Here’s a bit of information on our speakers for WordCamp Portland 2012:

Kiersi Burkhart

Kiersi is a 23-year-old writer of books for teens and adults. When she’s not novelizing, she writes for her author blog, The Prolific Novelista. She blogs with a focus on sharing stories, good books, and how-to articles for improving your craft.

Kiersi is presenting Blogging as a Platform: Making a Name For Yourself in Your Targeted Community

Taylor Dewey

Taylor creates websites for 10up, LLC – a company focused on building awesome, custom WordPress installations. Along with his coworkers, he wrangles code, perfects layouts, and extends core functionality to create custom experiences for clients such as 9to5mac, Trulia, and SportsNet New York.

He chose to work with the web 13 years ago because it is a medium where creativity and technology synergize and, as a virtual product, is constantly evolving into something better.

Taylor is presenting Why we Click “Publish”: Advocating for User-Centricity through Interaction Design

Laura Kimball

Laura Kimball is a word warrior who slays metaphors and believes that if you want to be a successful blogger, you have to market yourself. She has the heart of a writer, the brain of a marketer, and is obsessed with building buzz and motivating communities online. Laura has a background in book publishing and is currently managing communities on social media. She blogs about life, ambitions, and dreams at lamiki.com and can always be found on Twitter (@lamiki).

Laura is presenting How to Blog Once a Day

Kailey Lampert

Kailey wrote her first line of HTML in 2000, and the years following were filled with some really, really terrible stuff (her words).
Then in about 2005/6 she was finally introduced to CSS, and a few months later, also to PHP and MySQL. Those were dangerous times. Putting this new found knowledge to use, she actually managed to cobble together something like a custom blogging system. Code so terrible, it has since been banished from existence. For the next couple years, she continued writing code for all sorts of little things, playing around with it all until she eventually got hired as a web developer.
Shortly following, in late 2008, she had her first WordPress task, create a custom theme for a client’s new blog. Kailey’s first question: What’s WordPress? (though she probably said it with a lowercase p). With a lot of help from Google, she did eventually complete the custom theme, which was really just a heavily modified version of the default Kubrick theme. In 2009 she attended the first Seattle WordCamp, and around this time, her interest was piqued. Since then, she’s started doing all sorts of things with WordPress, including just reading through core. Countless code snippets, a handful of plugins, and a few WordCamps later bring her to today, as a full-fledged WordPress geek.

Kailey is presenting Don’t Put That In Functions.php! (Or, How to Write A Basic Plugin)

Grant Landram

Grant is a designer/developer with a background in business, as well as half a decade of experience working exclusively with WordPress as a CMS for his clients. Grant started as a freelancer building small sites, and has since grown his company into a WordPress exclusive agency building plugins and themes for numerous Fortune 500 companies. You can follow Grant on Twitter at @grantlandram or learn more at http://www.freshmuse.com.

Grant is presenting How to Build a Professional WordPress Business

Ben Lobaugh

Ben is a Seattlite and organizer of the Seattle WordPress Developer Meetup. When not out sailing, Ben can be found hacking out WordPress code at FreshMuse where he is currently Chief Code Poet (Head of Development). Ben has worked with companies from mom & pop shops to multinational corporations, consulting on building effective web platforms and strategies.

Ben is presenting How to Use WP-Cron

Eric Mann

Eric is a web developer, writer, and outdoorsman from the Pacific Northwest. He builds WordPress themes and plugins under the name Jumping Duck Media. Eric is also a community moderator for the WordPress Stack Exchange and a contributor to WordPress core. When not hacking WP apart, Eric is either publishing code to GitHub, publishing books for friends, out recklessly losing himself in the woods.

Eric is presenting Questions You’re Too Embarrassed to Ask

Shane Pearlman

Shane Pearlman is the Chief Executive Officer at Modern Tribe, the company behind The Events Calendar Framework as well as numerous high profile WordPress sites for companies like GigaOm, Zillow, Seagate & MTV. He has spoken at SXSW, GigaOm’s Future of Work, eBay and numerous barcamps. Shane is a contributor on the topic of remote work, business & freelancing to Mashable, A List Apart, Smashing Magazine, GigaOm and more. He is an active participant in both the WordPress and RoR Redmine / Chili open source projects. Shane is a Freelance Evangelist, Coder, Project Manager, Speaker, Blogger, Surfer, Toddler Wrangler, Goat Herder, Real Estate Investor, Teacher, Intrepid Traveler & Voracious Reader.

Shane is presenting The Art & Science of Premium

Robert Rowley

Robert is a security architect at DreamHost.com, a shared and virtual hosting provider for approximately over one million websites and hundreds of thousands of customers. DreamHost provides the unique environment which requires providing increased security for an extremely broad range of websites and customers, all without being intrusive to their hosting experience.

Robert is presenting WordPress Security 101 (and beyond)

Justin Sainton

Justin Sainton is the founder of Zao, a web firm based in Portland, Oregon.

As a core contributor to WordPress and a core developer for the WP E-Commerce project, Justin believes passionately in the philosophy of open-source software. Working exclusively with WordPress and an array of other open-source technologies, Justin and Zao have provided creative and effective solutions for a wide variety of companies and associations ranging from Targus to Pitney Bowes to the National Education Association to HTC.

When not building the Zao empire or spending time with his beautiful wife and lovely daughters, Justin can be found enjoying the best espresso in Portland (Stumptown, naturally).

Justin is presenting WordPress + E-Commerce = $$$

Zack Tollman

Zack has been building websites for over 8 years, specializing in WordPress implementations since 2007. Zack was attracted to WordPress’ blend of exciting features in combination with a highly usable and engaging publishing environment. When Zack is not building websites for 10up clients, he gives back to the community by building plugins, teaching new developers about WordPress, and contributing code to other projects.

Zack is presenting _doing_it_wrong: Improving Your Development Skills Through Examining Bad Practices

Robert Wagner

A native of the Pacific Northwest, Robert Wagner is the founder and former owner of Cascadia.fm (formerly pdx.fm), the most popular Internet talk radio station and podcast studio in the region.. Jack of all trades and master of at least 1/2 of 1 of them, Robert has had much success in technology and new media – and then he got into podcasting and Internet radio.

A self-professed WordPress addict, Robert is also a well-practiced social media crazy, and host of the once popular and quasi-controversial “Portland Sucks” podcast.

Robert is presenting Frankenblog: Group Blogging with WordPress for Fun, Frustration, & Financial Gain