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Adam Bell
Talk: WooCoffee and Beignets: the story of the Cafe du Monde redesign
Adam Bell runs the independent web design studio, dataTV, based in the Los Angeles area since 2005, when he migrated from New Orleans and Hurricane Katrina. He runs the Los Angeles Adobe User Group since 2006 and has been on the board for Social Media Club LA since 2017. Bell has worked with WordPress since 2005 and has designed sites for Tender Greens, Ovation TV, Tattoo Tequila, Karmana CBD, and the legendary Cafe du Monde. Bell last spoke at WordCamp LA in 2016.
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Alicia St. Rose
Talk: Piping Hot Delivery Anywhere with Zapier
Alicia St. Rose is the owner, principal designer, and developer at WP with Heart. Her WP journey started over 13 years ago when a UX friend offhandedly suggested using the CMS for a website. The adventure turned into a torrid love affair. In addition to creating for WordPress, her agency provides an online one on one DIY website coaching for heart inspired entrepreneurs and content creators. She is also a Creativity and Mindshift Mentor, empowering people to dropkick their limitations to express their own wildly creative selves with authenticity and integrity.
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Allie Nimmons
Talk: 5 Ways to Make Your Events and Projects More Diverse
Allie Nimmons is the Community Manager at WP Buffs. She is a self-taught WordPress user. Before joining the WP Buffs team, Allie spent five years maintaining, troubleshooting, designing, building, and breaking WordPress sites for small business owners. She is passionate about tapping into what makes WordPress and the WordPress community so powerful, from human to code and back again.
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AmyJune Hineline
Talk: Inclusive Content Strategy
Amy is the Open Source Community Ambassador at Kanopi Studios. She brings a dual focus on both open-source community development and inclusivity to uniquely help individuals become more comfortable and confident as they contribute to their communities. She has co-organized various open-source camps and conventions throughout North America, empowering individuals to forge deep community connections that benefit the whole. As a self-described non-coder, Amy helps communities discover how they can contribute and belong beyond coding.
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Cal Evans
Talk: The Basics of Hosting
Cal touched his first computer at the tender age of 14, and his life has never been the same. (We’re using the term “computer” loosely here as it was a TRS-80 Model 1). He graduated from TRS-80s to Commodores and eventually to IBM PCs. For the past 15 years, Cal has worked with PHP and MySQL on Linux, OSX, and Windows. He has built various projects ranging in size from simple web pages to multi-million dollar web applications. Cal lives in West Palm Beach, Florida, happily married to his lovely and talented 1.36 wife, Kathy. They have two wonderful kids who were both smart enough not to pursue a job in IT.
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Chris Ferdinandi
Talk: The Lean Web
Chris Ferdinandi loves to help people learn vanilla JavaScript. He believes there’s a simpler, more resilient way to make things for the web. Chris wrote the “Vanilla JS Pocket Guide series,” created the “Vanilla JS Academy training program,” and is the host of the “Vanilla JS Podcast.” Thousands of developers read his daily developer tips newsletter with code snippets, tools, techniques, and interesting stuff from around the web. Net Magazine featured his ideas on building a simpler, faster world-wide-web. He’s taught developers at organizations like Chobani and the Boston Globe, and Apple and Harvard Business School have used his JavaScript plugins. Chris Coyier, the founder of CSS-Tricks and CodePen, has described Chris’ writing as “infinitely quote-worthy.”
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Desiree Rose Martinez
Talk: How Video Storytelling Can Propel Your Brand, Build Community, and Get Leads
Desiree Martinez is a long-time and award-winning social media creative content creator. She has worked with hundreds of businesses and brands to help them grow their business with better content marketing. As a YouTuber, podcaster, speaker, and business owner, Desiree knows what it takes to help your business grow, build a community, and get leads through a very noisy news feed. She is the author of Innovation From Desperation: The Unfiltered Failures & Successes of an OG Social Media Marketer.
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Francesca Marano
Talk: The Future of WordPress
Francesca is the WordPress Core Team Lead at Yoast, where we believe SEO is for everyone. She is an accomplished educator, community leader, and public speaker.
Francesca co-led the release of WordPress.org 5.3 and 5.4. She serves as the Core Team global representative and mentors other women to get involved in making WordPress.
One of the things she is most proud of is the blog she founded in 2013, C+B. With an editorial staff of more than eighty authors, C+B has helped thousands of Italian creative female entrepreneurs find their path throughout the years.
Francesca is a passionate speaker and you can find her around the world talking about WordPress, community, open-source, women in tech, and small businesses. Right now she does it via Zoom from her living room.
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Glen Ingram
Talk: Web Accessibility and On Page SEO. Why they are really like twins?
Glen is the founder of Web Search Pros Inc. in Huntington Beach, CA. He brings over 15 years of experience in online marketing. Previously he developed online media opportunities for one of the largest phone book companies in the US. Web Search Pros Inc. has built over a thousand websites and ranked hundreds of first-page sites for too many phrases to count. Web Search Pros Inc. specializes in website accessibility and compliance, which enables websites to work for those with disabilities and help protect businesses from lawsuits and increase their reach
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Jake Spurlock & Liz McDonald
Talk: Failure Is Not an Option: What Apollo 13 Can Teach Us about Launching Websites
Jake splits his time between being a Technical Account Engineer at Automattic on the WordPress.com VIP team and being a release lead on the WordPress Core Security team. Most recently, he was the release coordinator for WordPress 5.5. Jake has spent more than a decade building editorial tools for publishers and has a deep love of podcasting which started back when video iPods came out. He wants to hear about your favorite show. He loves WordPress because it keeps getting better, and the amazing tools that are being built around Gutenberg are continually redefining the product. Did you know that Jake is also in the top #100 players in the world for expert level solves for a popular Sudoku app?
Liz’s career has centered around the excitement of large technology projects. She is a Lead Technical Account Manager for WordPress VIP, where she partners with Enterprise clients to manage their applications. Before joining WordPress VIP, she enjoyed employing WordPress to meet the needs of startups and Fortune 100 brands from a small agency. She also had opportunities to deep dive into what it means to manage a brand’s digital assets and form deep relationships in business and nonprofit development.
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Jason Orellana
Talk: Level Up With Child Themes
Jason Orellana is the founder and web developer at Emphasis.LA, a digital marketing and website development agency. Their priority is to help Los Angeles small businesses and non-profits create an online presence and expand their exposure from LA to the world.
Jason began studying website development in 2014. After freelancing for a few years, he founded Emphasis.LA with the help of his wife Josie. Jason has learned a lot from attending various WordPress meetups, WordCamps, marketing meetups, and other networking activities. He hopes to share the same value that has been given to him with others that are in a similar situation.
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Joe A Simpson Jr.
Talk: History 101: How creating a Wapuu adds fun to your WordPress Event
Joe A. Simpson, Jr. is a Front-End Web Developer and User-Experience Designer specializing in WordPress solutions. He is also a SiteGround Ambassador. Faced with a life-altering heart event in 2017, Joe pivoted, focusing FIRST on doing the things he truly loved — WordPress, creative passions, teaching tech, and truly giving back. He actively contributes to the WordPress Community, founding WordPress and Elementor Santa Clarita Valley Meetups, speaking or volunteering at WordCamps, is the Lead Organizer for WordCamp Santa Clarita Online, and is helping wrangle volunteers for WordPress Accessibility Day.
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Maciej Palmowski
Talk: Creating Gutenberg blocks using ACF Blocks
Maciej is a WordPress developer working in WPMU DEV. After hours, he is helping develop a Timber plugin. He is also an organizer of WordCamp Lodz (Poland).
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Marieke van de Rakt
Talk: Importance of Readability for SEO Copywriting
Marieke van de Rakt is the CEO at Yoast, a top WordPress SEO plugin. As the founder of Yoast Academy, she teaches bloggers, developers, marketers, and business owners how to set up a winning local SEO strategy to rank among the top local search results. She also manages the Yoast marketing and project teams. Marieke’s favorite SEO topics are copywriting and site structure.
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Mario Santos Guillamot
Talk: Connecting Gutenberg and Frontity: A Case Study
Mario is an industrial engineer passionate about learning and testing new tools. After being on the Big Data team at Orange Spain, he joined Frontity, an open-source framework to create websites using WordPress and React. As Product Manager, Mario is in charge of understanding the user needs and trying to figure out the best solution. To continue learning about different areas, Mario has simultaneously developed a small eCommerce company and is about to launch a new hostel in his home town of Burgos, Spain. Since beginning to work with WordPress on these projects, his love and passion for this platform has grown.
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Mauricio Dinarte
Talk: Understanding React.js
Mauricio is a web developer passionate about Drupal, WordPress, and ReactJS. He believes in the value of free software communities working together and looks for collaboration opportunities among them. Mauricio enjoys traveling, reading, and teaching. He blogs in English, Spanish, and French.
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Meryl Evans
Talk: Much Ado About Captioning Your Videos for WordPress Sites
Born hearing-free, Meryl’s first encounter with captions started in 1983 when she received her first closed-caption decoder. As she depends on captions to follow videos, she has seen the best and worst of captioning. Fast forward decades later, Meryl’s digital marketing career has come in handy in educating people about the benefits of captioning videos and captioning them well. Meryl created #Captioned in social media to help people find captioned videos to spread awareness and video reach.
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Mike Demopoulos
Talk: How to Have a Human Connection to your Clients in a COVID-19 World
Mike is a virtual marketing innovator always looking to bring his energy and creativity to the next challenge. He has a proven background of managing 100+ accounts, creating successful multi-channel marketing packages, and monitoring outsourced vendors to ensure the highest quality and adherence to best practices. Mike spoke at Press4Word in Tel Aviv last year and is a former Disney cast member. He even had his own Disney podcast – The MouseStation Podcast – “Magic to your Ears!”
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Natalie MacLees
Talk: Creating content for everyone: Tips for ensuring your digital presence is accessible
Natalie is a born leader and motivator. As the founder + principal of Digitally, an accessibility-focused digital agency, she has been building the internet since 1996. Her credits include:
- Author of jQuery for Designers, now in its second edition.
- Founder of Website Weekend, a 48-hour hackathon matching web professionals with nonprofits in need of websites.
- Lead organizer of WordCamp Los Angeles in 2013 and 2014 and on the organizing team for 2015.
- One of the founders of the Los Angeles chapter of Girl Develop It, a nonprofit organization that provides training in web development for women.
- Co-host and co-producer of the “Do Weekly” Podcast, a weekly challenge podcast by small business owners.
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Pablo Pastigo
Talk: Frontity Framework: Introduction to Building React Frontends for WordPress
Born and raised in Madrid, Spain, this software engineer, entrepreneur, and foodie founded Worona.org in 2015, a platform to turn WordPress blogs into mobile apps. Worona had more than 15,000 users from 140 countries. In 2017, Worona became Frontity, a platform to build PWAs for WordPress using React. Pablo is proud of this technology, which served more than 50 million pageviews. In June 2019, Frontity evolved into a 100% open source project after releasing a framework to build lightning-fast sites using React and WordPress.
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Rachel Anderson
Talk: How to Research and Write Blog Posts People Want to Read
Rachel Anderson is the Managing Editor for Need Someone to Blog (Women Who WP Co-Founder Jen Miller’s company). She’s a “Jill” of all trades and can write and edit copy for a website, whip up fun blog posts, ghostwrite books, and manage social media. Rachel’s specialty is writing blog posts and cornerstone content for real estate agencies, design-build residential construction firms, architects, and brick-and-mortar businesses in the US and Canada.
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Rob Watson
Talk: The Care and Feeding of Your Web Designer
Rob Watson has been a web designer since 1996, a blogger since 2001, and a WordPress user, designer, and developer since 2007, where he integrated WordPress into the content publishing environment of a multi-national educational publisher. For ten years, Rob owned and operated a digital agency called Webidextrous.com. In 2019 he became a part of the Pantheon.io Heroes program. He is now an online business coach and the founder of the West Orlando WordPress Meetup.
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Sabrina Liao
Talk: Who Cares About UX? Case Study: UX Before And After
With a passion for creative, fun, and challenging things, Sabrina Liao has worked at a top Asia agency on global brands as the Creative Director. Her work consists of UX research and educating future designers/developers at universities and providing digital solutions to Fortune 500 companies and government agencies.
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Sean Conklin
Talk: Database Cleanup, Prune Legacy Plugin And Theme Cruft To Free Up Resources
Sean Conklin, MBA and Founder at Coded Commerce, LLC has been a full-stack PHP web developer since 2002. He’s been specializing in WordPress powered websites since 2011 and WooCommerce powered stores in recent years. Sean co-organizes the West Valley WordPress Meetup, WooCommerce Los Angeles Meetup and has spoken at or helped organize local WordCamp conferences.
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Steve Zehngut
Talk: Five Reasons to Move to Headless WordPress
Steve founded Zeek Interactive in 1995 and ever since then, he has been the creative technologist behind the Huntington Beach, CA-based company.
Steve is the Orange County (OC) WordPress Meetup organizer and has helped build the community to over 2,400 members. He is a two-time lead organizer of WordCamp Orange County and has served on the organizing committee for WordCamp US and on the organizing team for WordCamp Los Angeles.
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Topher DeRosia
Talk: Build Ecommerce Sites With Confidence (Demystifying Commerce)
Topher DeRosia is a Senior Developer Advocate at BigCommerce, where he works to enhance the communication between BigCommerce and developers. He brings more than 25 years of experience as a web developer, over a decade spent building out WordPress sites. Topher also has extensive knowledge of WooCommerce development, helped make Easy Digital Downloads, and curates HeroPress.com.
