Joshua Hansen

Joshua is the Manager of the Customer Security Products team at Godaddy. He is passionate about security and the Open Source community. As a kid he used to take apart toasters, which taught him two things: 1) He really likes to figure out how things work 2) He does not like putting toasters back together

He previously spoke at WordCamp Phoenix regarding several vulnerabilities found in plugins and themes, and how they can be prevented.

Stay tuned for our last speaker announcements in March!

Just a quick note that we have published our Saturday (April 6th) and Sunday (April 7th) schedule. This schedule is subject to change slightly, so please check it at least once a few days before the event. But go forth and plan, WordCamp attendees!

David Parsons @david_j_parsons

David Parsons, a Computer Science major at the University of Central Florida, has been working with WordPress for over five years now. His passion for the web originally started by making a simple website with WordPress, but over the years he has been branched out with responsive design, web apps, SEO, theme & plugin development, and even Compass & SASS enhanced stylesheets. Recently David has been spending a lot of his spare time speaking at local events such as WordCamp Orlando, the Orlando WordPress Meetup Group, and BarCamp Tampa.

Stay tuned for our last speaker announcements in March!

Blanca Stella Mejia @miamishines

Blanca Stella Mejia is the founder of Vizred.com, an agency focused on delivering online digital solutions to the small to mid-sized businesses with expertise in mobile marketing, website development, local search, social media consulting and reputation management. She has been blogging for five years and is also the founder of MiCaminar.com, which means My Walk. This bilingual blog won the award of Best Inspirational Blogger by Latism.

Blanca is on the board of Social Media Club South Florida and was one of the speakers at the first Ignite Miami. To capture the spirit and activities of the South Florida grassroots social media community, she blogged for several years on Blancastella.com sharing many videos and pictures.

Stay tuned for our last speaker announcements in March!

Ernie Hsiung @ErnieAtLYD

Ernie Hsiung is Principal of LYD Labs, a small business focused on front-end development for community based websites, many of which are powered by WordPress. Along with his development work, Ernie is a well-known blogger: He’s the founder of 8Asians.com, a community blog for Asian Americans and for over ten years blogged about his personal life on his award-winning weblog, Little Yellow Different. Born and raised in the San Francisco Bay Area, he relocated to Miami in February, 2012 where he created the Front-End Developers of Miami MeetUp group as well as MiamiWiki.org.

Stay tuned for our last speaker announcements in March!

Alex de Car­valho @alexdc

Alex is the co-founder of Feynlabs, which teaches programming concepts for kids. He also consults to companies and individuals on social media strategy and implementation. He is an adjunct pro­fes­sor at the Uni­ver­sity of Miami’s School of Com­mu­ni­ca­tions and recently co-authored “Secur­ing the Clicks: Net­work Secu­rity in the Age of Social Media,” pub­lished by McGraw-Hill.

Alex has helped unite South Florida’s tech com­mu­nity by found­ing Social Media Club, Bar­Camp, Ignite, Social Media Day, The Startup Forum, and Mobile Mon­day events for South Florida new media pro­fes­sion­als; he is also a found­ing mem­ber of Refresh­Mi­ami. Over the past six years, these orga­ni­za­tions have hosted events for over 10,000 tech and busi­ness pro­fes­sion­als, lead­ing to new con­nec­tions, employ­ment oppor­tu­ni­ties, and startup ideas.

Alex’s Session: “Top 20 Plugins That You Can’t Live Without”

If you’re self-hosting your WordPress website, you’ll want to extend its functionality with plugins. However, there are more than 23.500 free plugins in the WP library. You can of course visit WordPress’ Most Popular Plugin Directory, but it’s a potential time sink and you’ll miss many great ones by not digging deeper. So, we’ve shaken down the interwebs for you to come up with this list of must-have plugins you won’t know how you survived without.

Stay tuned for our last speaker announcements in March!

Very happy to announce that Bluehost – one of our Gold Sponsors – is also exclusively sponsoring both WordCamp Miami beginner’s workshops. What this means is that we will be talking more about how you can use hosting companies like Bluehost in setting up your WordPress site. You can grab an exclusive WordCamp discount with them now to get started by clicking here.

If you are new to WordPress, then you want to make sure you attend one of our two beginner’s workshops. And as our beginner workshops are quite popular, we wanted to share with you some information before they sell out.

Registration will start at 8am, and a full day’s schedule is planned (9am to 5pm).

View the Full Schedule Here

Here are the locations of our two beginner’s workshops. BOTH ARE IDENTICAL. Just pick the most convenient one:

Beginners WordPress Workshop (April 5th) – Held in Miami, FL on April 5th at the Miami Shared location. This workshop is recommended for those who live in the Miami Area.

Lunch will be provided, so just bring yourself (and a laptop, tablet, or something to take notes with) and get ready for a full day of getting up to speed with WordPress. After this workshop you’ll be ready for Saturday and Sunday (April 6-7) for even more WordPress knowledge.

Grant Landram @GrantLandram

Grant is a front end developer and founder of Freshmuse, a small WordPress design and development agency working with mid-market clients around the world crafting unique and high quality WordPress websites and blogs.

Grant has spoken at numerous WordCamps and technology conferences on how his company uses WordPress to serve it’s clients, and how he has built a business around the open source platform. His 2012 talk from WordCamp Portland is the one of the top 5 most watched WordCamp videos of 2012. You can follow Grant on Twitter at @grantlandram or learn more at http://www.freshmuse.com.

Stay tuned for our last speaker announcements in March!

Mason James @masonjames

Mason is the Co-Founder and CEO of WP Valet where he’s made an art of making people happy with their WordPress experience. He has a passion for creating solutions and truly loves it when a plan comes together. When not connected to a computer he’s probably playing music, video games, or with his puppy, Penny (photos available on request).

Stay tuned for our last speaker announcements in March!

Another “local” guy (we consider Orlando close enough) joins the WordCamp Miami speaker ranks.

Nick Gernert @nickgernert

Nick heads up the Platform Development team for Voce/Porter Novelli, overseeing the team’s custom application development projects. Voce’s Platforms team is a WordPress VIP Services Partner that specializes in creating large-scale WordPress apps for the biggest brands in the world.

Nick started the development team with the mission of building great experiences atop powerful publishing platforms and while the mission hasn’t changed, the scale certainly has. Nick has grown what was a two-person development team in Winter Haven, Florida to a team of more than 20 distributed across the country. Throughout his years in web development Nick has had developed projects for brands such as Discovery, Prudential, Disney, Bloomberg, Honeywell, MIT, and Symantec. Nick drives the strategy behind the team’s largest projects, maintains strategic partnerships and ensures the Platforms team has everything it needs to do great work.

Stay tuned for our last speaker announcements in March!