Speakers

We are VERY honored to have a great selection of speakers this year from across the country and the globe.

Boone B Gorges

Tammie Lister

Paul Gibbs

Diana Espino

Syed Balkhi

Michael Chacon

Michael Alcantara

David Parsons

Brian Breslin

John James Jacoby

Bowe Frankema

Emilio Cueto

Federico Sandoval

Asa Shatkin

Erick Hitter

Mark Jaquith

Siobhan McKeown

Andy Vitale

Andy Vitale a UX Designer specializing in emerging technology and digital media, for web, mobile and software starting before the terms UI/UX were common to the industry. He has gained professional experience from designing and maintaining National and International brands to teaching design practices and theories on the collegiate level, spending five years as the Graphic Design Program Department Chair at a regionally accredited University. Staying on top of the latest trends, Andy has had strategic roles in managing branding and marketing projects across various platforms from traditional to interactive media.

Andy is currently finishing his Master’s Degree in Human Computer Interaction at DePaul University as well as working as a Mobile Usability Architect for Office Depot. Since starting with Office Depot, Andy has implemented many new features which have seen the mobile conversion rate increase by 60%. In addition to his experience in UX/UI, he has a visual design and creative direction background. Andy’s core belief is to create immersive, emotional experiences with users through different mediums and to explore new interaction models in emerging technology.

Ernie Hsiung

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. He’s also the creator of MoodThingy, a WordPress plug-in that tracks the emotional feedback of an individual blog post or article. Previously, he was a Developer Evangelist at internet start-up Ning, as well a front-end engineer for Yahoo! and its product development incubator, Yahoo! Brickhouse.

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.

Mason James

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)

Mauricia Ragland

Mauricia is a front to back freelance developer and entrepreneur at heart. She stumbled into the world of WordPress at the request of one of her first clients who couldn’t figure out how to add a page to their website. Since then it’s been her go to framework for any cms or blog needs.

Mauricia strongly believes that developers should be learning at all times, and that learning from one another is the best way to do it. She loves to teach, learn, and provide opportunities for other to do same. As a new Miami local she co-organizes the Front-end Developers of Miami, founded and organized a local event named Code Miami, and helps others find and announce their local tech event in hopes of creating a stronger ecosystem here in South Florida.

Nick Gernert

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.

David Laietta

David has been working with WordPress professionally for five years. An alumnus of the University of Central Florida, David stays involved in the Orlando tech and development community. An organizer of the Orlando WordPress Meetup and of WordCamp Orlando 2012, David likes giving back to community, hoping to repay some of the help and advice that has been given to him over the years.

David runs his own freelance WordPress development company, working with clients to build and maintain their business websites. He also trains and consults on WordPress and web development, offering one-on-one and group courses in getting started with and using WordPress. When not working, David is constantly reading everything that he can get his hands on, going on epic quests with his roommate and friends and being a general coffee snob.

Jacqueline Jimenez

Jacqueline Jimenez is the Marketing Director at Alcantara Media and is The Innovative Consultant. She often speaks about WordPress and social media marketing at conferences and local events, as the #WPMIA – WordPress South Florida co-organizer. She executes social media strategies for high-profile clients, authors, and entrepreneurs. Her marketing vision is unparalleled and her execution of creative ideas is what sets her apart. Join her on Facebook at The Innovative Consultant.

Myke Bates

Myke is a web developer, musician, husband, and pizza connoisseur. While not one to boast of verbose skill sets and fancy job titles, Myke is known for crafting one-of-a-kind WordPress themes and solutions. Born and raised in the Midwest, his friendly approach sets him apart from the others. Currently residing in South Florida Myke is part of the WordPress team with UpTrending, an agile web agency based out of Silicon Valley who provides outside-the-box enterprise level solutions for some of the web’s biggest startups. Follow on Twitter @MykeBates.

Blanca Stella Mejia

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.

Her business partner from the UK, Lee Hodson, has several WordPress plugins hosted in the WordPress repositories and creates WordPress based websites, E-commerce sites and Buddy Press sites.

She was selected to attend a Top Latina Blogger Retreat in Washington DC, which included a briefing in the White House and mentoring with top corporate Latina executives. She is Co-Director of the South Florida Chapter for Latism and a Community Manager for Socl, Microsoft’s creative research project by FUSE labs that combines social networking with web browsing and search for the purpose of learning.

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.

Her motto is “Make Authentic Connections Through Social Media Platforms”, and her passion has been doing just that. She feels lucky to have met so many amazing and talented people in this way, many of whom she now considers true friends.

Follow Blanca on Twitter at: @micaminar and @miamishines or get updates on her personal blog.

Alex de Car­valho

Alex de Car­valho is pas­sion­ate about cre­at­ing spaces for indi­vid­u­als, com­pa­nies, and brands to con­nect. 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.

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.

Cody Landefeld

My name is Cody Landefeld and my passion is helping organizations solve problems creatively. I am a user experience problem solver by nature and have over 10 years of experience in the creative field. I currently lead the team at codyL where we are building the future one pixel at a time.

Steve Zehngut

Steve founded Zeek Interactive in 1995 and he has been the creative technologist behind the Huntington Beach based company since its inception. Under his direction, Zeek has grown from an apartment bedroom to one of Southern California’s leading development and consulting shops.

Steve is the organizer of the OC WordPress Meetup and has helped build the community to over 850 members. He is a frequent speaker at industry conferences and has taught interactive courses at UC Irvine, USC, the American Film Institute, and Cal State Long Beach. Steve has a BA in Film from Cal State Northridge.

Ken Granger

Ken Granger has taught more than 10,000 small business owners how to brand their business and leverage the power of the internet to increase sales, brand loyalty and quality of life. Ken has been working with WordPress since 2008 and he and his team have built more than 3,000 WordPress websites. BrandCo helps small businesses build their offline and online branding with things like logos, business cards and fully custom WordPress websites.

Joe Boydston

@joeboydston – Joe is an advocate for open source, an evangelist of Journalism and a dreamer of exciting futures for both. A Knight News Challenge winner, named Innovator of the year by Suburban Newspapers of America, and serves on the board of directors of the Local Media Foundation. His latest endeavor is the founding of NewspaperFoundation.org. It’s goal is to promote the use of open source software by newspapers.

Jayvie Canono

@onefinejay – Jayvie Canono is the lead designer for WebDevStudios’ small business division. Before he took on this role, he was a freelance web designer and developer. Having learned to design for the web in-code, and with a background in print design through the family business, he’s grown a passion for bridging the gap for designers between the print medium and that of code. His WordCamp talks have focused on helping designers with a background in pushing pixels to make their work easier to realize into the languages of the web. In addition to his professional responsibilities he is also an aspiring bodybuilder and dedicates about three hours of each day towards fitness.

Suzette Franck

@mt_Suzette – Suzette is a Media Temple WordPress Evangelist and helps people everyday in matters related to WordPress. She’s been doing web development and hand coding for over 17 years, the last five years she’s gone WordPress exclusive. Fresh from speaking at WordCamp Phoenix 2013, she’s traveling down to South Florida to talk about customizing default WordPress themes – a perfect topic for those just getting into creating and tweaking themes in WordPress.

Zac Gordon

@zgordon – Zac currently teaches WordPress for the amazing online learning site Treehouse. An experienced educator, Zac has taught web design and development at the middle school, high school, and university level. In addition to teaching, Zac owns a web design company that specializes in making $975 templated WordPress sites for small businesses.

Andi Graham

@BigSea – Andi owns Big Sea Design & Development in St. Petersburg, Florida. She is a designer and front-end developer who fell in love with WordPress in 2005 for her personal blog. Since then, she’s amassed a team of creatives and nerds who’ve tackled just about every business-logic problem out there with WordPress. She’s led WordPress-based projects of every scope and scale, including a huge multisite networks of small business sites, a complex COPPA-compliant BuddyPress user-generated content hub, a custom hotel reservation system (or two), dozens of directories, eCommerce sites and more. WordPress isn’t the answer to every problem though, and her team has put together some pretty amazing integrations between WordPress and other complex systems to help her clients easily manage content – which is the problem WordPress is best at solving.

Randy Hoyt

@randyhoyt – Randy Hoyt teaches PHP and other web development skills at Treehouse. He has built numerous custom WordPress themes and plugins for clients, working at various times as an independent consultant and as a developer for an interactive agency. Offline, he spends his free time playing and designing board games.

Denise Jacobs

@denisejacobs – Denise R. Jacobs is a regarded expert in Web Design and is an industry veteran with over 14 years of experience. She is now doing what she likes best: being a Speaker + Writer + Web Design Consultant + Creativity Evangelist who writes, speaks on, teaches, and coaches creativity, productivity, and innovation to both organizations and individuals in the business context. Denise is the author of The CSS Detective Guide, the premier book on troubleshooting CSS code; and co-author to the Smashing Book #3: Redesign the Web and InterAct with Web Standards and has presented and lectured at conferences and organizations such as South By Southwest, the BBC, The Future of Web Design, and Paris-Web. From her own experience of embracing and expressing her creativity as well as helping hundreds of students do the same, she is passionate about evangelizing ways to make the creative process better, easier, and more fluid. Through her presentations and workshops, articles and books, she teaches big concepts leading to “ahas” that translate into immediate actions, practices and skills to transform all parts of people’s lives with focused creativity.

Taylor Jasko

@tjasko – Taylor Jasko is an expert in web design and development, having years of self-taught experience. He helps make the internet faster by working in the marketing department at NetDNA / MaxCDN, which is a CDN-based company in Los Angeles.

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.

Chris Lema

@chrislema – Chris Lema is the VP of Software Engineering at Emphasys Software in San Diego, where he manages high performers and oversees product development and innovation. He’s also a blogger, ebook author and a frequent guest on the hit show that is sweeping the nation – wpwatercooloer. Such a nice guy, he’s offered to buy everyone drinks at the WordCamp Miami after-party (really?). He’ll be speaking at of WordCamp Miami’s new business track this year.

Brian Messenlehner

@bmess – Brian Messenlehner is a co-founder of WebDevStudios (the best WordPress development shop on this planet). He specializes in custom WordPress/BuddyPress development and creating active online communities for the various organizations WDS works with. Brian is also a co-organizer of the New Jersey WordPress Meetup Group. Prior to working with open source Brian was a web application developer for the United States Marine Corps where he had a lot of experience building robust custom applications from the ground up, he now prefers open source and utilizes WordPress as an application framework to slash timelines and costs. When Brian isn’t going blind sitting it front of his computer (from looking at code he swears) he is hanging out with his wife and 2 kids and trying to teach them all about the internets.

Michael Montgomery

@montgomery – Michael Montgomery has been a friend of the Web since the 90s. By day, he works in technology, innovation and the law for Miami Children’s Hospital. (This is not legal advice; but you knew that already.) He is also a weekend designer and erstwhile developer, fan of web standards and clean front-end code, web typography, responsive design, the open web, and structured content. You can follow Michael on Twitter or learn more at http://montgomerystudios.com.

Andrew Norcross

@norcross – Andrew builds things. Internet things. He’s the founder / lead developer of Reaktiv Studios and the Senior WordPress Developer for Raven Internet Marketing Tools. To quote Andrew: “I live and work in Tampa, Florida with my amazing wife and three hell raising children. When not mainlining coffee or writing code, you can probably find me working on renovating the home I recently purchased. Beyond that, it’s anyone’s guess what I do. I rarely know anymore.”. You see, we are quoting him here so there’s nothing that can come back on us, right?

Shane Pearlman

@justlikeair – Shane is a partner at Modern Tribe Inc. and leads indie teams in UX/UI, web, mobile & product design. Did you say Shane is new to speaking? Slap yourself, because he’s spoken at SXSW, HOW, GigaOm’s Future of Work, and of course other WordCamps. He also has contributed on the topic of remote work & freelancing to Mashable, A List Apart, GigaOm, Smashing Mag, CodePoet, Elance, FreelanceSwitch & Copyblogger. He’ll be speaking at of WordCamp Miami’s new business track this year.

Tony Perez

@perezbox – Tony used to call Miami home, but as the result of some encouragement (and blackmail) Tony is making the trip to WordCamp Miami 2013 this year. Tony owns a web security company called Sucuri (maybe you’ve heard of it, they remediate between 200 – 300 websites every day). He’s also the lead incident handler for large enterprise clients with websites that have millions of followers. He’ll be bringing his security knowledge to attendees (and maybe some dancing moves?).

Justin Sainton

@JS_Zao – Justin Sainton is the founder of Zao, a web firm based in Portland, Oregon. As a core contributor to WordPress and a core developer for the WP E-Commerce project, Justin believes passionately in the philosophy of open-source software. Working exclusively with WordPress and an array of other open-source technologies, Justin and Zao have provided creative and effective solutions for a wide variety of companies and associations ranging from Targus to Pitney Bowes to the National Education Association to HTC. When not building the Zao empire or spending time with his beautiful wife and lovely daughters, Justin can be found enjoying the best espresso in Portland (Stumptown, naturally).

Cliff Seal

@cliffseal – Cliff is a UX Designer at Pardot, an ExactTarget company, with a passion for WordPress, design, content strategy, and doing business that matters. For the past five years he has worked on the web largely with small businesses and non-profits under Logos Creative. You can also find him working on fun projects like MusicGrid.me.

He lives in Atlanta with his wife, April, where they do young urbanite-y things.

Lisa Sabin-Wilson

@LisaSabinWilson – Lisa Sabin-Wilson is co-owner of WebDevStudios – a WordPress design and development company specializing in customized WordPress themes and plugins.

Lisa is the author of WordPress For Dummies and is the For Dummies brand franchise author on all things WordPress; having worked with WordPress since 2003, she has extensive experience and knowledge on the platform and shares it in her several WordPress-related books. She is also a regular public speaker on topics such as: WordPress, blogging, design and social media.

Brad Williams

williamsba – Brad is the co-founder of WebDevStudios.com, a co-host on the DradCast podcast, and the co-author of Professional WordPress (1E & 2E) and Professional WordPress Plugin Development. Brad is also one of the organizers of the Philadelphia WordPress Meetup Group and WordCamp Philly.

Pippin Williamson

@pippinsplugins – If you are a WordPress plugin developer, you probably have used or seen one of Pippin’s plugins. He’s written more than 100 plugins (we are looking to see if he has a social life) He has spent a long time working on improving community involvement on projects by developers / designers. Not to mention contributing to the WordPress core and WordPress Codex. Most recently spoken at WordCamp Chicago 2012 where he melted the minds of attendees, and we are looking at another repeat performance on a new topic at WordCamp Miami this year.