Vito Peleg
Vito started building websites for clients from the back of a van while touring the world with my band at the time.
After the band split, Vito made the transition from freelancer to agency, with a team of 12 by year three at their London agency, before evolving to focus completely on WP Feedback – a communication tool for WP pros and their clients. He will be sharing his tips on scaling WordPress in a lightning talk at WordCamp Dublin.
Twitter: WP Feedback
Siobhan Cunningham
Siobhan works for Yoast and is based in The Netherlands. She is a Make WordPress.org marketing team representative and co-ordinator for the weekly marketing team meetings. She was a co-organiser for the recent WordCamp Nijmegen 2019, working on speaker liaison.
With Abha Thakor, they lead the marketing campaign to encourage subtitling on WordPress.tv videos and the WordPress video marketing project.
Siobhan has a background in Communication and Multimedia Design and Communication science. She enjoys being part of a community where so many people from across the world not only build together the WordPress open source project but they share knowledge and learn so much from each other too.
Twitter: @siobhanseija
On the Schedule
Siobhan will be co-leading a workshop on SEO on the Friday afternoon of WordCamp Dublin 2019 for those new to WordPress and students at DCU.
Scott Jones
Scott is the founder of Illustrate Digital, a specialist digital agency based in Cardiff, UK who focus on User Experience Design and WordPress Development.
With plenty of experience in the digital sector, the agency carry a people-first approach to the sites they create, including their work with notable clients such as Penguin Random House, Hodge Bank, National Theatre Wales and more.
Additionally, Scott is a board member at FinTech Wales, a not-for-profit organisation aimed at promoting and upskilling the thriving FinTech sector in Wales.
He is a volunteer on the Make WordPress Marketing team. He also speaks and writes on the benefits of using the WordPress platform, helping brands to understand how flexible content and strategic digital experiences can shape a company and their marketing efforts.
Sabrina Viot
Sabrina is a digital strategist based in Ireland. She helps pragmatic entrepreneurs to be able to automate their business online to increase their leads and revenue on autopilot without the tech overwhelm, even if they don’t know where and how to start!
Ryan Hellyer
WordPress obsessed Kiwi former scientist, Ryan used to live in Canada, then Norway and now Berlin. He has been a creator of WordPress plugins for more than 10 years.
He’s a passionate supporter of open source and spends his time working on ways to speed up and secure the web at strattic.com.
Ryan was an organiser of WordCamp Europe 2019 and on the Communications Team.
Twitter: @ryanhellyer / Website: geek.hellyer.kiwi / GitHub: ryanhellyer
Topic Title: Road to a faster web
Rui Cruz
A geek from Portugal who loves cats and spends most of his day in the Internet.
He is journalist of a Portuguese Wikileaks-inspired website, security enthusiast and sysadmin, working in the health industry.
Rodolfo Melogli
Rodolfo is an author, WooCommerce expert, web developer and internet marketeer.
He was a previous organiser of the Dublin Ecommerce Meetup and a co-organiser of the Dublin WooCommerce Meetup and the Dublin WordPress Meetup. He was on the organising team for WordCamp Dublin 2017. Now based in Italy, he maintains his connections and enthusiasm for Ireland. He joins us for WordCamp Dublin 2019 to lead one of our workshops (require specific booking) for both those new to WordPress and students at the university.
Rodolfo enjoys interacting with people, running on the beach and chasing tennis and soccer balls. Of course, he loves pizza too.
Twitter: @rmelogli / Website: businessbloomer.com
Rhys Wynne
Rhys Wynne is a WordPress Plugin developer, author and speaker. In 2013 he penned bbPress Complete (ISBN-13: 978-1782167242) and has written plugins that have been downloaded more than 100,000 times.
He has a keen interest in commercial WordPress development, SEO, security and open source technologies, and enjoys the community that has surrounded open source technologies. He can be found on Twitter at @dwinrhys and his freelance site, Dwinrhys.com
Twitter: @dwinrhys Website: Dwinrhys.com
Raffaella Isidori
A creative polymath for more than two decades, Raffaella Isidori has been designing, consulting, building brands, optimising the communication for businesses around the world, and producing events.
Her personal story, experience with non profit and open source environments, and passion for sharing her knowledge and values, propelled her towards social entrepreneurship.
Raffaella is currently kickstarting her latest project, Humanise.it, which focuses on creating awareness on mental wellness, diversity and inclusivity and on fostering human skills.
She also studies, teaches, writes, translates, takes pictures, speaks at conferences, coaches professionals on communication and language.
She contributes to a number of Make WordPress teams including Polyglots and Marketing, and was a member of the lead team behind WordPress Translation Day 3 and 4.
Curious as a cat and in love with diversity, Raffaella lives and works in the countryside – surrounded by some flora and lots of fauna. When not working or hatching ideas, she practices mindfulness, cultivates dreams, pushes boundaries, and collects books, fonts, and essential oils. Online, she’s Zetaraffix.
Twitter: @Zetaraffix / Website: RaffaellaIsidori
Paul Scollon
Paul Scollon is a Technical Officer at Dundalk Institute of Technology, primarily responsible for the day-to-day delivery of web-based IT services to students in the Department of Computing and Mathematics. He also teaches a WordPress Beginners’ nightclass at DkIT and runs a small web development business in the ‘real’ world (WordPress is used as the base of all website projects).
Paul uses GNU/Linux and open source software exclusively to create the solutions required by lecturers in class. He carries what he has learned to his own business, altFIRE Technologies, thus keeping costs down for clients.
In 2016 Paul created My WordPress VPS which provides pre-built, managed and monitored WordPress servers hosted at Digital Ocean.
His presentation ‘Deploying and using WordPress in a learning environment’ will include a discussion on the three methods the institute uses to deploy WordPress on campus to students:
1) LAMP Stack deployed by bash scripts
2) VM Templates in XCP-ng (via Xen Orchestra frontend)
3) App Templates in Docker (via Portainer frontend)
Paudie Fearon
Paudie is the founder and MD of Wibble. He has more 15 years of commercial experience and has been working as Wibble since 2013.
He grew the business from a small, home-based freelance set up to a full design and dev studio with clients all around the world and currently have a staff of four.
Hugely passionate about WordPress and open source, Wibble has a reputation as experts in all things WordPress and have worked on WordPress sites for everything from sole traders to huge multinationals.
Before Wibble, Paudie worked for some of the biggest companies in the world including GE Energy, The Australian Broadcasting Corporation and Saatchi & Saatchi.
From Crossmaglen originally, he now lives in Belfast where Wibble is based with his family.
Twitter: @paudiefearon / Website: wearewibble.com
Melin Edomwonyi
Currently Head of Production at Illustrate Digital, Melin is responsible for all project delivery. Before working at Illustrate Digital and really delving into UX Design, she worked with various brands and companies as a designer.
Melin is originally from Turkey and is passionate about food and cooking.
She is also the host of CreativeMornings in Cardiff, a monthly meet-up of creatives from in and around the city.
Martin Splitt
Martin is a developer advocate on the Webmaster Trends Analyst team at Google Switzerland.
In this role, he helps developers and content creators to build great content on the web. He is involved with the open source community as well as the global web and JavaScript developer community, working to keep the web open.
In 2019 he started contributing to WordPress too.
Mark Smallman
Mark, one of the main organisers for WordCamp Dublin 2019, has agreed to jointly lead a workshop on using the block content editor in response to feedback.
Join Mark and Tim O’Driscoll, with input from other WordPress contributors for this session on Sunday morning. They will also feature examples from WordCamp websites to encourage future organisers and support those who are unfamiliar with updating the site using the block editor.
Twitter: @macgraphic / Website: MacGraphic
Marijana Kay
A content writer and strategist for software-as-a-service companies.
She’s worked with Fortune 100s and fast-growing SaaS companies like Pipedrive, AWeber, and Zapier.
She writes around 200,000 words per year for her clients to help them tell stories that can both build traffic and get sales.
Maja Benke
Maja studied landscape architecture but soon discovered her love for WordPress and travelling the world.
Now she works as a web designer with a passion for UX and accessibility and has a blog for WordPress newbies.
Luminus Alabi
Luminus is a WooCommerce Happiness Engineer at Automattic with a penchant for helping people figure out the easiest and most reliable way to achieve their objectives with WordPress, WooCommerce and everything in between.
He describes himself as “Sometimes coder, abysmal designer, Equal Opportunities Hugs Dispenser and wannabe social butterfly with a 6th-degree black belt in hanging out.”
He is a plugin developer and contributes to core on Make WordPress.
Twitter: @luminus / Website: luminus.alabi.blog
Increase your productivity – the local WordPress development toolset of your dreams (talk at WordCamp Brighton 2018)
Louise Towler
Louise is the Director of Indigo Tree which she started in January 2011 after freelancing as a developer since 2003.
As a self-confessed geek, she is passionate about digital and web technologies including accessibility, performance and data. Louise enjoys working with clients to deliver business growth with innovative digital solutions.
Leo Mindel
Leo Mindel is the founder of Sotic, a multi award-winning Digital Sports Agency that uses WordPress CMS as the platform to deliver large-scale websites for major sporting rights-holders.
Established in 2002, Sotic adopted WordPress as its preferred CMS in 2015 and has discovered a home in the WordPress community.
Leo has been a member of WordPress London since 2016 and has regularly livestreamed this Meetup.
He is an active contributor to the WP Community, supporting MeetUps and WordCamps with talks and support and is part of the Communications Team for WordCamp London 2019, which took place in April.
Kayleigh Thorpe
Kayleigh is a WordPress Specialist at 34SP.com. You will often find her socialising at tech meetups throughout the UK. When she’s not learning about WordPress, she loves to draw, travel and be part of the WordPress community.
Twitter: @kayleighthorpe
Katerina Angelova
Katerina is a Partnerships Manager at SiteGround, where she excels in building strategic long term relationships.
With nine years of experience travelling and managing people from different countries, she has an in-depth knowledge of culture and human behaviour which helps her establish strong and successful business collaborations.
She believes that no matter the industry, the human element is the foundation of every thriving business and the key to meaningful synergy among entrepreneurs.
Jochen Lillich
Jochen Lillich is the founder and CEO of freistil IT, a distributed team of web operations experts running the managed hosting platform freistilbox. After studying computer science in the 1990s, he founded a number of IT businesses and gained experience in IT management at leading technology companies. Jochen lives with his family near Dublin, Ireland.
Website: freistilbox.com
Jenny Wong
Once a Web Developer, Jenny now works as a Community Engineer at Human Made. When she started, she spent her first two weeks organizing a conference. She can often be found evangelizing open source community, event organiser and occasionally, speaker.
Her days are varied: from solving issues with event sites and supporting organisers, to passionately cheering people on to contribute back to their communities. She loves cooking up elaborate ideas to help improve participation experiences in open source projects.
When away from the laptop, she’s usually binge watching Formula 1 and anime, doing house renovations or making a mess whilst cooking.
Fleur Heesen
She is an E-learning editor at Yoast.
Fleur is also a contributor to Make WordPress Polyglots.
Twitter: @seizehuit
Enrico Battocchi
A freelance developer from Tuscany, Italy, Enrico began using WordPress for a personal blog. He soon found himself using it for almost every project he worked on.
His main contribution to the WordPress community since he joined it in 2007 is his work on Duplicate Post, a plugin to copy posts and pages with a click.
Emer Carr
Emer has had a diverse career from training as a therapist specialising in chronic pain to software roles (QA, dev and engineering up to management level). Her growing interest is in how we use Big Data and AI.
She advocates that designing for the user and user experience is a necessity. From running her own therapy business, she started to get involved in WordPress from 2012 as a way to keep her tech interest happy.
After returning to IT for a few years, she realised it was time to make a choice, to continue doing what she loved or relocate for a job. She decided to turn to web development using WordPress full time in 2017.
She is currently ‘reinventing’ her tech business to capture the more human side of the digital dimension and creating digital micro ecosystems. She wants to focus solutions on harnessing human behaviour and systems rather than a websites with disconnected strategies.
Eimear Murphy
Eimear is a Malahide native living in Swords, Co. Dublin.
She has been teaching yoga for more than 20 years.
She teaches with the ETB around Fingal, Co. Dublin and also with people who have multiple sclerosis.
She loves teaching yoga as she feels that it gives people the tools to look after their physical and mental well being.
Yoga is a way of life and Eimear encourages people to bring it into their every day by being aware of their posture, their breath and their body.
Doreen Kennedy
Doreen Kennedy is a graphic designer and photographer. Her photography work has appeared at Irish and International galleries and festivals including Art in Odd Places, New York; Electric Picnic Festival, Ireland; Arts & Disability Forum Gallery, Belfast; National Botanic Gardens, Dublin and PhotoIreland Festival.
Her editorial photography documenting the Cannes Film Festival, Venice International Film Festival and Berlin International Film Festival have been published internationally.
She is founder of the photography agency NoPhotography and the social initiative project Popup Libraries.
Damien Carbery
Damien has been thinking in pseudo code since long before he had a computer. Now he forces it on his children. He studied Electronic Engineering in DCU when it was a tiny college and hasn’t used any of what he learned since then.
He’s a freelance WordPress developer that really enjoys reading source code, because it’s always more accurate than documentation.
He’s also a cycling fan and a park run regular that finally completed 100 runs.
These days he posts a weekly technical article about WordPress, each with at least one add_action() or add_filter() call. Through these articles he’s had the opportunity to help readers from across the world.
Craig West
Craig is an online educator that focuses on bringing together the WP and non-WP worlds by advocating Agnostic WordPress, ‘where there is HTML, there is WP’.
He is based in Brighton and attends the local WordUp meetings. With a previous career in business and accounting, as well as having run his own non-IT business, Craig can speak both technical and business. He believes that technology serves the user, not the other way around, so the user experience is paramount.
He has started to speak at WP events and is interested in Web Components, Progressive Web Apps and Blockchain.
Colm Baker
Originally qualified as a pharmacist the move into the online marketing world wasn’t a normal route to take but I have now been working over the last few years to provide social media management and Facebook advertising management and training to businesses across Ireland, UK and the USA with my agency Full Blast Advertising.
We were delighted to recently win the best marketing campaign award at the Chambers Ireland awards. We specialise in driving traffic to websites and increasing conversions through advanced retargeting strategies.
Clare McSharry
Clare is the founder of Smiling Spiders Web Design and Web Development. She originally graduated from Sligo Institute of Technology in 1991 with a Diploma in computing (Merit) at a time when the IT industry and the internet was in its infancy.
During the past 25 years, she has worked in a number of blue chip companies such as Zurich Insurance and Unilever and in the computer consultancy industry in the employment of Cap Gemini Sogeti. Her most recent addition to upskilling has been a BSc(Hons) in Digital Computing (First Class) from the DIT in 2015.
Clare’s work in tech was as a project manager and in IT support. Security was of the upmost importance. Keeping the systems running 24/7 was a key requirement and any problems had to be fixed within a very tight timeframe.
In 2009, she decided to take the plunge and set up her own business – Smiling Spiders Web Design and Web Development. She wanted to combine new technologies of the digital age with product creation, and to help businesses create a web presence to sell to their target market.
Chris Brosnan
Chris is a self-taught developer with eight years of professional experience and several more as a hobbyist tinkerer. He has a particular interest in PHP development with Laravel and other MVC frameworks, and also in developing for WordPress.
He has shared his passion for both in different industries including the charity sector, travel, financial software, blockchain and property sectors. When not coding, Chris enjoys film, board games, blogging and watching football.
Camila Waz
Camila is a Brazilian web designer and developer, now based in Dublin, Ireland.
Her passion for content brought her into the world of tech where she got to know WordPress, front-end technologies and design through building blog themes.
Using this knowledge she worked as a freelancer for a number of years helping entrepreneurs and bloggers to get their message (and their websites) out there. At the same time she contributed to her local tech community organising events, Meetups and training sessions for new developers.
Now she works as a UI/UX Web Developer and is a co-organiser for DublinCSS a community with monthly Meetups which welcomes all developers, designers and curious individuals, regardless of experience level, to discuss and learn about the latest and standard CSS tips and techniques.
Arūnas Liuiza
Arūnas is an experienced WordPress plugin developer. He has been using WordPress since version 2.6.3 and has developed a number of free, premium and custom plugins.
He has 15 years of experience in web development. He works on Kayak.com content platform architecture. He is a WordPress Core Contributor, WordPress Kaunas Meetup co-organizer, a WordCamp speaker and co-editor of the Lithuanian WordPress translation.
Amanda Webb
Amanda from Spiderworking helps small businesses win at online strategy. She’s a blogger, vlogger, podcaster and self confessed content addict. Her blog has won awards nationally and internationally and she just loves to talk marketing.
When she’s not creating she loves watching Dr Who, playing with her cats and going for long cycles in the Irish countryside.
Twitter: @spiderworking / Website: Spiderworking
Abha Thakor
Abha is an experienced communicator, journalist, researcher and digital professional working in a variety of sectors. She has specialisms in new technology, content development, supporting continuous professional development and cross-cultural working.
She is a contributor to a number of teams on Make WordPress including marketing and is a WordCamp and Meetup co-organizer. She is Communications Lead for WordCamp London and a WordCamp Europe 2019 co-organizer. She is also CPD-Lead for a number of professional organizations and writes on technology, AI and machine learning.