Speakers

Aaron Reimann

Aaron is a designer that turned into a developer and now an agency owner (but he still tries to write code when he can). He’s been working with WordPress since 2008 and has worked with a couple of Fortune 100 companies but also with the local sewing machine shop. Aaron co-leads a WordPress developer Meetup and the Atlanta WordPress Meetup.

Adam Soucie

Adam Soucie is a WordPress developer based in Orlando, FL. Adam has participated on the core WordPress Accessibility Team and is also a member of the WordPress Orlando & WordCamp Orlando organizing teams.

For more information on Adam, visit adamsoucie.com or impossiblycreative.com.

Alex Sanfilippo

Alex specializes in business consulting and life coaching. He’s also passionate about WordPress! His purpose is to help businesses and individuals grow and develop into their full potential. His vision is to help you achieve yours.

Alicya Simmons

Brain Health Expert & Hypnotherapist: Affiliate of Dr. Daniel Amen Clinics
12 years of Hypnotherapy experience in helping people go into trance in their own mind to break patterns and behaviors that no longer serve them- business – personal – and self -identity. Data on your brain is supplemented by science based evidence that clinically supports brain wave speed, regions of your brain that is not working hard enough and that is working too hard. Solutions and strategies to function at optimal levels and enjoy doing it.

Andrew Norcross

Andrew (or Norcross, as most know him) is a Senior Engineer and Developer Advocate at Liquid Web, focusing on internal product development and being a voice inside the WP community itself.

Previously, Norcross was the founder and lead developer of Reaktiv Studios, an agency focused on solving complex problems with killer WordPress solutions. After quite a few years in the finance industry, Norcross switched to coding and hasn’t looked back. He’s got experience in both the service game — Reaktiv Studios is a WordPress VIP Featured Partner, helping top-tier clients with their WordPress development— and the product game, with Reaktiv’s flagship plugin, Design Palette Pro, continually being developed and supported. An organizer for WordCamp Tampa, Norcross loves to keep giving back to the WordPress community with free plugins, education talks at conferences, and core contribution to WordPress. Norcross lives in Tampa, Florida with his amazing son and a rescue dog that believes he’s a human.

Angel Yarde

Angelica Yarde is the co-founder of Sevenality, a brand strategy agency, located in Orlando, Florida. She is also the owner of Studio 404 Paper and co-host of the Heart + Hustle Podcast, a weekly podcast focused on giving creative entrepreneurs the tools they need to achieve with life-work balance. She has been a designer and developer for over a decade and is passionate about helping brands achieve their goals using design and user-experience based solutions.

Brian Richards

Brian Richards, creator of WPSessions.com, has been using WordPress since 2007 and training and leading development teams since 2011. In addition to investing his time into training, Brian has had the opportunity to work with many amazing WordPress agencies and experts over these last several years. This has allowed Brian to help develop sites for Microsoft, Disney, TIME, YMCA, and numerous others. Brian has an affinity for self-directed learning and helping others to develop skills and workflows to better solve important and complicated problems. He can’t resist helping good people do great things.

Carol Gann

Carol understands the beauty and power of WordPress, that it can give a voice to people who otherwise may not be heard. Carol is a WordPress developer, public speaker, consultant and WordPress trainer. She is a Lead Generation Specialist and Project manager for Orlando Web Wizard a local WordPress hosting and development company.

Chad Windnagle

Chad Windnagle is an experienced software engineer who has experience working with a wide array of software development teams, languages, and organizations. He has worked with nearly every well known, and even some obscure CMS on the market – examples include WordPress, Joomla and Drupal. He spent nearly 10 years working with the Joomla Project with roles varying from the Joomla Framework Development team, Google Summer of Code coordinator, and documentation team member. He is currently working as an software engineer in Port Orange, Florida.

Chris Edwards

Chris is co-owner of CE Squared, a WordPress Maintenance and Marketing agency. He is a 17-year Internet marketing veteran with experience in web design & development, search engine optimization, online marketing, social media marketing and mobile development. He specializes in WordPress custom development utilizing either Genesis Framework or underscores and is very active in the WordPress Orlando community. Chris has held development and Internet marketing positions in some of Orlando’s top technology companies.

Chris Wiegman

Chris is a developer for UF Health at the University of Florida who has been working on WordPress since 2008. Over the years he built one of the largest security plugins on WordPress.org as well as numerous other plugins, themes and other solutions. When not coding Chris loves to teach and has presented at numerous WordCamps and other conferences as well as taught computer security for St. Edward’s University and other University courses ranging from computers to aviation.

Christina Siegler

Christina is the Director of Operations and Project Management at Crossfield Digital. What does that mean? She plans out resourcing and leads the project teams on all of the awesome sites and apps being built. Christina loves process and thinks it is important to provide a fun and rewarding working environment for all team members and clients. She has over 8 years of Project Management experience and is a certified Scrum Master. Yay process!

David Laietta

David has been a professional web developer for well over a decade, with the last nine years being focused on WordPress development. His focus is on helping small businesses, providing ongoing support, and educating users. He helps organize both WordPress Orlando and WordCamp Orlando.

Dwayne McDaniel

Dwayne has been working in tech and open source sales since 2005. He knew as soon as he started working with Java middleware developers he never wanted to work outside of open source ever again. Dwayne first started building in Drupal and WordPress when he needed to build projects for the San Francisco Improv scene. He fell in the love the community of developers and then found his position at Pantheon at the end of 2013.
As a Community and Agency Success Manager he has had the privilege of presenting at Stanford DrupalCamp, Drupal Northern Lights (Iceland), WordCamp Europe and many other conferences.
Outside of tech he loves producing and performing improv theater, and also loves comic books and karaoke!!!
Reach out at https://mcdwayne.com or on twitter @mcdwayne

Irina Blumenfeld

Irina Blumenfeld is a founder of Netmagik, a WordPress development company, based in Orlando. She has been building sites for more than 15 years.
Prior to beginning her career, Irina studied Management Information Systems and Computer Science. Over the years, she branched out her skills to responsive design with focus on website speed and security. Irina loves helping people learn more about the Web.

James Tryon

I’m Creative Director & founder of Easily Amused, lead ambassador of Wapu.us, Husband and father of 3. I’m also one of the co-organizers of WordCamp Orlando and the WordPress Orlando meetup group. I’ve been in the creative industry for more than 18 years and have an eye for design & usability. I also possess the know-how to plan, design, code, and market it all if needed.

An avid collector of random awesomeness, thrift-store artifacts, and some just plain weird crap, I’m always finding something interesting to spark my creativity. When I’m not working, I am more than likely building/creating something, playing with toys, or hanging with my friends and family

John Hughes

John Hughes is a PGA Master Professional and an Orlando-based full-time golf coach.  He serves as Vice President of the North Florida PGA Section, is a PGA National Award Winner, and an avid WordPress user.

What began 3+ years ago as an immediate need to build a website, with zero capital due to a loss of employment, John embarked on what became a meteoric journey to build his initial website as well as a supporting cast of landing page sites, using WordPress and its various resources. John credits WordPress and the WordPress community in building his successful golf coaching practice in Central Florida, that routinely brings him clientele from around the globe.

Joshua Walker

Joshua Walker is an honorable Army Vet turned tech looking to shake up the world with Cloud, Code and Big Data.

Micah Wood

Micah Wood is the Technical Director at Narwhal Digital, an agency in Atlanta. He’s written and publicly released over a dozen WordPress plugins, is a core contributor and specializes in enterprise WordPress development. He has a passion for learning best practices and sharing his knowledge with the greater WordPress community.

Michelle Schulp

Michelle is an independent graphic designer and frontend developer in Minneapolis. Prior to beginning her career, she studied Visual Communications, with minors in Psychology and Sociology. As her work progressed, she also branched into front-end development and user experience design to round our her skillset. This combination of disciplines led her to adopt a strategy-based approach to design, focused on solving tangible problems and achieving real goals based on how people think.

She loves the open source community, and when she is not working on projects she speaks/volunteers/organizes at events and workshops around the country. Her passions are communication and empowerment, and she believes in the power of “Why?”

Mike Demo

Mike “Demo” Demopoulos is a longtime lover of Open Source Software. He currently works at BoldGrid (a WordPress Site Builder) as an Evangelist. He has spoken at numerous open source events around the world. Mike is also a contributor to Huffington Post as well as other publications. He also volunteers as Treasurer for Open Source Matters.

Miles Lifton

Miles, who is currently 11 years old, lives to learn about tech. With several years of study already under his belt, Miles specializes in C++ and web development languages, but also finds time to study object oriented programming.

Miles contributes as a passionate committee member for Be The Difference Foundation, Sophia’s Hope, and Polyblox Totems educational toys.

When hanging out at home, Miles can be found solving Rubix cubes of all shapes and sizes, practicing American Sign Language, and working on his newest web project using WordPress www.LanguageIsNotaBarrier.com a site devoted to helping people around the world foster world peace. You can find him on Twitter at @KidCoderDev.

Nathan Ingram

Nathan is the Host at iThemes Training where he teaches WordPress and freelance business development topics via live webinar.

He is also the creator of >ADVANCE Coaching. He works with WordPress web developers individually and in groups to help them become more successful in their freelance businesses.

Nathan has been a freelance web developer since 1995, and is based in Birmingham, Alabama where he is the lead organizer of WordCamp Birmingham and co-organizer of the Birmingham WordPress Meetup.

You can learn more about Nathan at https://nathaningram.com.

Neha Patel

Neha is a Web Developer and Designer by profession, an Artist and an Entrepreneur at heart. She is a WordPress Enthusiast who runs and operates a Business of her own in Montreal, Canada and work at a multi million dollar marketing firm as a Digital projects specialist. She likes how WordPress is such an amazing platform to build great things and how millions of people can use it to achieve their passion with a little bit of dedication. She also mentors at a non profit organization called Ladies Learning Code and other such organizations that make a difference.
Twitter | LinkedIn | Website

Olivia Skrzypek

Energetic, intelligent, fast learning and devoted… Those are just a few words to describe Olivia. She is very passionate about learning and exploring new things, is very motivated, and not afraid to take new challenges.

She worked for a large corporation for 12 years. It was okay, but Olivia always felt like she was missing something. Her husband worked from home as a Freelancer at the time, and every day when she had to leave for work and saw him in his pajamas by the computer, drinking his coffee and listening to the music – she was simply jealous. One day she just decided to do something about it.

Olivia decided to start her own company and ever since then she has been working as a Web Designer and Search Engine Optimization consultant. She loves working with different businesses and helping them their business endeavor.

Olivia’s keys to success are good time management and organization.

Patrick Alexander

Patrick Alexander is the CEO and founder of WPBICO, an all in one WordPress platform which provides every tool (domain,email,theme,hosting, plugins & training) required for a WP website at one affordable price. An avid WordPress enthusiast and lover of all things tech, Patrick has devoted himself to the tech industry for over 15 years gaining extensive experience in Programming, Web Development, System Administration and Technician; and a resume with related positions in the U.S military, Universities and several Internet Start Ups. He is also the founder of several startups www.balambico.co, www.wpbico.com and www.collegepaperreview.com.

Pratik Ghela

Working as a CTO at PSD To Manythings and Founder at PressMate, Pratik has been actively involved with WordPress since 2012. While working at PSD To Manythings, he and his team has managed to develop about 500+ WordPress websites. Programming since 2008, he lately moved into the role of Customer Happiness and makes sure his customers are happy. His core interests revolve around Frontend Development , WordPress & PHP.
Twitter 

Rob Ruiz

Rob Ruiz has been doing web design/development for over 10 years now and a WordPress user for five years. He’s been developing plugins and themes for a little over three years now. Rob also does a lot of graphic design, UI/UX design, and teaching. He is also the lead organizer for WP Omaha and co-organizes Wordcamp Omaha.

He works a full-time position at Orion Advisor Services as a WordPress Software Engineer developing custom WordPress-based solutions that integrate a variety of web services and REST APIs with an industry leading Investment Advisor software platform. He is also the owner of Bizzle Designs, which specializes in extremely customized WordPress-based websites for small-to-medium-sized businesses of all kinds.

Sam Smith

Sam is currently a Firefighter Paramedic who, for the past year, has been using WordPress to leverage a side gig. He works part-time for an agency, CE Squared, as a Web Developer and Digital Marketer. When Sam isn’t driving a firetruck he is creating and maintaining websites for clients. His goal is to continue learning as much as he can about WordPress and to give back to the community that has helped him so much.

Scott Mann

Scott’s been managing amazing teams of creatives and makers since 2001 with his company, Highforge. They switched from Movable Type to WordPress in 2009 for commercial projects. These days they use Genesis and Shopify for a lot of their projects.

He’s a certified Google Adwords Partner (has been since 2002) and a community advocate in Orlando.

For a few summers, he worked as a tour guide at Disney.

His driving passion is to empower others to grow their businesses and improve their communities.

He’s a gamer, backpacker, chess player and he enjoys racquetball recklessly in his free time. He’d also like you to join www.BeTheMatch.org, a non-profit organization that saves lives.

Thomas Giella

Thomas is the owner of Complete I.T. Service and Solutions. A company whose sole goal is to provide businesses simple website solutions and office network solutions. Thomas began his career with a degree in design in 2006, leading to a degree in management in 2011. Thomas is also the developer behind Divi Mobile Menu, a popular Divi Theme Plugin. He has also been a WordCamp Tampa organizer since 2014, and was the lead WordCamp Tampa organizer in 2016.

Zac Gordon

WordCamp Orlando 2017 is over. Check out the next edition!