Meet the speakers of WordCamp Toronto: Developers 2012!
Al Davis
Al Davis is an organizer of WordCamp Toronto, the Toronto WordPress Group, and Toronto WordPress Developers Meetup Group. Al has been developing web sites and web strategies for more than 15 years, and has worked with thousands of website owners, communicators, and online strategists in the course of his career.
Arley McBlain
Arley McBlain is a front end web developer at Thrillworks Inc. in Burlington, and has been working with WordPress since 2006. His writing has been featured in CSS Tricks. He blogs, tweets and creates online experiments as ArleyM.
Brandon Hill
I’m a seasoned web developer dating back to the GoLive days. Starting as a freelance web designer and developer, I worked on projects touching a wide variety of digital technologies including videos, CDs, radio commercials, cubics/panoramas/VRs, video games and of course the requisite portfolio sites. PHP was my turning point sending me to the back of the web from where I’ve only returned to fall in love with the latest capabilities of Javascript and CSS. WordPress was hoisted upon me as the IIS-hosted site I work with transitioned to the most popular blogging platform in the world.
Brent Kobayashi
Brent Kobayashi is president of Kobayashi Online, a Toronto-based marketing agency that specializes in WordPress website development. Brent and his team have extensive experience working with clients of all sizes, from independent professionals to large-scale corporations. Vandals have been known to relieve tension by slashing Brent’s tires; we blame the giant ladybug on his van.
Brian Hogg
Brian Hogg is a seasoned freelance developer, currently working primarily in PHP/WordPress. Though he’s been making websites from scratch since it was cool to have a ‘Made with Notepad’ icon in the footer, he loves how WordPress allows a lot of the leg work to be done while still being able to customize anything and everything. Meeting Mike Little whilst living in England also helped with the transition.
Chad Mohr
I am a designer and WordPress developer, and half of SwitchWP. In a previous life I worked in the not for profit sector so have a particular interest in and understanding of building usable websites these organizations. And generally I just spend way too much time in front of a screen.
Chris Van Patten
Chris Van Patten is the creative director at Van Patten Media, a digital agency providing beautifully handcrafted responsive websites and branding for theatre artists and arts organizations. In a previous life, Chris was a theatre artist himself, graduating from the University at Buffalo with a B.F.A. in Theatre Design. His work as a scenic designer was featured in the Prague Quadrennial of Stage Design, and he was nominated for regional awards at the Kennedy Center American College Theatre Festival.
Chris is also an active member of Buffalo’s tech community. In addition to creating the #ThirdThursday series of happy hour meetups and BfloFRED (Buffalo’s Front End Developers meetup), he was a co-organizer of Buffalo’s inaugural WordCamp this past October.
Christopher Ross
Father, programmer, husband, zymurgist, son, blogger, brother, speaker, uncle, designer, cousin, artist … in that order, with a little time left for a pint. I built WordPress websites for businesses, from small shops to big companies.
Erick Hitter
Erick Hitter is a Design Engineer with Automattic, the company behind WordPress.com, Gravatar, PollDaddy, and more. As part of Team Custom, he helps create awesome features that let WordPress.com users tailor sites to their personalities with more than just a great theme. He was formerly a web developer with Oomph, Inc., where he specialized in complex WordPress implementations for high-traffic sites, including several on the WordPress.com VIP platform. Erick has created a number of plugins available from the official repository, including WP Print Friendly, View All Posts Pages, and Taxonomy Dropdown Widget, as well as the WordPress.com VIP External Permalinks and View All Posts Pages plugins.
Jeremy Clarke
Jeremy Clarke is a PHP, HTML, CSS and WordPress hacker from Montreal. He loves his job working on the nonprofit citizen media site Global Voices, where he manages dozens of WordPress sites, blogs, plugins, themes and a couple of bitchy Linux servers. He has a communications degree from Concordia University, but is mostly a self-taught web developer. Jeremy has been an organizer of WordCamp Montreal since it started in 2009, and has spoken at many other WordCamps as well.
John Hartley
John Hartley is a freelance front-end dev and WordPress consultant in Columbus, OH. He currently develops responsive WordPress themes and plugins at Max Foundry as well as custom sites through his own business, Forknight Interactive. John loves responsive design and is excited with the direction it’s going. He hopes someday the <picture> tag becomes a real thing.
Jonathan Davis
Jonathan is the lead developer of the Shopp e-commerce plugin for WordPress and owner of Ingenesis Limited. He is a designer of code solutions. He enjoys typography, good design, UX, solving e-commerce problems and helping people with WordPress. Back in Ohio, he helps organize WordPress meetups and WordCamp Columbus.
Kirk Wight
Kirk builds WordPress websites for fun and a living. He is an organizer for WordCamp Montreal 2013, and also enjoys volunteering as a reviewer for the WordPress Theme Review Team.
Time spent away from computers usually involves good people, dogs, music and/or beer (in no particular order).
Marko Heijnen
Marko Heijnen is a WordPress and mobile developer and founder of Rocksta.rs. He has been working with WordPress since 2006. In 2009 he started contributing to core and helped out with 3.0, 3.3, 3.4 and 3.5. He now works on innovative projects, services and plugins.
Martin Kuplens-Ewart
Martin Kuplens-Ewart is an interactive practitioner with a particular interest in user- and customer-experience design. He has spent more than a decade crafting web-based solutions for organisations and businesses around the world.
Martin is now Product Designer for BraveNewCode, where he is helping to shape the future of the company’s WordPress tools, including the popular mobile solution WPtouch.
Mo Jangda
“I wrangle code and VIPs at WordPress.com. I enjoy ice cream and other sugary things.” Check out Mo’s blog.
Nathaniel Schweinberg
Hey! My name is Nathaniel and I’m a Front End Developer from Nashville, TN. I’ve been developing with WordPress for the last three years. With a degree in Media and Communication Studies, and a background in Video, Print, and Web, I have a pretty diverse perspective and hope to use that to better educate others in both their professional and personal lives. Whats the point in working if you don’t live, too?
Patrick Johanneson
“I’m the Web Coordinator at Brandon University. I work as part of a three-person web team; my role is maintaining the webservers, doing backend programming, and training users. We’re currently in the middle of a project to move our website and various web applications off of IIS/ASP classic and into WordPress.
In my spare time I write SF/F, volunteer as a projectionist at the local indie cinema, and teach judo.” Visit Patrick’s website here.
Paul Bearne
Head Geek at enginuitygroup.com, a Toronto start-up. Paul has been working with WordPress for over 6 years supporting muti-site installs and building plug-ins and themes.
He is the maintainer of the Author Avatar List plug-in.
Randy Hoyt
Randy Hoyt has built numerous custom WordPress themes and plugins for client websites, working as an independent consultant and as a developer for an interactive agency. He currently teaches PHP at Treehouse. Offline, he spends his time playing board games and studying mythology.
Rick Radko
Rick Radko is a developer & designer with a passion for finding solutions to difficult design problems. He is the owner of R-Cubed Design Forge, where he develops custom web applications, social networking and team collaboration solutions for businesses. Rick specializes in custom application development and multilingual WordPress sites. He is co-leader, and a frequent presenter at the Ottawa WordPress Group.
Sam Xu
Sam Xu is a web developer and analyst at the University of Toronto. He utilizes WordPress exclusively as a Content Management System, and builds fancy websites to support the University’s advancement initiatives. Sammy is also an aerial photographer, he loves flying his remote control helicopter with a DSLR duct-taped to the landing gear.
Shannon Smith
Shannon is the founder of Café Noir Design, a boutique Montreal web design company specializing in multilingual web development. She builds beautiful, functional websites that her clients can update themselves and that are easy for search engines to find. She support things like making the web accessible for everyone, using open source software, helping organizations find greener more sustainable ways to operate through online technology and helping non-profits with online community organizing. Also foodie and mother of four. twitter | google+ | blog
Taylor Dewey
Taylor creates websites for 10up, LLC – a company focused on building awesome, custom WordPress installations. Along with his coworkers, he wrangles code, perfects layouts, and extends core functionality to create custom experiences for clients such as 9to5mac, Trulia, and SportsNet New York.
He chose to work with the web 13 years ago because it is a medium where creativity and technology synergize and, as a virtual product, is constantly evolving into something better.
Trevor Mills
Trevor Mills is a songwriter who functions() now as a Code Poet. He came across WordPress around version 3.0 and hasn’t looked back. Why bother, right? At last year’s inaugural Toronto WordCamp he presented a session on building Sencha Touch mobile apps using WordPress as the core. This year, he’s back to present version 2 and continue the discussion for developers interested in furthering the potential of a mobile app custom post type. When he’s not coding, he plays bass and tours internationally. Actually, who are we kidding; he still codes when he’s on tour.