Category Archives: Speakers

Speakers

Introducing Sara Cannon

Sara Cannon is an artist, designer, creative thinker, business owner, developer, and dreamer. She’s a Partner and the Creative Director at Range: a Design and Development Agency specializing in WordPress.

In the beginning

In 2004, Sara was a design student in college when she  was searching for a CMS to use for an organisation she supports.

I put them on Joomla and thought “surely there is another option out there.” I stumbled upon WordPress and have been hooked ever since.

Since then she’s contributed to core, organised WordCamps and Meetups, and co-founded a WordPress business:

WordPress and the WordPress community is such a huge part of my life. I can’t imagine what I would be doing without it. #CheersToTheGPL

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As well as being a designer, Sara is a talented artist. Her work, at saracannonart.com is based on the intersection of organic shapes, geometry, and landscapes:

I thoroughly enjoy making art and believe that the exploration of form and imagery in a different medium makes be a better designer.  I really enjoy exploring stimulating geometric patterns and bright whimsical imagery.

Sara at WordCamps

WPYall

Sara is a WordCamp regular. In the past she’s been an organiser of WordCamp Birmingham. She’s attended 4 WordCamp San Franciscos alone, and spoke at two of them. “One of my favorite memories is hosting a launch party for Range in 2012 and inviting all of our close friends in the community (our WordPress family) to come and celebrate the new beginning with us.”

Sara’s first WordCamp presentation was at WordCamp Birmingham in 2009. The presentation, “WordPress and Your Brand”, went well, but unfortunately there was no microphone so she had to yell to be heard.

A slide from that presentation is a precursor to her presentation this year. It reads “good typography improves user experience.” This year she will talk about “Typography and User Experience.”

“Typography is everything” has been one of my mantras for many years. It is one of the most important aspects about visual communication, yet we rarely discuss it. It sets the tone, message, readability, as well as the experience in performing tasks. Typography can be so great that you don’t even notice it’s there when reading, or it can be so bad that it messes up your experience to the point of frustration (Like sending an article to a reader to avoid on-page distractions). Really, I believe that type is an important aspect of user experience and I’m super thrilled to be presenting on it an WordCamp San Francisco!

 

Speakers

Introducing M Asif Rahman

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M Asif Rahman is an entrepreneur and WordPress enthusiast. His motto is “I do Code, I Write, I Dream and I make them Real.” He spends part of the year in Dhaka, Bangladesh, part of the year in Florida, and the rest of his time is spent travelling in places like California, Europe, Australia, and Singapore.

Getting Started with WordPress

His first experience of WordPress was in 2004 when he had to make a website at University. He tried Blogger first but, disappointed with how it looked, he switched to WordPress.

Asif Speaking at WordCamp Melbourne

Asif’s first WordCamp presentation was “Best practices in WordPress from a Webmaster point-of-view”, presented at WordCamp Melbourne. His biggest challenges was his accent, which some people struggled to understand, but he slowed down and the audience gave him a warm round of applause at the end.

Asif has attended WordCamp San Francisco four times. One of his fondest memories is meeting Matt in person.

Though I wrote to him and we communicated in social media for long time, but meeting in person was superb. We talked for awhile and he showed keen interest on learning how people interacted with WordPress back in my country, Bangladesh, and how we could bring that community closer.

WordPress in Bangladesh

WordPress’ growth in Bangladesh was slow to begin with, competing in its early days with Joomla. Since 2010, WordPress has had a big impact on developers and small businesses. A large number of people are builing themes and plugins, and some design firms and consultants a focusing purely on WordPress. “You will be astonished,” Asif says, “that the rates of adoption of WordPress among mid to large company is way higher then US or other market.” In Bangladesh, WordPress enthusiasts gather around a community called WordPressians which has 12,500 member on Facebook alone.

WordPress became the touch point, the starting tool for a young nation with about 100 million people under 32yrs old: it’s massive. You probably wouldn’t believe me if I told you but WordPress is more well-known among normal Bangladeshi people than from here at US.

Asif’s presentation

At WordCamp San Francisco this year, Asif will talk about his story with WordPress.

I want to show people how WordPress changed my life, I want to show how this community, this open source eco-system, helped me to dream big. How does a very simple boy from Bangladesh without any prior web programming experience try to make a real difference. This is real honor to me and I really feel privileged to be able to speak in Central WordCamp on such an emotional topic. I hope to inspire others and give them hope.

Speakers

Introducing Jenny Wong

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Jenny Wong is a web developer from Reading in the UK. She works at Human Made, a WordPress-focussed agency in the UK. As well as her development work, she works to help local communities to get involved with the WordPress project.

Her first involvement with WordPress was at the PHPNW conference. As an intern, she was given the job of updating content. In 2011, she migrated all of their annual conferences into one multisite instance and built a new theme.

UK WordPress Contributor Days

WordPress co-founder Mike Little at the contributor day in Manchester
WordPress co-founder Mike Little at the contributor day in Manchester

Jenny has spearheaded a drive in the UK to organise contributor days across the country. These events are focused on getting people started with contributing to WordPress. The first was a one-day event in Manchester. The day starts with the attendees splitting off into groups and learning how to contribute in different areas.

It was inspired by WordCamp London and it was to encourage contributions outside of WordCamp events. I found that it was a common problem where people either could not get set up correctly on their machines locally to contribute / didn’t know how to contribute / didn’t have any time to contribute. Contributor Days solve this because you have people who can help you get set up, you are making time to contribute by going to a event as well as getting help and support to contributions.

It’s also more fun to be contributing together as a community rather than on your own.

The first event went really well with patches being accepted into core on the day of event. Since then, the UK community has had 3 more contributor days and there are more being planned. With so much contributor activity in the UK more names are appearing on the WordPress contributor list.

Jenny at WordCamps

Jenny’s first WordCamp presentation was last year at WordCamp Lancaster, where she talked about debugging. “I learnt a lot through the Q&A,” she says, “which was more of a discussion of tools other people used to debug WordPress.”

Since then she’s been to a number of WordCamps, and organised WordCamp Manchester. She finds that she learns a lot at WordCamps, from different developers’ methodologies to tools and plugins.

The best bit about attending WordCamps has to be the awesome people you meet. I meet people who on IRC or a forum have helped me out on setting up or developing something (Paul Gibbs springs to mind as one of the many people) and being able to say Thank You in person means a lot. Other people I’ve met at WordCamps are now my colleagues and friends.

2014 will be Jenny’s first WordCamp San Francisco! She’ll be presenting a lightning talk on “The base ingredients of debugging.” In the presentation she’ll be taking you on a tour of the debugging process and tools that will make your life easier.

it doesn’t matter what level of developer you are or what type of developer you are, we all come across bugs in our development life. I used to always get myself in a frenzy over how to tackle each bug but this process has helped me keep my head cool and my stress levels down.

Speakers

Introducing Boone Gorges

Boone is one of the lead developers of BuddyPress, a contributor to WordPress, and the author of a dozens of freely available plugins. As a freelancer, his free software work is unpaid: he’s a vocal advocate for convincing clients to cover the costs of his community-focused work.

He works as freelance WordPress developer and consultant, specialising in custom functionality for BuddyPress. As a former academic, he works mostly with universities who are interested in creating online spaces where faculty, students, and staff can meet, collaborate, and share the work being done on campus.

He is also a dad, a competitive crossword solver, a former philosopher, a barbecue enthusiast, and a very cool guy.

In the beginning

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Boone first used WordPress to create a forum for the students in his Introduction to Ethics class where they could share work and provide feedback to one another. In 2009, he started working professionally with WordPress when a friend started a WordPress-powered project called CUNY Academic Commons. From helping out with IE6 CSS bugs he found himself delving under the hood of WPMU and the then-in-beta BuddyPress.

The same year, he gave his first WordCamp presentation, on the WPMU & BuddyPress track at WordCamp New York. It was called “Developing BuddyPress as a Collaboration Hub.” Boone talked about some of the customizations he’d done for CUNY Academic commons.

I don’t remember much about the talk itself. I do remember being terrified that Andy Peatling – BuddyPress’s founding developer – was sitting silently in the back row. It was like being in high school and meeting a girlfriend’s father for the first time: I half expected to get my lights punched out for defiling his baby. (Postscript: I now know that Andy is One Sweet Fella and I am far less afraid of him.)

L to R: Matt Mullenweg, John James Jacoby, Boone Gorges, Raymond Hoh, Andy Peatling
BuddyCamp Vancouver. L to R: Matt Mullenweg, John James Jacoby, Boone Gorges, Raymond Hoh, Andy Peatling

At WordCamp San Francisco

2014 will see Boone attend WordCamp San Francisco for a second time. The last time he came was in 2012. He spent the contributor day working with other members of the BuddyPress team, wrapping up some final issues before releasing BP 1.6. “I had to catch the red-eye back to NYC that night,” he recalls, “and I remember sitting in a bar at SFO around 11pm, waiting for my flight to board, and drafting release materials in a WordCamp-induced haze.”

This year, Boone will be talking about why it is both prudent and feasible for WordPress freelancers and small business owners to contribute to WordPress and other related free software projects. Despite being a free software advocate himself, Boone stresses that the presentation will be non-idealogical. “The truth is that  people susceptible to Stallman-type arguments probably don’t need any convincing to contribute to the cause of free software,” he says “The people who need convincing are those who are more concerned with profits than with philosophy, and its to those people that I’ll really be addressing my talk.”

Boone will talk about strategies that enable freelancers to contribute to the project in a sustainable. He’s put together some interesting stats about the project’s contributor base:

I’ll have much more to say during the presentation itself, but I’ll tease it with this observation: WordPress powers some 20%+ of all web sites. Yet WordPress itself is built (even when we understand “built” quite broadly) by just a few hundred people. When such a huge economic burden is placed on such a small number of individuals, it puts the entire system in danger. For this reason, I humbly suggest that my presentation is super important and unmissable for every person who relies on WordPress in any way at all.

(Featured Image CC License webmatter – thanks! 🙂 )