Speakers

Zack Tollman

Residing in Portland, Oregon, Zack longs for the cold, snowy days of his Alaskan youth. He enjoys strumming his guitar, playing hockey, and spending time with his wife and dog. Otherwise, you’ll find him at his computer meticulously spinning lines of clean WordPress code.

Natalie MacLees

Natalie MacLees is a front-end web developer and UI designer and is founder + principal of the interactive agency, Purple Pen Productions. She is the author of jQuery for Designers, now in its second edition. She founded and runs the jQuery LA Users’ Group and together with Noel Saw she heads up the Southern California WordPress User’s Group, organizing WordPress meetups, help sessions, and workshops. She was the lead organizer for WordCamp Los Angeles 2014 and 2013 and organized the first bi-annual Website Weekend LA. She’s also the founder of the Los Angeles chapter of Girl Develop It, bringing affordable and accessible coding classes to the community. She makes her online home at nataliemac.com.

Alex Vasquez

He doesn’t come from the same planet as you or I. He exists in the air, in the moon, the air and, you might even say he lives in your heart. Born from the fires of a place that was a drag to visit for vacations he learned the ways of life by going out and living it. That scene in 300 where the boy defeats a wolf with his bare hands? Closely based on real life events that happened during his primary school years. Yes, he is the Alex Vasquez.

Rachel Baker

Rachel Baker (@rachelbaker) has lead development on web projects of all sizes including high-traffic communities and Fortune 500 companies. She works for 10up as a Senior Strategic Engineer by day. At night, Rachel contributes to the development of the WordPress JSON REST API or WordPress core. In her downtime, she enjoys drinking beer, watching Chicago sports teams, and mentoring new developers.

Mike Adams

Under the moniker “mdawaffe”, Mike has been a member of the WordPress community since 2004 and a Contributing Developer since 2006. He works at Automattic doing mostly back-end development and security.

Mike Schroder

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 getsource.net.

Mika Epstein

Mika Ariela Epstein is better known as Ipstenu, the Half-Elf Support Rogue. Working for DreamHost as a WordPress Support Specialist and Manager (aka ‘WordPress Guru’), she solves any WordPress problem that comes up, trains everyone from support to marketing in why WordPress makes your life better, and still finds time to slash unanswered WordPress.org forum threads by night and wrangle plugins by day. A self-taught guru on Multisite and .htaccess, she has a passion for writing and technology and blogs about them whenever possible.