Speakers

Aaron Hockley is a photographer and blogger who spends a lot of time conversing with others about new media topics. He writes frequent articles and has been cited as an industry source by publications such as CNN and the New York Times. Aaron founded WordCamp Portland and is active in a variety of events in the Portland tech scene. He has attended and spoken at several blogging and social media events including BlogWorld & New Media Expo, a few Ignites, and a handful of WordCamps.

Aaron will present on “IRL FTW! Organizing Meetups and WordCamps“

Nacin is a core developer of WordPress. As a member of the core team, he wrangles contributions, develops new features, and tries to fix more bugs than he creates. He lives in Washington, D.C., and works as a Tech Ninja at Audrey Capital, where he works on WordPress.org and other projects. He prefers decisions over options.

Nacin will present “Debugging in WordPress” and “The Nacin & Otto Show” on Friday.

Andrew Riddles is Web Architect in the Web Services Department at Carleton University in Ottawa, Canada. He has 12 years experience in web development in the private sector and in higher education. When not working he is writing; when not writing he is listening to opera, getting a tattoo, or getting a tattoo about opera.

Andrew will present “Creating a WordCampus” on Friday.

Few people witnessed the time when Andy wasn’t a computer geek. He began contributing to WordPress and joined Automattic in 2005. His AFK pastimes include perspiring in the Texas heat and throwing a slimy tennis ball.

Andy will present “Deep Voodoo: How the Innermost Innards of WordPress Work” on Saturday.

Austin Smith is a founder and partner of Alley Interactive, a software development firm in New York City which specializes in high traffic sites for news media, entertainment, and higher education. Alley Interactive was founded by ex-employees of The New York Observer, which converted to WordPress in June of 2011 after four years of running Drupal. Austin learned to use WordPress in early 2011 and launched Betabeat.com and PolitickerNY.com for The Observer, and then led the Observer.com rebuild project, which involved migrating 100,000 articles from Drupal, implementing a complex cross-site syndication system, battling chronic performance problems on the database server, and culling plugins which were causing issues.

Austin will be presenting “From Drupal to WordPress: Migrating the New York Observer” on Friday.

Brad Williams is the co-founder of WebDevStudios.com, a co-host on the SitePoint Podcast, and the co-author of Professional WordPress and Professional WordPress Plugin Development. Brad is also one of the organizers of the Philadelphia WordPress Meetup Group and WordCamp Philly.

Brad will be a judge in the Security Showdown on Saturday.

Chelsea Otakan, also known as Chexee, is a web designer and time traveler from Reno, NV. She started blogging with b2/cafelog when she was in high school and spent her early college years crafting a student newspaper’s website with WordPress MU. These days, she can be found wrangling designs for Automattic, contributing to the core UI group, sailing through space and time, and trying to make her puppy famous.

Chelsea will present “Version Control for Designers” on Saturday.

Tiny, fiery Southern girl who, when she isn’t baking pies or telling you what to do, works at Mozilla as a User Experience Designer. Previously she was a LOLcat herder at Cheezburger, Inc.

Crystal will present “Getting to +1: Negotiating UX in Open Source Teams” on Saturday.

Daryl Koopersmith is a man of many hats. By day, he is a nomadic WordPress core developer — he works at Automattic and is jazzed about JavaScript, interface engineering, and the infamous Alot. By night, he dabbles in the dark arts of rhythmic tapping and culinary combinatorics. Koop is currently settling into temperate San Francisco, where he is fueled by burritos and all things musical.

Daryl will present on “Decisions, Not Options” on Saturday.

Dianne Jacob is the author of Will Write for Food: The Complete Guide to Writing Cookbooks, Blogs, Reviews, Memoir, and More. The first edition won the Cordon D’Or International award for Best Literary Food Reference Book in 2005. The second edition won the Gourmand World Cookbook Award in 2010 for best book in its category in the US. Her blog, Will Write for Food: Pithy Snippets about Food Writing, covers food writing trends and technique. Her posts have been picked up by Publishers’ Weekly, Chow, Eater, BlogHer and the Food News Journal. She started the blog in 2009 as a way to update her book, which features an extensive chapter on food blogging.

Dianne will present on “Killer Food Blogs” on Sunday.

Ed is the founder of TableTracker, a startup that is being built in the tradition of Victor Frankenstein, MD. He hopes to inspire you with his talk about how you can create a better monster building with cloud-based tools, open-source parts and a lot of heart and sweat. TableTracker has already achieved a couple of unique “firsts” using WP and BuddyPress, which Ed will be showing off as part of his talk. He has written a book, attended a number of film festivals in exotic locales, and once dove into a pool with no water.

Ed will present “Building a Better Frankenstein: WordPress + Others to Create Tabletracker” on Friday.

Greg Veen is a co-founder of Typekit, where he’s working to enable beautiful and effective typography on the web.  Before Typekit, he developed Measure Map, a blog analytics application acquired by Google in 2006. While at Google, he redesigned Google Analytics and designed and developed new features in Gmail and other apps. Earlier, he led a front-end development team at Tickle Inc, building a suite of social media products acquired by Monster in 2004.  He has consulted for companies including Twitter, Adaptive Path, Mule Design Studio, and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.

Greg will present “Web Fonts for Developers” on Friday.

Heather Gold is an innovative artist, comic, speaker and talk show host best known for her ability to work the room. She’s a web veteran with geek cred from Apple’s webcast pioneering team and the start- up that birthed some of the iPod/iTunes experience. She mixes up Net ideas and performance flow and DJs the people formerly known as the audience in her shows. Heather shares her insights on tech, social engagement and authenticity as the host of Tummelvision.tv and in popular keynotes at places like Google and Web 2.0 and YLE, Finland’s BBC. Heather’s written for Alan Cumming, shared the stage with Margaret Cho and  baked over 50,000 cookies in her interactive solo show Cookie was named the Best of the Bay and won Curve Magazine’s national lesbian theatre award. Heather often appears in media like NPR, Wired and TWIT.tv. BoingBoing calls her “one of our favorite comedians.”  You can follow her work at heathergold.com or on twitter @heathr or join her at one of her UnPresenting workshops on 8/17 (http://bit.ly/oWgtFP).

Heather will present “Tools for Tummelling (in Light of Google+)” on Sunday.