Speakers

Adam Silverstein

Adam is a contributing developer to WordPress and wrote the initial code for the Backbone revisions rewrite. He started programming by learning assembly code on his Radio Shack color computer, and is now a Senior Web Engineer at 10up. He loves WordPress, JavaScript and collaborating in core.

Alexis Bellido

I’m a full stack web developer who has worked in projects involving all kinds of open source solutions since the late ’90s. I’m part of the team at Alley Interactive, in New York, where we build websites for leading companies in the media, entertainment and education spaces.

Andrea Rennick

I started out as a volunteer in the WordPress.org forums, and now work for Copyblogger Media in customer support for all products. I like to learn and I like to help people. Often changing my hair color, I make quilts and entertain my three grandkids in my spare time.

Andrew Nacin

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 and is primarily tasked with working on WordPress core and keeping the lights on at WordPress.org. He resides in downtown Washington, D.C.

Austin Burns

I am the lead software engineer for W Magazine at Conde Nast who loves all things WordPress.

Ben Dunkle

I’m a designer, professor and artist from Buffalo, NY. I’m on the core design team at WordPress.org. I co-run WordCamp Buffalo and mentor WordCamps. I designed most of the WordPress admin icons, going back to version 2.7.

Beth Soderberg

I am currently a Front End Developer at APCO Worldwide in Washington, DC. My happy place is where art and code intersect. I’m a self taught developer and I believe everyone should feel empowered in their dealings with the internet. Also, I’m a cat mom, politico, painter, and proud herbivore.

Boone Gorges

Freelance plugin development consultant. Lead Developer, BuddyPress.

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.

Cal Evans

Cal is the Developer Advocate for Pantheon. This allows him to live his dream of traveling around the US talking to developers and attending camps and conferences. When not on the road, Cal is based in Nashville, TN where he is happily married to wife 1.30, the lovely and talented Kathy.

Chris Cochran

I have always had a love for art and computers. I finally found a way to merge my two loves together. Web design and development are my true passions, followed closely by food, and music. I like to think I am making the web a better place one site at a time by doing what I truly love.

Chris Lema

Chris Lema has been working with WordPress for 9 years. His daily blog (chrislema.com) covers the WordPress ecosystem from a business perspective. His day job is as the VP of Engineering for Emphasys Software. But it’s his coaching and consulting that brings him into the community – helping theme and plugin companies with product development and strategy.

Cory Miller

Cory is a former newspaper journalist turned web entrepreneur. In 2008, he started iThemes.com, which builds web design software and offers cutting-edge web design training for thousands of customers around the globe. A passionate entrepreneur, he enjoys helping others start or grow their businesses.

Courtney O’Callaghan

Who I am … professional listener, amateur teacher, vegetarian mom, animal caretaker, people watcher, culture enthusiast, off-hours feminist, book hoarder, designer/coder/other, Chief Digital Officer at Freer and Sackler Galleries, CA native, proud DC resident – but it needs an ocean.

Craig Ralston

I work at Web Solutions as the lead WordPress developer. Though my life pretty much revolves around WordPress, I do enjoy playing hockey at my local rink and spending time with my daughter as well as teaching WordPress and helping businesses grow their online presence.

Dana Skallman

Dana’s work resides in the intersections of communicating between users and developers. Similar to her interests in pickling and gardening, Dana carefully configures her technology projects by taking in the details of the environment of how a website is growing and will be used in the future. WordPress plugins setup with CiviCRM configuration is her expertise. She enjoys examining how different features and functionality affect each other, and advising clients on how to make their technology work for them!

Daniel Bachhuber

Daniel Bachhuber is founder of Hand Built, a consultancy focusing on code review, data migrations, scaling, and custom development. His open source time goes to maintaining WP-CLI. He is an alumnus of Digital First Media, Human Made, and Automattic / WordPress.com VIP.

Daniel lives with his wife Leah and daughter Ava in the beautiful city of Portlandia.

Daniel Convissor

Author of the Login Security Solution plugin. Contributor to the PEAR and PHP projects. Team Lead at Ubersmith. Likes long walks on arrays.

Daryl Koopersmith

Drew Jaynes

Drew is a WordPress docs committer who recently led the effort to document all actions and filters in core. He lives and works in Denver as a Web Engineer at 10up, a distributed digital agency focused on making publishing and content management easy and fun. 10up donates a significant portion of Drew’s time to contributing back to core and the community.

Gabriela Levit

Six years and counting as a WordPress project manager and developer doing web sites, custom themes, and plugins.

When not working on WordPress projects, she can be found taking pictures, eating/cooking yummy food, and flying small planes, not all at the same time as it’s not recommended.

Helen Hou-Sandí

Helen is the Director of Platform Experience at 10up, where she is sponsored to work on WordPress full-time. She is a core committer and the release lead for WordPress 4.0. Helen proudly lives in Jersey City, is a Virginian at heart, and a New Yorker by blood.

Jake Goldman

Jake is the President of 10up, a full service digital agency that makes web publishing and content management simple and fun. At 10up, he serves name brand clients like TechCrunch, ESPN, Consumer Reports, NBC Universal, and Google. In just over 3 years, Jake built 10up from 1 to more than 70 full time employees. Jake has been quoted on publications like c|net, written for Smashing Magazine, taught at Boston University, and presented at conferences around the country. He is a core contributor to WordPress, maintains some highly rated WordPress plug-ins, and organizes the Sacramento WordPress Meetup.

Jamie Schmid

Jamie Schmid is a WordPress theme developer and Information Architect. Her experience in user-centered interaction design led to an interest in developing for user experience in administrative interfaces (known as the “author experience”) as well. She enjoys taking sites from conception through a well-managed build process that encourages communication, planning and smart use of content.

Jared Novack

Jared is a founder of Upstatement, a web design firm in Boston. There he builds and directs projects for media organizations like NPR, The Boston Globe and Harvard Law Review. He is also the author of Timber for WordPress. @jaredNova on Twitter and GitHub

Jason White

Jason is Director of SEO at DragonSearch based out of New York. He has been actively involved in many different forms of marketing but digital marketing and more specifically, SEO remains his passion. His role evolves as the field changes but his core skill sets enable Jason to draw from previous experiences, connecting multiple platforms to create holistic campaigns that deliver results.

Jay Hoffmann

Jay is a front-end and WordPress developer at Sesame Workshop where he works on digital projects like Flappy Bert. He is also the founder, designer and writer of Tidy Repo, a curated list of useful plugins with new updates every week.

Jeanne Brooks

Jeanne Brooks is the first-ever director of Hacks/Hackers, a fellow at the Reynold’s Journalism Institute and founder of New/s Disruptors. Previously she was the Digital Director of the Online News Association and recently completed work with WNYC leading audience development and engagement on the Sleep Project. 

Jenn Schiffer

Jenn Schiffer is an open web engineer at Bocoup, creator of Make8BitArt.com, and tech humorist. She also organizes the JerseyScript meetup for front-end developers in New Jersey, where she lives on purpose.

Jeremy Zilar

Blog Specialist and Content Strategist at The New York Times.

Jim Doran

Jim Doran is an artist who has exhibited all over the United States, in Europe and the Visionary Art Museum in Baltimore.  He’s also a Web Developer, musician, book editor and college instructor.

John Eckman

After a first career as an academic, John‘s been working in digital agencies for the last 15 years, and with WordPress for the last 8. He is the CEO of 10up, and lives in Salem MA with his wife and dogs. He blog is Open Parenthesis.

Kathryn Presner

Kathryn thrives on helping people get the most out of WordPress. She joined Automattic as a Happiness Engineer in 2012 and is a member of the Theme Team,, where she specializes in theme support. She enjoys collecting vintage Pyrex, growing garlic, and cavorting with her four felines.

Kevin Conboy

Kevin has been one of the codery-designery types at Automattic for over 4 years now and currently works to transform WordPress into an awesome tool for team and project collaboration. Kevin’s main blog is alternatekev.me and he can be found on Twitter at @alternatekev.

Kevin Cristiano

Kevin is a SQL ninja, an accounting expert, and active in the WordPress  Community.   He has worked with WordPress and been involved with the New York meetup for many years, and has been spotted at WordCamps from Baltimore to Boston. He is also a member of Tadpole Collective.

Kevin Miller

Kevin Miller is a developer living and working in Corvallis, OR, and running P51 Labs. With over 10 years of experience programming in dozens of languages, the web is his true passion. Kevin’s focus has always been on how to use the web in new and interesting ways, to really push the boundaries. His current passion is working on Piklist.

Kiko Doran

As a business consultant, I work with clients in many industries. My inquisitive nature and desire to learn all the tech things, led me to WordPress in 2009. Now 4 years later, I’m building custom WordPress powered web applications for my clients to run their businesses.
I spent 11 years in the US Air Force and have been doing process/tech consulting since separating in 2007. I find WordPress to be the best platform to showcase my problem solving skills. I also write first person bios.

Konstantin Obenland

Konstantin is a WordPress developer, and core contributor since WordPress 3.4. After contributing to Twenty Twelve, he was the backup lead and theme developer for Twenty Thirteen and Twenty Fourteen, the most recent default themes. Today he’s working on improving the theme selection experience on WordPress.com. He enjoys craft beers and good food — sometimes so much that he blogs about it.

Lara Schenck

Lara (not Laura) is a freelance instructor, designer and front-end developer. She specializes in training small teams and individuals in WordPress and front-end development, and loves using metaphors to explain technical concepts to her students. In addition to all things web, Lara is into coffee (of course), skiing, and coworking.

M. Shannon Hernandez

M. Shannon Hernandez, founder of The Writing Whisperer, helps small business owners and brands solidify the words and content they use across a variety of platforms, so they can connect more completely with their markets. She is a leading voice in the world of authentic business writing and writes regularly for The Huffington Post.

Marc Benzakein

Marc Benzakein has been working online since the mid 90s, starting as a Network Administrator for a small, independent ISP in Southern California and has been involved in almost all aspects of technology. In 2009, he started developing in WordPress, first for his own purposes and then for clients. In early 2013, he got involved with ServerPress, LLC, makers of DesktopServer, a local development tool created for WordPress designers and developers.

Marc lives in Milwaukee, Wisconsin with his wife, Jessica and two children, Eli (8) and Brenna (4).

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.

Marko Heijnen

I’m a long term WordPress contributor from the Netherlands. I use wordPress for more then 7 years and starting contributing back to it in 2009 to already nine releases. After years of freelancing I now work for 1&1 as their WordPress specialist. Part of my job is improving WordPress by contributing back to the community.
I also work on GlotPress as the main core developer and creating a better open source tool for translations. I can be found on twitter @MarkoHeijnen and I do blog on markoheijnen.com or wpunknown.com.

Mary Beth Coudal

Mary Beth Coudal is a blogger, journalist, tutor, and humorist. She leads writing workshops and consults on communications services. Coudal blogs about happiness at mbcoudal.com. Her essays have appeared in The New York Times, Self, and Salon.com.

Max Cutler

Max is a developer at Microsoft specializing in web and mobile performance for the Dynamics CRM product team. He is a WordPress core contributor who has worked on the XML-RPC API, unit testing framework, and official mobile apps.

Mel Choyce

Mel is a Design Engineer at Automattic. She loves big type, cold brew coffee, and printmaking.

Mika Epstein

Mika Epstein is better known as Ipstenu, the Half-Elf Support Rogue. Working for DreamHost as a WordPress Support Specialist and Manager (aka ‘WordPress Guru’), she solves any WordPress problem that comes up, trains everyone from support to marketing in why WordPress makes your life better, and still finds time to slash unanswered WordPress.org forum threads by night and wrangle plugins by day. A self-taught guru on Multisite and .htaccess, she has a passion for writing and technology and blogs about them whenever possible.

The rumor that she has dice in her purse and tinfoil in her hats is in a constant state of Schrödinger proofs.

Mike Schroder

Mike Schroder, known as Shredder to most of his colleagues, is a cross-cultural kid, coffee-drinking sailor, and lover of Open Source. He currently works at DreamHost, developing WordPress products like DreamPress, and contributing to the WordPress core and community projects. You can find him blogging on various geeky things at http://www.getsource.net

Mikel King

Mikel is a 20+yr Technology Leader, USCG Veteran, Brewer of beer, Coffee Evangelist and currently the Sr WordPress Dev at Reader’s Digest behind http://rd.com. He is also a plugin author and a part time writer for Huffington Post, Jafdip, Bit Rebels and BSD News.

Nicole Arnold

Nicole is a software developer at Alley Interactive, a leading WordPress.com VIP service partner. She develops WordPress sites for Alley Interactive’s high profile media clients, such as Fortune and The New York Post. She also contributes to WordPress as part of the Documentation Team, and has spoken at Detroit area meetups and WordCamp Phoenix.

Noel Tock

Noel builds solutions online. He leads up Happytables & WP Remote at his company, Human Made. Noel is also an organizer for WordCamp Europe and WordCamp Switzerland.

Pippin Williamson

Pippin Williamson is a WordPress plugin developer from Hutchinson, KS. He runs PippinsPlugins.com and is the founder and lead developer of Restrict Content Pro, Easy Digital Downloads, AffiliateWP, and other plugins.

Rami Abraham

 Rami is a developer at Maintainn, a co-organizer of WordCamp Lancaster, and lover of tacos.

Richard Dinh

Senior Consultant at NorthPoint Digital that specializes in content management solutions such as WordPress, Drupal and SiteCore. I was a speaker at Providence WordCamp 2013. I¹ve developed custom WordPress plugins and themes for InStyle, Essence, Entertainment Weekly, rGenerator (Sony Music), and Shaw Media (Food Network Canada).

Ryan McCue

Ryan is a WordPress core contributor, and the lead developer of the SimplePie RSS/Atom parsing library included with WordPress. He’s also the developer of the popular Requests HTTP library, used by projects such as WP-CLI. Ryan has been involved in the WordPress community for more than seven years, and is currently leading development of the JSON REST API project aiming for inclusion into WP 4.1. In what’s left of his time, he’s a developer at Human Made, a top-tier WordPress agency, working on WordPress.com VIP projects as well as the Happytables restaurant website platform.

Sam Hotchkiss

Sam Hotchkiss is the Principal of Hotchkiss Consulting Group, a WordPress development firm based in Bath, Maine.  He is also the Big Cheese at Parka, the company behind BruteProtect, a WordPress security plugin in use by tens of thousands of sites. Sam’s background is in PHP development, and he has been developing sites with WordPress since 2004.

Sara Cannon

Sara Cannon has a passion for art, design, and typography. She is Partner and Creative Director at Range. Sara loves open source, her pets, and traveling. Twitter: @saracannon, Design Blog sara-cannon.com, Art Blog: artcation.com, and view her art works at saracannonart.com. “Life is short, art is long, typography is everything, code is poetry.”

Scott Taylor

Scott is a Sr. Software Engineer at the New York Times and a WordPress core committer. He wrote the code for Audio and Video support in WordPress and manages a music blog that no one reads (High For This – highforthis.com). His band, Goodbye Picasso, has played over 600 shows – many at Rockwood Music Hall in NYC.

Shanta Nathwani

Shanta R. Nathwani is an IT and Social Media Consultant and an Instructor in Web Design and CCIT Capstone at Sheridan College, which includes teaching WordPress. The ICCIT program is a joint program with the University of Toronto at Mississauga. She teaches students and small businesses how to use their websites and social media to increase their online presence leading to increased revenues and improved customer service. She has assisted companies to incorporate social media in the real estate, financial, non-profit, education and technical fields to name a few.

Shanta is a problem solver and it has been said she has the patience of a saint. She can explain even the most difficult concepts to the most basic user and has developed training documents that allow clients to learn for themselves. She thrives on understanding the needs of her clients. She believes in making social media as simple as possible and making it fun, which allows her clients to seamlessly incorporate it into their organization.

Siobhan McKeown

Siobhan McKeown works at Audrey Capital where she writes about WordPress, deals with documentation, and has nightmares about the Codex. She’s working on book about the history of WordPress. When not worrying about the finer details of forking and the GPL, she’s helping out with the project’s future by wrangling WordPress’ documentation.

Stephen C. Miller

Stephen Miller has been covering technology for more than 30 years. He has worked in every area of the media, TV, radio, magazines and newspapers. His staff positions included CBS News and the New York Times. He was one of the original bloggers for CyberTimes.

Steve Bruner

Steve Bruner is the CEO of SlipFire, a New York City based WordPress development studio, and a partner in Piklist where he is creating the most powerful framework available for WordPress. When he’s not building awesome websites, Steve runs the WordPress NYC Meetup.

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.

Svetlana Kouznetsova

Svetlana Kouznetsova (Sveta) is a NYC-based experience and accessibility professional. She also provides consulting services to help businesses make their audio, video, events accessible to deaf and hard of hearing people and writes articles about web design, user experience, accessibility.

Syed Balkhi

Syed Balkhi is the founder of WPBeginner and List25 an extremely popular entertainment site with over 1 million subscribers and 150 Million video views. Syed’s work has been featured in NYTimes, HuffingtonPost, Yahoo Small Business, Wired, Mashable, and countless other well-reputed online magazines.

Tammie Lister

Tammie Lister is a Theme Wrangler with Automattic and a BuddyPress expert who’s authored a book on BuddyPress theme development and contributed to the project’s UI refresh and template pack. She can often be found torturing pixels and hugging dogs.

Tracy Levesque

Tracy Levesque is a co-owner of YIKES, Inc., a Philadelphia web design and development shop located in Fishtown. She is also a WordPress instructor for Girl Develop It Philly.

She has been designing websites since 1996 and working with WordPress since 2006. She spends her days building custom themes for WordPress and seeing how much functionality she can add without really knowing PHP.

Tracy Rotton

Tracy Rotton is the Lead Web Developer for RP3 Agency in Bethesda, Maryland. She is passionate about creating responsive web experiences and is also a WordPress core contributor. Away from her computer, Tracy is a mother of two, an avid skier, and die-hard Redskins fan.

August 2-3, 2014 at the New York Marriott at the Brooklyn Bridge

WordCamp NYC 2014 is over. Check out the next edition!