Speakers

WordCamp Philly 2011 Speakers

Interested in speaking? Please fill out our Become a Speaker form.

Aaron Jorbin

Aaron Jorbin is an engineer with Clearspring where he works on AddThis and a WordPress Core Contributor. He has spoken to multiple User Groups and at WordCamps in four time zones. When he’s not busy creating and fixing bugs, Aaron helps run an educational simulation conference for over 1500 college students. He’ll gladly toast to the GPL any day of the week and happily will discuss whisky, quality beer, or the upper peninsula of Michigan anytime he can.

Andrew Nacin

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.

Andrew Norcross

Beneath the colorfully tattooed skin and lanky frame beats the heart of a competitor, a guy whose eclectic background as code geek, athlete and punk-scene lifer has coalesced into a fiercely creative, independent and energetic methodology. He knows the languages. He’s a digital alchemist; Norcross has thought of the things the clients haven’t, because – all together now – that’s his job.

Andrew Spittle

I’m a Happiness Engineer at Automattic where I reply to support requests for WordPress.com users every day. I’m also involved in developing Edit Flow, which I spoke about at WordCamp Philly 2010. I’ve been in customer service jobs for the last 9 years in various industries.

Anthony Bubel

Having had his introduction to the wonder of WordPress while a student at Temple (go Owls!), Anthony always loves returning to the campus for an event like this. He fills his days engineering happiness on WordPress.com until he has to cook his wife dinner and run clinics in Call of Duty over Xbox Live. You can find him on Twitter at @anthonybubel and his personal blog at http://anthonybubel.com/.

Anthony is also one of the organizers of WordCamp Philly 2011!

Bill Dennen

Bill Dennen is a Web Technologist at Wheaton College in Massachusetts. Somehow, what started out as a part-time job as an undergraduate in college has turned into a 20-year career of supporting the use of technology in higher education. Bill remembers the first time he received a URL via email and wondered “what do I do with it?” and he has been focused on and fascinated by the web ever since. Prior to Wheaton, Bill worked at Brown University and Colby College. Outside of work, Bill is an avid Red Sox fan and enjoys traveling to sunny, warm destinations with his family. Follow Bill at @wjdennen on Twitter.

Bill will be participating in the Academic Panel – Socializing Higher Education through Content Management Systems.

Brad Williams

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. You can find Brad on twitter @williamsba and his blog at http://strangework.com

Brian Richards

I am the creator of the StartBox theme framework, a long time designer, avid photographer, and general all-around nice guy. I’ve been using WordPress since 2007 and have helped launch well over 60 WP-powered sites over the last 4 years.

Dave Konopka

Dave Konopka is a full stack web developer based in Philly who loves hacking on backend and frontend code. He knows his way around WordPress custom plugins and themes, BuddyPress community sites, and Multisite installations. Dave also organizes Build Guild Philly, a monthly social meetup for web nerds who enjoy adult beverages. You can find him on Twitter @davekonopka.

David Schuff

David Schuff is Associate Professor of Management Information Systems at Temple University and is part of the MIS Community Site Project (http://community.mis.temple.edu). He is also the Director of Innovation in Learning Technologies for the Fox School of Business. David studies various topics in social media, including its use in political campaigns, political polarization in the blogosphere, and online consumer reviews. He can be found on Twitter at @dschuff.

David will be participating in the Academic Panel – Socializing Higher Education through Content Management Systems.

Doug Stewart

A ten-plus year veteran of the IT industry (please don’t hold it against him!) and Linux expert by trade, Doug has been using WordPress since its 1.0 days and has been surreptitiously converting internal websites and coworkers alike over to it for almost as long.

Doug is also one of the organizers of the Philadelphia WordPress Meetup Group and WordCamp Philly. You can find Doug on twitter (@zamoose) and his blog at http://literalbarrage.org/blog/

Dre Armeda

Andres “Dre” Armeda, CISSP is a web designer with a security habit. Dre is the founder of CubicTwo, a web solutions company. He gets his web security fix as Co-Founder of Sucuri Security.

CubicTwo is a web solutions company based in Riverside County, California. CubicTwo stemmed from over 10 years of consulting and creating web and graphics solutions.

Sucuri is a security company that concentrates on being the leader in web integrity monitoring and web malware removal. Sucuri offers web integrity monitoring and alerting capabilities to small, large, and enterprise web networks.

Follow @dremeda on Twitter, or say hi at dre.im.

Fajr Muhammad

Fajr Muhammad is an avid blogger and WordPress groupie! In 2006 she started her fashion/lifestyle blog Stylish Thought. Today, Stylish Thought is a mashup of fashion commentary, female empowerment and tried and true advice on living and dressing outside the box! Armed with a love of the internet, Fajr is also a professional SEO copywriter and helps small businesseses and entrepreneurs harness their digital mojo through the power of WordPress. You can follow Fajr on Twitter @stylishthought

Helen Hou-Sandi

Helen Hou-Sandi is a Web Design Engineer with 10up and formerly served as Web Developer at the Eastman School of Music. She loves WordPress for its flexibility, extensibility, and community and largely focuses on CMS implementations. When not at the computer, Helen can be found practicing and performing as an accomplished classical collaborative pianist.

Helen will be participating in the Academic Panel – Socializing Higher Education through Content Management Systems.

Jake Goldman

Jake Goldman is the owner of 10up LLC, a web agency focused on content management and awesome WordPress implementations. At 10up, Jake works on exciting and wide ranging WordPress projects, like TechCrunch, 9 to 5 Mac, Hip2Save, and m62 visualcommunications. Jake is a writer and expert reviewer for Smashing Magazine, and has authored over a dozen highly rated WordPress plug-ins. Jake founded and continues to organize the WordPress Providence meet up, and has spoken at WordCamps around the country, including Boston, New York, Mid-Altantic, Chicago, and Miami.

Jason Coleman

I am CEO of Stranger Studios, a small web development firm out of Reading, PA. We’ve been building websites full time since 2006 and have slowly moved our business to nearly 100% WordPress development.

Besides building the Paid Memberships Pro plugin, we’ve built many large, complex plugins for clients including our own eCommerce plugin, a workshop/events plugin, real estate plugins, and large custom sites that do crazy things with WordPress.

Jayvie Canono

Jayvie is a freelance web designer who has been using WordPress since its initial release, 0.71. In addition to making websites, he coaches his clients on content creation for the web, and speaks at WordCamps about design. He’s also known for the occasional contrarian editorial, although his inner Thomas Paine is on vacation. His speaking engagements and writing focus on common sense approaches to design, development and project management.

You can follow Jayvie on Twitter @onefinejay

Lisa Sabin-Wilson

Lisa Sabin-Wilson is the founder of E.Webscapes Design Studio, a blog and web site design and development company specializing in premium WordPress themes, made to order to your specifications. She has designed and developed over 1,000 personal and professional WordPress web sites.  Lisa is also the founder of Allure Themes, a premium theme company catering primarily to women and the web sites that run them.

Lisa is the For Dummies brand (Wiley Pub) franchise author on all things WordPress; having worked with WordPress since 2003, she has extensive experience and knowledge on the platform and shares it in her several WordPress-related books. She is also a regular public speaker on topics such as: WordPress, blogging, design and social media. Follow Lisa on Twitter here: @LisaSabinWilson

Marie Selvanadin

Marie Selvanadin is a Web Application Developer at the Center for New Designs in Learning and Scholarship at Georgetown University (GU) where faculty, students, and staff have been using WordPress for about five years now. You can find some interesting case studies here. At CNDLS, she does Django development, writes WordPress plugins and helps manage GU’s multisite infrastructure which has about 3,100 blogs.

Marie will be participating in the Academic Panel – Socializing Higher Education through Content Management Systems.

Matthew K. Gold

I am Assistant Professor of English at New York City College of Technology and the CUNY Graduate Center, where I also serve as Assistant to the Provost for Master’s Programs and Digital Initiatives. I’ve began using WordPress in 2004; since then, I’ve gone on to direct several WordPress/BuddyPress academic projects, including the CUNY Academic Commons and Looking for Whitman. I’m especially proud that these projects contribute back to the WordPress community; the plugins developed by the CUNY Academic Commons team have been downloaded over 100,000 times.

Matthew will be participating in the Academic Panel – Socializing Higher Education through Content Management Systems.

Michael Toppa

Mike Toppa is the Director of the web application team for Penn’s School of Medicine Information Services. He has been coding for the web since the days of Mosaic and Netscape 1.0. His 16 years in web application development range from academic experience at Georgetown, Stanford, and Penn, to dot com experience at Ask Jeeves and E*Trade. Mike is the author of several free WordPress plugins and assists in managing web sites for several non-profit organizations. Although his current responsibilities are in management, he maintains a passion for code and is an advocate of Agile coding practices.

Nile Flores

My name is Nile Flores. I am a mother, pro blogger, as well as a WordPress Designer and Developer. I have been in the WordPress community since its b2 days. My goal has always been to help people rock out their websites.

I have spoken at several WordCamps since 2010 and it is not uncommon to see me in the WordPress support forums or on Twitter fielding questions. I love to teach and help, which are my passions. These are reflected in both my websites Blondish.net and WPAddict.net.

Owen Winkler

By day, he’s Owen Winkler — the owner/architect of Critical Hit, a web development and consulting company in suburban Philadelphia. By night, he’s known by his IRC nickname, ringmaster — an emeritus developer of WordPress core, and current project management committee member of the Habari Project. From 2005 and 2007, Owen was the organizer of the Philadelphia WordPress meetup, at the time, the world’s largest regular monthly WordPress meetup. These days, he writes about stuff and junk on his personal blog, Asymptomatic.

Patrick O’Keefe

Patrick O’Keefe is the founder of the iFroggy Network, a publisher of websites. He has been managing online communities since 2000 and is the author of “Managing Online Forums,” a practical guide to managing online social spaces.

He has been responsible for the cultivation of communities like KarateForums.com. phpBBHacks.com and
PhotoshopForums.com. He blogs about online community at ManagingCommunities.com, his favorite record label at BadBoyBlog.com and more at patrickokeefe.com. On Twitter, he’s @iFroggy.

Paul Paire

Paul is currently the Executive Director of Special Projects at Temple University.

Pete Schuster

I am a Front End Web Developer working at O3 World in Philadelphia. Before coming to O3, I worked as a Web Developer at Inverse Paradox in Feasterville. In addition to working full time, I also freelance as a WordPress Developer where I develop sites for Curious and Company and others. I’ve been using WordPress for 3 years, and have developed dozens of sites using WordPress as a CMS.

Peter Baylies

Peter Baylies is a WordPress developer for Semper Fi Web Design with decades of experience in computing stemming from an innate enthusiasm coupled with having far too much time on his hands.

Reed Gustow

I’ve been working with WordPress for 2 years or so, making websites and teaching, and I’m the Principal of a web development company, Delta Angel. I’m the co-leader of the Web Design group of the Philadelphia Area Computer Society and a board member of the Philadelphia Area New Media Association.

Reed is also one of the organizers of WordCamp Philly 2011!

Sam Napolitano

Sam Napolitano is a technology enthusiast and an accomplished website developer. He has been building high profile websites for the past 8 years and has been working with WordPress actively for the last 3 years.

In his most recent role as Manager of Development and QA for the Lawyers.com small law marketing team, Sam has been responsible for the development and maintenance of over 3000 fully custom websites. He was also tasked with designing and deploying an enterprise level WordPress Multisite install that would be the new platform for all websites built by the agency.

After a successful 6 years with Lawyer.com, Sam is now transitioning to AOL where he will be focused on development for the AOL Entertainment web properties. You can follow Sam on Twitter @eightamrock

Sean Blanda

Sean Blanda handles IT, editorial innovation and client management for Technically Media. For Technically Philly, he heads up venture capital coverage and organizes the Switch Philly demo event. Blanda is responsible for most of the company’s technology needs, and can often be seen tinkering with the latest WordPress plugin. He also oversees Constitution Daily for Technically Media, training staff and dictating editorial strategy.

Steven L. Johnson

After completing a PhD in online communities from University of Maryland, Steven L. Johnson created a WordPress-powered course in social media innovation at Temple University in Fall, 2008. You can check out this semester’s class at: http://community.mis.temple.edu/social/.

Dr. Johnson is an Assistant Professor at Temple University. His primary area of research interest is group dynamics and leadership processes in online communities. His broader area of interest is knowledge management, social media, and large-scale social networks.

For daily news on social media and business follow @StevenLJohnson.

Tom Carney

I have been working with WordPress for three years. I have been developing WordPress websites and themes for YellAdworks, a King of Prussia based company, for over a year. My company designs websites for mostly small and medium size businesses. I built a search directory WordPress site for YellAdworks out of custom made theme. I love working with WordPress and teaching others how to use it – no matter what their computer skill level is. I am very excited to see what WordCamp has in store for Philly in November.

Yasmine Mustafa

Yasmine Mustafa’s two main passions are 123LinkIt.com and GirlDevelopIt. 123LinkIt is a blog advertising company with the #1 most
downloaded WordPress affiliate tool. The software scans blog posts and transforms product
keywords into affiliate links. GirlDevelopIt aims to repair the wide gender gap in development
by focusing on helping women learn how to program in a supportive and fun environment. When she has free time, Yasmine enjoys people watching and playing poker.