Jonathan Williams
Jonathan is a web developer working in the IS&T department at Boston University. BU uses WordPress as the basis for a custom CMS that serves hundreds of sites with over a million users per month, managed as a centralized service across the entire University. Jonathan has worked for several years with universities and non-profits and to develop inventive solutions to a wide variety of web publishing needs.
Krystle Herbrandson
Krystle has had the great pleasure of being a part of the Sucuri family for the past 2 and a half years. Throughout her time she has experienced everything from cleaning a website to building and establishing a sales organization for the company. In her current role as Director of Sales she aids users, agencies and enterprises in navigating the complexities of website security.
Diane Danielson
Diane Danielson serves as SVN‘s Chief Operating Officer overseeing operations and brand development. Diane is a former attorney, accomplished speaker, published author, and widely recognized social media expert. Formerly VP of Business Development for corporate services and strategy at Spaulding & Slye/Colliers (now Jones Lang LaSalle) and before that, head of marketing for Meredith & Grew/ONCOR (now Colliers International Boston), Diane went on to publish two books and founded the award-winning Downtown Women’s Club national network. In 2006, she launched the first social network for businesswomen in the U.S. Over the past decade, Diane has been featured in the New York Times, Forbes, and other noteworthy publications; has been a regular contributor to the Boston Globe and Entrepreneur.com; and has been a speaker on leadership, networking, and social media at companies like Johnson & Johnson, Amgen, and EMC, as well as for organizations like NEHRA (New England Human Resources Association), NAIOP, IFMA, and SMPS. In 2013, Diane was honored as one of 40 over 40 Women to Watch in Forbes.com. In 2014 she was selected by Bisnow as one of their 50 Power Women in Boston Commercial Real Estate; and in 2015 Real Estate Forum named her a 2015 Woman of Influence.
Kate Gilbert
Kate fell into web development by accident. Every job – from newspaper journalist to online health writer to web manager at a hospital – built upon the basic HTML skills earned in her last year of college. More than a decade later, Kate has built years of expertise working with the WordPress CMS, coding custom sites, building functionalities, and branding it all to build web solutions that speak for businesses. With superior project management and oversight skills and a vast store of WordPress knowledge and resources, Kate has learned what the WordPress site owner really wants: Some help!
Sam Hotchkiss
Sam has been involved in most parts of the WordPress ecosystem: he built and ran an agency, is a core contributor, built a plugin business (BruteProtect) which he sold to Automattic in 2014, and currently heads up the Jetpack team at Automattic. In his spare time he enjoys travelling, camping, and taking photos.
Annie Smidt
Though her independent consultancy Durable Creative, Annie Smidt develops strategic branding, graphic design, and websites for businesses and organizations that offer something positive to the world.
Jared Novack
Jared is a founder of and partner a Upstatement, a creative technology and design firm located in Boston. At Upstatement he directs projects and uses WordPress to build and prototype sites for clients like ESPN, Random House and NPR. He’s also the creator and chief maintainer of Timber for WordPress — a library for building themes with the Twig template language.
Jared was formerly the newsroom developer at the Houston Chronicle and Boston Globe and an adjunct professor at MassArt. He graduated from Syracuse University with a BA in Computer Art.
Tony Guarnaccia
With over 15 years digital marketing experience working with thousands of small businesses as well as a dozen Fortune 500 companies, Tony founded Big Fish Results to help businesses of all sizes achieve market leadership using the same digital marketing strategy, tools and tactics that are normally reserved for large enterprises. Some of the market leaders he has worked with include General Motors, ADP, Foster Grant, AutoNation and Ford Motor Company. He supports World Vision to bring drinkable water to children across the globe and Save the Bay to protect our natural resources here in New England.
Maura Webster
Maura Webster is the Founder, CEO, & Chief Strategist at LillaBlu Strategies, a boutique marketing company focused on real meaningful marketing. Her background includes a account management for a private PR firm, non-profit communications, government, and managing the marketing team of a growing software company through re-branding and new product launches to acquisition.
Because of these experiences and more, Maura brings an authentic, creative, strategic, and people-centered approach to marketing for entrepreneurs, small businesses, and growing companies who want to make a difference.
When not engaging in fun brainstorming sessions with her clients or being all “social”, Maura can be found traveling (not often enough!), running, cooking, or sitting by the ocean. That is when she’s not keeping up with her husband, two daughters, and their pets – Larry the black lab, and Toby and Gilbert, the guinea pigs.
Eileen Lonergan
Eileen Corrigan Lonergan graduated from Michigan State University with a BA in Advertising. She worked as a Media Buyer | Planner at advertising agencies in Boston, Chicago and London.
While living in Asia she was fascinated to see entire malls devoted to technology and slowly began to learn how to build websites. Upon returning to life in the States Eileen resumed her career in media, this time using the most direct form of marketing, Google AdWords. The power of keywords opened up the doors to seo and lead to building WordPress websites.
Eileen’s entrepreneurial spirit was the motivation behind opening her own boutique agency, which caters to small to mid size businesses. Eileen creates websites with the purpose of them getting found by the search engines, she also focuses on content creation and social media integration into your business.
Eileen is the founder and Community Manager of the Divi Theme User Group on Facebook, a previous contributor to the Search Engine People Blog, which is a leading search engine optimization service based in Canada and to the Expand2Web Blog.
Eileen is the Co-Owner of ElegantMarketplace.com a website devoted to premium Child Themes for both the Divi and Extra Themes and premium plugins for WordPress. Eileen is also the Editorial Director for Elegant Marketplace.
Eileen is based on the southeastern coast of Massachusetts and has clients around the world.
Eileen was featured on the Divi Nation podcast on Successful Solopreneurship https://www.elegantthemes.com/blog/community/divi-nation-01-successful-solopreneurship-with-eileen-lonergan
Josepha Haden
Josepha comes from a long line of writers and was raised to be a life-long learner. She has a passion for language and storycrafting, a skill she practices on starsandthemoon.com. Josepha has over a decade of experience using SEO, data analysis, and content marketing to bring success and visibility to clients all over the world. Since 2010 she’s been working in her hometown of Kansas City to increase digital literacy and get more women in tech. Josepha works at Automattic as a community organizer for the WordPress open source project and can be found on Twitter as @josephahaden.
Amy Masson
I am the co-owner of Sumy Designs, LLC. We just celebrated our tenth year in business, building websites for small to medium businesses, entrepreneurs, writers, and anyone else.
Prior to this, I was a teacher. I taught middle school computer technology. I managed the school website, taught kids HTML among other things, and really enjoyed that career. I left when I became a mom, but people still kept asking me to make them websites. I noticed there was a real demand for trustworthy professionals in web design, and so Sumy Designs was born.
We make websites using WordPress and the Genesis Framework. My first WordPress site was in 2006.
https://www.sumydesigns.com/
J.J. Toothman
In my current role as Web Strategist at NASA, I am developing a holistic strategic roadmap for the role of the web at NASA. This strategy integrates elements of Gov 2.0, Open Gov, social media, cloud computing, enterprise 2.0 and much more. Sort of a “strategic mashup”, if you will.
Mike Swartz
Before starting Upstatement, he worked in the newsrooms of the San Jose Mercury News, Boston Globe and magazines like Complex Magazine as well as as a freelancer. At Syracuse, Mike studied Journalism and Advertising Design before leaving for a job as Art Director of the Globe’s Sunday Ideas section. Mike was also an adjunct professor of graphic design at MassArt from 2009 to 2011.
Nate Sprague
Mel Choyce
Mel Choyce is a Design Engineer at Automattic, WordPress core committer, and co-organizer for the Boston WordPress community. She loves big typography, cold brew coffee, and craft beer.
Jennifer Ecker
Jen is a principal and the creative director of shines & jecker labs, a web development firm in Portland. She has over 13 years of experience in digital design, doing everything from creating original graphic design to writing CSS. Her strength is her ability to master the latest technologies quickly to provide clients with modern, current designs. Jen spends her free time reading, running, and serving on the board for her local library.
Daniel Miller
Daniel Miller has been a WordPress programmer for the last two years for Cynosure, Inc. Before that he was an accountant.
Joshua Eaton
Josh Eaton is a partner at Reaktiv Studios, the WordPress agency who partnered with the HBS Digital Initiative to build the Open Knowledge platform, and can speak to the WordPress implementation. Josh has spoken previously at WordCamp Miami 2014, and WordCamp Tampa 2014 & 2015.
Adrienne Debigare
Adrienne is the Community Manager and Technology Guru at Harvard Business School’s Digital Initiative, and a Research Affiliate at the MIT Media Lab Center for Civic Media. A designer by training, and a coder/hacker/maker by birth, I enjoy acting as a bridge for cross-disciplinary teams. In my spare time, you’ll likely find me on a mountain somewhere: rock climbing, snowboarding, or just hiking to a remote lake in the middle of a forest.
Inderpreet Singh
Inder Singh is a Senior Web Developer at Boston University. He has been working at BU for 5 years and mainly works on the central WordPress installation (and its themes and plugins) on a daily basis at work. He helps manage over 2000 sites in WordPress at the same time using a shared repository of themes and plugins. Other than WordPress, Inder has also worked on Django, iOS and Amazon AWS. He also likes to travel, play basketball and soccer, dance Bhangra and eat food for fun
Matthew Dorman
Matthew is a co-founder of Ndevr, Inc, a distributed WordPress development company. He started building websites as soon as he got an internet connection back in 1995, and hasn’t stopped since. He built successful sites for clients as big as Time Inc., Johnson & Johnson and Fox News; and as small as, well you wouldn’t even know who they are anyways. He recently moved West to Colorado, where he’s thoroughly enjoyed camping and snowboarding with his wife and two boys.
Andrew Bauer
Andrew Bauer worked as UI Developer at Boston University since 2013, integrally involved in the management of the multi-network, multi-site platform. Andrew is a theme and plugin developer, also a WordPress core contributor.
Travis Totz
Travis Totz is an award-winning designer with a passion for creating profoundly usable web experiences. He began using WordPress over 10 years ago and has never looked back.
His intentionality and empathetic leadership skills have shaped him personally and professionally, guiding him through the journey of WordPress entrepreneurship and a long history of successful client projects all over the globe.
As Senior Web Strategist for Modern Tribe Travis focuses on being intentional each day, being inspired by the talented team he surrounds himself with, and contributing a high level of strategic energy to large-scale client projects.
Konstantin Obenland
Konstantin is a WordPress aficionado, and Core Developer based in Southern California. You might remember him from projects like WordPress 4.3 or the new WordPress.org Theme Directory. At Automattic he’s is part of a team that contributes to Core and WordPress.org full time. He enjoys bourbons, craft beers, and good food — sometimes so much that he blogs about it.
Konstantin is a WordPress Core Developer and enjoys bourbons, craft beers, and good food — sometimes so much that he blogs about it.
Michael Cain
Michael is a Portland, Maine-based developer for Automattic‘s Delta team. He spends his days developing, testing, and improving the new user experience on WordPress.com, 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.
Kevin Cristiano
Has been using WordPress since circa 2007. Has been seen at community events and working on sysadmin tasks and back end development at times.
Ellen Biewald
“Ellen is a developer at boston.com. She has her BFA in Graphic Design from Northeastern University and through working in the world of web design, she found her way into development and hasn’t looked back since. Some of her favorite things are poetry slams, honk bands, board games, and mountains.
Greg Opperman
Greg Opperman is a web developer at the Boston Globe, helping them migrate Boston.com to WordPress. In the past, he has worked with dozens of clients, non-profits, and colleges, both through steady jobs and freelancing. In his free time, Greg organizes the New England VegFest (an annual food festival), rides bikes, makes silly websites, award-winning mac and cheese, and pretty decent bread.”
Aaron Ware
Spanning nearly two decades, Aaron Ware has worked with leading brands, start-ups and everyone in between to develop innovative, highly interactive, feature-rich websites and online apps. Today, Aaron is very active in the WordPress community. In addition to developing open source plugins and speaking at Rhode Island and New England area WordCamps and meetups, he is also a lead organizer of WordCamp Rhode Island.
Troy Dean
Troy Dean is a WordPress consultant from Melbourne, Australia. He co-founded the Video User Manuals plugin in 2008 and the WP Elevation business training program in 2013 that currently has over 500 active members. He speaks at conferences regularly and is also a professional singer, guitar player and voice over artist.
Elizabeth B. Thomsen
I am a librarian, working as the Member Services Manager for a network of public and academic libraries, where my responsibilities include training library staff. I manage a few WordPress sites and provide training and support for several others. Outside of work, I manage my own WordPress site and a WordPress portfolio site for an artist. I am also a photographer, specializing in roadside architecture and historic places, and am an active participant in Wikipedia, HistoryPin, Flickr, and other social media.
Ashley Kolodziej
I’m a lead interactive designer in Boston University’s Interactive Design department, and I love code, design, and teaching others. I’m maybe the only person on this earth that gets excited to write documentation, and I’m an active contributor to our custom theme framework. I frequently work with large school redesigns (most recently, BU’s College of Communication), as well as work on feature articles for our Bostonia and Research editorial properties.
Gina Deaton
Gina works from home for Sideways8, a WordPress development shop based in Atlanta, GA. She has filled various roles within the company, from project management to content creation to setting up template WordPress sites from start to finish. Currently located in Boston, Gina enjoys cooking great food, reading a good book, watching sci-fi, and singing a cappella.
Karalyn Thayer
Karalyn Thayer is a graphic designer and artist based in Portland, Maine. She holds a BFA in New Media from Maine College of Art. She is currently a Graphic Designer at Mainely SEO and works with clients to create user friendly sites for their businesses.
Amy Felman
Amy Felman is a psychologist based in Melbourne, Australia and hosts a top 10 podcast for early career psychologists called “We All Wear It Differently”, which is built on WordPress (http://weallwearitdifferently.com/). The podcast is aimed at Psychology students and graduates and helps them navigate those first few awkward years when they transition from studying to the real world. She has a degree in Media Radio Studies and a Masters of Clinical Psychology. She currently works in public health and is travelling to WordCamp New York and WordCamp Boston with her husband, Troy Dean from WP Elevation.
Christopher Plummer
Christopher Plummer is a technologist at Upstatement with a passion for education, accessibility, performance and JavaScript frameworks. Chris started programming games for the TI-86 graphing calculator before he took a detour to work as a set designer and prop master. In 2014 he earned his Master’s Degree in Interactive Digital Media at Northeastern University and went on to work at DockYard and Upstatement. The past year Chris has been integrating the WP Rest API and Ember.js for enterprise clients. He also dabbles in Clojure, Processing and Arduino and was a programming tutor at Northeastern.
Mike Burns
Mike is a Senior Developer (and the third Mike) at Upstatement, where he works with a team of amazing people making the web a better place. He contributed to four WordPress releases and worked on some pretty cool open source plugins. Before Upstatement he worked as a developer at Boston University, and in a past life as an audio engineer at the Modlin Center for the Arts in Richmond, VA.
Meeky Hwang
I have been involved in development of WordPress implementation for clients such as Fusion.net, Penske Media, Bloomberg, Forbes, Interactive Media, Sony Music, SAVVIS, Siegel+Gale, Time Inc., Hearst and Shaw Media, including multi-site, multilingual sites, WordPress.com VIP and platform creation. I have been a core contributor and plugins and has spoken at various WordCamps previously.
Andrea Trew
Andrea is a graphic designer at Flywheel, a WordPress hosting startup in Omaha, NE. As a graduate of UNK, her background includes working on brands such as Cuties, Panda Express, TD Ameritrade, Nebraska Lottery, and Blue Cross Blue Shield — specializing in elevating brands through logo development, social media, photography, web design and local/national campaign work.
Payton Swick
Digital craftsman. Tea explorer. Avid learner of things. Writes code at Automattic.
Amanda Giles
Amanda Giles is WordPress Evangelist and Enthusiast who loves converting people to WordPress. She’s been developing websites since 1994 and has been building WordPress themes since 2009. She founded the Seacoast NH WordPress meetup in 2011. She works for herself and also as part of Spark Development. You can often locate Amanda by her loud sneezes and it’s likely because of these sneezes that she leads such a blessed life. Find her on Twitter @AmandaGilesNH or @SparkDevs
Brian Krogsgard
Brian is a web developer, writer, and consultant based in Birmingham, Alabama. He’s the editor of Post Status, a news and information website for WordPress professionals. It’s a community-centric project with around 700 members doing incredible things with WordPress.
Anthony D Paul
I help build great digital experiences and software through usability research, IA concepts, and prototypes. Outside the office, you’ll find me spread across regional meetups and conferences—evangelizing IA/UX, accessibility, and a variety of open source dev projects. When I’m not doing responsible adult things, I grow the world’s hottest chili peppers and bottle my own hot sauce. I’d divulge something funny from my past, but these days the Internet does a better job of surfacing our embarrassing moments; find me anywhere by Googling “anthonydpaul”.
Erik Bernskiold
Erik is a digital strategist who is the managing director and owner of full-service boutique digital agency Bernskiold Media. He has been developing for WordPress since around version 1.2, and is today helping businesses of all sizes succeed with digital tools, using them in the best way possible for their situation. Also a businessman and economist, Erik has the unique possibility of combining the technical aspects with high-level business strategy, serving clients with well-balanced solutions.
(More info for organizers but too long to publish on site: http://www.erikbernskiold.com/about/)
Andrew Taylor
Andrew currently works for Pantheon helping agencies and giving back to the WordPress community.
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 8 years of web development experience, specializing in WordPress, he is a seasoned veteran.
Dustin Meza
Dustin Meza is the Director of Customer Experience Operations at WP Engine. He has been in the hosting industry for 7 years and has been with WP Engine for 3 years. At WP Engine, Dustin oversees many aspects of the WordPress platform including WordPress upgrades for over 100,000 WordPress installs.
Outside of WordPress, Dustin loves being outdoors in Nashville with his wife Megan, and black lab, Maddy. He enjoys all kinds of sports, both watching and playing, and has been known to play some video games when time allows.
Tom Shapiro
Tom Shapiro is CEO of Stratabeat (http://stratabeat.com/), a branding, marketing, and design agency in Burlington, MA. Services include WordPress website design & development, marketing strategy, branding, SEO, paid search, PR, and conversion optimization. Prior to Stratabeat, Tom was Director of Digital Strategy at iProspect, where he helped the agency to grow from 85 employees to more than 700 in five years. Through his career, Tom has developed digital strategies for various market leaders, such as Intel, Hewlett-Packard, AT&T, Clarks, eBay Enterprise, UnitedHealthcare, Kraft Foods, and P&G. Tom’s insights on websites, UX, and marketing have been published in CMO.com, CNN, iMedia Connection, MarketingProfs, MediaPost, Search Marketing Standard, Website Magazine, and others.
Kristina Romero
I’m a website developer, mompreneur and passionate advocate for WordPress. I work with small businesses and entrepreneurs through my company KR Media & Designs (http://krmd.co) to build amazing websites to grow their business. As a front-end developer in the Washington D.C area, I’ve had the opportunity to work with the Coca-Cola Company and Food Network on various WordPress projects. I’m also proud to be a WP Elevation Business Coach (http://wpelevation.com) that works with a current member list of 500 WordPress designers, developers and consultants on a monthly basis to streamline their WordPress business.
K.Adam White
K. Adam White is an engineer at Bocoup, an Open Web technology company in Boston, Massachusetts, where he writes web applications, contributes to open-source projects, and evangelizes the web as an open platform for technology and collaboration. An artist and enthusiast photographer, K.Adam is also a WordPress core contributor and the author of a JavaScript client for the WordPrest REST API.
Nicole Kohler
I’m a Pennsylvania native who loves video games, Pokemon, good books, and anything yellow. When I’m not acting as the Content Creator for WooCommerce, you can usually find me snuggling my pets, beating my husband at a tabletop game, or taking a nap.
Adam Warner
Adam W. Warner discovered the world of WordPress in 2005 and has been working within the community ever since. To feed his entrepreneurial spirit, he founded several WordPress-focused businesses that provide education, plugins and consulting services for online business owners. He is a true product evangelist for WordPress in spirit and personality, and that also happens to be his job title at SiteLock. In addition to WordPress, Adam is passionate about his family, robots and of course, life, the universe and everything.