This years speaker line up is pretty great, if we do say so ourselves. Just take a look at our speakers and their bio’s below to learn more about who will be presenting at this years WordCamp Portland, Maine!
Jonathan Perlman
Jonathan Perlman is an experienced web developer working for Dawson College in Montreal, Quebec. Having 15+ years of experience in web development, he builds custom solutions for the educational institution.
Jonathan is also an instructor for Dawson’s Centre for Training and Development specializing website and database technologies such as HTML & CSS, PHP and WordPress along with SQL.
Jeff Golenski
Multidisciplinary UX Designer & Photographer at Automattic. Jeff began working with WordPress in 2005 when he began Midnight Shift Studio, a small design & development agency in New Bedford, Massachusetts. Over the past 4 years, Jeff has dedicated his time into crafting better marketing and product UX design for Jetpack and WordPress.com.
Cory Miller
Cory Miller is a passionate leader and entrepreneurwho believes in finding and maintaining work happiness (for himself and others) that aligns with your purpose and plays to your strengths, talents and ambitions, while challenging you to do great things with your life.
In 2008, he started iThemes, a pioneer in building cutting-edge web design software and training for tens of thousands of customers around the globe.
Over a decade and starting from a home office, Cory grew iThemes into a multi-million dollar enterprise, leading a team of 25+ people, in four countries, with an office headquarters in Oklahoma City.
In 2011, iThemes was named the 7th fastest growing company in Oklahoma City by the Metro 50. That same year, he co-founded The Div, Inc., a nonprofit tech foundation aimed at inspiring and training the next generation of software developers through its kid’s program, Div, Jr.
After a decade of successful business, in January 2018, iThemes was acquired by Liquid Web, a premiere web hosting company, and is now an independent unit within the company.
In addition to being a regular leadership speaker, trainer and writer, he is the co-author of WordPress All-in-One for Dummies (Wiley, 2011).
He is a member and past board member of the Oklahoma chapter of Entrepreneurs’ Organization (EO), a network of over 8,000 entrepreneurs in 40 countries with companies that have revenue over $1 million dollars annually.
Cory has also served as an EO moderator for 3 peer-to-peer “forum” groups and started and seeded two forum groups during his membership.
You can follow him on Cory Miller on Twitter or Cory Miller on LinkedIn.
Jesse Friedman
Jesse Friedman has been building online experiences for 19 years, and exclusively with WordPress since 2006. He has written several books, taught 100’s of students as a professor, and organized dozens of local meetups along with a few WordCamps. He has spoken at tech conferences worldwide and has utilized his expertise as a consultant for small agencies and billion dollar international companies. He joined Automattic in 2014 through an acquisition of BruteProtect a company he co-founded that same year. Today Jesse focuses his efforts on in product marketing and strategic partnerships for Jetpack and Automattic.
Matthew Boynes
Matthew Boynes is a partner at Alley Interactive, where he’s worked on sites such as the Kaiser Family Foundation, People.com, and the New York Post. The only thing Matt loves more than solving complex problems with WordPress is helping others use and develop with WordPress. When he’s not coding, you’ll often find Matt engaged in some outdoor activity like hiking or skiing.
shines & jecker
shines (Sarah Hines) & jecker (Jen Ecker) are the principals of shines & jecker labs and have been running this successful, primarily WordPress, development shop for over 10 years. They founded it with a shared vision of designing and building goal-oriented, visually engaging, and easy-to-use web tools. Their philosophy is that web technology should be efficient and accessible to everyone. Sarah is the chief web mechanic, and Jen is the chief pixel surgeon.
Liz Coursen
Liz Coursen is an award-winning author, editor, and professional speaker from Brunswick, Maine, who divides her time between Maine and Sarasota, Florida, where she owns EditNation.com. The author of 17 books, including Self-Editing for Content Editors and Beyond SEO: 3000 POWER WORDS for Content Writers, last year Liz presented 11 editing and writing programs in India, including editing workshops at Citrix and Oracle.
Closer to home, Liz is an active, two-club member of Toastmasters International and a professional member of the National Speakers Association. In addition to offering corporate training and editing services, she presents an original, 42-topic repertoire of educational programs in libraries, historical and genealogical associations, and museums; the full list can be seen at LizCoursen.com.
A lifelong entrepreneur, Liz put herself through Atlanta’s Emory University by starting a lawn care service and played ice hockey all four years—as the only girl on the team.
Karalyn Thayer
Karalyn is a passionate web and user experience designer based out of Scarborough, Maine. She loves creating elegant websites which helps businesses meet their users needs. When not creating websites she loves helping students at Skillcrush.com where she works as a teachers assistant.
Adam Warner
Adam W. Warner discovered WordPress in 2005 and has been working within the community ever since. To feed his entrepreneurial spirit, he founded several WordPress-focused businesses that provide education, plugins and consulting services for online business owners.
He is a true WordPress Evangelist in spirit and personality, and that happens to have been his job title when joining SiteLock.com. Today, he’s the Open Source Community Manager there, continuing to bring his experience and knowledge of the web, business, and security to many other communities.
Adam is also passionate about his family, robots, and of course Life, the Universe and Everything.
Bradley Maravalli
Bradley is a Senior Web Developer at GreenBananaSEO, an INC 5000 digital ad agency on the North Shore of Massachusetts. He has a deep passion for WordPress development along with self-improvement audiobooks. In his free time, Bradley likes going to yoga, volleyball, salsa nights, and carpentry classes. Feel free to learn more about Bradley at bradleymaravalli.com.
Ben Greeley
Ben is Director of Engineering at 10up, finely crafting websites and tools for content creators. In his spare time, he keeps active by training for marathons, climbing mountains and exploring the world. He lives in Brunswick, Maine and holds degrees in Computer Science and German from the University of Maine.
Christopher Tousignant
Chris is a web developer and WordPress Evangelist for Wakefly, Inc. Wakefly is a New England-based digital marketing agency committed to creating the best possible digital presence for its clients for over 15 years. Our team of skilled engineers and visionary marketers are experts in their fields, employing current trends to create cutting-edge websites.
Tim Howe
As the Lead WordPress Developer, Tim helps in all stages of web development. An early advocate for WordPress and responsive design at Hall, Tim optimizes every website for maximum performance and security. He has contributed to several web development innovations at Hall, as well as WooCommerce and opensource projects.
Alonso Indacochea
Alonso Indacochea is the CEO of 11 Online, a full service digital agency in Albuquerque, NM. At 11 Online, Alonso lives and breathes WordPress, where he and the team build, fix and maintain websites for their clients. Recently, 11 Online launched Block Party, a collection of advanced Gutenberg data visualization blocks.
Pratik Ghela
Pratik Ghela has been working on WordPress since 2011. Till date, he has worked on 500+ WordPress projects for clients from all across the world. His core interest has now focused to Customer Satisfaction. Apart from just working as a bridge between his Dev Team and Clients, he regularly keeps an eye over upcoming technologies. Currently, he is working exclusively on Google AMP based projects and developing a product MakeStories for building web based stories
Elio Rivero
Elio is a developer, designer, and has contributed to WordPress core. He’s a Code Wrangler at Automattic working on the Jetpack plugin for WordPress, in the UI built with React and Redux that leverages the REST API.
He’s also behind the UI in WordPress.com for Activity Log and Rewind, features that allow users to oversee any activity in a site, as well as create backups and restore it.
He enjoys rain, chocolates, taking a lot of photos, and hiking in the hills and woods that surround his city.
Jonathan Desrosiers
Jonathan has been using WordPress since 2007 to build sites of all sizes, covering the entire spectrum of local businesses to enterprises and large universities. He has been a contributor to WordPress Core since 2013 and is a WordCamp Boston/monthly Boston WordPress Meetup organizer. He currently works as a WordPress Developer at Bluehost, where a majority of his time is spent contributing to WordPress Core.
Rich Collier
Rich has been building websites since the beginning of the web. He discovered WordPress in it’s early years and has made many core contributions and authored several plugins. He worked as CTO for a major publishing startup in the United States and has now settled in at Automattic, building the next generation of Jetpack and VaultPress. After hours, Rich is a proud husband and father, and enjoys building & racing drones.
Mike Kirby
Mike Kirby, the manager of digital communications at University of Maine, is responsible for the overall web presence and marketing strategy of Maine’s land and sea grant institution, the flagship campus of the University of Maine system. He assists with branding UMaine’s websites through its WordPress content management system and is passionate about the potential for a robust internet presence. Mike has managed enterprise websites for over 20 years and joined UMaine in 2014.
Tara Johnson
Tara Johnson is a front-end web developer, print designer, brand specialist, WordPress consultant, photographer, digital marketer and business owner (https://alchemythree.com). She’s committed to humanizing the online experience by way of smart design, compelling content and elevated branding. She’s been building sites with WordPress since 2006 and adores the WP community!
In her free time Tara loves to knit, ride bikes, hang with her 2 kids and drink the hoppiest IPAs she can find!
Email: tara@alchemythree.com
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/alchemythree/
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/alchemythree/
Twitter: https://twitter.com/Alchemy3Studio
Scott Fennell
Scott has worked as a WordPress theme and plugin developer since 2008. He is the lead developer for LexBlog.com, where he maintains a customizer-intensive theme framework that powers over 1,000 domains for the largest law firms in the world.
Greg Schoppe
Greg Schoppe is the lead developer for Bytes.co (https://bytes.co), a full-service Digital Marketing company with over 400 clients, ranging in size from independent contractors to multinational corporations. He is passionate about WordPress, programming, and technology in general, and writes about these topics at https://gschoppe.com.