We’ve got some awesome talent lined up for WordCamp Austin this year. Take a look at who we’ve confirmed below.
Ryan Duff
Ryan Duff has been working with WordPress since early 2004 and was the original author of WordPress Contact Form. As a long time community member, he enjoys exploring new ways to make use of WordPress. Making things simple for clients and pushing the envelope of what’s possible is at the core of that. Ryan is a developer by nature so he focuses primarily on back end architecture and less on design. He’s also an experienced linux sysadmin with 6+ years under his belt. Over the past few years he’s given various WordCamp talks highlighting these skills.
Corey Ellis
It has only been in the past 4 years that I stopped running from my calling to work in and around the internet. I have been building WordPress themes for the past 4 years and have another 6 years of experience in graphic design. I am one of the co-organizers of the ATX WordPress meetup.
Taylor Christensen
Taylor Christensen started learning to build WordPress plugins and themes when he was 16, and hasn’t looked back since. Over the last 5 years he’s built websites for clients ranging from small businesses and startups, to large newspapers and the State of Texas. Taylor runs a small web agency, CloudioWeb, where he focuses on cultivating content and community with design, strategy, and WordPress.
Devin Price
Devin Price is a WordPress developer in Austin, Texas. He’s built several popular themes (Portfolio Press and Visual) and a couple plugins (Options Framework). He also writes WordPress tutorials and posts code snippets at wptheming.com. He’ll probably show up to WordCamp on his bike.
Elise C. Alley
Elise is the Lead Support Tech for iThemes Exchange. She has been working with iThemes for two years, first in general plugin support, then leading Exchange support since its release, as well as support for each of the Exchange add-ons. When not working with Exchange, Elise can be found chasing her nephews, reading or watching zombie movies/shows to prepare for the upcoming apocalypse.
Chris Olbekson
Chris is a native Texan from Houston and works as a WordPress developer at X-Team, a WordPress.com VIP featured partner, building websites for some of the biggest brands in the world . He is also an active contributor to WordPress core and recently earned Rockstar status during the 3.8 release cycle. This will be his 3rd year attending and speaking at WordCamp Austin.
Jennifer L. Jones
Jennifer is a graphic designer, Adobe Certified Expert in InDesign, and teaches Digital Publishing at Austin Community College. She’s an avid knitter, and other knitters seem to enjoy her explanations of how she constructed things (they’re called patterns in the knitting world). Her relatively new blog is at www.jjlitke.com, and she spends way too much time on Twitter as @jenztweets. Her tolerant husband actually encourages all of this, but the dogs often insist on play breaks.
Ilene Haddad
Ilene Haddad is a graphic designer, business owner and Grand Poobah of BlogathonATX. Her work with Austin’s blogging community earned her the Creative Initiative Award from the Women Communicators of Austin and a Statesman Social Media Award. In her spare time, she hosts a co-working group for local entrepreneurs and draws comics at CasaWeenie.com. She lives in Austin with two lapdogs, one husband and about a dozen Apple products. Buy her a decaf espresso, and she’ll reveal all her secrets.* *Disclaimer: Ilene doesn’t really have any secrets, but she’ll happily make some up in exchange for coffee.
Joe Casabona
Joe Casabona is a web developer, author, and teacher who focuses primarily on WordPress and mobile development. His latest book, Responsive Design with WordPress is out now. He is also a Yankee fan, plays the drums, and enjoys a fine cigar from time to time. You can find him over at casabona.org or on Twitter at @jcasabona.
Nick Batik
Nick Batik has been building websites since 1994 and has been a WordPress consultant and developer for over six years. He specializes in custom theme design using the Genesis Framework. Nick contributes to the WordPress community as Co-organizer for the Austin WordPress Meetup Group, as a member of the organizing team for the WordCamp Austin 2010, 2012, and 2013, and WordUp Austin 2012. Nick is a lead trainer for HandsOnWP.com. Nick has had a life-long love affair with design and typography and has written numerous training courses, articles and seminars on design, publishing and web development. He has presented at publishing conferences in over 100 cities across the US, England, and Scandinavia. His work reflects his passion for elegant and effective information design and dedication to using design technology to communicate, and manage Information in a way that is beneficial to his clients and the client’s customers.
H. Sandra Chevalier-Batik
H. Sandra Chevalier-Batik is a WordPress Consultant, Curriculum Developer, Trainer and a lead instructor for Hands-On WordPress Training. She’s earned a reputation for taking highly complex subjects and presenting them in easily understood modules. Her informal approach helps put attendees at ease and ready to tackle unfamiliar material. Sandi brings over thirty-five years of real-world publishing experience to her presentations. She has enjoyed responsible assignments in print production and management; training program development; project management; quality system operations; product research and content creation and curation. She has gained an international reputation as a trainer and consultant for her expertise in graphic arts management, electronic publishing, and quality business processes. Sandi has conducted over 400 seminars and workshops and has been a featured speaker at numerous national and international publishing conferences. As a web content developer, Sandra’s reward is when a client reports that their site is bringing in customers and making them money. A WordPress Evangelist, since 2007, Sandi serves as a co-organizer of the Austin WordPress group. Additionally, she served as member of organizing team for WordCamp Austin 2010, Organizer for WordCamp Austin 2012, Co-Organizer Austin WordUp 2012, Co-Organizer WordCamp Austin 2013, and Dev-Day 2013.
Andy Cook
Andy built his first startup, Rentabilities, on WordPress and now works at HubSpot on LeadIn, an inbound marketing plugin for small businesses, bloggers and startups. He blogs about startups lessons learned at andygcook.com.
RC Johnson
RC has been a leader in the design and construction of high scale web applications for the last ten years. Currently he’s the Director of Engineering for WP Engine and his team’s platform is responsible for hosting over 120,000 domains running WordPress, and sees over 30 Million unique users every day. Prior to that RC founded the Bazaarvoice New York City office building a 10 person Engineering team focused on the Connections business which has brought thousands of new clients onto the Bazaarvoice platform. Originally, RC was a software developer writing high scale web and big data applications in Java with backends based on Oracle, MySQL, and various search engines (Solr/Fast).
Lani Rosales
Lani is the COO at The American Genius, Co-Founder of #BASHH, and has been named in the 100 Most Influential, as well as 12 Most Influential Women in Blogging. She is a business and tech writer is immersed not only in advanced technologies and new media, but is also a stats nerd often buried in piles of reports. Lani is a proven leader, thoughtful speaker, and vested partner at The American Genius and helped grow the news outlet to over 6 million readers. Sidenote: if Lani was a piñata, she would be filled with internet cats, chocolate syrup which she most certainly does NOT squeeze into her mouth from the bottle, and cuss words.
Jackie Dana
Jackie is a WordPress evangelist. As a Happiness Engineer at Automattic, she provides support for users on WordPress.com, and she’s also a co-organizer for the WordPress Austin meetup. She’s also a writer, homebrewer, herbalist, dreamer, and schemer, and frequently documents those activities on her blog at jackiedana.wordpress.com.
Yusuf Chowdhury
Yusuf Chowdhury is a Digital marketing Consultant, Coach and Speaker. He teaches and provides services in the areas of Social Media Marketing, SEO, Building WordPress based websites, Video marketing, Blogging, Mobile marketing. What started as a hobby back in 2006 became a passion and a business venture. Over the years, Yusuf has been a consultant to many non-profit organizations, small businesses, and online education groups to help them find ways to promote and advance their business. It is a motivation for him to empower others to start their businesses and see them grow as he helps them create a lasting legacy for themselves and their families. He loves to help new start-ups, entrepreneurs, local business owners through sharing his knowledge in online marketing channels and strategies. He provides trainings and classes to local businesses in San Antoino at Coworking Space, Local Community Colleges, University and Learning Centers. He also manages San Antonio WordPress Meetups.
Aaron Edwards
CTO and Lead Developer for WPMU DEV (140+ premium plugins and support) and Edublogs (hosting 2 million+ education blogs). WordPress plugin developer specializing in Multisite for 5 years. Proud father of 3 and a world travel nut.
Joe Casabona
Joe Casabona is a web developer, author, and teacher who focuses primarily on WordPress and mobile development. His latest book, Responsive Design with WordPress is out now. He is also a Yankee fan, plays the drums, and enjoys a fine cigar from time to time. You can find him over at casabona.org or on Twitter at @jcasabona.
Chris Nichols
I create personal and business websites using WordPress. Themes and designs are catered towards each clients needs often using frame works such as Genesis.
Grant Norwood
Grant is a native Austinite and WordPress chef. He currently develops websites for the Michael & Susan Dell Foundation, where WordPress has become a favorite platform because of its flexibility, ease of use, and awesome power in the cloud. Also an avid volunteer, he spends hours each week at Dell Children’s Hospital, and serves on the board of directors of Amber’s Angels, a children’s non-profit in Austin. Grant uses software to make things which help people and organizations be more successful on the web. Lately, Grant likes to wander GitHub, avoid people who use words like “paradigm” and “synergy”, and is taking his sweet time getting his pilot’s license. Follow @grantnorwood on Twitter, or discover the occasional blog post on his blog.
Pat Ramsey
Pat Ramsey is a WordPress consultant based out of Austin, Texas. A long-time developer, Pat specializes in custom WordPress theme development, plugin customization, and operational best-practices for the website owner. When he’s not building websites, he can be found organizing the Austin WordPress Meetup or helping run the tech networking community, Refresh Austin. He’s been a trainer and advisor for Knowbility’s Accessible Internet Rallies and AccessU. Pat is a former Navy Reserve sailor, a native Texan, and enjoys cooking large quantities of crawfish.
Amanda Krauss
Amanda Krauss is the Director of Technology at the Texas Tribune, an award-winning digital-only news outlet. Before that she was a freelance designer/developer who worked primarily with WordPress. In the years since joining the Tribune, she has worked with Rails and Django professionally while maintaining a personal WordPress blog. As such, she considers herself a platform-agnostic developer who believes strongly in cross-language experimentation.
Chris Lema
Chris Lema has spent two decades developing software products and software teams. He’s currently the VP of Software Engineering at Emphasys Software – a company you’ve never heard of. But he spends his evenings and weekends helping organizations leverage WordPress and helping WordPress organizations find leverage. He also blogs daily at chrislema.com.
Eric Binnion
Eric is from Wichita Falls, Tx where he is a senior computer science student at Midwestern State University and works for Microbrand Media. Eric spends his days working with WordPress and has built many themes, plugins, and even a CRM solution built using WordPress.
Jeanine Kay Lineback
Jeanine earned a B.A. from the University of Texas at Austin. She holds multiple technology certifications. Jeanine has done 508 compliance testing, Taught Career Guidance and Technology with the Texas Department of Assistive and Rehabilitative Services, consulted for state agencies on web accessibility and written screen reader scripts to integrate with proprietary software. Her career with Knowbility has included giving screen reader demonstrations and presentations in the community, teaching courses for Access University, testing websites for usability/accessibility and assisting with judging web sites for the Accessibility Internet Rally. Now she handles Knowbility’s digital rights and social media management, manages the Access-Works program and is the Senior Access Technology Specialist. In addition to her job at Knowbility, she launched Lineback Enterprises LLc in 2012. The company’s mission is to provide technology and employment training to youth and young adults with visual impairments. Read more about Jeanine at LinkedIn.
Jason Cohen
The Founder of WP Engine, Jason has built four startups in Austin, all profitable, all with 7- or 8-figures in revenue, both bootstrapped and funded, sold two, and currently serves as the CTO of WP Engine. Jason blogs about startups at A Smart Bear.
Tony Tovar
Tony Tovar’s passion is sky rocketing small business owners into online dominance and providing tried & tested marketing services that will catapult their online exposure into the stratosphere. When he’s not movin’ and shakin’ things up on the internet, you can find him organizing events in the entrepreneurial community as the founder of the Austin Entrepreneurs meetup group.
Nelson Joyce
A Boston native and product designer currently building LeadIn, a WordPress plugin startup.
Chris Wiegman
Chris is the developer of iThemes Security (formerly Better WP Security) and has been working on WordPress security for over 5 years. Previously a captain for a small airline Chris’ interest in security began on his first day as an employed pilot, 9/11 and gradually evolved over the years to helping individuals and smaller organizations protect their websites from many of the common methods attackers use to compromise their victims. When not coding Chris loves to teach and has taught computer security for St. Edward’s University as well as other courses ranging from computers to aviation.
Brandon Kraft
Kraft as he’s better known, started building websites in 1996 and hasn’t looked back. Kraft has worked with his own “weblog” since 2002, first in HTML, then Movable Type, then finally to WordPress. Kraft ran a freelance web development business exclusively using WordPress. Currently, Kraft works at Automattic, the parent company of WordPress.com, focusing on the Jetpack plugin. Married with three young daughters, you can follow Kraft on Twitter (@Kraft) and on his personal site (http://www.brandonkraft.com/).
Zack Tollman
Residing in Portland, Oregon, Zack longs for the cold, snowy days of his Alaskan youth. He enjoys strumming his guitar, playing hockey, and spending time with his fiancée and dog. Otherwise, you’ll find him at his computer meticulously spinning lines of clean WordPress code.
Fernando Labastida
Fernando Labastida speaks and writes about content marketing in both Spanish and English at places such as the Economic Business Growth Business Incubator in Austin, TX, the SXSW Latinos in Tech program in Austin, TX, the Congreso Internacional Emprendor in El Salvador, Product Camp and the Rise Multicultural Series, among others. He organized the first Latin American track for the South by Southwest Interactive Conference, co-organized the debut of the Americas IT Forum in Austin, and he’s the founder of the Austin Content Marketing Meetup. He is the founder of Latin IT Marketing and Emprende.us a blog providing advice to Hispanic business owners on digital marketing.
Karen Taylor
After graduating with a degree in professional writing, Karen Taylor began her career as a freelance writer for companies and publications. She’s written marketing content and articles for over 200 companies and magazines during her 20-plus-year career. In the past five years, she’s added author, coach, and blogger to her resume — by writing books, launching online courses, and running blogs related to her various writing and teaching projects. One of her courses is a content marketing class for freelance writers — where they learn all of the moving parts of the rapidly evolving content marketing discipline and how to write the powerful, highly targeted, and results-focused content that companies, publications, readers, and robots demand today. Karen lives in Austin, Texas, where she takes full advantage of everything America’s fastest-growing city has to offer a creative person — arts, theater, education, books, nature, the local food scene, and much more.
Cody Landefeld
Cody Landefeld is founder and director at Mode Effect, a WordPress design and development consultancy. A user experience problem solver by nature and have over 10 years of experience in the creative field, we are passionate to help businesses succeed using their websites as their marketing hub.
David Vogelpohl
David Vogelpohl the founder and CEO of Marketing Clique, an online marketing and web development agency which helps clients build websites, create web applications, and manage online marketing campaigns. Since 1996 David has been overseeing web development and online marketing projects, including the development of a variety of web technologies and online marketing channels. David is a published author in Feed Front Magazine, speaker at major online-marketing conference Pubcon, speaker at WordCamp Atlanta, speaker at WordCamp Austin, speaker at Affiliate Summit and veteran of the web since 1996.
Amanda Quraishi
Amanda Quraishi is a blogger, interfaith activist and technology professional living in Austin, Texas. She currently works full time for Mobile Loaves & Fishes, a non-profit organization that addresses the issue of homelessness in the U.S. She also leads an populist-based interfaith initiative at InterfaithActivism.org, and is the Principle Web Media Strategist for both BlogathonATX and the Karmally4Texas Campaign.
Ronnie Burt
A native Austinite, Ronnie Burt helps lead the team behind CampusPress – hosting hundreds of large WordPress Multisite networks for schools and universities, including the Edublogs network with well over 2 million blogs. He volunteers on the side helping to build and maintain WordPress sites for a few education groups and a local community orchestra, that he also performs with.
Zac Gordon
Zac Gordon teaches WordPress for the amazing online education company, Treehouse. Before that he taught WordPress, web design and development at the high school and college level. In addition to teaching, Zac runs a web design company that builds $975 templated WordPress sites for small businesses.
Joel G. Goodman
Joel G Goodman is a jack-of-all-trades marketer, designer, and front-end developer at his creative media studio, Bravery Transmedia. He has been designing and developing WordPress sites for bands, universities, bakeries, bloggers, professionals, and startups since 2007 and holds a master of arts degree in Media Studies from The New School for Public Engagement. Joel lives in Austin, TX where the sun shines warmly and the tacos never run out.
Konstantin Obenland
Konstantin is a WordPress developer, and 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 even blogs about it.
Eric Johnson
Eric is a Mobile Wrangler at Automattic where he’s contributed to the WordPress mobile apps since 2012. He is an Oklahoma native who’s been using WordPress personally and professionally since 2009, and who really enjoys a good cup of coffee.
Siobhan McKeown
Siobhan McKeown is a Word Ninja at Audrey Capital where she writes about WordPress, deals with documentation, and has nightmares about the Codex. She’s currently working on an open source book about the history of WordPress. She spends her days delving into the brains of its early developers and community members. When she’s not worrying about the finer details of forking and the GPL, she’s helping out with the project’s future by wrangling WordPress’ documentation. In her spare time, she writes and edits for Smashing Magazine, eats, reads, and travels under the sea looking for manta rays.
Michele Butcher
Michele is a full time blogger, designer, and all around awesome person. Michele started her love for WordPress back in 2010. She got her feet wet working with Bit51 as a content creator and support ninja until its merger with iThemes. Michele is also the Organizer for the Southern Illinois WordPress Meetup. When not in front of a screen, Michele enjoys life with her family and friends.
Michael Cain
Michael is a Portland, Maine-based Theme Generator for Automattic‘s Theme Team. He spends his days creating, converting, and improving the theme experience on both WordPress.com and WordPress.org, his evenings blogging about food and travel on mapandmenu.com, and his nights dreaming about how to make tomorrow’s WordPress blogs and sites even better.
Bill Erickson
A WordPress consultant with 7 years of experience and hundreds of satisfied clients. He’s also a contributing developer to the Genesis theme framework, and has written 19 plugins which have been downloaded over 200,000 times.