Speakers

Alex Denning

Alex Denning is a 19-year-old social marketer, student and blogger. He founded (and recently sold) WPShout four years ago, earning his blogging stripes in the process. Before heading to University, Alex spent a year at casual games giant Miniclip as Community Assistant where he managed a ten-million strong social media presence and content-created for the Miniclip Blog. Alex is currently Community Manager at WPZOOM. Follow him on Twitter: @AlexDenning.

Andrew Nacin

Andrew Nacin is a lead developer of WordPress, wrangling contributions, spearheading initiatives, advising new development, and squashing bugs. He’s the release lead for 3.7 and is a member of the core security team. 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., with his wife. You can follow him on Twitter at @nacin.

Austin Smith

Austin co-founded Alley Interactive with Matt Johnson in 2010 to provide consulting and web development expertise to digital publishers and content producers in the media, education and entertainment industries. He’s an expert in the design, creation and maintenance of high scalability Drupal and WordPress sites, defining the architecture and direction of some of the firm’s most prominent WordPress projects, including NYPost.com, Observer.com, KFF.org, and Digiday.com

David Coveney

As the Director of interconnect/it, David helps provide WordPress solutions to the publishing industry. The agency runs the WordPress platform for The Spectator, assisted The Telegraph in starting their journey with WordPress and BuddyPress, and manages a small galaxy of digital properties for Informa. He’s responsible for the popular and dangerous search and replace script that almost everyone seems to use!

David Lockie

A WordPress freelancer, business owner and entrepreneur, David runs Pragmatic Web Limited (a hybrid WordPress agency) and FreelanceWP.com. When he’s not WordPressing, he’s into cycling, CrossFit, music and food. He organises WordPress meetups in Brighton & Hove where he lives with his wife, step-son and various animals and is planning WordCamp Brighton & Hove for Q3 2014. You can follow him on @divydovy, @pragmatic-web and @FreelanceWP.

Graham Armfield

Graham Armfield is a Web Accessibility Consultant and WordPress Developer with Coolfields Consulting. He’s been building websites for nearly 20 years, and has been advising on accessibility for over 10 years – initially for a large corporate, but now with his own company.
He lives in Woking, Surrey with his wife and young daughter. He’s been known to enjoy a glass or two of real ale – when he’s not playing his guitar that is.

Hristo Pandjarov

Hristo is a WordPress enthusiast who’s done it all: supported WordPress clients, built websites, designed WordPress themes, wrote tutorials, dug deeper into SEO and developed his own WordPress SEO plugin. He’s been fortunate to have his passion for all things WordPress and his job overlap at SiteGround, where he develops and implements various in-house performance boost solutions to help make WordPress websites faster and more secure.

Ilona Filipi

Ilona Filipi is the Co-Founder and Managing Director of Creative Web Agency Moove, specialising in the planning, production, and post-launch support of bespoke WordPress websites. She will share her experience of building and running a WP agency, which grew from a collaboration of 2 freelancers, to a team of 8 designers, developers and account managers. She’s passionate about web, business, marketing, SaaS apps and wants to meet like-minded WordPress enthusiasts.

Jessica Jones

After being diagnosed with breast cancer, writer Jessica Jones started the acclaimed blog: Chemo Chic – A Guide to Surviving Cancer with Style which was chosen by The Times as one of 40 Blogs that Really Count. She pitched her story to Hachette Australia and was commissioned to write her memoir The Elegant Art of Falling Apart. The book has received excellent reviews and was recently published in the UK by Unbound through their innovative crowd-funding process.

John Blackbourn

John is a WordPress Specialist Developer at Code For The People. He’s been developing with WordPress for  eight years. Prior to working at CFTP he was a freelance WordPress developer. 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.

Kimb Jones

Kimb is a WordPress consultant based in the North of England. As well as offering WordPress consulting and services, he runs Make Do, an education and events initiative that connects makers and doers. He runs the WordPress Sheffield meetup and co-organises WordPress Leeds.

Konstantin Obenland

Konstantin started contributing to WordPress in 2009 with a few plugins, over time got more and more involved. He eventually started to contribute to WordPress core. Most recently he helped out with the development of Twenty Twelve and served as theme developer for Twenty Thirteen. Last year he joined Automattic as a Theme Wrangler.

Lee Willis

Lee is a plugin developer with over 15 plugins on WordPress.org. He contributes to WordPress core and several WordPress plugins. Lee has a healthy GitHub profile and his Open Source Report Card describes him as “an awesome PHP expert”. This goes to show that you shouldn’t believe everything you read on the Internet. He lives in North Cumbria with his wife, 2 children, cat and dog and is employed as a Drupal developer.

Luke Oatham

Luke intranet fanatic with a background in coding and CMS development. Originally a developer, then an information architect and UX practitioner, he has worked in public and private sectors creating intranets and websites since 1996. He works at Helpful Technology, where is is Client Services Director. He blogs at intranet diary, where he writes about content strategy, staff engagement, search and analytics.

Mario Peshev

Mario is a WordPress Engineer and WordPress Ambassador for Siteground. He has around 8 years of experience in development (Java, PHP and Python), and 3 full-time years with WordPress. Mario has worked with various large clients around the world, using WordPress for SaaS and PaaS and building large plugins for the public. He has contributed to WordPress, as well as other open source projects.

Mark Jaquith

Mark is a WordPress Lead Developer and a freelance WordPress consultant with a focus on security, scaling, and custom plugin development. He first used WordPress in 2003, and really didn’t care for it. But in 2004, he was won over, and has been developing on it ever since. Mark’s personal goal is to bring intuitive, low-cost web publishing to everyone who has anything to say.

Michael Cain

Michael is a Portland, Maine-based Theme Wrangler for Automattic’s Theme Team. He spends his days creating, converting, and improving the theme experience on both WordPress.com and WordPress.org, his evenings blogging about food and travel on mapandmenu.com, and his nights dreaming about how to make tomorrow’s WordPress blogs and sites even better.

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.

Nikolay Bachiyski

Nikolay is a Bulgarian developer, who’s been contributing to WordPress for 9 years. A programmer at heart, he works at Automattic, so he gets to travel to places all over the world but back home, he has a great view from his terrace. He loves thinking. About anything. Nikolay blogs at extrapolate.me, tweets at @nikolayb, and has a bear.

Rachel McCollin

Rachel is a WordPress developer and writer specialising in mobile and responsive design and development. She’s published three books on WordPress, the most recent WordPress: Pushing the Limits, an advanced resource for developers. She runs Compass Design and is in the process of launching a startup Compass EduWeb which provides school websites based on WordPress. You can also find her on her blog and on twitter.

Tammie Lister

Tammie’s a designer who creates communities. She works with a wide range of clients creating BuddyPress sites. When she’s not working for clients, she’s an active contributor to the BuddyPress project. She’s worked on the Status Theme, Turtleshell, is leading the UI refresh for 1.8 and template pack for 1.9. An integral part of the BuddyPress community, she’s always looking for more people to get involved, especially designers!