Adam Walker
I’m a husband, father of 5, digital agency co-founder / owner and nonprofit co-founder / executive director. I’m a digital marketing strategist at heart, though I have a background in design and development as well. I have been working with WordPress since 2005 and started an agency dedicated to custom WordPress design and development in 2010. I love to speak at WordCamps and Meetups and geek out talking about digital marketing strategy.
Adrian Roselli
Adrian is a member of the W3C Web Platform Working Group, W3C ARIA Working Group, and W3C Accessibility Task Force. He’s written articles for trade journals, web sites, and participated as an author and editor on five books. In 1998 he co-founded a software development consulting firm before leaving at the start of 2016. Some may recognize Adrian from his days helping to run evolt.org, one of the first communities for web developers. Adrian has been developing for the Web since 1993.
Alain Schlesser
Alain is a freelance software engineer and WordPress consultant living in Germany.
He started out as a government agent working in prison administration in Luxembourg, and has recently made the switch to self-employment to enjoy productive work without the bureaucratic hurdles.
He has worked with numerous platforms and programming languages for the past 25 years, and is now trying to settle down on modern web development with the WordPress platform. He is passionate about software architecture and code quality and never misses an opportunity to share best practices.
He offers his WordPress services and expertise through his company Bright Nucleus, while you can catch some of his more personal ramblings at https://www.alainschlesser.com.
Anca Mosoiu
Anca Mosoiu is the founder of Tech Liminal, where people with various skills and backgrounds come together to learn and build using technology. She is a programmer and consultant who loves complex, large-scale technology projects, where her curiosity and ability to translate between technical and non-technical helps teams get things done. She is a graduate of MIT who has worked on the web with companies like Razorfish, Cisco Systems, the Lawrence Berkeley Lab, and many, many startups.
Andi Wilkinson
I’m a digital Agency owner in Manchester and a mum of four. My work is focussed on ensuring clients are delivered high quality websites that don’t just work but convert. This came from working amidst a sea of small web companies with very low price offerings. To deliver value, your web presence needs to be seen, and needs to generate income. As a developer and marketer I am keen to tie the two together, so that a digital presence can really succeed.
Benjamin Read
“As a writer I was initially put off by the internet revolution, but 8 years ago I got back into coding after stints as a print & logo designer, office administrator and tea boy.
Not in that order though.
I can most often be found developing in PHP and JavaScript with Indigo Tree (https://indigotree.co.uk), a forward-thinking Hertfordshire-based agency full of people who are far smarter and more knowledgeable than me.
I feel keenly the responsibility to share what we know so that we can continue to create an open web that’s available to everybody.”
Borek Bernard
Borek is a developer and lead idea generator at VersionPress, a tool hoping to bring full version control to WordPress. When away from computer (and more importantly, Slack!), Borek loves spending his time with his young family.
Carme Mias
Carme Mias is a freelance web developer from Glasgow. Her first job in IT was as a PC Maintenance City and Guilds teacher in London, followed by jobs in Desktop Support and Network Administration before getting into Web Design and Development. She cares about work well done as well as inclusiveness and giving back to the community.
She is currently co-organiser of the WordPress Glasgow meetup and a newbie mentor at Code Your Future.
Daine Mawer
A Front-end Engineer at 10up, Daine has been a committed (no Git pun intended) and passionate open source follower for over 6 years now. Completely self-taught from the ground up, Daine has managed to grab the attention of many award-winning agencies and media houses in South Africa, not to mention international brands such as Women’s Health, Men’s Health and award-winning author, Ken Follett.
Daine’s roots truly began in education. Having trained some of South Africa’s biggest corporates in digital technologies, he found himself contributing not only to the business sector but to tertiary education as well. Daine has planned, developed, lectured and implemented web courses for students, professionals and newcomers; covering everything from UX, HTML5, CSS3, Javascript and WordPress Development. He is also an Envato Tuts+ Author and contributes regularly to the site.
He’s currently focusing his attention on delving deeper into Javascript, specifically React and NodeJS.
Daine gravitated to WordPress early on in his career, learning the ins and outs of theme and plugin development. He regularly contributes to the WordPress.org support forums, speaks at WordPress South Africa MeetUps and WordCamp Cape Town
When the laptop closes, Daine fills his time travelling, running and spending most of his disposable income on coffee in and around Cape Town’s hip food and restaurant culture. The laptop tends to open again to mess around with electronic music production and synthesis.
Daryll Doyle
I’m a PHP developer at https://wearenymble.co.uk, based in Cornwall, where I work on a lot of WordPress themes and plugins.
In my spare time I like to look into SVG security and have built and maintain a PHP based SVG sanitisation library which is used by the likes on Craft CMS. I also built and maintain the Safe SVG plugin on WordPress.org which sanitises SVG uploads in WordPress.
David Lockie
David is the Founder & Director of Pragmatic – a WordPress specialist agency. He has experience building a WordPress business from the ground up having grown his agency from one freelancer to over 40 full-time employees over the course of 5 years.
Elliot Taylor
I’m lucky enough to work on my projects and as a freelance developer Raison. I specialise in enterprise development and eCommerce. I’ve built a number of SaaS products all built using WordPress. I’m self-taught and love that the community encourages this. It’s why I’ve been contributing back to our UK community, running the London WooCommerce meetup and the Brighton WordPress community (quick plug: come to our WordCamp this year!).
Felix Arntz
Felix is a freelancer and WordPress core committer based in Germany, where he has been implementing client solutions and plugins for several years now. He is a backend developer with a major focus on multisite environments.
On the open source end, he is heavily involved in core development, as a core committer and component maintainer for Multisite, Capabilities and Post Thumbnails. He furthermore writes plugins and libraries, focusing on developing clean and sustainable solutions.
When not doing WordPress stuff, he spends his time producing music and playing the piano as well as soccer. He does all of that while drinking a lot of Mountain Dew.
Francesca Marano
“Francesca is the WordPress Community Manager at SiteGround, web hosting company. She is also part of the WordPress community team, organising Meetups and WordCamps in Torino.
She has years of experience as a small business owner, having transformed her passion for the web into a successful WordPress business.
She published three books in Italian to help freelancers with business planning, productivity and websites.
She also founded C+B, a blog with an editorial staff of sixty authors offering advice to more than 35.000 Italian female creative entrepreneurs that reads it every month.
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 and small businesses.”
Francesco Canovi
Trained as a biologist (Master Degree) starts working in science communication, then lands to online business consulting. He has now 15+ years of professional experience in the industry. Founder of Black Studio, the company behind the popular plugin Black Studio TinyMCE Widget (6+ million downloads). WordPress enthusiast and WordCamp speaker.
Gabe Karp
Gabe joins the 10up team from London where he brings more than 10 years of experience working with NGOs, major political campaigns and large corporate clients to design and develop digital platforms. He works closely with his clients to craft strategies and solutions, helping organizations achieve their goals by leveraging thoughtful, impactful design and the right technology solutions.
Prior to joining 10up, Gabe was a partner at Siberia, an experience design studio. He was responsible for launching their European presence, opening offices and building teams in both London and Berlin. Gabe worked with major corporate clients at Siberia, helping to re-invent their digital products and platforms. Before joining Siberia, he worked at Blue State Digital for six years where he started as a front-end developer. He later ran the global project management team and was responsible for the delivery of websites and custom development projects across BSD’s five offices.
He’s worked with the likes of AOL, American Express, the Human Rights Campaign and Malaria No More. Additionally while at BSD he worked on high-pressure political campaigns in Mexico, Brazil and India.
In his free time, Gabe loves to spend time with his family, cooking big meals for friends, going on long runs and is constantly in pursuit of the perfect cup of coffee. He has a BA in Political Science from University of Rochester, and a year of film studies at the Chapman Film School.
Georgia Cottle
Heather Burns
Heather Burns is a digital law specialist in Glasgow, Scotland. She researches, writes, publishes, consults, and speaks extensively on internet laws and policies which affect the crafts of web design and development. She has been designing and developing web sites since 1997 and was a professional web site designer from 2007-2015. She is a co-organiser of WordPress Glasgow, a member of the WordCamp Edinburgh organising team, and a survivor of numerous WordCamp afterparties.
Jim Bowes
Jim Bowes is the CEO and co-founder of Manifesto, the London-based award-winning digital agency specialising in agile consultancy, technology, content and strategic user experience designed around the needs of users.
John Blackbourn
John is one of the WordPress core developers, a member of the WordPress security team, and was the release lead for WordPress 4.1. He works as a senior developer at Human Made and has over ten years’ experience developing with WordPress.
Jon Bird
Jon Bird heads up Enterprise Sales and Strategic partnerships for WP Engine in EMEA. With 10 years’ experience working in the internet industry for SaaS startups, Jon has been part of 2 IPOs from startup stage to public listing. A career spanning eCommerce, Social Media and Voice of Customer Analytics. Now with WP Engine, WP Engine is a WordPress fully managed digital experience platform working with over 75,000 customers. Recently Jon worked with the Office of the Prime Minister to host the EU Referendum website on WordPress.
Kayleigh Thorpe
I am a WordPress Specialist at 34SP.com. You’ll often find me socialising at tech meetups throughout the UK. When I’m not learning more about WordPress, I love to travel and I am passionate about the WordPress community.
Keith Devon
Keith is the co-founder of Highrise Digital – a specialist WordPress development team.
As a serial community starter, he is the founder of the WordPress London meetup group, co-founder of codeHarbour – a web meetup in Kent – and started Folkestone Cycling Club. Keith has been building WordPress sites for over eight years and has worked with agencies and clients of all size.
His focus is on how to leverage the power of WordPress to help businesses meet their goals.
Lee Jackson
Lee lead’s two digital businesses providing powerful WordPress solutions for personal brands, design agencies and event companies.
He runs the WP Innovator Facebook Group with over 1400 members who support one another, network and have fun. There is a focus on productivity, WordPress tools and tips, business and strategy.
He is the host of The Agency Trailblazer Podcast (Formerly WP Innovator Podcast), which focuses on agency life with a heavy WordPress bias (WordPress for President). He compliments this with a paid community focused on helping stressed out design/web agency owners fall in love with their businesses again. No 10x BS, just practical advice and support to help people undo bad decisions and create an agency they can love that supports the lifestyle they need.
Maja Benke
Maja studied landscape architecture but soon discovered her love for WordPress and traveling the world. Now she works as a web designer with a passion for UX and accessibility and has a blog for WordPress newbies.
Marco Chiesi
Software Engineer from Italy with 15+ years of professional experience in the web industry. Lead Engineer at Black Studio. WordPress enthusiast, Plugin developer, Core contributor, and WordCamp speaker. Author of the popular plugin Black Studio TinyMCE Widget (6+ million downloads).
Mark Wilkinson
Mark is a developer and Co-founder of Highrise Digital, a specialist WordPress agency focusing on WordPress development solution for post small pre-enterprise solutions. Mark has been using WordPress since late 2005, all the way back to version 2.0. He is also an active member of the UK WordPress community attending meet-ups and WordCamps in the UK, as well as getting involved in organising such events.
Matt Brunt
“Matt Brunt is a Senior Software Engineer with Viva IT where he leads and mentors a team of developers. Helping them to learn and grow into their full potential.
In his spare time, he’s an organiser for the PHP East Midlands user group, and the PHP East Midlands yearly Unconference. When not tinkering with code he can be found reading comics, fighting monsters in dungeons and dragons, or drinking tea and eating jaffa-cakes.”
Melanie Machan
Melanie is Head of Product at PA, the UK’s national news agency. 18 months ago, she and some colleagues embarked on a challenge to completely rebuild PA’s editorial systems and suite of customer products. She met the guys from 10UP, realised the true power of WordPress and the team has been transforming the PA newsroom and its output.
Prior to working at PA, Melanie worked at the BBC in a variety of product and production roles, including for BBC iPlayer and the BBC Learning websites.
In her spare time, Melanie likes to take a tent out to the Sussex countryside, light a campfire and kick back with the sound of nature and a cold beer.
Nemanja Aleksic
Product Marketing Manager at ManageWP & GoDaddy, WordCamp Belgrade organizer. On a personal quest to help the WordPress community charge an honest fee for their services.
Nicola Campbell
Nicola is the Art Director with 93digital, a WordPress design and development agency based in London. She came to her current position via a scenic route involving illustration, customer service, SEO consultancy, web design, content planning and development. Her greatest passion in life is for learning.
Pascal Birchler
Pascal is a student, software engineer, and WordPress Core Developer based in Zurich, Switzerland. He’s been working with WordPress for half of his life and is an avid member of the community. Living in a multilingual country, Pascal is passionate about internationalisation and improving this area in WordPress.
Piccia Neri
Piccia Neri is a WordPress consultant, graphic designer, creative director and photographer. Over the course of 2.5 decades, Piccia has gathered together an extremely varied portfolio that spans from global corporations to venerable cultural institutions.
CAREER HIGHLIGHTS:
– Editorial design for Shell Syria
– Editorial and marketing material design for National Gallery, London
– Editorial and marketing material design for Tate Gallery, Liverpool
– Editorial and marketing material design for British Council, London and on location in Shanghai, China
– Editorial design for British Museum, London
– Creative direction of the design department at the British Film Institute, London, for 4 years and then ongoing as a freelance. Brand guardian as well as responsible for creative direction and design of all marketing aspects (online and offline) of major film season campaigns, film distribution and the various film festivals produced by the BFI. Delivered workshops and created educational programs for the BFI, in conjunction with University of Middlesex and University of the Arts, London.
– Creative direction, editorial, web and marketing design for a number of film festivals and institutions, including: Bird’s Eye View Film Festival, Palestine Film Foundation, London Turkish Film Festival, Hors Pistes Film Festival (Pompidou Centre, Paris), BFI Lesbian and Gay Film Festival, BFI Future Film Festival, BFI London Film festival and more.
– Freelance experience with top London agencies working on giant multinational brands, from Unilever to Diageo.
– 5+ years experience as freelance designer in the art department of the Sunday Times Magazine.
– On the board of the Chartered Society of Designers as vice-president from 2013 to 2016.
CURRENT ACTIVITY:
Piccia now runs her own agency, dedicated to tailoring brands and marketing-driven websites that increase sales for high-achieving businesses and entrepreneurs, using WordPress as her beloved tool of choice. She plays to her strengths and concentrates on delivering outstanding design experiences for her clients, while also educating and coaching them on the importance of content marketing and SEO – and how brochure sites really don’t have much reason for existing. Piccia is working on a couple of projects that will allow her to scale her WordPress business via multisite and site cloning, creating recurring revenue streams. She is also in the planning stages of her own membership site where she’ll sell her photography, up to now distributed via stock sites such as iStock, Shutterstock, Fotolia and so on.
EXPERIENCE AS AN EDUCATOR:
– Created and ran a workshop and competition for a live project (BFI FUTURE FILM FESTIVAL) for design students from University of London and Middlesex University, London, for 4 years. The project had a website with blog and forum for the students to document their experience.
– Photoshop and web design tutor for Photography Course London, a photography school in Shoreditch.
– Visiting lecturer at Camberwell College of Art on Lightroom and photography and design-related subjects.
– Tutorials and workshops on my blog and for my own clients.
Raffaella Isidori
I create brands and design the communication for businesses around the world. I also assist companies in their Italian or English localization. Besides that, I study, teach, take pictures, write, translate and coach professionals and entrepreneurs on communication and language. You can see my work at www.raffaellaisidori.com. Curious as a cat, mindfulness practitioner, and in love with diversities, I collect books, fonts & essential oils. At the moment I live and work in the Italian countryside, surrounded by flora & fauna, where I cultivate dreams & push boundaries.
Richard Copping
The first 10 years of Rich’s career was within global ad agencies in London & Sydney, designing for award-winning campaigns and branding projects. After that Rich co-founded Republique, a boutique creative agency in Brighton. Working with lots of innovative start-ups and new brands, mostly in the digital space, including lots of WordPress.
In 2016 Republique merged with Pragmatic, making Rich the Creative Director there and undertaking the exciting journey of growing an internal team and galvanising design within the agency, and the WordPress community.
Sabrina Zeidan
WP lover since 2010. Seven years ago she installed WordPress for the advertising agency she was working at and it was love at first sight.
Since that time there was a long way through design, SEO and marketing career to what she is really excited with — WordPress Multisite development.
Sabrina specializes in helping dev teams implement WP Multisite and get the most out of its functionality. Some of her experience is shared in her blog sabrinazeidan.com.
Sami Keijonen
Teacher and front-end developer, who likes to learn about web, accessibility and WordPress.
Sarah Semark
Sarah Semark is a designer, developer, and world-traveller. She ran a business doing freelance design work for eight years, and now she works for Automattic, where she works on new products using emerging technologies.
She lives in Scotland in a small flat with very tall ceilings, but she can often be found in other parts of the world, tapping away anywhere there’s a power outlet—from ramshackle Soviet sleeper trains to a hut in the Amazon. When she’s not busy making things, Sarah likes obsessing over typography, collecting impractical footwear, and exploring new places.
Sean Blakeley
Sean Blakeley discovered WordPress in early 2006 and has never looked back. He loved the flexibility it gave him and the control it gave his clients.
From those early, simple websites he’s grown to become Tech Lead & Producer on large, enterprise projects for household names.
Alongside working with WordPress, Sean spent a decade working in the film industry – working as a sculptor on some blockbuster films including Tomb Raider, Batman Begins, Harry Potter, Prometheus and more.
Stef Mattana
Stef works at Automattic as a Happiness Engineer. She helps users who need support for products mainly on the wp.org area such as Jetpack, VaultPress, Akismet, Polldaddy etc.
WordPress evangelist, Stef is active in the International and Italian communities, and had also being involved in the organisation of WordCamps.
When she’s not lifting heavy weights, Stef likes stalking dogs and extinguishers, or ending up people on fiction.
You can find Stef on Twitter @stefmattana and on Instagram as eraniapinnera
Steve Folland
Steve creates creative video & audio for businesses whilst staying at home and being their for his kids.
Wait, where’s ‘WordPress’?
Well, he’s also the cake-eater behind ‘Being Freelance’ – the podcast where freelancers chat about, erm, being freelance. And the vlog where Steve documents his week being, yep, freelance.
So many lovely WordPress folk listen to and have appeared on the podcast.
Want more bio?
He used to work in radio.
He loves cake.
He runs because he knows he should.
Sometimes it’s past a bakers.
Steve Honeyman
I’m a Junior Developer at Tomango, a Web, Brand and Digital Marketing agency in Lewes where we use WordPress to build bespoke websites for local, national and international businesses. Before this I worked at the University of Leeds where I managed the WordPress multisite for the Faculty of Arts (roughly 100 sites) and built their first responsive website using WordPress as a CMS. I’ve an MA in Interactive Multimedia which I gained in 2004, a time when Flash sites and table layouts still roamed the internet. Away from design and development I’m a passionate rock-climber and spent several years wandering round the Northern Hemisphere seeking out some of the best bouldering in the world, all whilst living in a van. My move to the South Coast has marked the end of this itinerate life (for the time being at least) and been about picking up my career in Web Development. I love WordPress for its easy of use, versatility and community. Learning WordPress gave me a my first break as a developer trying to re-establish my career and as I result I’d love to be able to give something back where possible.
As a designer and developer I’m passionate about CSS, graphics, typography, layout and WordPress (of course!). My formative influences came through music and counter culture; via the album sleeves of Reid Miles, Swifty, Futura 2000, Will Bankhead, Jamie Reid and magazines such as Raygun, Straight No Chaser, Level and Document, my lightning talk will be draw on all this to some degree.
Tammie Lister
I work at Automattic, where I am an experience designer donated to the WordPress.org project full time. My background is varied and includes psychology, design, front end development and user experience. I am passionate about Open Source and community.
Thomas Vitale
“Systems Engineer at Systematic A/S, a Danish software company which develops software and systems solutions to customers in healthcare, defence, law enforcement, the public sector, finance and service industries.
I have a Master’s degree in Computer Engineering specialising in Software. IT Security, Software Engineering and Web Development are some of my main interests.
I started using WordPress many years ago and I’ve never stopped working with it. Proud member of the beautiful WordPress community, I contribute to Support, Polyglots, Community and Meta teams. I’ve been one of the organisers of WordPress Meetup Torino and WordCamp Torino 2017.
I love reading, travelling and playing the piano. As a volunteer, I’m the Managing Director and Communications Manager for Avventure Magiche, a no-profit cultural organisation based in Turin (Italy) that, among other things, has been organising the Wizard Academy for 12 years.”
Thorsten Frommen
Thorsten is a certified PHP engineer, web development professional and tester. He has been working on the web since 2000, and with (and on) WordPress since 2005. Thorsten is a Senior WordPress Engineer at Human Made.
A big fan of open source, Thorsten created several plugins and other projects, but also contributed to existing open source projects. Also, he is an advocate of object-oriented design, and software testing.
Since the first official German WordCamp in Hamburg in June 2014, Thorsten fell in love with both the WordPress community and WordCamps, in particular, where he likes to both gain and share knowledge.
Toyin Agunbiade
I am an IT Programme Management consultant who had delivered multiple end-to-end projects in the Retail, Finance and Utilities sector.
Most recently, I have delivered GDPR compliance and Privacy projects in 15 countries. These projects include implementing changes to IT systems and Organisational policies/procedures in time for GDPR compliance in May 25 2018.
Zac Gordon
Zac Gordon is a professional educator, currently working on the JavaScript for WordPress Courses. 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.