Some familiar faces and many, many newcomers to WordCamp Philly will be among this year’s speakers. Tara Claeys and Sal Ferrarello, who were with us for the 2017 event, will be returning. They’re joined by Michael Dance, Tessa Kriesel, Tori Pugh, Beka Rice and Nick Smith.
Stay tuned for our next announcement! And read on to find out more about our first round of speakers.
Tara Claeys
With a bachelor’s degree in fine arts, Tara Claeys began her career in advertising and marketing. After her first child was born, she supplemented her full-time job as mom with illustration and stationery design for clients around the world. Her extensive marketing background and understanding of business quickly became her focus. Tara now designs and builds websites for clients — so they can actually work on their own business — with her agency, Design TLC.
She’s given presentations on essential tools for productivity (her passion), as well as sharing examples of websites she has built with WordPress, and panel discussions on freelance work. Tara organizes her local WordPress meetup and enjoys traveling to WordCamp conferences. Along with Liam Dempsey, Tara uncovers the stories of people in the WordPress community in their podcast “Hallway Chats.”
When Tara isn’t redesigning websites, she can be found volunteering for a nonprofit, running, challenging you to get out of your comfort zone, taking piano lessons, or vacationing with her family.
Michael Dance
Michael is a senior developer at CHIEF, a digital agency based in Washington, D.C., and Portland. He started making a living with WordPress nearly 10 years ago, and suddenly feels old. He lives in Washington and really likes clean code, accessibility, and playing volleyball on the weekends.
Sal Ferrarello
Open source veteran Sal Ferrarello has a list of accomplishments to rival any of the Who’s Who in WordPress, including contributing to WordPress Core, Genesis, and authoring the Bootstrap Genesis Theme. If you have time, check out his GitHub account at github.com/salcode.
Along with his volunteer work in the WordPress community, Sal has spoken on a wide variety of topics, including Gutenberg, introducing people to post meta, and getting developers started with transients, as well as encouraging developers to blog.
When Sal isn’t wowing you with his magic or calculus skills, he can be found teaching web development teams the tools to improve their workflows. He also enjoys spending time with his family.
Tessa Kriesel
Teaching and mentorship come naturally to Tessa Kriesel, dog-lover and developer outreach manager at Pantheon. She wears many hats in her life — all with sass and finesse — including instructor for Girl Develop It, lead organizer for WordCamp Minneapolis, and founder of Outspoken Women and Coders of TMRW.
Tessa has spoken on many topics including helping beginners with workflow, mentorship, configuration management, and continuous integration and deployment. She has also been a panelist on a wide range of topics at conferences and meetups.
When Tessa isn’t working on her development chops or mentoring junior developers, she is using her extroverted super hero skills to make people feel welcome and included at whatever event she attends.
Tori Pugh
Tori is a self-taught developer and school-trained designer who works hard to solve problems and bridge design and development thinking. She never stops learning and is always curious about new technologies.
Beka Rice
Beka is the head of product at Jilt, where they focus on helping merchants increase revenue through automated lifecycle emails. Jilt is built by SkyVerge, the top WooCommerce.com extension provider, and maker behind some of the most popular extensions, such as WooCommerce Memberships. Beka loves leveling the playing field for eCommerce growth, making enterprise-level tools accessible to any online store.
Nick Smith
Once a WordPress engineer, Nick Smith now works full time in JavaScript, building React frontends and GraphQL-powered backends. He is passionate about building well-documented and scalable systems that encourage a strong buy-in from junior level to senior level employees.