Speakers.

Hear from industry-leading experts who are using WordPress to deliver breakthrough digital experiences.

Joost de Valk

Founder & Chief Product Officer at Yoast

Bio

Joost de Valk is the founder and Chief Product Officer at Yoast. Joost spends most of his time at Yoast working on Yoast SEO and its add-ons. As Chief Product Officer, he makes sure the roadmap for all our products is well managed.

Joost has a background as an SEO, digital marketer and web developer. In the early days of his career, he worked in several IT companies, ranging from enterprise hosting to online marketing agencies. This allowed him to work with several large brands around the world.

In 2010 he founded Yoast, which has as its mission to allow as many people as possible to build a findable website. It empowers people through software (most notably its Yoast SEO plugin) and training. Team Yoast currently consists of more than 100 people. Yoast SEO is currently available for four open source platforms and active on more than 9 million websites.

Carrie Dils

FREELANCER COACH &
WORDPRESS DEVELOPER

Bio

Carrie Dils is an independent contractor and developer with 20 years of experience in web development and deep experience in full-scope WordPress projects. From small, locally-owned businesses to Fortune 500 companies (including Disney and Nvidia) Carrie has worked with clients to deliver creative and successful digital solutions.

She’s passionate about education and empowering others to do the work they love. She hosts the OfficeHours.FM podcast for digital freelancers and small business owners, helping them grow their service-related businesses. She teaches WordPress and front-end development courses for Lynda.com and LinkedIn Learning. She also offers a series of business courses for freelancers at The Fearless Freelancer^®.

When Carrie’s not working, she’s probably reading a book, playing with her dogs, drinking a craft beer, or taking an absurdly long walk.

Syed Balkhi

Founder & CEO,
Awesome Motive

Bio

Syed Balkhi is an award-winning entrepreneur with a strong 8-figure online business. He was recognized as the top 100 entrepreneur under the age of 30 by the United Nations. His work is featured in top publications like Entrepreneur, Forbes, Inc, and many more. In 2009 he created WPBeginner, the largest free WordPress resource site. Syed is the CEO of Awesome Motive, the company behind popular WordPress plugins like WPForms, OptinMonster, MonsterInsights, WP Mail SMTP, SeedProd, and several others collectively powering over 10 million websites.

Rebecca Gill

Digital Marketing Executive & SEO Consultant

Bio

Rebecca Gill has a well-rounded business background and over twenty years of experience in sales and online marketing. She is the President and Founder of Web Savvy Marketing. In addition to running the day to day activities of Web Savvy Marketing, Rebecca also provides one-on-one SEO coaching, publishes online SEO courses, and hosts an SEO podcast. She loves to teach the latest SEO strategies and tactics to others, helping businesses grow their online footprint.

As an early adopter of blogging, her online marketing efforts have been highlighted by media outlets such as Wired Magazine, Ziff Davis, and IT Toolbox. Her writing has been featured in a variety of publications that range from technology outlets such as Backbone Magazine, Social Media Today, and Search Engine Roundtable. Her SEO work and training have been mentioned in Ahrefs, Dynomapper, Marketo, mangools, Hongkiat, iThemes, and Liquid Web.

Rebecca has appeared on Detroit2020, spoken at WordCamp Miami, DFWSEM Meetup, WordCamp Toronto, Higher Ed Web, WordCamp San Diego, WordCamp Las Vegas, WordCamp Ann Arbor, WordCamp Chicago, and Girls Are IT Conference. She is also has served as a WordCamp organizer. Rebecca has been a guest speaker on a variety of WordPress podcast series and has also guest lectured and presented at the Grand Valley State University, and Michigan State University and the University of Toledo.

Alain Schlesser

Maintainer of WP-CLI & Freelance Software Engineer

Bio

Alain is a freelance software engineer, WordPress consultant and Google Developers Expert in Web Technologies living in Germany.

He is the maintainer of WP-CLI, the command-line interface for WordPress and works on WordPress Core itself as a contributor and component maintainer.

He offers higher-level consulting, code reviews and software design coaching, enabling companies to deal with frequent change and ever-growing complexity while optimizing for reduced maintenance effort and lower total cost of ownership.

Passionate about software architecture and code quality, he never misses an opportunity to share best practices and tries to live up to his educational aspirations through public speaking and blogging.

You can read his thoughts on code & other things at https://www.alainschlesser.com or say hello on Twitter under the handle @schlessera.

Jason Cohen

FOUNDER & CHIEF TECHNOLOGY OFFICER at WP Engine

Bio

With over 20 years of experience in business and software development, Jason Cohen is founder and CTO at WP Engine where he develops and refines the company’s technology and product roadmap. Jason is a serial entrepreneur, having built four technology startups to more than $1 million in annual revenue. He is a founding member and mentor at Capital Factory, and was previously a founder of Smart Bear and IT WatchDogs. Jason received the EY Entrepreneur Of The Year 2017 Central Texas Award for Technology.

Shelly Fagin

Founder at
Highly Searched

Bio

Shelly is the founder of Highly Searched, a Houston Based Digital Marketing Agency and is proud to be a Brand Ambassador for powerhouse SEO Tool company, SEMrush. She first started working in web development over 17 years ago, and shortly after her fascination with SEO began. After a brief stint as SEO Director for a large Agency, the past eleven years she has worn many hats as an independent SEO consultant working mostly with local businesses and helping them thrive through digital marketing. Shelly is a coder at heart, enjoys developing WordPress sites and specializes in Technical SEO. Shelly also enjoys teaching her trade but speaking at industry conferences all across the US.

Rick Knudtson

Co-founder & Chief Product Officer at Flywheel

Bio

Rick Knudtson is the co-founder and CPO of Flywheel, a delightful WordPress hosting and development platform built for freelancers and agencies. Rick spends his days building the best product team in the midwest, scaling innovation, and enjoying the ride as Flywheel rapidly grows. He’s passionate about all aspects of web development and making an impact on the local entrepreneurial community. Rick’s also into fitness (like chasing around his daughter), trying new beer, and wondering if aliens really are out there.

Troy Dean

CEO at WP Elevation

Bio

Lisa Sabin-Wilson

Chief Operating Officer and Co-Founder at Web Dev Studios

Bio

Lisa Sabin-Wilson is the Chief Operating Officer, and Co-Founder, of WebDevStudios (WD3, LLC). In this role, she provides the leadership, management, and vision necessary to ensure WebDevStudios has the proper operational controls, administrative and reporting procedures, and people systems in place to effectively grow the organization and to ensure financial strength and operating efficiency.

Lisa has 15 years of experience delivering WordPress solutions to clients, both large and small, and is the subject matter authority on WordPress and is the For Dummies™ brand (John Wiley & Sons Publishing) franchise author on all things WordPress due to her extensive experience and knowledge on the platform and shares it as the author of several WordPress-related books, including the best-selling WordPress For Dummies.

Nick Adams

Chief Operations Officer at WP Buffs

Bio

Nick Adams is the COO at WP Buffs, a fully-remote, 24/7 WordPress Maintenance and Support company. Originally from Connecticut and now living in New York, Nick is a front-end developer who some may know as one of the members of The WP Crowd, which was a popular WordPress podcast from 2015 to 2017 and is still recognized as a top WordPress podcast in some of the rankings as recently as 2019, prompting talks of a revival.

Jonathan Jeter

Director of Technical Production at Click Here Labs

Bio

Jonathan Jeter has been the director of technical production for Click Here Labs, an affiliate of The Richards Group, since 2018. He has over 20 years of experience in web development, digital marketing, and emerging technologies. Jonathan and his teams have built industry-leading web and mobile apps for clients including PepsiCo, Keurig Dr. Pepper, The Salvation Army, Pizza Hut, Alcon Labs, Samsung, Raytheon, T-Mobile, Heineken, HP, Frito-Lay and many others.

Loren Baker

Co-Founder, VP at Foundation Digital

Bio

Aurooba Ahmed

Front-end Web Developer

Bio

Aurooba Ahmed is an independent WordPress developer. She has been developing bespoke WordPress solutions for 5+ years and is currently writing a course on WordPress theme development. She’s the co-organizer of the Calgary WordPress Meetup and WordCamp Calgary and marketing lead for the Diverse Speaker Training initiative within WordPress. She loves putting together dinner parties and getting lost in a really good book.

Matt Landers

Technical Architect
at WP Engine

Bio

At age 19, Matt was hired by Microsoft where he spent 10 years as a Software Architect. With his expertise in mobile development, Matt left Microsoft and co-founded a company with 2 of his Microsoft colleagues where they developed a single page application framework for web and mobile applications. Now, Matt is using his expertise in front-end JavaScript technologies as a Technical Architect at WP Engine focused on headless WordPress.

Sara Greenlaw

Senior Web Developer at The brandiD

Bio

Sara is the senior web developer for the brandiD. She has been coding websites for nearly 10 years. She specializes in creating clean, functional code with an emphasis on usability. A deeply inquisitive person and lifelong learner, Sara loves to research and test the latest WordPress trends. She loves a challenge and is the go-to developer for researching and crafting solutions with her can-do attitude. When she is not immersed in developing a site or staying on top of the latest and greatest trends, she has a great love for beautiful stationery, soap-making, binge-watching docu-series and spending time with her amazing family.

Robert Windisch

CIO at Inpsyde

Bio

Robert is the co-founder and CIO of the WordPress enterprise agency Inpsyde. He is also part of the WordPress Community since 2005 and active in several teams in the project.

Robert is known in the WordPress community by wearing his straw hat and being passionate about community and multilingual topics. His agency helps big brands like PayPal ... to use WordPress for their
websites or by creating plugins for the WordPress market.

Carl Alexander

Advanced WordPress Developer

Bio

Naomi C. Bush

Lead Developer
at Gravity Plus

Bio

Karim Marucchi

CEO at Crowd Favorite

Bio

Patrick Garman

Chief Technology Officer at Mindsize

Bio

Nick Croft

Senior Developer at Reaktiv Studios

Bio

Nick “the Geek” Croft has been developing with WordPress for over a decade. Today he is a senior developer for Reaktiv Studios, a WordPress VIP Partner. He has created several plugins for WordPress.org mostly using the Genesis framework as well as custom work for clients and his employer. Nick is the author of the Genesis Explained, a book that focuses on Genesis theme framework. Lately, he has focused on writing highly efficient code, automating all the things, improving in Javascript and React, security, and accessibility. When he’s not working, he enjoys spending time with his wife, 4 children, and a puppy and lives on a quiet cul de sac in the Shenandoah Valley. He also enjoys home improvement projects, hiking, and river activities.

Mike McAlister

Author of Atomic Blocks

Bio

Amy Carney

Publications Specialist at Alaska State Libraries, Archives, & Museums

Bio

Amy Carney has been the Publications Specialist (web designer) for the Alaska State Libraries, Archives, & Museums in Juneau, Alaska for the last 6+ years, where she advocates for web and digital document accessibility daily. She has been certified by IAAP as a Web Accessibility Specialist, and has recently sat for their Certified Professional in Accessibility Core Competencies certification exam. Her learning journey, blogged as 100 Days of A11y (on WordPress), is available for others interested in learning accessibility for themselves or to be certified. Currently, she participates as an invited expert in W3C’s CSS Accessibility Task Force, and chairs the State of Alaska’s Web Accessibility Working Group, of which she instigated 2 years ago.

David Vogelpohl

VP, Web Strategy
at WP Engine

Bio

David is the VP of Web Strategy at WP Engine and has been working in service of WP Engine since 2010 as an agency vendor and then as part of the leadership starting in 2015. David leads WP ecosystem strategy, serves as brand lead for the Genesis & StudioPress product suites, and embarks on various special missions to support WordPress and the open source community. David is a digital veteran with over 20 years experience building and promoting digital products and over a decade of experience supporting the WordPress community.

Annan Patel

Senior manager, product management
at WP Engine

Bio

Annan leads WP Engine's product group focused on software and tools that help WordPress developers manage and optimize their sites. Prior to WP Engine, he spent time at Microsoft on the Bing Ads platform and various startups around Austin, TX working on both consumer and SaaS products. In his free time, he enjoys spending time with his wife checking out all of Austin's new restaurants, traveling, and being way too invested in Atlanta Braves baseball.

Jon Brown

CEO at 9seeds

Bio

I started my journey with WordPress 15 years ago with a simple travel blog on WordPress.com. That was to document a year sabbatical I took from my career as a Civil Engineer to travel. That foray into long term travel sparked a desire to be a full time "digital nomad" before the term existed.

That drove me to turn my life long hobbyist programing skills into real profession programming skills, then going from a freelancer to eventually the owner of 9seeds a small WordPress development focused digital agency.

At the start of that path into WordPress lay the Orange County WordPress Meetup and WordCamp Orange County, both which played a critical role into supporting my career transition.

Later I moved to Maui, Hawaii where I founded the Maui WordPress meetup group and 5 years later organized the first (and only) ever WordCamp Maui. Now I’m back to being a full time digital nomad traveling the globe and running 9seeds and it’s all remote worker staff from wherever I can find decent wifi.

Attend DE{CODE} 2020

DE{CODE} is a developer-focused event that will take place virtually, and is dedicated to help you advance your WordPress expertise, so you can create better performing websites. A live-streamed event, DE{CODE} will feature 12 expert-led sessions on how to leverage WordPress for easy setups, fast builds, smooth launches, and effortless maintenance.