Matt Mullenweg
Matt Mullenweg is the co-founder of the open-source blogging platform, WordPress, the most popular publishing platform on the web, and the founder of Automattic, the company behind WordPress.com and Jetpack. Additionally, Matt is a principal and founder of Audrey Capital, an investment and research company.
Matt got his start in technology working at CNET Networks as a senior product manager. He went on to found Global Multimedia Protocols Group, an experimental metamemetics company, to develop open data formats. He has been recognized for his leadership and success by Forbes, BusinessWeek, INC., PC World, and Vanity Fair.
Matt is originally from Houston, Texas, where he attended the High School for the Performing and Visual Arts and studied jazz saxophone. In his spare time, Matt is an avid photographer. Matt splits time between Houston, New York, and San Francisco.
Rami Abraham
Rami is a WordPress developer and ‘gif savant’ at WebDevStudios. He’s been building with WordPress since version 2.8, with a heavy focus in JavaScript and CSS. Prior to that, he worked in a few lead roles at web agencies, with a focus on JavaScript application development. He enjoys working with an unending variety of frameworks, SVG animation, and is part of the AffiliateWP support team after hours.
A co-organizer of WordPress Lancaster as well as WordCamp Lancaster, Rami also attends and speaks at a variety of WordCamps, other tech conferences and meetups. In his remaining time, Rami practices and writes music for a variety of small electronic music labels. He’s pretty great at Legos, and likes to take his time assembling even the smallest Lego creation.
Zach LeBar
During his time in the Web industry he’s done a little bit of everything. He’s a designer, a developer, a writer, and an artist. He’s been a sysadmin, a technical support officer, even an Apple senior advisor. At the heart of it all though has been the Web. Thanks to the power and openness found online, he’s been able to teach himself everything he knows today about web design and development.
Lauren Pittenger
Lauren is a front end developer and designer. She chose her topic because she sees bloggers using out-of-the-box default WordPress themes and she wants to show them that there are ways that we can make our sites our own without having to know how to build an entire theme from scratch.
She also am an instructor with the Women’s Coding Collective in their WordPress Basics course and gets a lot of folks asking about creating child themes after learning the basics and wants to help others out there with the same questions.
Taylor McCaslin
Taylor McCaslin is a Technical Product Manager living in Austin, Texas. He currently works at WP Engine, a managed hosting platform for websites and apps built with WordPress. WordPress has been Taylor’s platform of choice for over 5 years. He even paid his way through college by freelancing as a WordPress developer! Since then, Taylor has created custom WordPress themes and plugins for a large range of clients from SMBs to multinational corporations.
Previously, Taylor helped people find jobs as an Interaction Designer at the world’s largest job search engine, Indeed.com. Before that, he worked as a Product Design Intern at Bazaarvoice. Taylor graduated from UT Austin in 2013, where he studied business, digital art and media, theatre, and computer science.
When not pushing pixels or coding, Taylor can be found geeking out with the latest tech gadget or experiencing the rich Austin, Texas art scene. You can learn more about Taylor at taylormccaslin.com or by following him @Taylor4484.
Dustin Leer
Dustin is a proud poppa that loves graphic & web design. Currently he is addicted to Olympic Lifting, learning all he can aboutWordPress, PHP, JavaScript/jQuery & responsive web design! He has been designing stuff since 2001 and has been making the web beautiful and functional since 2009.
Renée Moore
Renee had a really bad website using iWeb (remember that from Mac?), wanted to improve it, and heard about WordPress. She called her friend who was also new in business and convinced her they should try this WordPress thing. After getting her site set up, she started to learn all she could about WordPress and now she does sites for others. She chose her topic because plugins are what made her fall in love with WordPress.
Anthony Laurence
Anthony started as a designer and developer and have been building WordPress sites since 2010. During his career he quickly learned that most clients need more than just a website built, so he gravitated into taking on online marketing duties as well. He picked RESS as a topic because it is an important tool that every developer and designer should know in order to provide their clients with the websites that their clients need to stand out and truly compete on the web.
Ben Dunkle
Ben is a core designer for WordPress.org. He’s designed thousands of icons for WP, including the current Dashicons that we see in the wp-admin. He’s a full-time professor at Canisius College in Buffalo, NY, and a designer for Field 2, his design consultancy.
He teach WordPress nearly every day & see many opportunities for the WP community be better teachers, but not many resources. Hopefully his talk will change that!
He’s organized and spoken at 3 Buffalo WordCamps, WCNY, and WCSF & runs a bi-weekly WordPress users meetup group.
Kerch McConlogue
Kerch McConlogue, retired ADHD coach and front-end developer, has been writing code by hand for 16 years and using WordPress since version 1.5. Her passion is for helping WordPress novices to understand (at least) the basics of care and feeding of their own site and to get past their fears of breaking the internet and of their site developer.
Cameron Barrett
Cameron (@camworld) pioneered the blog format in the late 1990s. He’s built web sites for presidential candidates, the U.S. Army, the World Economic Forum and led the migration of 70+ web sites from a proprietary SaaS to WordPress for NJ’s largest public school district. He’s now migrating all 14,000+ U.S. public school districts to WordPress (via his startup/SaaS K12presser.com), saving millions of taxpayer dollars. He hails from Northern Michigan and currently lives outside of NYC with his family.
George Stephanis
George Stephanis is the Team Lead for the Jetpack Pit Crew at Automattic (the company behind WordPress.com). When not working on Jetpack, he spends his time contributing to Core, running the WordPress Lancaster Meetup Group and WordCamp Lancaster PA, and is a regular on the WP Watercooler podcast.
Dustin Meza
Dustin Meza is the Senior Manager of Customer Experience Operations at WP Engine. He has been in the hosting industry for 7 years and has been with WP Engine for 2 years. At WP Engine, Dustin oversees many aspects of the WordPress platform including WordPress upgrades for over 100,000 WordPress installs.