Speakers

Alena Holligan

Wife, Mother, Programmer, Designer, Teacher, Leader. With almost 20 years of programming experience, she is passionate about helping people overcome their own barriers to excellence in order to achieve confidence in their ability to learn and succeed.

Andrea Middleton

Andrea Middleton has worked with WordCamp organizers since 2011, helping people plan events that inspire people to do more with WordPress, connect the WordPress community, and contribute to the WordPress project. A wine enthusiast and avid reader of science fiction, Andrea lives in Portland, Oregon with her husband and two kids.

Andrew Taylor

Andrew currently works for Pantheon as a Developer Programs Engineer providing consulting to their agency partners around complex workflows and automation. He also enjoys giving back to the WordPress community through the hosting group, plugin development and speaking at WordCamps. As a former web developer, Andrew spent his time on large scale projects for clients such as AMC Networks, Frito Lay, National Van Lines and more. With over 10 years of web development experience, specializing in WordPress, he is a seasoned veteran.

Becky Davis

Becky is a custom theme developer based in Chicago. She runs the local meetup there and has been active in the WordPress community since 2010. She loves movies, good whiskey and visiting her cousin in Portland.

Benjamin Turner

I’m a full stack Web Developer who loves to tinker with new technologies. I wear many hats on projects and can often be found doing things ranging from front and backend development to content migrations and DevOps things like setting up and troubleshooting infrastructure.

Beth Ball

I’m Senior Content Strategist for UplinkSpyder in Eugene, Oregon. I use data to write content that engages and compels the readers to act. I’m a firm believer in humor as a marketing tool as it helps create a bond between the customer and brand, and that creates brand loyalty. I pretty much get paid to play with words, which is my childhood dream come true!

Bob Dunn

I am a blogger and podcaster on BobWP.com that focuses on WordPress, eCommerce and monetizing your blog. Been active in the WordPress space since 2007 and spent many of those years educating WordPress users through workshops, online training, coaching and blogging. I tend to blog a lot and run two podcasts. One is a WordPress eCommerce podcast and the other is Do the Woo, a WooCommerce podcast. When I’m not WordPressing I am devouring fiction and old, old movies with Judy and our cat, Chester.

Chris Lema

Chris Lema is the Vice President of Products at Liquid Web. He’s also a blogger, public speaker, and WooCommerce evangelist.

Corey McKrill

Corey has worked full time as a WordPress developer and designer since 2009. Currently he is a member of the WordPress Meta Team, where he focuses on building tools that support WordPress community events, such as WordCamp.org. Corey lives in Corvallis, but was born and raised in Juneau, Alaska, which makes Portland and the Willamette Valley seem downright arid in comparison.

David Greenwald

I’m a freelance WordPress developer and performance engineer designing sites and making them faster. I’ve jumped into the WordPress world full-time after 10 years as a music critic and culture journalist.

Derek Herman

Derek is the VP of Technology at XWP and technical lead for the Tide Core development team and is responsible for the DevOps work related to Tide. As well, he’s been a WordPress Core contributor & Customize component maintainer since WordPress 4.1 and has been developing GPL licensed WordPress themes & plugins for over a decade.

Dwayne McDaniel

Dwayne has been working in tech and open source since 2005. As soon as he started working with Java middleware developers he knew never wanted to work outside of open source ever again. Dwayne first started building in Drupal and WordPress for the San Francisco Improv community, where we fell in the love the Open Source communities. As a Developer Advocate at Pantheon he has had the privilege of presenting at dozens of community events from Paris to Iceland and from MIT and Stanford. Reach out at mcdwayne.com or on twitter @mcdwayne

Erika Saracco

Erika Saracco is the Creative Director at City Ranked, a digital marketing agency in Vancouver that provides data-driven solutions for Web Design, SEO, and SEM. Striking the balance between the often-conflicting goals of design and function is her daily pursuit, and she strives for innovation and efficiency.

Erin Olmon

Erin is a User Experience practitioner and hobbyist beekeeper. She lives in Hillsboro, OR.

Felix Arntz

Felix is a web developer and open-source contributor from Germany. Just recently, he joined Google as a Developer Programs Engineer to further improve WordPress and the open web, and he is therefore currently in the process of moving to Zürich, Switzerland. He has been involved in WordPress core development for several years, as a core committer and component maintainer for Multisite, Capabilities and the REST API. He furthermore writes plugins and libraries, focusing on developing clean and sustainable solutions. Before joining Google, he was a freelancer and part-time contractor for Yoast.
When not doing WordPress stuff, he spends his time producing music, playing the piano and soccer. He does all of that while drinking a lot of Mountain Dew.

Fellene Gaylord

For over a decade, Fellene has been building smart websites for small businesses using WordPress. With a foundation in graphic design, topped by 2 decades of coding, she finds WordPress offers the solid foundation for her web projects and the creative license to make her ideas come to life. She works as the Creative in Chief of Sirius Media and is Associate Professor of WordPress and other web topics at Clark College in Vancouver, Washington.

Jocelyn Mozak

As a Cornell & Stanford University graduate and Intel engineer turned homemaker and entrepreneur; I know the unique challenges of walking away from one’s expected plan in life to create your own unique path. While my education in engineering certainly refined my technical and analytical skills, it is my passion for what I do that makes me an outstanding WordPress website designer. I’m an expert in thinking outside the box and filtering out the key points amidst all the noise. I have over a decade of experience building, running and wrangling a 6-Figure WordPress Web Design Agency working part-time while having two boys at home under the age of thirteen. I love life, family, friends and running my business with my team!

Joshua Giowaya

I’m Passionate about creating well-crafted, visually engaging and highly usable digital experiences. I have 10+ years in web design & development at advertising and digital agencies, plus a number of years running my own consultancy. I also bring an extensive background in design that has proven invaluable when contributing to the design process and communicating with creative teams. Currently, I’m a WordPress consultant extremely active in the WordPress community. I regularly attend and speak at local WordPress Meetups. My hope is to give back to a community that has shared so much knowledge with me.

Kathy Zant

Kathy Zant is a seasoned digital executive with over 20 years of web development experience for companies large and small. She’s been using WordPress for over a decade. In the last two years, she’s been a security analyst for Wordfence, developing services for WordPress users to better understand and manage their site security. She currently lives in Phoenix, but her heart resides in Mount Shasta, California.

Larry Swanson

Larry Swanson is a lifelong publisher and 20-year digital strategist. He hosts the Content Strategy Interviews podcast, gleaning insights from luminaries like content design inventor Sarah Richards, UX guru Jared Spool, Lynda.com instructor Morten Rand-Hendriksen, “toxic tech” warrior Sara Wachter-Boettcher, and dozens of other content-strategy experts. He’s always looking out for the interests of small-business owners like WordPress agencies and independent professionals like freelance designers and coders, hence his development of the “DIY Content Strategy” concept. He contributes to WordPress as a community deputy and event organizer.

Machielle Thomas

After nearly a decade in finance, Machielle Thomas turned her love for content and social media into a more fulfilling career. Machielle has written content for small agencies and major corporations, such as Golfsmith and 11 brands for Starwood Hotels. She currently manages all things content and social for Bluehost. Machielle believes that great content starts with strategy and ends with analysis. A southern girl at heart, Machielle lives and learns in Austin, TX.

Matthew Eppelsheimer

Matthew studied politics at Whitman College before an early management consulting career facilitating strategy for public agencies and private nuclear waste cleanup contractors. He’s developed with WordPress for 15 years and helmed Rocket Lift, a Portland-based agency that built software for impactful organizations. Matthew joined 10up as a Senior Web Engineer in July, 2018. His passion for applying user experience design plus his mix of technical knowhow, entrepreneurial creativity, and experience with channeling conflict into collaboration and high-stakes risk management contribute to his ability to work with complex systems. Matthew’s recognized for integrity, compassion, openness, rigor, and building others up.

Michelle Levine

I’m Michelle, a creative front end developer. I love learning and sharing what I know with the Portland Tech Community. I am a leader/organizer for several meetup groups here including Women Who Code Portland and PDXNode.

Mikey Veenstra

Mikey is a researcher, writer, and speaker who specializes in malware identification and taxonomy. He is passionate about information security, data privacy, and the open source community. He holds a GWAPT certification and is a member of the GIAC Advisory Board. As a Threat Analyst at Defiant, Michael analyzes threat intelligence in order to provide up-to-date malware signatures and firewall rules to Wordfence users worldwide. Outside of his work he enjoys tabletop gaming and cooking, and dreams of starting a nonprofit to make DFIR more accessible to charities.

Nick Halsey

Nick Halsey is a WordPress user, theme designer, plugin developer, and core contributor. As a customize component maintainer for core, he’s focused on improving both user and developer experience, introducing features such as panels, menu management, JavaScript-templated controls, media controls, device preview, additional CSS, and theme installation in the customizer. Nick works full-time at KPFF Consulting Engineers designing new building structures and seismic retrofits. He is also a multi-instrumentalist and classical composer specializing in cello ensemble music.

Rocky Kev

Rocky Kev is the course technologist at Mirasee, which uses WordPress to power all of its online courses. In the past three years, he has built 11 courses and counting, which have reached more than 8,000 students. As the education landscape continues to evolve, Rocky and the team at Mirasee developed custom WordPress tools for their courses improve the student experience and ensure their success

Zachary Brown

As Director of Systems Engineering at 10up, Zachary leads a team that focuses on the infrastructure side of WordPress, establishing scalable, performant, and secure hosting solutions. Working for the past 7 years in partnership with many WordPress managed hosting providers as well as on the major cloud computing platforms has given Zachary a unique perspective into the best practices needed for a fast and scalable WordPress website. Zachary has a Master’s degree in Meteorology from North Carolina State University and brings the same rigorous attention to detail to his work with WordPress as he did his thesis on hurricanes.