Speakers

Here’s the complete list of speakers for May 17 (excluding a few surprise guests).

Andrew Nacin

Andrew Nacin is a Lead Developer at WordPress, squashing bugs, wrangling contributions, and spearheading new development. He has strong feelings about the core philosophies of WordPress, among them “decisions, not options”— software should be opinionated in lieu of burdening the user with too many options.

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.

Cliff Seal

Cliff is a UX Designer at Pardot, a salesforce.com Company—a leader in B2B marketing automation — where he is the resident WordPress developer and has co-led team efforts on a complete Pardot.com refresh and a major UI overhaul. Cliff has been developing in WordPress for over five years as Logos Creative, and also co-founded MusicGrid.me. He has spoken around the world at numerous WordCamps and conferences such as Conversion Conference and Web Conference at Penn State, covering topics such as content strategy, user experience process, and WordPress development.

He lives in Atlanta with his wife April, and enjoys nerding out over music and cycling through the city.

Session: No One Cares About Your Content (Yet)

David Laietta

David is a website developer, and founder of Orange Blossom Media, a company that builds custom themes and plugins for WordPress. He teaches frequently, and does numerous one on one lectures, small group presentations, and provides his training in a professional capacity for organizations looking to train their users.

He has donated his time to a variety of groups over the past few years and teaches basic programming courses at a local college.

David is also the lead organizer of the WordPress Orlando Meetup, as well as WordCamp Orlando.  If you want to get in touch about custom development work, please send your project information to Orange Blossom Media. Otherwise, if  you are contacting regarding a potential engagement or anything else, you can reach him at http://davidlaietta.com/contact/.

Jared Smith

Jared works as  a WordPress and Web Engineer with a great team on a highly disruptive real estate Web platform called BoomTown. When he get’s home from work, he  and his wife Stephanie cook dinner and outstanding Web ideas up at their internet marketing and search engine consultancy, More Caffeine Studio.

If the weather is about to cut loose, Jared has somehow got an eye on that too, letting everybody know about what’s up over at chswx.us and on Twitter at @chswx, the most-followed and fastest local weather social media account in the Charleston metro area.

Session: WordPress at Peak Performance

Jason Finneyfrock

Jason’s been programming since the late 90’s, starting with Perl and PHP, then ASP and .NET. Along the way he joined BoomTown in 2006 and has seen the company grow from 3 to 130 and counting. For the last couple years he’s helped build a monster WordPress plugin for a fairly large multisite install and is happily slinging PHP and front-end code these days.

Session: Use Vagrant and Puppet to Fully Automate Your WordPress Stack

Joe Casabona

Joe Casabona is a web developer, author, and teacher who focuses primarily on WordPress and mobile development. His latest book, Responsive Design with WordPress, is out now. He is also a Yankee fan, plays the drums, and enjoys a fine cigar from time to time.

You can find him over at casabona.org or on Twitter at @jcasabona.

Session: Responsive Design with WordPress

Maggie Hall

Maggie is a user experience design professional passionate about helping startups develop design and marketing-focused business strategies. As a Senior User Experience Designer at SPARC, Maggie has lead design efforts for several successful product, mobile app, and website launches.

Her approach to the design process is user-centered and data-informed, with a focus on workplace productivity, data visualization, and presentation design. Prior to SPARC, Maggie spent years at Blackbaud leading nonprofit client projects as an interactive designer.

Maggie is a proud graduate of the University of Alabama, and when she’s not helping clients succeed, you’ll find her working on her golf game or playing violin in beautiful Charleston, SC. You can find her on Twitter at @maggieDixonHall.

Session: Agile Design for Marketing Websites: Building WordPress Content Collaboratively with Startups

Mannie Schumpert

Mannie is a web developer and designer who creates custom web solutions with the WordPress platform. A lifelong Charlestonian who transitioned from a career as a music producer, he now works exclusively on the web, making websites, plugins, and applications with WordPress.

He serves as a co-organizer of the WordPress Charleston user group.

Session: WordPress Capabilities Magic

Maria Scarpello

Maria Scarpello is the Internal Community Manager at WooThemes and also a full time traveler.

Maria is the first lady to join the WooThemes Ninjas Support team. Originally from Lawrence, Kansas, Maria has spent the last three years living in her RV traveling the US. As a part of her travels she frequents craft breweries with her partner Brian where they write about their journey @TheRoamingPint. It has always been her dream to travel the world and now thanks to WordPress her dream life has become a reality.

Session: Sweet Selling Success with WooCommerce

Michael Carnell

Michael is a writer, British car fanatic, train buff, and general eccentric. He is currently a systems programmer for the Medical University of South Carolina and holds certifications from both Apple and Microsoft. He has worked independently with WordPress for many years, and specializes in back end issues with databases and security.

Session: Don’t Get Hacked

Naomi Bush

Naomi’s been involved with WordPress since 2005 as a professional site developer, college educator, plugin developer, and now builds products to help you accept payments on your WordPress site using modern payment processors like Stripe, in addition to working at Stripe for the past year.

She contributes back to the WordPress project through the core code, the codex documentation, free plugins, organizing the WordPress Gwinnett developer meetup, and speaking at WordCamps.

Learn more about Naomi at http://naomicbush.com

Session: A Whole New World…brought to you by Forms

Patrick Phillips

Patrick is a professional blogger. He’s also a TV producer, writer, Mac lover, and Christian, though not necessarily in that order. He has a natural dislike of double standards and poor grammar, but often writes about many other topics as well.

You can find him on Twitter @patricksplace or at read his blog at  patrickkphillips.com

Session: Fighting the Deadline Pressure

Shauna Mackenzie

Shauna is a serial entrepreneur with expertise in communication, branding, and online marketing. After starting a consulting practice in 2007, Shauna became harshly aware of the limitations of trading hours for dollars. Seeking the best way to scale her consultancy, she turned to the internet in 2010 and self-taught herself WordPress and the basics of code so she could package her expertise into profitable content-based products.

Now, after the launch of several successful content-based products, Shauna has team members in place to take over the consulting arm of her business so she can focus exclusively on building her own e-learning products and helping others package their expertise into profitable content-based platforms.

Shoot her a tweet at @MsShaunaMack.

Session: Package your Expertise into Profitable Content-based Products

Suzette Franck

Suzette Franck is a WordPress Evangelist at (mt) Media Temple, a Los Angeles-based company providing premium web hosting and cloud services to web designers, web developers, digital innovators and entrepreneurs since 1998. An established member of the WordPress community and one of today’s most prolific female WordPress speakers, Suzette joined Media Temple in 2012 and has, since then, been building on the company’s early involvement with the WordPress and Open Source communities. She advocates and educates for WordPress by actively participating in WordCamp conferences country-wide and WordPress meetups in Southern California.

As passionate about front-end coding as she is about increasing awareness of the wonders of WordPress, she also co-hosts Media Temple’s weekly educational podcast, WP Unicorn Project (wpunicornproject.com), with WordPress Unicorn Rockstar Natalie MacLees, which addresses all things WordPress and web development with a variety of WordPress professionals including designers, developers, and entrepreneurs. Suzette blogs about WordPress at suzettefranck.com, and she is a repeated guest on the popular WPWatercooler (wpwatercooler.com) video podcast (over 5 million views). When she is not “WordPressing”, Suzette, who resides in North Hollywood, CA, paints and collects art.

Talk: Setting Up and Maintaining Your Self-Hosted WordPress Site

Tony Perez

Tony is one of the Co-Founders and Chief Operating Officer at Sucuri Inc – a company specializing in the detection and remediation of malware and protection of websites.

Tony has been working in the technology industry, specializing in web based solutions, for the past 11 years. Tony is a certified Project Management Professional (PMP), holds a Bachelor’s of Science degree in Technology Management and is actively pursuing his Masters in Business Administration, specialization in Technology Management.

Session: WordPress Security – It’s about the Basics!

Zac Gordon

Zac Gordon has a background teaching web design, development and WordPress at levels from middle schools, high schools, colleges and Universities. Today he teaches WordPress at Treehouse, the online technology school.

Zac also owns a web design company that specializes in $975 WordPress sites for small business owners

Talk: An Introduction to PHP for WordPress