum studies.

Kathryn Reeve

Kathryn is a PHP developer who’s been working for PHP since early in PHP4’s lifespan. Currently working for Manchester based Reason Digital where she works with WordPress sites that use lots of data.

Daniel Westall

Co-founder and Front end developer by day, Exodus Esports lead developer by night.

Adrian Restantia

Adrian is the Art Director and one of the co-founders of Moove Agency, an innovative WordPress agency based in London. With a design industry experience spanning for over 10 years, he has worked for a wide range of clients, from small companies and startups to big names like Toyota, Lexus, MSN and O2. Adrian’s interests cover a wide range of subjects from interactive design, typography, web usability and digital strategy to photography and motion graphics.

Laura Kalbag

Laura Kalbag is a designer with a thing for the web. She works at [Ind.ie](https://ind.ie), creating design-led, free and open alternatives to technologies that are funded through the exploitation of users’ data. She tends to harp on about web development, design theory, web fonts, responsiveness and walks with her big fluffy dog, Oskar.

Corinne Welsh

Corinne Welsh makes things look great online, and in print, using free and open source software. She hand-coded her first website in 1999. Now she prefers WordPress and Drupal.

Before branching out, Corinne worked for a national gardening charity, then in regional housing, and in social infrastructure. Ten years ago, fuelling her passion for lifelong learning, she set up a training and development company. At JustOutsource.it she is as happy building your website for you, as showing you how to do it for yourself.

Corinne lives in London with two cats. She loves watching films and reading novels.

Lorna Jane Mitchell

Lorna is based up north in Leeds; she is the Principal Developer at Siftware, a published author, web development consultant and technical trainer. She brings her technical expertise to audiences all over the world with her writing and speaking engagements, delivering topics from git to web development and tools, all with a very practical slant. In her spare time, Lorna runs the joind.in open source project and blogs at http://lornajane.net.

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

Simon Dickson

Simon Dickson joined Automattic in November 2014, becoming Director, Platform Services on the WordPress.com VIP team. He has been a web professional for just short of 20 years, working in government, broadcasting and technology. These days, his main contribution to WordPress is as lead translator into Proper English.

Petya Raykovska

Petya is the co-founder of Open Media Foundation, a NGO that aims at improving the media environment in her home country of Bulgaria.

She’s project manager and a WordPress consultant and also an active member of the WordPress community.

She helps the WordPress Polyglots team alongside some of the most inspiring people in the world and was involved with the organisation of WordCamp Europe 2014.

Jon Cave

Jon is a security consultant and researcher from London. He is a WordPress core contributor and member of the security team. He enjoys solving interesting programming challenges and discovering subtle vulnerabilities.

Matt Haworth

Matt is one of the UK’s leading experts on doing good with digital. He’s spent nearly 10 years getting results for not-for-profit organisations using digital, has worked on hundreds of projects and campaigns, and reached tens of thousands of people with his talks at national conferences, put on by the likes of The Media Trust, The Institute of Fundraising and others.

Bowe Frankema

Bowe Frankema has been part of the WordPress community for over six years. He’s originally from the Netherlands but moved to the lovely city of Berlin two years ago! His decision to focus exclusively on BuddyPress projects over the last few years has resulted in him being often referred to as a BuddyPress fanatic. Last year he decided to move away from client work and focus on creating CFCommunity; an international social network for people affected by Cystic Fibrosis.

Helen Hou-Sandi

Helen is the Director of Platform Experience at 10up, where she is sponsored to work on WordPress full-time. She is a lead developer for the WordPress project and led the 4.0 release. 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.

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.

Graham Armfield

Graham Armfield is a Web Accessibility Consultant with Coolfields Consulting. He works with organisations to improve the accessibility of their websites – carrying out accessibility testing and recommending solutions to designers and developers.

Graham is also a WordPress developer – building accessible websites for clients such as small businesses and charities. He has contributed accessibility fixes to WordPress core, and is an active member of the Make WordPress Accessible team.

When not bringing accessibility to the web, you might find him playing the guitar or dispatching a pint of real ale.

Jason King

Trained as a librarian, Jason has worked in the non-profit information and technology sector for 20 years. He’s run local projects to help small charities use technology better, in England and Australia. He’s now a freelance WordPress developer, building sites for charity clients. Jason is a co-organiser for NetSquared London, organising monthly talks about technology for social good.

Heather Burns

Heather Burns is a web site designer and consultant in Glasgow, Scotland. She has been designing web sites since 1997 and working with WordPress since 2008. Outside her client-facing work, her focus is researching and writing about internet law and policy, specifically laws which impact on the professions of web design and development. Recent work has included extensive writing on the EU Cookie Law, the EU Consumer Rights Directive, and the EU Place of Supply reforms. She is currently enrolled in the postgraduate programme in Internet Law and Policy at the University of Strathclyde.

Jim Bowes

Jim Bowes is a Scrum coach, occasional stand-up comedian, regular speaker at Agile events and CEO of Manifesto Digital. Manifesto uses Agile methods to deliver bespoke digital solutions to organisations such as Cancer Research UK, The Children’s Society and National Trust. He’s used WordPress for over 8 years and loves converting people to its simplicity and the speed at which great sites can be created. This will be his first Wordcamp.

Sophie Plimbley

Hi, my name is Sophie Plimbley, I am an Operations Product Owner for News UK based in London. I can be found liaising between development teams and business stakeholders across the 10 WP sites hosted on our internal WordPress platform. During my career I have also worked for an award winning digital agency as a front end developer, being motivated, creative, and extremely passionate about digital design and development. I graduated at the University of Brighton with a 2:1 degree in Digital Media, bringing comprehensive insight, ingenuity and intelligence since 1990.

Ben Gillbanks

Ben Gillbanks is WordPress developer, web designer and part-time Online Entrepreneur. By day he is the Director of Web Development at Miniclip.com (the worlds largest independently owned online games site with 65 million+ unique users a month). By night he has many interests and most of them involve creating things online.

Matt Radford

Matt has been an active volunteer in the pro-choice community for 15 years, and has built several websites for non-profit womens’ organisations.

He is a WordPress developer at 10° in Wokingham.

Mike Little

Mike Little is a co-founder of WordPress. In 2003 he responded to a post on Matt Mullenweg’s blog about forking their blogging tool. Ten years on and it powers more than 20% of the web. Mike now runs zed1.com, his WordPress consultancy & web development company. He’s an author and has contributed to a number of open source projects, including DJGPP, CVS, MYSQL, and b2.

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.

Bruce Lawson

Bruce has been active in web standards since 2002. He’s an open standards advocate for Opera, the European browser with 350 million active users. He blogs at brucelawson.co.uk, and you can follow him on @brucel.

Glyn Moody

Glyn Moody is a journalist, blogger and speaker. He writes about a
wide range of subjects on Computerworld UK and on Techdirt. He started writing and speaking about business use of the Internet in early 1994, and about open source in 1995. In 1997 he wrote the first mainstream feature about GNU/Linux and free software, which appeared in Wired magazine

His book, “Rebel Code: Linux and the Open Source Revolution” – the only detailed history of free software written so far – was published in 2001. “Digital Code of Life: How Bioinformatics is Revolutionising Science, Medicine and Business” appeared in 2004, and explores the rise and importance of digital genomics.

He is active on Twitter, identi.ca and Google+, and can be followed at glynmoody@twitter.com, glynmoody@identi.ca and +glynmoody on Google+.

Jack Lenox

Jack Lenox is a Design Engineer on the Theme Generation team at Automattic, the company behind WordPress.com. He has been building websites and web apps with WordPress since 2008. In 2011 he set up writing community jottify.com, powered by WordPress. He lives in the north of England where he enjoys mountain biking, skiing, appreciating great design and drinking good coffee.

Jane Falconer-White

Jane Falconer-White works with Human Made creating client case studies, blog posts and content on their company website.

A self-described pseudo-geek, Jane is happiest trying to explain technical stuff to non technical people. She has been crafting words for over 15 years throughout an extremely varied career that has included IT project management for Deloitte, conference production and owning a scuba diving business. She has also worked as a freelance website designer specialising in WordPress sites for micro-businesses.

Currently she is juggling content writing with accountancy, small children and escaping to the hills of Derbyshire on her bike.

Scott Evans

Scott has been responsible for the design of WordCamp London since it began in 2013. During the day he works as a front end developer and designer on the WordPress.com VIP team at Automattic. Scott studied graphic communication and digital media at the University for the Creative Arts and has two D&AD yellow pencils for his work in digital design. Outside the world of WordPress you will find him cycling, eating pudding and tinkering with electronics.

Tammie Lister

Tammie is a theme wrangler at Automattic. She’s lucky enough to spend her days in the world of themes. This means, she gets to not only work on WordPress.com with themes, but also as part of the theme review team for WordPress.org. When not themeing, she likes to spend time with her husband and two dogs around the beach they live by. She likes to balance the time spent online with offline crafts, yoga and photography.

Simon Wheatley

Simon Wheatley is an enthusiast for open source software and WordPress, he co-founded Code For The People, a WordPress consultancy. Code For The People was acquired by Automattic last year, where he now works, democratising publishing and helping major online publishers in WordPress.com’s VIP team. Simon has worked on WordPress sites for the Rolling Stones, the UK and Scottish Governments, Stephen Fry, and Oxford University, amongst others.

Simon will talk about the humble URL, one of the cornerstones of the web, how it works, and how you can even have a little fun with it.

Samantha Miller

Samantha is a front-end and WordPress developer from Leeds. She has been doing front-end development for over ten years, and has been building bespoke WordPress websites since 2008. Samantha also helps to run her local WordPress user group, WP Leeds.

Jessica Rose

Jessica Rose is a self taught programmer and general tech enthusiast. Focuses include SEO, community education initiates for technical skills, technical writing and planning hacks. She blogs at closetoclever.com and is excited to be working with wonderful partners to bring trans-code.org, a beginner level hackday for transgender persons and allies to London in the spring.

Jo Waltham

Jo Waltham is a freelance WordPress developer at Callia Web. She specialises in building websites with the Genesis Framework for bloggers and small businesses. Jo has a passion for helping people to get to grips with their website, giving them the support and confidence to manage it themselves. When not in front of the computer, Jo can typically be found on the school run in Wiltshire.

Tim Nash

Tim struggles when asked what he does for a living and usual ends up just staying stuff. As one of the worlds leading “Stuff” consultants he spends most of his time providing training and consultancy for organisations. His Primary day to day focus, is e-commerce, security and open source solutions especially promoting the use of WordPress. Tim is one of the organisers of WordPress Leeds and writes for a number of magazines as well as on his own site timnash.co.uk

WordCamp London 2015 is over. Check out the next edition!