Josh Broton –

Josh will be presenting You Don’t Need jQuery on Saturday in the Advanced Development track

Josh spends his days building interactive infographics, cool ways to visualize data, and high performance NodeJS web apps and WordPress themes at Lemonly. There, he fills the roles of both senior developer and curmudgeon.

He writes HTML, CSS, and JavaScript at Kidblog.org, the world’s largest educational blog network.

He also helped build the Spring Theme and Sassquatch Sass mixin library with 3themes.

In his spare time, he works on standing.io, a collection of his favorite conference videos. Continue reading Interview with Josh Broton →

Gregory Cornelius –

Gregory will be presenting Taking Your JavaScript Further on Saturday in the Advanced Development track

Gregory Cornelius is a code wrangler at Automattic and WordPress core contributor. Prior to moving to Boston, Massachusetts, Gregory spent ten years pursuing music degrees at schools in Missouri, Ohio, and Texas.

Along the way, he discovered that helping folks share their ideas on the web with WordPress was invigorating and has been doing so professionally since 2008.

Interview:

Why do you use WordPress?
I love how awesome the WordPress community is, how easy it is for users to edit content, and how it can scale from personal blogs to large complicated enterprise installations.

What would you say to convince someone to attend a WordCamp?
WordCamps are inexpensive and are great chance to meet people in your area doing awesome things with WordPress.

What is your favorite WordPress project you have worked on recently?
Having the opportunity to work on some of the main new features in WordPress 3.9 was

Do you have any advice for someone looking to start or grow a WordPress based business?
Never stop learning and listening to users. Users will always give you clues and insights that you can use to make their lives better and solve their problems.

What is your favorite WordPress-related resource?
The source code.

Tell us something awesome about yourself that is not WordPress related
I wrote a pretty neat piece of music Earth and Green inspired by Mark Rothko’s painting of the same name in 2006. And, then in 2009, I got married in the Rothko Chapel in Houston, Texas.

John James Jacoby –

John James will be presenting Multisite and Multi-network on Sunday in the Advanced Development track

Interview:

Why do you use WordPress?
The community is so great

What would you say to convince someone to attend a WordCamp?
If I were a zombie, the community would still accept me.

What is your favorite WordPress project you have worked on recently?
BuddyPress 2.0

Do you have any advice for someone looking to start or grow a WordPress based business?
Ship a v1 of your idea early, iterate constantly, and don’t be ashamed to humble-brag every once in a while.

What is your favorite WordPress-related resource?
Core Trac

Tell us something awesome about yourself that is not WordPress related
Not a zombie

Zach Tollman –

Zach will be presenting Speed as a Feature: Getting a Handle on Page Load Time on Sunday in the Advanced Development track

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 code as a developer at The Theme Foundry.

Interview:

Why do you use WordPress?
I use WordPress because of the amazing community around the software. People of WordPress are universally exceptional and it is a wonderful to work alongside so many talented individuals.

What would you say to convince someone to attend a WordCamp?
In order to understand why the WordPress community is so great, you need to start interacting with it. The best place to start is at a WordCamp. With very little effort, you will begin to build lifelong relationships that will affect many aspects of your life.

What is your favorite WordPress project you have worked on recently?
At The Theme Foundry, we recently rebuilt our servers in order to improve security and performance. We were able to implement SSL everywhere, while not sacrificing (and in some cases, improving) performance of our site. Much of this work has inspired my WordCamp Chicago talk.

Do you have any advice for someone looking to start or grow a WordPress based business?
Talk to people. WordPress business owners are competitive, yet very helpful. The business “stars” of our community tend to be more than willing to share information to help you be successful. The more successful businesses that champion WordPress, the more successful WordPress will be overall.

What is your favorite WordPress-related resource?
As a developer, I used to rely on what other people had to say about WordPress code; however, overtime, I’ve learned that it’s best to just go to the “horse’s mouth” to get the information that you need. In this case, that is the WordPress core code itself. You will learn more about WordPress, PHP, and development practices by reading core code than any one else’s writing about it.

Tell us something awesome about yourself that is not WordPress related
I’m a huge hockey fan and because my wife is from Chicago, I’ve adopted the Blackhawks as my team. I’m hoping for another parade during WordCamp Chicago this year.

Aaron Holbrook –

Aaron will be presenting Introduction to IDEs and Debugging on Sunday in the Advanced Development track

Aaron’s passions are his wife and two boys, gaming and exercising. He devises brilliant solutions as a Web Engineer at 10up.

Aaron was the Lead Organizer of WordCamp Chicago in 2013 and founded the Northwest Suburbs of Chicago WordPress Meetup.

He has spoken at more over half a dozen WordCamps ranging from WordCamp Milwaukee to WordCamp Providence and loves to teach others the joys of using remarkable tools well.

Interview:

Why do you use WordPress?
I use WordPress because of it’s ease of use for the end user. I have always been impressed by the amount of work that has gone into making the user experience as simple and as intuitive as possible.

There are a lot of CMSs out there that simply do not think about how the user will actually have to USE their interface and because of that they suffer.

What would you say to convince someone to attend a WordCamp?
OMG, you haven’t been to a WordCamp yet? What are you doing with your life?

Haha, in all seriousness though, a WordCamp is a great place for all levels to learn, meet other community members and to simply get inspired and reinvigorated.

K. Adam White –

K. Adam will be presenting Modular JavaScript on Saturday in the Advanced Development track

K.Adam White is a JavaScript engineer at Bocoup, an Open Web technology company located in Boston, MA, where he builds web applications and evangelizes for the web as an open technology platform.

K.Adam has been a co-organizer of the Boston WordPress meetup since 2012, and has presented on WordPress and front-end development best practices at meetups and WordCamps across the country.

Interview:

Why do you use WordPress?
I started a WordPress blog in college because I liked the look of the old “Typography” theme. Later, as an aimless recent graduate in the middle of an economic slump it was the WP community that gave me my first foothold in web design. I taught myself to code by helping a friend tweak WordPress themes for local businesses, and slowly began to take on my own freelance work.

Freelancing lead me to a great full-time job, where I left behind PHP but discovered jQuery and JavaScript – four years later I joined Bocoup, and finally got involved with core development. WordPress is the foundation of my career, and I’ve met some great friends through this community. I use it because I think it’s the best tool for what it does; I contribute because I am grateful; and I have a WP phone case just because I’m a big fan!

What would you say to convince someone to attend a WordCamp?
They’re among the highest-value conferences I’ve ever attended, for some of the lowest ticket prices: whether you’re a blogger, an artist, a designer, a front-end scripter, an expert PHP developer, or even a recovering technophobe, there will be talks to learn from and great people to meet.

Because users, designers and developers all attend, and are all equal in the eyes of the event, WordCamps are a great place to stretch your wings and learn something outside your comfort zone.

What is your favorite WordPress project you have worked on recently?
We’re in the process of building a site using WordPress through the JSON API plugin, and it’s really exciting to be proving out WP’s capacity to be a content platform for apps without a single line of client-facing template code!

Do you have any advice for someone looking to start or grow a WordPress based business?
Embrace the community! People have succeeded by “going it alone,” but 90% of the WordPress professionals I’ve met regularly get work from (or pass work along to) friends within the community.

Whether you can attend a WordCamp, start a local WordPress meetup, hang out in any of the WP-related IRC channels, or just keep an eye on Twitter and mailing list conversations, it pays to be visible and involved in the greater WP ecosystem.

What is your favorite WordPress-related resource?
Twitter. So many brilliant people in the community post links and share their knowledge on Twitter, it could be a full-time job keeping up on the flow of tips and new information.

I’ve got a couple TweetDeck columns devoted to different groups of WordPress community members; they’re my first stop if I have a question or want to see what’s new.

Tell us something awesome about yourself that is not WordPress related
I can mix a mean cocktail, and despite living in Boston these days I used to be certified to bartend in Illinois – although I’m working on a drink recipe database that’s using WP for the back-end, so maybe that’s not actually a good answer to the question