We are excited to announce the following speakers are confirmed for WordCamp Albuquerque 2018.
Check out the schedule page for more details.
John Maeda
Maeda is Global Head of Computational Design and Inclusion at Automattic and author of The Laws of Simplicity. He is the past President of Rhode Island School of Design and formerly eBay‘s Chair of their Design Advisory Board. He is also the recipient of many awards, including the Smithsonian Institution National Design Award.
“I look to advance thinking around design and inclusion in the tech industry. I began as an engineer, then moved to art / design, and then to research / leading / operating, and then into business / tech / investing.”
Ashleigh Axios
Ashleigh Axios is an international speaker, strategic creative, and an advocate for design’s ability to break barriers and create positive social change. As Design Exponent at Automattic, Ashleigh advocates for the value of design, demonstrates skill, and raises the value of design at the company. Ashleigh worked as Creative Director, Digital Strategist for the Obama Whitehouse and served as president of the AIGA (American Institute of Graphic Arts).
Chris Lema
Lema is Vice President of Products & Innovation at Liquid Design and author of several ebooks including Building & Managing Virtual Teams. Chris speaks at WordCamps around the country, helping people learn how to leverage the technology for their business and personal use.
“I’m driven by challenge and motivated by the opportunity to add value. I’ve managed development teams filled with people smarter than me, and yet motivated and managed them to deliver consistent and high quality work, in corporate and startup contexts.”
Dennis Snell
Spline Reticulator at Automattic
As a software developer at Automattic, Dennis spends his time chasing problematic code, writing about design, and pursuing simplicity. He travels around as a nomad exploring cultures and people and places. When not programming he is probably cooking, hunting dark skies, or thinking about code.
Sakin Shrestha
Sakin has started various technology companies starting with Catch Internet, which provides technology solutions. In 2012, he created Catch Themes to provide premium themes to clients who needed more functionality and support. He also founded DevotePress, a magazine that helps developers with in-depth tutorials.
I am passionate about helping this sector grow, for many reasons. The technology sector creates jobs for many young Nepalis who would otherwise migrate to foreign countries. It lets Nepali professionals develop skills for a fast-changing global workplace, and compete at a high level with anyone, anywhere in the world. If it grows, it will provide a viable career option for many young Nepalis, and help us reap the benefits of a global economy.
Sakin is also involved in ThemeReview.co, providing reviews for WordPress themes. To help Nepali theme developers access the international market, he created Theme Palace, a curated marketplace of themes. He also organizes regular WordPress meetups and WordCamps in Nepal, and has spoken at technology events in Nepal and abroad.
Konstantin Obenland
Konstantin is a WordPress aficionado, and Core Developer based in Southern California. You might remember him from projects like WordPress 4.3 or the new WordPress.org Plugin Directory. At Automattic he’s is part of a team that contributes to Core and WordPress.org full time. He enjoys bourbons, craft beers, and good food — sometimes so much that he blogs about it.
Michael Cain
Michael is a Portland, Maine-based developer for Automattic’s Delta division. He spends his days developing, testing, and improving the user experience on WordPress.com, his evenings blogging about food and travel on mapandmenu.com, and his nights dreaming about how to make tomorrow’s WordPress blogs and sites even better.
D’nelle Dowis
D’nelle Dowis, owner of Berry Interesting Productions (a WordPress agency) and No Kill Websites (a website rescue shelter and rehoming program), has over 15 years of experience wrangling clients that eat expensive shoes, bark incessantly at squirrels, and anger-pee on the carpet. She has helped plan and volunteered with WordCamps in Nashville and Denver since 2012, was lead organizer for WordCamp Nashville 2016, and headed the team responsible for brining WCUS to Nashville for 2017-2018. She is currently located in Denver, CO.
Jon Brown
Jon Brown started his journey with WordPress more than 10 years ago with a simple travel blog on WordPress.com. That first foray evolved into becoming a freelance WordPress developer and the beginnings of a location independent lifestyle. Jon is now the owner of 9seeds a distributed WordPress focused web development agency. At the start of Jon’s path with WordPress was the Orange County WordPress meetup group and WordCamp Orange County both of which were full welcoming guides into the world of WordPress. A few years later Jon moved to Maui, Hawaii where he started paying that generosity forward founding the Maui WordPress meetup group and 5 years later organizing the first ever WordCamp Maui. Now Jon is a back to digital nomad living, traveling the globe, attending WordCamps as far flung as Bangkok and Warsaw while running 9seeds from wherever he can find a hammock with decent wifi.
Oban Lambie
Oban Lambie is the owner of Brownrice Internet, Inc, New Mexico’s fastest growing hosting and data center company. Brownrice specializes in WordPress hosting on the SmartVPS platform. Oban blogs on WordPress and he and his staff support some of the best WordPress developers around.
Daniel Schutzsmith
I’ve been developing and designing on WordPress for 8 years. From 2010-2016 I ran my own studio making WordPress sites for Greenpeace, Oxfam, Petra Nemcova’s Happy Hearts Fund, and dozens of other nonprofit clients. For the past 1.5 years I’ve been with Amnesty International USA to spearhead a website redesign and now a mobile app built on top of Ionic that can communicate with the WordPress site.
Laura Dapkus
I own a boutique agency in Van Alstyne, Texas, and built my first website in 1996. It was HTML and it was dial-up, because I wanted to share photos of my Pit Bull, Lucy. Lucy sent me down a path of advocacy and volunteering that informs my work today. I have been using WordPress since 2007, but have been most energized since I started steering my focus toward projects for local government and non-profit corporations. My passion is education; I support our public schools, and serve on the board of a foundation that provides scholarships for community college students.
Kerry Carron
I launched my startup business in September 2009. There are actually 3 sites to my business – my personal site, my services site and my teaching/networking site. Combined, they provide solutions for online success in web design and development, web hosting, website security and maintenance, SEO and analytics, online marketing and WordPress instruction. I am a firm believer that education does not and should not start or end with formal education, ie. school. In fact, I believe that the only way to continue to grow and move from where I am to where I want to be – to reach my goals, to become all that I want to become, to improve myself – is to never stop learning. Therefore, I am a perpetual student and my course of study is life. As my business evolved and I became better at being an entrepreneur while building my freelance business, I realized the importance of having a life outside and away from the technology that I love. Working long hours and being very sedentary began to have an effect on my family relationships and perhaps even more frightening, my health. In either case, I had to be the one to change. My long-term goals have always been to be able to work from home and spend my time doing all of the things I love to do (work included), when I want to do them. This meant learning how to balance my work and my life – even though work is a big part of my life. Interestingly, what I learned is that I can implement my business into my life, and my life into my business.
John Cousins
I have developed and run a number of WordPress websites. My latest business is built around a WordPress site mba-asap.com . MBA ASAP is dedicated to helping you learn skillsets that will make you more valuable at your job, help you start something on the side, or let you quit your job and start your own business. We focus on helping overcome the fear and intimidation of diving into subject matter that is usually obscured by clouds of arcane buzzwords. We keep it simple and clear. By applying concepts of accelerated learning we break down business subjects and disciplines and give you the core 20% knowledge that gets you 80% of the practical skills and knowledge ASAP. Whether its corporate finance, entrepreneurship and startups, accounting, understanding financial statements (FREE!), becoming a better negotiator, management and leadership, digital marketing and growth hacking, or how to draft and file a patent; we give you what you need to get to work.
Eric Debelak
I started doing WordPress sites as a side business in 2004. In 2013, I switched to full-time web development doing a variety of WordPress, React.js, Laravel, Python, Android and Node.js work.
Brennen Bliss
Brennen Bliss, at only 18 years old, is the founder and CEO of a growing marketing agency that partners with brands across the United States to produce uniquely high-performing marketing campaigns. Brennen founded his company, PixelCutLabs, during his sophomore year of high school and has since coordinated brand strategy and marketing campaigns for both early-stage companies and established organizations, such as the College Football Playoffs. Brennen started PixelCutLabs in 2015 when he made a WordPress website for his mom’s company. In the two years since, even with project scopes exceeding $100,000, Brennen and his team have used WordPress as the go-to content management system for every client they engage with.
Dwayne McDaniel
Dwayne has been working in tech and open source sales since 2005. He knew as soon as he started working with Java middleware developers he never wanted to work outside of open source ever again. Dwayne first started building in Drupal and WordPress for the San Francisco Improv teams and projects. He fell in the love the community and then found a position at Pantheon at the end of 2013. As a Community and Agency Success Manager he has had the privilege of presenting at Stanford DrupalCamp, Drupal Northern Lights (Iceland), WordCamp Europe and many other conferences. Outside of tech he loves producing and performing improv theater, reading webcomics and singing karaoke!!! Reach out at https://mcdwayne.com or on twitter @mcdwayne
Anna Blanch Rabe
Anna Blanch Rabe has been helping professionals, companies & organizations thrive as they meet their profit objectives and build sustainable, thriving communities for over 10 years. In 2016, she founded her company Anna Blanch Rabe & Associates, which intentionally does 50% of its work on a pro bono basis. Anna focuses in working in the socially responsible business & non profit management & communications space specializing in Woman-Forward Businesses, Legal Professionals, Non Profit Organizations and Social Enterprises seeking to grow community capacity, and with non profit organizations seeking to diversify revenue generation. Anna is an Australian trained attorney (currently non-practising while living in the US) who consults for legal firms in the US, Australia, and the UK. Anna has been blogging using wordpress since 2007, and through her consulting and freelance writing has published articles for dozens of clients who use the wordpress platform. While she started learning BASIC and C++ as a teenager, it was wordpress that made her learn html, CSS, and delve into Java Script.
Dominic McBride
I started working 15-years ago as a web designer then learned to program in C, PHP and JavaScript. Much of my work in creating web sites for other people began to drift (10-years ago) into Content Managed (CMS) based sites. I worked in Mambo before it became Joomla. I helped build a learning platform using Moodle. I have created many wikis using MediaWiki. And I cut my teeth on many occassions developing theme and plugins in WordPress. Three years ago, I was more involved in designing and developing WordPress sites than I am today. For the past few years, I have been locked into a developing a single set of applications using Zend Framework. Still, entirely based on the LAMP stack, but not WordPress.
Mary Baum
Mary Baum is the founder and principal of RacquetPress, which builds Genesis child themes and other fun stuff for the tennis industry. A veteran creative and degreed designer, Mary speaks on WP design and development and helps organize WordCamp St. Louis. She’s partial to rare steaks, hard serves and high-contrast serifs, homemade hot fudge, high backhand volleys, Genesis hooks and Joshua trees.
Alonso Indacochea
President and CEO of 11 Online, a local web development agency. Born in Lima, Peru and a proud East Coaster, Alonso taught English as a Second Language and spent time in the non-profit world before becoming a developer. He’s the rare Mets / Eagles fan (attributed to his prior residence in both Queens and Philly). Alonso is a lover of cinema, from Kurosawa to John Ford to even John Waters. Le gusta hablar en castellano y também em português. He is a graduate of Temple University and lives with his wife, Kathleen, his energetic daughter, Josephine, twin boys Francisco and Iñigo, a neurotic dog, Rafa, and the various rabbits, quail, road runners and spiders that roam his backyard.
Michael Blaes
We’ve been business consultants for over 10 years. and have built many websites for our clients using WordPress. In addition, my wife and i are blind, and have a unique perspective of what an accessible website looks like. We also host the small business puzzle podcast where we interview successful business owners about marketing, building websites and website acessibility.
AJ Morris
AJ Morris is a Product Manager for Liquid Web, a fully managed hosting company. Here he work on various WordPress products and initiatives focusing on open-source, community, and spreading the love of WordPress. He has been involved with the WordPress community since 2006, working with theme and plugin companies in support and project management positions. In his spare time he loves to travel and spend time with his lovely wife and daughter.
Pam Ann Aungst
I own an agency in NJ that specializes in SEO & PPC. We have a very strong reputation for being experts in results-driven white-hat SEO and highly-effective PPC campaigns. We recommend WordPress to almost all of our clients, and consult with developers on how to maximize its search-engine-friendliness. I personally have been using WordPress since approximately 2009.
Brian Stinar
I’ve been running Noventum Custom Software for six years. Most of my time has been spent coding, with recently expanding my team and having to focus more on management and sales. My team became involved with WordPress through custom plugin development, theme customization, and other heavy-lifting WordPress development. As we’ve grown, we’ve expanded to include more marketing, content loading, and customer service to our business. For me personally, this has been challenging as I have zero formal experience in management. Coding is the easy part.
Nathan Ingram
Nathan is the Host at iThemes Training where he teaches WordPress and freelance business development topics via live webinar. He is also the creator of >ADVANCE Coaching, working with WordPress business owners individually and in groups to help them become more successful in their businesses. Nathan has been a freelance web developer since 1995, and is based in Birmingham, Alabama where he is the lead organizer of WordCamp Birmingham and co-organizer of the Birmingham WordPress Meetup. You can learn more about Nathan at https://nathaningram.com.
Adam Warner
Adam W. Warner first discovered WordPress in 2005 and has since founded several WordPress-focused businesses that provide education, plugins and consulting services for online business owners. In 2016 he brought his passion for WordPress to SiteLock as a Product Evangelist. Adam has since delivered his zeal for WordPress to many WordCamps and other events all over the world. In addition to WordPress, Adam is passionate about his family, robots and of course, life, the universe and everything.
Dustin Hartzler
Dustin Hartzler is a Happiness Engineer at Automattic by day, where he helps business owners work all of the kinks out of their WooCommerce stores. If working with WordPress all day wasn’t enough, he spends time each week recording his WordPress podcast call [Your Website Engineer](http://YourWebsiteEngineer.com). He enjoys helping people understand and use WordPress to it’s fullest capacity and spends time tinkering with code. When he’s not in front of the computer (which is rare), he enjoys spending time CrossFitting, reading and traveling. He lives in Dayton, OH with his wife, 3.5 year old daughter, and 9 month old son.
Mark Carrara
Mark has been managing and creating websites for about a decade, the last half using WordPress. He has worked in small businesses and education. Currently Mark is the IT Director for a charter high school in Albuquerque. Mark has been preaching the web and WordPress at WordCamps, educational technology and outdoor adventure conferences for at least 15 years.
Kim Kuhlman
I have a PhD in Engineering Physics and worked at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory and Planetary Science Institute before leaving planetary sciences due to budget restrictions. I have been programming in UNIX since 1986, designed my first websites using a text editor in the late 1990’s and have been working with WordPress since early 2015. While I don’t have as much experience with WordPress as some, I have spent a fair amount of time trying to eek out as much speed as possible from WordPress installs. I am also a bit of a fanatic when it comes to security. I am also a Certified Professional Photographer, which is the main reason I got into website construction in the first place (https://www.chiledogphoto.com). I run WordPress exclusively on Digital Ocean servers managed through Serverpilot.io as I got burned by the EIG monster ;). However, I am looking forward to implementing WordPress on CoreOS with Tectonic.
Kitty Lusby
Kitty Lusby is a long time professional blogger based in Las Vegas, Nevada, where she blogs both at a day job and as her nighttime gig. About 5 years ago, Kitty decided to start a blog to hone her writing skills and build an audience, and after a perfunctory Google search for “how to start a blog,” she created her first WordPress site. That simple search led to a full-time career within 6 months, and today, Kitty spends most of her day on a WordPress dashboard. She’s known for her humor and wit, her knack for picking up a brand’s voice in her writing, and also for her minor obsession with all things taco. You can find Kitty’s personal blog at kittylusby.com, her most prominent professional blog at NeONBRAND.com, and articles with her name on them all over the web.