Speakers

Sean Conklin

Sean Conklin is a Lead Developer, Integration Technologies with Maryland based Pongos Interactive. Sean telecommutes from San Jose, California. He develops high quality WordPress plugins that do cool, cutting edge, and custom stuff while following best practices for performance, security, and interoperability.

Kerry Mickelson

Kerry Mickelson is currently the Director of Information Services at the American Geophysical Union in Washington DC.

He has been an open source innovator and supporter for over 15 years and a WordPress advocate for its use in mission critical systems.

His career spans 25 years with almost a decade as the Director of Software development @ NPR in Washington DC, as well as developing software for Allstate Financial, his own company Vhroom.com, Mayo Clinic, and Bank of America.

He wrote his first program while in high school in 1978.

Shane Powers

Rami Abraham

Rami is a WordPress developer at WP Site Care (wpsitecare.com), and a freelance WordPress developer. He presently lives in Baltimore, MD.

George Stephanis

By day, George Stephanis is a mild-mannered code monkey on the Jetpack Pit Crew for Automattic. By night, however, George is a Core Contributor to WordPress, and a Team Fortress 2 aficionado. When not glued to his laptop, he enjoys letterpress printing, napping in his hammock, and handcrafting hardwood furniture.

Aaron Brazell

Aaron Brazell is a senior WordPress developer for Baltimore-based AGORA Publishing and is a co-founder of WordPress hosting platform WP Engine. He has been blogging, writing, developing, consulting and contributing to WordPress for nearly a decade and is the author of the WordPress Bible. His specialty is plugin design, architecture and development and lives in the Mt. Vernon neighborhood of Baltimore.

Byron Warnken

Byron Warnken, Esq. is a content marketer.  He runs eight active, lead generating wordpress sites.  He is also an attorney.  His two largest wordpress projects are www.injurylawyerdatabase.com andwww.accidentvalues.com.    With InjuryLawyerDatabase, Warnken scraped all of Maryland Case Search (Maryland’s public litigation repository) to put together statistics on lawyers.

Akilah Thompkins-Robinson

Akilah Thompkins-Robinson, PMP is a Web Strategy Coach, who works with e-commerce and on-line businesses to design, develop, and dominate the web! Akilah is the owner of AKZMe Designs and Marketing (www.akzmedesigns.com) where she provides designs, development, consulting, and training services.

Akilah is also the author of, “The Website Content Workbook: The guide to what should be inside your website.” And the host of the upcoming podcast “Girl Get Your Business Online”

Aaron Jorbin

Aaron Jorbin is a Developer, Designer, and Open Source Evangelist working to make the web more usable and accessible. He works as a Senior Interactivity Engineer for Privia Health and co-organizers the WordPress DC meetup. Since WordPress 3.0, Aaron has contributed bug fixes and enhancements to WordPress core and each default theme since Twenty Ten. He has contributed or open sourced over fifty projects and is always trying to figure out what the next one will be.

Kelly Hansen

Cruise Director/Vice President of Client Services, Pongos Interactive

Kelly’s “favorite things” are: WordPress Evangelization, reading association mission statements, and making sure each of Pongos’ clients’ sites is a true and interactive digital representation of their real-life business, organization or association.

Her past life as anthropology grad student somehow led her to a life in technology. Now she’s a CSS dabbler, and enjoys pondering the cultural milieus and intersections of open source and proprietary software.

Brennen Byrne

Brennen Byrne is the founder and CEO of Clef, a new identity company with the mission of replacing less secure usernames and passwords with mobile cryptography. Brennen is an active speaker with experience in user authentication, data protection and cryptographic digital identity protection solutions. Clef is located in San Francisco, CA and is privately funded company.

Brad Parbs

Bio: Brad Parbs is a WordPress and WordCamp junkie. As well as being a core contributor, plugin author, theme designer, open source fanatic, and startup lover. Brad has created open source WordPress tools, themes, and plugins. He currently runs Snow Day Group, a Milwaukee-based WordPress development agency. He likes cats, chai tea, and weird music.

Lee Blue

Lee Blue founded the web development firm Reality66 in 2002. In 2008 he released Cart66 (http://cart66.com), one of the first e-commerce plugins for WordPress. With a B.S. in computer science and over 12 years professionally developing web applications Lee, and the team at Reality66, continue to develop plugins and services extending secure e-commerce tools to the WordPress community.

Arsham Mirshah

Tracy Rotton

Russell Heimlich

Russell is the lead developer at the Pew Research Center where he built a multi-site set-up from the ground up. Before that he has worked at USNews and World Report and interned at the web magazine A List Apart. Dummyimage.com is one of his side projects as well as co-organizing the WordPress DC meetup.

Douglas Bell

Douglas Bell is the co-host and editor of Tech tAUk Reloaded (http://techtauk.net), a weekly technology news talk podcast. Previously he was the Webmaster & IT Director, and later General Manager of ATV (http://auatv.com), the student-run campus television station at American University in Washington, DC. He designed and managed the website and podcasting platform for ATV and its 10-15 television shows. Before joining ATV, he co-hosted and edited the phpBB Weekly podcast, which ran for over 160 episodes. He currently works as a video production intern at WAMU 88.5 FM in Washington, DC.