Speakers

Graham Armfield

Graham is a Web Accessibility Consultant for his own company Coolfields Consulting. He works with organisations to help them improve the accessibility of their websites – testing the websites for accessibility, and advising the designers and developers on how to fix issues found. He has also written detailed training courses on accessibility for developers which he presents on a regular basis.

He is also a WordPress developer, and has built many accessible WordPress websites for clients – both large and small. He has contributed the Make WordPress Accessible Team and has spoken on accessibility to many WordCamps and other WordPress meetups.

Outside of work you’re likely to find him playing his guitar, recording his next album or performing at local open mic evenings.

Luminus Olumide Alabi

Luminus Olumide Alabi is a Happiness Engineer in the WooCommerce team at Automattic.

Pam Kocke

New Orleans resident Pam Kocke works for Automattic on the team responsible for hiring Happiness Engineers. She started blogging over a dozen years ago while training for her first marathon. In her free time, she enjoys photographing and blogging at pyjammy.blog about her identical triplet sons. She is an organizer of the New Orleans WordPress Meetup, and enjoys traveling to other places to speak about WordPress.

CJ Andrew

CJ Andrew is an independent consultant/contractor, specialized in providing WooCommerce services to individuals and businesses.

With a background in IT support, change management, and web administration, he brings unique insight to each WordPress project.

In his spare time, CJ enjoys jazz music and long walks.

Richard Carter

Richard Carter is a web designer and frontend developer based in Newcastle upon Tyne, and author of 7 books in the web design field. He runs Peacock Carter, a web design agency established in 2006, and loves WordPress.

Edmund Turbin

Edmund Turbin is a London based Senior Sales Engineer at WP Engine originally from New York. He has been building CMS based websites for over 15 years and has been involved in the media, publishing and ad-tech industries. Edmund is passionate about front end development, task automation and architecting scalable systems for high traffic web properties. When the laptop is closed, Edmund enjoys producing electronic music, cycling and exploring the globe with his family & kids. Follow him on Twitter @spicecadet.

Mark Wilkinson

Mark is a developer and Co-founder of Highrise Digital, a specialist WordPress agency focusing on custom development that is built to last. Mark has been using WordPress since late 2005, all the way back to version 2.0. He is also an active member of the UK WordPress community attending meet-ups and WordCamps in the UK, as well as getting involved in organising such events.

Maciej Swoboda

He likes to say that he’s in love with WordPress since 2006. Then his great adventure began. Since then he’s built many websites and stores based on WordPress and founded an agency that works with WordPress on a daily basis. Since mid-2013 he also began creating plugins for WooCommerce and built a business WP Desk: https://www.wpdesk.net/

He is also a lead organizer of WordUp Warsaw and a co-organizer of WordCamp Gdynia 2016 and WordCamp Lublin 2017 responsible for the speakers team.

Elzette Roelofse

Elzette is a South African from Cape Town, that has made herself comfortable in London, UK for the last decade. In this time she discovered WordPress, started fiddling with it. The last couple of years she became fond of designing and building custom WordPress themes for small businesses and charities. She also likes hanging out with the WordPress Polyglots and has done a significant amount of translations to Afrikaans.

Besides being a keen Jetsetter, she is also trying to become a better half marathoner.

Sue Fernandes

Sue is a freelance web designer and developer from Stockport in Cheshire who specialises in creating custom child themes for the Genesis framework. She has been working with WordPress for over 8 years and now works with a large range of clients across the UK as well as a fantastic assortment of WordPress coders, designers and writers.

Ben Usher Smith

I’m a designer specialising in WordPress, illustration and branding. I run a small design shop in Edinburgh called BU-S. I love my clients even if they think I’m difficult and tell me so to my face. I’ve been helping people solve design problems on the web since 1998 on projects both BIG and small. I’m still learning from clients and colleagues everyday.

Hannah Smith

Hannah graduated from Bristol University with a BSc in Computer Science in 2004 but realised very early on that to be great with code, you also need to be a great people person and so diversified into project management. These days she works as a freelancer in Bristol offering coding and project management services, and often works with WordPress. She co-organises the Bristol WordPress group. When Hannah isn’t working she likes cycling, snowboarding, gardening and being with her two favourite beings – her partner Nick and her golden retriever Lili – on long walks in beautiful places.

Barbara Saul

Working with the Internet for nearly 20 years now and wrangling web design clients for at least 15, Barbara has learned many things about keeping customers happy, how to handle a customer always being right, and mostly learning from when she gets it wrong…

Karen Arnold

Karen Arnold leads the Happiness Engineer Hiring team at Automattic, the team responsible for hiring support staff for Automattic’s products. She has worked remotely for Automattic since 2012. Karen has spoken at a number of events including SupConfNY 2016, WordCamps the United States, Nicaragua, Argentina, Colombia, and Peru, and various WordPress meetup events. Prior to Automattic, Karen ran a business creating WordPress sites for small businesses. She lives in Albuquerque, NM with her husband and four children. She blogs at karen.blog and thearnoldexperience.com.

Tim Nash

Tim is the platform lead at 34SP.com for their Managed WordPress product in addition to being the companies Developer Advocate. One day he will work out what either of those job titles means. Until he does he spends his day in a mix of Dev, security, ops and project management as well as speaking at user groups and conferences. He also helps run WordPress Leeds and writes for several publications including his own site timnash.co.uk.

Kathir Sid Vel

Kathir is an eCommerce consultant who runs a digital agency in Edinburgh. He has been championing and building WordPress and Magento solutions since 2008. Focusing on marketing and coding disciplines, he advises and helps over 60 digital businesses – some of whom turnover millions of pounds through their websites.