Tag Archives: WordCamp Europe 2014 speakers

WCEU 2014 Speaker: Graham Armfield

Hey guys, we’re really glad to welcome Web Accessibility expert Graham Armfield from the UK.

Graham is a Web Accessibility Consultant for his own company Coolfields Consulting. He helps organisations improve the accessibility of their websites, and works with them to embed accessibility into their business processes. He also develops accessible WordPress websites for small to medium sized businesses and charities. He’s an active member of the Make WordPress Accessible team, and has spoken about web accessibility at quite a few WordCamps. He’s also led accessibility groups at WordPress contributor days.

When not making the web a more accessible place you might find him playing his guitar and writing songs. He turned his back on the rock lifestyle a few years ago, but now performs his songs solo at open mic nights near where he lives.

He was born many moons ago in South London, and he hasn’t strayed very far from there since – he now lives in Surrey with his wife and young daughter.

WordCamp Europe is almost here, so stay tuned to the most recent developments from the organising team on TwitterFacebook, and Google +

WCEU 2014 Speaker: Hristo Pandjarov

We’re happy to announce our next #WCEU speaker – WordPress enthusiast Hristo Pandjarov.

Hristo’s done it all: supported WordPress clients, built websites, designed WordPress themes, wrote tutorials, dug deeper into SEO and developed his own WordPress SEO plugin. He’s been fortunate to have his passion for all things WordPress and his job overlap at SiteGround, where he develops and implements various in-house performance boost solutions to help make WordPress websites faster and more secure.

Hristo will talk about WordPress optimisation and all the things that can go wrong when trying to improve the performance of your WordPress site. He will cover each of the most popular and widely accepted performance optimisation techniques, how to implement them without breaking your site and how to fix the most common issues with different speed boosters.

Follow WordCamp Europe on  TwitterFacebook, and Google +  for the most recent updates.

WCEU 2014 Speakers: Mike Schroder

We’re happy to announce that WordPress core contributor Mike Schroder is joining us in Sofia as a speaker at WordCamp Europe 2014.

Mike Schroder, known as Shredder to most of his colleagues, is a cross-cultural kid, coffee-drinking sailor, and lover of Open Source. He currently works at DreamHost, contributing to the WordPress core and community projects including WP-CLI. You can find him blogging on various geeky things at http://www.getsource.net

In 2011, I sent my very first email to the wp-hackers mailing list. I wasn’t sure if it was the right place to introduce myself, but I had to start somewhere. In the years since, I’ve gone from being a tentative new contributor to being one of the release leads for WordPress 3.9. In this presentation, I’ll talk about my journey through the WordPress project. I’ll focus on some of the problems I encountered as a contributor and how I dealt with them. I’ll also look at how, more recently, the project has removed some of those barriers, making it simpler than ever for newcomers to get involved.

Keep up with with WordCamp Europe announcements on  TwitterFacebook, and Google + . 

WCEU 2014 Speakers: Stefan Kanev

Next speaker at WordCamp Europe 2014 – programming polyglot Stefan Kanev.

Stefan has been a passionate programmer since forever. He easily gets enthusiastic about all things related to software development. In his professional life he has shipped code in PHP, JavaScript, Java, Perl, Python, Ruby and even a little bit of C. This makes him rarely qualified to appreciate all the nuances in this chart.

When not working for money, Stefan enjoys dabbling into fancy programming languages, tweaking his development environment and reading software books on assorted subjects. His latest favourite is Clojure, he’s an avid Vim user, he loves his Mac and his hidden weapon is a medium-sized collection of ZSH scripts. He occasionally blogs about programming (sadly, in Bulgarian), he occasionally teaches programming in the University of Sofia and helps with the organisation on a few small Bulgarian conferences.

Stefan will be talking about functional programming and what all the fuzz in recent years has been about. He’ll talk about all the fancy ideas in strange languages like Haskell and LISP and how they can help us in our more “mainstream” environments.

Full schedule is coming soon, so don’t miss any news from WordCamp Europe – follow us on  TwitterFacebook, and Google + . 

WCEU 2014 Speakers: Kimb Jones

The organising team is happy to welcome fellow WCEU organiser Kimb Jones to the 2014 speakers table.

Kimb is the co-founder of UK-based WordPress agency Make Do. In a previous life he worked in the corporate surroundings of the NHS for over 10 years working in both IT and Marketing. He promises it wasn’t as boring as it sounds (mostly).

He’s been running a local WordPress meetup in Sheffield (UK) for over 5 years and is the main co-ordinator of WordCamp Sheffield. He’s also on the WordCamp Europe co-organising team and has been speaking & involved with WordCamp’s since 2009.

He’ll be speaking at WordCamp Europe on the experiences he faced starting his own WordPress agency and everything in-between.

WCEU 2014 Speakers: Andrey “Rarst” Savchenko

Welcome back to WordCamp Europe to Andrey “Rarst” Savchenko.

Rarst is a computer techie, born and living in Kiev, Ukraine. Sometimes WordPress developer professionally. Tea drinker. Cat person.

He serves as community–elected moderator at WordPress Stack Exchange Q&A site. His idea of productive free time are wild coding projects on the intersection of advanced WordPress development and renaissance of modern PHP.

Spends too much time on Twitter and not enough at his blog (Rarst.net)

A little about his talk:

At what point answering questions about WordPress goes beyond the making conversation and becomes a driver for professional skills and reputation?

Our proficiency at answering questions spans over our work, our ability to learn, and how we are perceived in community. Yet we are rarely purposeful in learning how to benefit from this skill and improve at it.

We can do better than that — to evolve professionally and personally. Let’s talk about how. 

Follow Rarst & WordCamp Europe on Twitter so you don’t miss things like this.

WCEU 2014 Speakers: Hugo Fernandes

Hugo is a designer who went independent 3 years ago to embrace a new journey in his life. Passionate about interactivity and the human behavior, he tries to touch people with his work and words.

He always been fascinated by how our brain processes ideas and how individuals see things, and he’s been deepening his research on creativity – the way how our brain works – and how those two things combined influence our work as designers and developers.

Since then, he’s been speaking about it and also as a motivational speaker in high-schools using creative techniques, which has been a tremendous experience.

Right now he’s at his peak point of research and developed his own theories about creativity and our brains, so the timing to present it at WordCamp Europe is perfect.

More than a theoretical and subjective talk, Hugo will provide a full experience with creative exercises that will help everyone to understand their own brains.

At the end, he will show us that all questions have an answer, and that sometimes 1+1=3.

He’s also a #winelover, so feel free to bring a bottle to chat with him 🙂

In the meantime, you can follow him on twitter at @imhugo or read his words at www.imhugo.com.

WCEU Speakers: Yana Petrova

We’re happy to welcome marketing expert and event organiser Yana Petrova to the WordCamp Europe Speakers table.

Yana is a marketing person and also an event organiser, foodie and traveler. She’s been blogging about food since 2010 and In the past couple of years she’s been organising local technical conferences in Bulgaria including the biggest Bulgarian event dedicated to free software, free culture and knowledge sharing – Open Fest. She’s also a part of the civic hacking organisation Obshtestvo.bg (Society:Bulgaria) that builds independent online tools to help society be closer to the government and the decision making process.

Yana will talk about depression in IT, a problem that seems to be widespread in the industry and still something that people prefer not to talk about. How depression can be recognized, how to find the actual reasons for it and why nobody should be afraid or ashamed to ask for help are some of the main points in her talk.

Stay tuned to WordCamp Europe on  TwitterFacebook, and Google + . 

WCEU 2014 Speakers: Davide Casali

We’re happy to announce our next WordCamp Europe speaker – Automattic experience director Davide ‘Folletto’ Casali.

Davide is an experience director at Automattic with 11+ years of experience and a hybrid background in design, psychology and technology. He led cross-disciplinary teams of designers and developers, created and advised successfully funded companies and has done coaching and training for global and local organizations (DHL, EY, Atos).

Believing as Leonardo DaVinci reportedly said that “Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication”, he is specialised in social experience design, behaviour change and motivation applied to interactive and social systems. He has a specific focus in personal growth and leadership coaching to drive successful teams.

During his years of professional experience he led the design of consumer and enterprise services for more than 2 million users worldwide in different markets, industries and countries. He worked with Nokia, Mastercard, Red Bull, Ferrari, Bank of England, Intesa Sanpaolo, Banca Sella, Unicredit, Vodafone, Telecom Italia, Benetton and more.

His designs won the Aretê Award, eCommerce Award for Innovation in Delivery, Samsung GOLD Prize and got listed in the ADI Design Index 2010, the selection for the Compasso D’Oro.

He is an internationally recognised speaker and lecturer (IxDA, LIFT, Creative Mornings, General Assembly, Social Business Summit, Social Media Week, Frontiers of Interaction).

Follow WordCamp Europe on TwitterFacebook, and Google +