Speakers

Alex Denning

Alex does marketing for people who don’t like marketing. Alex ran popular WordPress tutorials site WPShout for four years before transitioning to freelancing, and now helps WordPress product companies grow their businesses.

David Lockie

David is the Founder & Director of Pragmatic – a full-service WordPress specialist agency. He has experience building a WordPress business from the ground up having grown his agency from one freelancer to over 40 full-time employees over the course of 5 years.

Davide Casali

Davide Casali, better known as “Folletto”, is currently one of the product design directors of WordPress.com and on the advisor board of multiple startups. He’s a polymath with a hybrid background in design, psychology and technology.

In Davide’s 15+ years of professional experience he designed consumer (B2C), enterprise (B2B) and internal products for more than 6 million users worldwide in different markets and industries. He worked with companies like Bank of England, Intesa Sanpaolo, Banca Sella, Unicredit, Nokia, Vodafone, Telecom Italia, Ferrari and Benetton.

He co-founded Good 50×70, an international social communication project and Baker Framework, a platform to publish HTML5 books and magazines on the iPad. Davide authored with Gianandrea Giacoma a framework to design for social dynamics called Motivational Design, and authored a chapter of the book “How to communicate effectively with a remote team”.

Davide was a design partner in the startup WideTag where he led the product design of WideNoise, shortlisted in the Compasso D’Oro selection, the ADI Design Index 2010 and selected in the Top 10 Internet of Things Products of 2009.

In Automattic, he crafted many facets of the WordPress.com experience – from the overall navigation and design patterns to the customisation and themes showcase experiences – as he was directly involved in the multi-year project Calypso, the React-based open source WordPress.com infrastructure. He’s also contributed to WordPress Core design.

Franz Vitulli

Franz works as a Product Manager at Human Made, a top-tier WordPress agency (WordPress.com VIP partner) that provides development and consultancy for large-scale sites and enterprise clients, creates awesome products online such as Happytables, BackUpWordPress and Nomadbase and runs its own line of events, so far based on the WP REST API and remote working.

As an open source evangelist, WordPress contributor and remote working advocate, Franz loves sharing his knowledge and helping other people in the greater tech community succeed.

When he’s not in front of his laptop, he’s either playing one of his bass guitars or hitting the gym. Chat with him on the Slack main WordPress team (@franz) and find him on Twitter (@franzvitulli).

Gabor Javorszky

Freelance developer working on high traffic / custom WooCommerce sites. Previously at Prospress (Subscriptions plugin). He spends his days breaking WordPress and WooCommerce in hilarious ways.

Izzy Crouch

Izzy is a freelance digital marketing consultant in Brighton, working with a variety of SMEs and also on digital products in order to fund her horse habit. She also enjoys photographing bugs.

John Blackbourn

John is one of the WordPress core developers, a member of the WordPress security team, and was the release lead for WordPress 4.1. He works as a senior developer at Human Made, and has over ten years’ experience developing with WordPress.

Katie Elenberger

All in. Go-getter. Laughs the loudest. With more than a decade of industry experience, Katie excels at developing effective design and messaging that cuts through the clutter and connects with target audiences. Katie’s enthusiasm for her work is contagious, her clients have noted creative talents and outcomes, personality and easy-going nature, and general feeling that she is an extension of staff as just a few reasons why they love to work with her. Plus, as an adjunct design instructor for six years, she will naturally coach you through any process.

Katie is the owner and Creative Director at Spark27, a premiere, full-service design + digital studio that partners with clients to solve complex business problems through strategy and effective communication. Katie is dedicated to the quality of her work and it shows – her designs have earned her 14 ADDY awards and she prides herself on strong client relationships by being focused on building brands with robust identities and measurable results.

Laura Nelson

Laura is the Marketing Manager at Pragmatic – a Brighton-based WordPress design, development, and marketing agency. She’s been marketing WordPress sites for the past 5 years, and loves creating digital marketing strategies for a variety of different clients. She’s also passionate about shedding the stigma surrounding mental illness. As someone who suffers from anxiety herself, she’s keen to shed more light on this issue in order to help others.

Maja Benke

Maja studied landscape architecture but soon discovered her love for WordPress and traveling the world. Now she works as a web designer with a passion for UX and accessibility and has a blog for WordPress newbies.

Michael Burridge

WordPress enthusiast and evangelist. I’ve been involved with the web almost since its inception in 1991 – by 1994 I was teaching a college course on web design. I’ve been working with WordPress as a freelance designer/developer for over 4 years now creating bespoke plugins and themes. I also have a free general purpose plugin in the WordPress Plugin Directory. I was the lead organiser for the first ever WordCamp Bristol held in May 2017.

Phil Ward

Phil has been building websites since he was thirteen years old, becoming a professional in 2008 after finishing a degree in Classics. Now a senior developer at Pragmatic, he enjoys the problem-solving nature of development and specialises in bespoke content migrations and API integrations. He spoke last year about getting a job in digital as part of the Brighton Digital Festival.

Rachel Finch

Rachel is the founder of Brighton Digital Women – a community of women working in digital marketing aiming to change the gender pay gap, learn together and support each other.

She works as a Digital Marketing Manager for several Travelopia brands and loves developing her knowledge of WordPress, SEO and content marketing, as well as spending time travelling and learning new and random skills.

Rian Rietveld

Rian is a WordPress Engineer, working for Human Made and an active member of the WordPress Accessibility team. When she’s not coding you can find her working in her garden.

Sean Blakeley

Sean discovered WordPress in early 2006 and never looked back. He loved the flexibility it gave him and the control it gave his clients. From those early, simple websites he’s grown to work with some household names and become tech lead on large, enterprise projects. Sean’s endlessly amazed at the depth of features and functions the WordPress community have created together – he’s still finding gems even now!

Alongside working with WordPress, Sean spent a decade working in the film industry – working as a sculptor on some blockbuster films including Tomb Raider, Batman Begins, Harry Potter, Prometheus and more.

Tammie Lister

Tammie works at Automattic as an experience designer, where she is on a team that contributes to the WordPress project full time. She has a varied background including psychology, design, front end development and user experience.

Teodora Lazarova

Teodora, originally from Bulgaria, lived and worked in China for 16 years and now calls Brighton & Hove her home.

While working in China she was desperately looking for a way to create a website for her expat magazine & creative agency, without the costly fees for a custom coded site. She discovered WordPress.

Teodora wanted to have control and be able to do most of it on her own. WordPress was not big in China at the time (2009) so finding help was not easy. She taught herself how to use WordPress and with the help of her in-house IT manager, built their first website. She’s been working with WordPress ever since – building sites for her own business as well as for clients.

Tom J Nowell

Tom works his days as a VIP Wrangler at WordPress.com VIP for Automattic. He reviews and deploys millions of lines of code each year for large sites at scale.

He’s also a community moderator at WordPress Stack Exchange, project lead for the WordPress The Right Way ebook, open source developer, and conference speaker.