All posts by Joe Casabona

Get to Know Your Speakers: Zach LeBar

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1) What do you do for a living (company you work for, official title, daily responsibilities, etc.)?

I’m a freelance nerd-for-hire. With experience in everything from branding and illustration to web development and sysadmin work, I’m basically a “jack of all web-related trades”. I really enjoy working on projects with multiple facets.

2) How did you get into WordPress?

Spoiler Alert! My talk at WCScranton is actually all about how I got into WordPress and why I’m back to using it today, so you’ll have to wait to hear that story 😉

3) What’s a great experience you had at a WordCamp?

Actually, this will be the first WordCamp I’ve attended. I’ve been aware of them for several years and always thought they’d be a great sort event to attend, so I’m really excited to be a part of WCScranton and hope to have some great experiences.

4) What are your non-WordPress, non-Computer related hobbies?

I could ramble on about all my different interests for way, way too long. I’ll keep it short though and say that I love drawing and painting, as well as exploring the great outdoors. My wife and I really love hiking around the Pocono Mountains where we live. There’s some really beautiful scenery.

Oh and disc golf! I love playing disc golf too. If you don’t know what that is, look it up, it’s awesome.

5) If you could be any fictional character, who would you be and why?

Captain Jean-Luc Picard. Obviously. I mean he’s the best of all the Enterprise captains (bring it on Kirk fans!), he had a holodeck to play with, and he got to boldly go where no one has gone before, seeking out new life and new civilizations.

Ever since I was a little kid I’ve wanted to be an explorer. Space is the final (and maybe the most interesting) frontier. So yea, I think being the starship captain of the Federation’s flagship is as cool as it gets!

Getting to Know Your Speakers: Anthony Laurence

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profilepic1) What do you do for a living (company you work for, official title, daily responsibilities, etc.)?

I’m a web developer/online marketeer for Resource Associates Corp. We train and provide services to business consultants and life coaches. My day to day includes building WordPress sites as well as our online tools for our affiliates as well as oversee our nurture marketing services.

2) How did you get into WordPress?

I found a book at Borders(R.I.P) that was on sale! lol

I was looking to expand my skill set and I had looked into several CMS’s(WP, Drupal, Concrete5) and at the time WordPress was the one that I found easiest to work with from both a developer and a user standpoint. I then purchased aforementioned discounted book, Smashing WordPress, and never looked back.

3) What’s a great experience you had at a WordCamp?

I always think that the greatest experiences at Wordcamps are when I get to see presentations on real life examples of innovative ways people are using WordPress. WP has the potential to be so much more than a blogging platform or a website framework; I love seeing people utilize it in ways that you wouldn’t normally imagine.

4) What are your non-WordPress, non-Computer related hobbies?

I have two kids, so my hobbies include driving to and from basketball practice, driving to and from Girl Scout meetings, and being protector from bugs that infiltrated the house.

When I am not doing that, I do enjoy getting outdoors to offset all of the time that I spend indoors.

5) If you could be any fictional character, who would you be and why?

I’m a big fan of the Fantasy genre, so I can’t think of a character so much as fictional worlds I would like to visit. I grew up reading Tolkien and Jordan and am really into Brandon Sanderson right now. So any of those worlds.

And while I like R.R. Martin, no Game of Thrones. I don’t want to die.

Get to Know Your Speakers: Taylor McCaslin

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1) What do you do for a living (company you work for, official title, daily responsibilities, etc.)?
I’m a Technical Product Manager living in Austin, Texas. I currently work at WP Engine, a managed hosting platform for websites and apps built with WordPress. I spend most days working to make the lives of WP Engine customers better. I listen to customer feedback, investigate new features, track down bugs, and help drive our product forward. My current focus is improving the developer tools we offer at WP Engine, making it easier and more efficient to develop WordPress websites on our platform.

2) How did you get into WordPress?
WordPress actually paid my way through college. I studied business, digital art & media, theatre, and computer science at UT Austin. That mix of studies provided me with a lot of great opportunities to engage Austin businesses—like local theatres—to help them build websites, powered by WordPress. I started a freelance business during college which ultimately helped me graduate college without any debt, and some extra cash in my pocket to fund my new technology habit. WordPress has always had a special place in my heart for the opportunities it opened up for me during my college years. WordPress has been my platform of choice now for over 5 years. I’ve built websites, mobile apps, ticketing systems, ecommerce sites, and headless backend systems on WordPress. I have yet to find something I couldn’t make WordPress do.

3) What’s a great experience you had at a WordCamp?
By far the best experience I’ve had was giving my multisite presentation to a packed room of 50-60 developers at WordCamp Philly in June. There is just something about having a room full of people with whom you get to share your experience. My favorite part of speaking at WordCamps is the Q&A at the end. I love hearing how people are using WordPress in new and interesting ways.

4) What are your non-WordPress, non-Computer related hobbies?
Well if I’m not playing with whatever new technology that’s captivating me at the moment (coin, vessyl, Apple Watch, nest, etc) I can be found experiencing the rich Austin, Texas art scene. Having studied theatre in college, I always enjoy attending a local theatre production. Anytime I’m traveling to a new city I always check out what’s on stage at the local theatres.

5) If you could be any fictional character, who would you be and why?
This one is easy, my inner tech geek makes this a no brainer: Tony Stark. I can just imagine what I’d do with a limitless supply of advanced technology, cash, and a best friend AI. I identify so much with Stark in the Iron Man series: endless curiosity, a knack for figuring out how anything works, and a drive to always be pushing the limits of what technology can allow us to do. Technology allows us to do more with less, it connects us to people we otherwise would never meet, it opens up new opportunities and drives innovation.

Get to Know Your Speakers: Dustin Leer

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1) What do you do for a living (company you work for, official title, daily responsibilities, etc.)?
Currently I am a freelance designer/front-end developer. I work on independent projects from clients who are either referenced to me or have contacted me directly. My official title is Creative Mastermind and I am in charge of almost everything since I work primarily alone, though I do try to team up with other creatives and developers from time to time.

2) How did you get into WordPress?
I got into WordPress about 3 years ago thanks to George Stephanis who gently shoved me in that direction. At the time I was primarily using Squarespace to complete client web projects.

3) What’s a great experience you had at a WordCamp?
It was my first WordCamp and Matt Mullenweg came to WordCamp Philly 2013. It was super awesome meeting him and then hanging out with all the people from that years WordCamp, it really opened my eyes up to what and who makes up the WordPress community!

4) What are your non-WordPress, non-Computer related hobbies?
I like to do Olympic Style Lifting, so yes I like to pick things up and put them down. I also love to spend time with my 2 year old son who loves climbing all over me like I am some sort of tree.

5) If you could be any fictional character, who would you be and why?
I would be be Batman because you should always be yourself unless you can be Batman, then always be Batman. Plus he has some awesome gadgets/toys!

Get to Know Your Speakers: Lauren Pittenger

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1) What do you do for a living (company you work for, official title, daily responsibilities, etc.)?
I’m a front end designer/developer at LBDesign. We’re a small communications consultancy. I design and build websites with HTML, CSS/SASS, PHP and WordPress. I mainly build custom themes. I am also an instructor for the Women’s Coding Collective.

2) How did you get into WordPress?
After I got my undergrad degree in English, I took an HTML class that I had a lot of fun with and then I went back to school for a web design certificate. One of my teachers there told me about a company looking for a web person, whose website was on WordPress. I was like “but I don’t know WordPress!” She was like, “you’re fine.” Then I worked for them for two years.

3) What’s a great experience you had at a WordCamp?
I’ve only ever been to one WordCamp and it was WordCamp Philly 2015. It was amazing. I met a ton of really awesome people and learned a lot, too!

4) What are your non-WordPress, non-Computer related hobbies?
When I’m not at my computer I like to snuggle with my puppies, paint, crafts, and yoga. I also like scrapbooking, writing, reading, meditation and have interest in women’s issues and fashion.

5) If you could be any fictional character, who would you be and why?
I would be Sabrina the teenage witch because magic!

Infinite Thanks to Our Community Sponsors!

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Thank you to our generous WordPress community sponsors! These are sponsors who pledge to support the WordPress community in a certain region (or, in some cases, the whole world). Their support allows us to concentrate on creating stupendous, volunteer-organized events for the WordPress community.

Outstanding community sponsors:

bluehost_main_logoBluehost has been a WordPress partner since 2005 and powers over one million WordPress sites. Their goal is to provide outstanding hosting services and customer support for the best possible price. Bluehost is also constantly innovating and upgrading their services and infrastructure at no additional cost to their customers. Join the millions of other website owners that have already chosen Bluehost and see how they can help you with your site.

wiredtreelogo600wideWiredTree provides Managed VPS and Managed Dedicated Servers to WordPress users worldwide from our Chicago-based data center and offices. Every WT server is backed by 24×7 telephone support, ticket support with 15 minute average response times, and is fully managed and monitored by WiredTree to maximize uptime and minimize frustration. All servers come ready-to-run with cPanel/WHM and are optimized and security hardened with firewall and anti-spam out of the box. With experience in SSD technology, MariaDB, Memcached, WordPress plugins, server optimization, and LiteSpeed Web server, WiredTree can take your site’s performance to the next level.

mt-250x140-dkFrom its inception in 1998, (mt) Media Temple has been on a mission to help people and businesses succeed online. Over 125,000 customers in 100 countries now rely on Media Temple’s tools for domain registration, web hosting, business applications, virtual servers, and other cloud services to power more than 1.5 million websites. With 200 dedicated, U.S.-based employees, Media Temple takes pride in their 24/7 customer support. Their customers range from everyday people to top bloggers, creative professionals, and small businesses, as well as large enterprises like Starbucks, Adidas, Samsung, and Toyota.

jetpack-logo-horizontal-940x198Jetpack is a free WordPress plugin that simplifies managing your sites by connecting to WordPress.com. This connection enables Photon (global CDN for images), uptime monitoring, brute force protection, traffic-boosting tools, single sign on, multiple site management, and automatic or bulk plugin updates. Additionally Jetpack includes several features that help you customize the look-and-feel of your site without needing extra plugins. More information can be found at jetpack.me

Superb community sponsors:

GoDaddy_logo-1GoDaddy’s mission is to radically shift the global economy toward small businesses by empowering people to easily start, confidently grow and successfully run their own ventures. With more than 12 million customers worldwide and 57 million domain names under management, GoDaddy gives small business owners the tools to name their idea, build a beautiful online presence, attract customers and manage their business.

Splendid community sponsors:

wpmlOnTheGoSystems is the author of WPML and Toolset plugins. WPML turns WordPress websites multilingual. It works with caching, SEO and E-Commerce plugins, and allows the building of complete multilingual sites. WPML powers simple blogs as well as corporate and enterprise sites. OnTheGoSystems is always looking for exceptional people to join the team. To learn more about our products and open positions, you can visit: http://www.onthegosystems.com/

dh_logo-a-2014-940x198DreamHost is a global Web hosting and cloud services provider with over 350,000 customers and 1.2 million blogs, websites and apps hosted. The company offers a wide spectrum of Web hosting and cloud services including Shared Hosting, Virtual Private Servers (VPS), Dedicated Server Hosting, Domain Name Registration, the cloud storage service, DreamObjects, and the cloud computing service DreamCompute. More information can be found at  http://dreamhost.com.

Get to Know Your Speakers: Rami Abraham

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1) What do you do for a living (company you work for, official title, daily responsibilities, etc.)?
I’m a developer at WebDevStudios, at which I work on team Maintainn – there I build cool WordPress solutions, audit and fix sites, and annoy coworkers with an endless stream of animated gifs and fart jokes. I’m also on the support team at affiliatewp.com, where, along with the plugin developers Pippin Williamson and Andrew Sumobi, we help customers with questions about the AffiliateWP plugin. Lastly, I’m one of the developers at LL Games, a mobile game dev company, in which we’re presently creating our first large MMO game.

2) How did you get into WordPress?
Quite incidentally; it was in the capacity of an end-user that I first became interested in WordPress. I was using a flat-file site structure back in late 2007, and wanted something better. I used MT and Blogger and others, and eventually stumbled onto WP in 2008.

3) What’s a great experience you had at a WordCamp?
Wow. I really have no idea where to start with this question. Every conference contains some combination of a great deal of learning, seeing old friends, making new friends, sharing great food and drinks, and usually at least one bizarre event resulting in photos I’ll regret in 20 years.

4) What are your non-WordPress, non-Computer related hobbies?
Music, video game development, cooking, Legos.

5) If you could be any fictional character, who would you be and why?
Ok, so, in this scenario, would I be the fictional character within their fictional world, or, like the movie Last Action Hero, would I be transported to this reality – the real world? If I have to remain in the characters’ fictional world, I’d probably first write a short story about someone exactly like me, except I have the mind of a 30 year-old self, in the body of my 10 year-old self. Also I invent a time machine so I can hand that 10 year-old self a Macbook from the future. That way I can invent JavaScript / Google. I’ll do it slowly though, inventing just enough each year to keep things interesting.

Some folks may consider this cheating, though. If so, my fallback answer is Commander Riker of the Starship Enterprise NCC-1701-D.

Get to Know Your Speakers: Kerch McConlogue

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hXZnuQJd1) What do you do for a living (company you work for, official title, daily responsibilities, etc.)?
I own my own web design/development company. So I do it all–mostly for small businesses and a couple of nonprofits. But in the past I was an artist, a coach for adults with ADHD and I produced BIG events. Like the Baltimore City Fair: National entertainment, fireworks, rides, the works. I also traveled 16 days with the Carson and Barnes Circus across the state of Maryland.

2) How did you get into WordPress?
I paid $1000 for my first website 1995. The second one, in 1999, I figured I could do myself. Started with a book and Note Pad. Around 2002 or so, at a business building event, the speaker mentioned BLOGS. I was one of a half dozen out of 100 who raised hands to say we had them. Mine was at Blogger; I really had no idea what to do with it–but I had one. My first WordPress installation started in 2005 with version 1.5. I really don’t remember exactly how I first found out about it, but I added the blog function to my existing website. And the rest, as they say, is history.

3) What’s a great experience you had at a WordCamp?
I think the best was at my first WordCamp in Boston (2011 I think). I realized that the crowd was not all 20-something goth men. I found plenty of “women of an age.” I was also surprised to see how much I did know, and how many people even I could explain stuff to.

4) What are your non-WordPress, non-Computer related hobbies?
We’re working on restoring a ’58 MGA and assorted other little British sports cars. I get to “hold a lot of stuff for a second.” But having sewed a great deal in my life I have a bigger part in the reupholstering the seats in that car and a ’67 Sunbeam Alpine. The Alpine we take on long trips. Besides that I love to buy plants (sometimes I even get them in the ground!) I’m sorting thru old family records, sewing and reading crappy mysteries. Oh yea.. and Pinterest!
5) If you could be any fictional character, who would you be and why?
I’d like to be any fictional character who talks to ghosts! I just think that would be cool.

Get to Know Your Speakers: Cameron Barrett

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1) What do you do for a living (company you work for, official title, daily responsibilities, etc.)
I’ve has been blogging since you were in grade school (well, some of you). I pioneered the blog format in the late 1990s and remember an eager, bright-eyed young man named Ma.tt being excited to meet one of the “founding fathers of blogging” in 2003.
I have designed and built web sites for presidential candidates, the U.S. Army, the World Economic Forum, Teach for America and I lead the migration of 70+ web sites from a terrifically-bad, proprietary SaaS to WordPress Multisite for New Jersey’s largest public school district.

I hail from Northern Michigan, but grew up internationally, and currently live in Northern NJ with my family. I am leading the charge for embracing “WordPress in Schools” and my goal is to eventually have all 14,000+ public school districts in this country using WordPress in some way through a services-based company called SchoolPress.

2) How did you get into WordPress?
Now, this is a story about how my site got flipped-turned upside down. I’ll take a minute to just sit right here and tell you how I came to use WordPress. I was born and raised in West Philadelphia where I spent most of my days chilling out online. But then I got all mixed up with 4chan and some guys who were up to no good. They started to make trouble in my online neighborhood. I got into one little Internet fight and my mom got scared. She said, “You’re moving with your aunt and uncle to California.”

I begged and pleaded with her day after day but she packed up my  MacBook Air and sent me on my way. She gave me a kiss and gave me my ticket. I put on my earbuds and said, “I might as well switch it up.” I flew first class, orange juice out of a champagne glass and all. Is this what living in California is going to be like? All right.

Well, the plane landed and when I came out there was a due who looked like a cop standing there with my name on a card. I wasn’t sure what to do, I just got here, so I hightailed it out of there and whistled for a cab. The license plate said Ma.tt and it had dice in the mirror. If anything, I could say this cab was rare. But I thought, “California, take me and my MacBook Air.”

We pulled up to a house around 7 or 8pm and I yelled to the cabbie, “Yo Ma.tt, see ya later.” I looked at my kingdom. I was finally there. To sit on my throne as the Prince of Bel-Air.

3) What’s a great experience you had at a WordCamp?
I especially appreciate the willingness and eagerness of WordCamp attendees to help others out, no matter their level of expertise. I spend a lot of time at very technical conferences and the technical vs non-technical cliques are very obvious. WordCamps span the gap quite well.

4) What are your non-WordPress, non-Computer related hobbies?
Biking, hiking and travel. About 15 years ago I came very close to starting an adventure travel company in Siberia but the funding fell through and the local Russian mafia advised me against it.

5) If you could be any fictional character, who would you be and why?
Wapuu. It’s not every day that you get to be the mascot for every WordCamp in the world.

Get to Know Your Speakers: George Stephanis

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George Stephanis1) What do you do for a living (company you work for, official title, daily responsibilities, etc.)

I work for Automattic, leading the team that builds the Jetpack plugin! 🙂

2) How did you get into WordPress?

I got into WordPress in depth around 2011 while freelancing — I was looking for a way to give back to the community and software project that had made my life so much easier.

3) What’s a great experience you had at a WordCamp?

While at the contributor day following WordCamp Philly 2011 — my very first WordCamp — Nacin merged in my first changeset to core, which I think was converting three sequential periods `…` into an ellipses `…` entity.

4) What are your non-WordPress, non-Computer related hobbies?

I enjoy woodworking and letterpress printing.

5) If you could be any fictional character, who would you be and why?

Probably Gilad Pellaeon, from the old Star Wars Extended Universe.  While he was an officer in the Imperial Navy and later the Imperial Remnants, he wasn’t evil, but rather an advocate for order, peace, and providing as best as could be managed for all the citizens under his purview.

Yes, I’m picking a Star Wars character, and no, this decision was in no way influenced by Joe.