Speakers

Tamsin Taylor

After graduating with a Bachelors degree in ‘English literature, writing and performance’ and a Masters in ‘Acting for the screen’ Tamsin performed in, and directed, a multitude of film and theatre productions in London, before settling in Sussex in 2012. Since then, she has continued to direct actors, musicians and stand ups, whilst managing a WordPress agency with her husband. 

She now helps the self employed find their voice, and create great talks, for the purposes of public speaking. 

Sim Brody

Sim Brody (https://simbrody.co.uk) is a Brighton-based freelance web designer and developer, who has designed and built innovative WordPress sites for clients of all shapes and sizes.

Before going freelance, Sim was head of design and technology at an international publishing company. His multifarious career also includes a decade as a journalist and several years as a homelessness campaigner. Luckily, he is a passionate believer in the benefits that wide and varied experiences can bring to the web industry.

Sim was a keen Lindy Hopper before twin boys came along!

Kelly Molson

Kelly Molson is the Co-founder and Managing Director of Rubber Cheese, an award winning web design and development agency with studios in Hertfordshire and Cambridge.

Digital partner to local and global brands, Rubber Cheese work across the food & drink, visitor attraction and museum and sectors, with some of the world’s most exciting organisations.

Blogger at kellymolson.co.uk a collection of interviews with leading women agency owners, helping to raise the profile of women in the digital industry.

Kelly recently founded Mob Happy a peer-to-peer network for agency owners, helping to increase the percentage of women agency owners by supporting existing founders on their journey and inspiring up and coming leaders. Structured as a not-for-profit, we invest in running enterprise days and confidence building activities in primary and secondary schools.

Hazlitt Eastman

Haze has been developing with WordPress for over 10 years as well as other CMSs, applications and APIs. He also has a strong background in information technology and is a sysadmin. When he’s not coding, you can find him diving in the sea around Brighton.

Sean Blakeley

Sean created his first website in the last century & discovered WordPress over a decade ago. He ran a small WordPress agency for a number of years where he slowly drifted further away from the pixel.

Today Sean loves to work on large, enterprise projects – refining his agile approach. He is a Senior Technical Architect at Pragmatic and a regular speaker at WordCamps – including London and Europe 2018.

Alongside WordPress, Sean had a success career in the film industry – working as a sculptor on some blockbuster films including Tomb Raider, Batman Begins, Harry Potter and Prometheus.

Francesca Marano

Francesca is the WordPress Community Manager at SiteGround, web hosting company. She is also part of the WordPress community team, organising Meetups and WordCamps in Torino.

She has years of experience as a small business owner, having transformed her passion for the web into a successful WordPress business.

She has published three books in Italian to help freelancers with business planning, productivity and websites. She also founded C+B, a blog with an editorial staff of sixty authors offering advice to more than 35.000 Italian female creative entrepreneurs that read it every month.

Francesca is a passionate speaker and you can find her in Italy and around the world talking about WordPress, community, open source, women in tech and small businesses.

Tess Coughlen-Allen

Tess is a writer and creator who is passionate about communicating stories across different platforms for different purposes.

Day to day, Tess works in Bristol for FlexiDB, the software development house that has created Mind Doodle, a digital workspace for creative idea generation, development, discussion and action.

Mind Doodle combines real-time collaborative thinking and mind mapping with space for files, images, data, charts, notes and team discussions using live chat, plus an agile task manager to turn ideas into reality.

Tess is an active member of WordPress and women in tech communities:

· Co-organiser of WordCamp Europe 2018, hosted in Belgrade

· Co-organiser of Europe’s first do_action day, hosted in Bristol in 2018

· Co-organiser of the Bristol WordPress People monthly meetup

· Support for the inaugural WordCamp Bristol 2017

· Member of Women’s Tech Hub Bristol

· Winner of the GoDaddy Pro scholarship for Women in Tech 2017, in association with Campaign

In her free time, Tess stays active by walking her two dogs, practicing yoga, cycling and kayaking – and you’ll find her enjoying at least one festival each summer.

Dan Maby

Dan is a director at Blue 37 – a WordPress specialist agency. He’s also the founder & director of WP&UP – a charity that supports & promotes positive mental health within the WordPress community.

You’ll find him organising WordCamps and Meetups throughout the UK. He thrives on business development and project management, as well as having a passion for seeing success within others.

Fiona Clarke

Fiona has been holding retreats, workshops and courses internationally for the past 15 years; sharing tools for well-being and connection, with adults and children.

She is a trustee and senior trainer with an international charity, Mind with Heart (mindwithheart.org), bringing mindfulness, compassion and emotional health into education, and helping school communities to flourish.

Meg Fenn

Meg is head of design and web and co-director of Shake It Up Creative, a design and marketing company based in Worthing serving SMEs across Sussex and beyond.

With 17 years in the design industry and a background in teaching, she is skilled as both a graphic designer and as a web designer and is a real people person who is patient and thoughtful. She loves meeting people from all walks of life; getting to know their passions, their businesses and helping them achieve what they want for their own business ventures is hugely important to her as a service provider.

Meg designs in Illustrator, Photoshop and InDesign and primarily builds in WordPress but works in other web platforms too. Originally from the States, Meg also runs a blog about living overseas and raising mixed race, cross-cultural children in the UK and has spoken at international schools, Universities and conferences about her journey as an expat parent and non-fiction book Bringing Up Brits.

Meg is thrilled to be at WordCamp Brighton for the first time and, after having spoken at WordCamp London, is really looking forward to experiencing another WordCamp in such a vibrant city.

Louise Towler

Louise is the Director at Indigo Tree, an agency specialising in WordPress and JAMStack website development. Over the course of 15 years she has grown the business from being a freelancer to having over 10 full-time employees, with clients across the UK.

Alain Schlesser

Alain is a freelance software engineer, author and speaker living in Germany, who has recently settled on WordPress as his market of choice. Within the WordPress space, he is part of the WordPress Core Team (Bootstrap/Load Component Maintainer) and CLI Team (WP-CLI Co-maintainer). However, he is just as passionate about Open Source in general, contributing to a diverse set of projects and efforts, and constantly growing his expertise in software construction as a craft to master.

Vineeta Greenwood

Hi I’m Vineeta, co-founder of a wholesome agency named Wholegrain Digital. We are a B Corp certified organisation and contribute 1% of our revenue to 1% for the planet.

At work, I create websites for positive organisations to help them excel in their mission to make the world a better for all of us.

Mika Epstein

Working for DreamHost as a full stack WordPress developer on DreamPress, Mika helps make the internet better for everyone. She is passionate about code, open source technology, open data, and mindful development practices.

The cofounder of LezWatchTV, the greatest database of queer characters and shows, she develops software and trawls queer representation on television to make the data visible.

David Lockie

David Lockie is the Founder and Director of Pragmatic which he set up in January 2012 after freelancing as a WordPress Developer for a number of years. David loves delivering websites that add value to businesses and organisations and has been invited to speak at international conferences WordCamp and WooConf, sharing his insights on becoming a successful WordPress freelancer and revealing how WordPress can save the world. As Director of Pragmatic he enjoys finding interesting and exciting work for the team, helping the team develop their skills and to care for their well-being. That in turn ensures Pragmatic are doing the very best for its clients and partners. He is proud to work with such a great team and fantastic clients, helping them to grow over the years.

Tammie Lister

I work at Automattic, where I am an experience designer donated to the WordPress.org project full time. My background is varied and includes psychology, design, front end development and user experience. I am passionate about Open Source and community.

Oscar Duignan

Oscar is a Bristol based developer working for binaryvision.com a London digital agency.

Daniel James

Dan is a WordPress developer and contributor and has been using open source software for years. He started making WordPress themes a few years ago, but since then has developed many complex plugins and even lead the 4.9.5 release. He loves all things WordPress, WordCamps and code. In his spare time he enjoys watching sitcoms, being bad at sports and listening to strange music. His biggest strength is writing PHP and biggest weakness is writing third person bios.

Matthew Burleton

You know, that creative director guy at Long Story Short 🙂

Mitko Kochkovski

Mitko started working with WordPress in 2010. He is a Codeable expert and founder of webpigment.com. He loves creating unusual websites, especially with WooCommerce.

Luna Carmona

TEDx speaker and organiser, Luna Carmona has been working in Communications and Social Media over the last five years specialising in the Third Sector. At the moment, Luna Carmona works for Achieve More Scotland, a grass-root NGO located in Glasgow that provides free sport activities in some of the most deprived areas of Scotland. Her role as a Marketing expert and Social Media Manager goes from fundraising events to digital communications including public relations and corporate management. Apart from that, she is a member of the External Relations Committee of the Alliance for the European Voluntary Service where she supports international volunteering of multiple charities across the world building their communications strategy and developing multiple campaigns. Her personal passions are books, travelling and good vegan food.

Marieke van de Rakt

Marieke studied Sociology and Communication Sciences at the Radboud University in Nijmegen. She obtained her PhD in Social Sciences in January 2011. In 2013 Marieke started working at Yoast. She is the founder of Yoast academy, our online courses platform.

Marieke is now one of the partners at Yoast. Together with Joost, Michiel and Omar, she runs Yoast. Her main focus is on Academy and marketing.

Vicki Jakes

Vicki Jakes is an experienced freelance Project Director based in Brighton, UK. She has over 10 years experience working in client services, project management and sales for agencies.

Vicki wants to help businesses, agencies and start-ups deliver better projects.
Vicki is also a cat fancier and baby wrangler.

Sabrina Zeidan

WP lover since 2010. Seven years ago she installed WordPress for the advertising agency she was working at and it was love at first sight.

Since that time there was a long way through design, SEO and marketing career to what she is really excited with — WordPress Multisite development.
Sabrina specializes in helping dev teams implement WP Multisite and get the most out of its functionality. Some of her experience is shared in her blog sabrinazeidan.com.

Piccia Neri

Piccia Neri has an academic background in art history and theory, and has been a practicing designer for over 2 decades. She’s worked with major global brands and cultural institutions, among which Shell, National Gallery, Tate Gallery, British Council, British Museum, Sunday Times Magazine. She has also collaborated with top London agencies working on giant multinational brands, from Unilever to Diageo. Piccia also led the creative direction of the design department at the British Film Institute, London. She served on the board of the Chartered Society of Designers as vice-president from 2013 to 2016.

Piccia made the move from print to web a number of years ago. She runs her own web consultancy agency using WordPress as her beloved tool of choice. She educates geeks, devs, techies and marketers on how to use design to their own advantage, and speaks at tech conferences on design topics.

Luminus Alabi

WooCommerce Happiness Engineer at Automattic with a penchant for helping people figure out the easiest and most reliable way to achieve their objectives with WordPress, WooCommerce and everything in between.

Sometimes coder, abysmal designer, expert hugger and wannabe social butterfly with a 6th-degree black belt in hanging out. If you see Luminus standing in a corner by myself it’s totally okay to come say hello and give him a hug.

James Hall

With over 15 years of experience working in the web industry in the public sector, James began freelancing in his spare time. In 2014 and with an increasing client base, James decided to take the plunge and turn HeX Productions into a full time business.

As a self-confessed geek, James is passionate about all things web from working on small independent projects to large local government and higher education sites and developing accessible, mobile and social strategies to enable easy access to information on the move.

Whether it’s working with new clients on improving their web presence to help grow their business or supporting existing customers with their daily web needs.

Kayleigh Thorpe

Kayleigh is a WordPress Specialist at 34SP.com. You’ll often find Kayleigh socialising at tech meetups throughout the UK. When she’s not learning about WordPress, Kayleigh loves to travel and is passionate about the WordPress community

Raffaella Isidori

Raffaella builds brands and creates the communication for businesses around the world and assists companies in localizing. Besides that, Raffaella designs (graphic/visual/digital/print), studies, teaches, take pictures, writes, translates & coaches professionals on communication & language. You can see her work at www.raffaellaisidori.com. Curious as a cat and in love with diversities, Raffaella collects books, fonts & essential oils. Raffealla lives and works in the country, surrounded by flora & fauna, where she cultivates dreams & pushes boundaries. Online, Raffaella is Zetaraffix.

Neil Gilmour

After spending 20 years teaching various breeds of vagrant children how to do outdoor activities with variable success, Neil moved up in the world and started teaching teachers about child development, (very basic) neuro-development, and using relationship to change their students’ brains. Along the way Neil has run and/or owned several small businesses. These days Neil owns a ‘not just for profit’ start-up which helps adults who look after children to measure, change, and measure the change in mental health and wellbeing.

WordCamp Brighton 2018 is over. Check out the next edition!