Tag Archives: speakers

Introducing Jenny Wong

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.

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

boone_cuny

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! 🙂 )

Introducing another group of WCSF speakers

Just when you thought WCSF couldn’t get any better, we’ve got another nine speakers to introduce you to. There’s some familiar ones and some unfamiliar, but we think you’ll love hearing what they’ve all got to say:

  • Lyza Danger Gardner is the the co-founder of Cloud Four where she leads mobile development. She’s the author of Head First Mobile Web.
  • Joseph O’Connor is a member of the WordPress accessibility team. He leads Cities, a world-wide effort to build free accessible themes.
  • Sam Hotchkiss is the creator of BruteProtect, a WordPress security plugin acquired by Automattic in August 2014.
  • Josepha Haden is an Analyst at Haden Interactive with nearly a decade of experience managing web analytics, behavioral analysis, and overall site performance.
  • Erick Hitter is a web developer, WordPress contributor, Automattician, former accountant, and occasional audio engineer.
  • Davide Casali is an experience director at Automattic with 11+ years of experience and a hybrid background in design, psychology and technology.
  • Andrea Rennick started out as a volunteer in the WordPress.org forums and now works for Copyblogger Media in customer support for all products.
  • Aaron Hockley is the founder of both WP Photographers and WordCamp Portland.
  • Dave Martin is the Creative Director at Automattic, and WordPress core contributor.

 

Say hello to more WordCamp San Francisco speakers!

WordPress 4.0 was released today! To celebrate we’re doing our own release – the next group of WordCamp San Francisco speakers. Say hello to them all!

  • Rachel Baker is a Senior Strategic Engineer at 10up, contributor to WordPress Core, and a mentor at Dev Bootcamp.
  • Mickey Kay is a senior WordPress developer at MIGHTYminnow Web Studio & School in Oakland, CA.
  • Michael Arestad is a designer at Automattic, and contributor to WordPress Core, Jetpack, VaultPress, and WordPress.com.
  • Mel Choyce is a designer at Automattic and contributor to WordPress Core.
  • Taylor Aldridge  the Creative Director at 10up where he is responsible for branding, design, and strategy.
  •  M. Asif Rahman is the founder CEO  Of A. R. Communications, a WordPress enthusiast, web entrepreneur,  and workaholic.

Just a few more speakers to go and they’ll all be announced. Watch this space!

Even More WordCamp San Francisco Speakers

We’re excited to introduce you to another six WordCamp San Francisco speakers. You’ll be able to hear these fine folks share their knowledge at the Mission Bay Conference Conference Center on 25th & 26th October.

  • Jenny Lawson is a journalist and author of The Bloggess. Her autobiography, Let’s Pretend This Never Happened, is a New York Times bestseller.
  • Luke Wroblewski is the CEO and Co-Founder of Input Factory Inc. He’s the author of three popular web design books, (Mobile First, Web Form Design, and Site-Seeing: A Visual Approach to Web Usability).
  • Joe Dolson is a WordPress plug-in developer and accessibility consultant.
  • Zack Tollman is a web developer at the Theme Foundry. He writes regularly about WordPress performance.
  • Jenny Wong is a web developer at Human Made. She organises WordCamp Manchester and PHP Northwest.
  • Paul Clark is a TEDx speaker, WordPress core contributor, and Director of Recruiting at 10up.com
  • Morten Rand-Hendriksen is a staff author at lynda.com and the Director of Pink & Yellow Media Inc. – a digital media company based in Burnaby, BC.

Welcome our next group of WCSF speakers

We couldn’t let the week pass without introducing you to another handful of WordCamp San Francisco speakers. We hope that you’re as excited to see them speak as we are.

  • Boone Gorges is an independent consultant specializing development services for colleges and universities. He is a lead developer of BuddyPress.
  • Jenn Schiffer is an open web engineer at Bocoup where she writes code to build web apps using open web technologies.
  • Cody Brown is the founder of Scroll Kit, a tool to help people tell dramatic visual stories on the web.
  • Christine Harkin is a writing and editing consultant. She’s been blogging at EditorPlease.com since 2011 and at the award-winning Naptimewriting.com since 2006.

Watch the blog and our Twitter account for more announcements and your email inbox for news because we’re still working on speaker selection!

Our second group of WordCamp San Francisco speakers

It’s Thursday! And what better day to introduce another group of WordCamp San Francisco speakers to you? The selection process is still ongoing, so if you haven’t heard anything, don’t count yourself out just yet. With that in mind, say hello to our second group of WordCamp speakers!

  • Guillermo Rauch was the founder of CloudUp is the author of several popular WordPress plugins, and the author of popular framework socket.io
  • Kel Santiago is Japan-based writer and product evangelist for Digital Cube, a WordPress Consultant company (pending visa approval).
  • Jeremy Felt is a developer at Washington State University and is a contributor to WordPress core.
  • Cory Miller is a former journalist turned full-time entrepreneur. He is the co-author of WordPress All-in-One for Dummies and founder of iThemes.

More speakers will be announced soon!

 

Say hello to the first group of WordCamp San Francisco speakers!

WordCamp San Francisco is getting closer, and we’re working our way through all of your nominations and proposals. While the selection process is still active, we’re excited to have confirmed our first group of speakers.

You’ll recognise many of the names from around the WordPress community; they speak at WordCamps, blog about WordPress, build WordPress websites, and create the software that we all know and love. It’s just a few months until they take the stage at WCSF.

    • Mark Jaquith is a Lead Developer of WordPress. He has been using WordPress since 2004 and offers freelance consulting services.
    • Helen Hou-Sandí is a WordPress core committer, release lead for WordPress 4.0 and Director of Platform Experience at 10up.
    • Chris Lema writes a daily blog covering the WordPress ecosystem from a business perspective.
    • Kathleen Vignos is a full stack engineer and leads the engineering team at WIRED.
    • Tracy Levesque is a co-owner of YIKES, Inc. and a WordPress instructor for Girl Develop It Philly.
    • Andrew Nacin is a Lead Developer of WordPress. He works at Audrey Capital.
    • Sara Cannon is a Partner and Creative Director at Range. She loves design, typography, user experience, and art.

Watch this space for more speaker announcements over the coming weeks!