Speakers

Rich Robinkoff

Rich is a WordPress community advocate, WordCamp organizer and speaker. He also helps other organizers as a WordCamp Central Community Deputy. He has worked in the corporate world for almost two decades and brings that vast business experience to the WordPress community as a Project Manager. You can usually find him searching for his next great cup of coffee while he ponders his own self-worth as he learns to deal with a really bad case of impostor syndrome. When the opportunity arises, he also teaches web development at his local community college.

Brian Layman

Brian Layman is a full time independent WordPress consultant working primarily to extend WordPress for use with evolving web technologies, helping sites adopt features such as AMP, Ad Prebid and ingesting data from new and evolving APIs.  He is a featured WordPress Developer in “WordPress for Dummies (2nd edition)” by Lisa Sabin-Wilson. In addition to custom feature development, he specializes in legacy site conversion, hacked site recovery and server security & optimizations.
He has designed and served as System Administrator for large dynamic WordPress installations hosted on Amazon AWS for companies such as Marsh-Mclennan, a fortune 50 company.  He has created custom multi-site WordPress features for companies like Lexis Nexus and has done server optimization for Hewlett Packard. Popular sites like RedState.com have brought him in to convert their 212,000 site WordPress MU install to a WordPress MultiSite installation. Digital media companies such as the Moguldom Media Group and Heavy Inc. have used him for moving their sites over to WordPress VIP hosting and continued consulting thereafter.

He was a speaker at Blog World Expo in 2007, 2010 and 2011 and numerous WordCamps over the years.  Brian conducts monthly presentations at the North East Ohio WordPress Meetup and is a co-organizer of WordCamp North East Ohio.  He is available for speaking or video training upon request.

Bobby Bryant

I have been involved in the WordPress space as a Developer for over 2 years. Prior to getting involved with WordPress I spent 13+ years in the United States Marines as Ground Electronics Technician.

I currently work for a web Agency called 10up as a Web Developer. While I spend most days working on both the front and backend of WordPress, I have a secret passion for Javascript. Which means I spend a lot of time, reading, writing, and working on JS heavy projects.

I am also the developer behind the YouTube channel Develop with WP, which is an Ad Free, payment free place, where I share what I call 201 WordPress Development tutorials.

Megan Morsie

Megan Morsie is a front end web developer at a travel agency in the Cleveland, OH area. She first got into web development with HTML & CSS on her Neopets site when she was 12. She has been working with WordPress since 2013. Most of her work over the last two years has been on custom themes, web forms, plugins, and utilizing third-party APIs. Also, she loves guinea pigs.

Justin Rains

I am a developer with 20 years of experience. I have been using WordPress for around 8 years in some capacity. I have 2 plugins in the WP repository and I am getting ready to release a 3rd plugin. I am also a Code Igniter fan and have our home movie server in CI that also has a responsive front end. I am currently working on a custom ROKU channel to play movies from our network onto our TV’s.

Mary Baum

Mary Baum is the founder and principal of RacquetPress, which builds Genesis child themes and full sites for a variety of verticals in the tennis industry.

A veteran creative and degreed designer, Mary speaks on WP design and development and is launching the Antelope Valley WordPress Meetup. She’s also an organizer of WordCamp St. Louis.

Steve Grunwell

Steve Grunwell is a Senior Web Engineer and Project Lead at 10up, a World-class web design + development consultancy. Specializing in WordPress and application development he has worked with brands and organizations including TED, Microsoft, Xylem, Elmer’s, and Experience Columbus.

Steve has released several plugins in the WordPress.org repositories, including one from the grounds of The White House during the first annual National Day of Civic Hacking in 2013. When he’s not writing software he enjoys hiking, music, and writing about writing software on his blog.

Steve holds a B.A. in Telecommunications from Bowling Green State University where he graduated Cum Laude with minors in General Business and Recording Technologies.

More information, including portfolio work and his development blog, can be found at https://stevegrunwell.com.

Don Abbott

The Snarky Gardener (aka Don Abbott) is a gardener, blogger, author, educator, speaker, reluctant activist, and permaculture practitioner from Kent Ohio. Professionally he’s a software developer but spends his spare time producing food at Snarky Acres, his rented .91 acre urban farm. His blog – thesnarkygardener.com – assists others with growing food in Northeastern Ohio and beyond.

Jeff Long

Jeff Long has had the opportunity to serve entrepreneurs, companies, and organizations around the world since 2003 by creating engaging online courses, building flexible WordPress websites and producing compelling videos. He’s been using WordPress since 2008 and loves the flexibility that it offers. His company specializes in creating online course systems, and video-based online learning. He’s the host of The Online Course Coach Podcast, which is THE podcast for the latest in online course creation tips, news, interviews. He not only talks about strategies of how to best teach online but also interviews industry leaders who share their insights & experiences. You can find Jeff at OnlineCourseCoach.com.

Thomas Cottrill

Working with WordPress since v 1.9, I have managed development teams for large agencies before starting my own company. 90 percent of our work is customized WordPress, optimizing sites for SEO and speed, and integrating them with countless third party APIs.

I have been developing for over 18 years, and have developed sites for Fortune 500 companies, professional athletes, and countless small, medium and enterprise businesses.

Maria Averion

I was a Designer and Graphic Artist in the newspaper business for more than 20 years, but now I do freelance Web Design using WordPress. I’ve been a speaker at WordCamp Columbus for the last 2 years and a member of the WordPress Meetup for the last 5 years.

David Brattoli

I have worked in web industry for the past 9 years. I have been running my own web and graphic design company “Infinite Reality LLC” since 2007 and have been working in higher education for the last three years. I hold a Bachelor’s degree in Mathematics from Bluffton University and Associate degrees in Graphic and Web Design and Gaming and Simulation Design from Lorain County Community College. I am also self-taught in a host of different coding languages and have integrated my mathematics, graphic, and web design skills to accomplish whatever web design tasks I have needed to solve. Utilizing this knowledge allows me to give my clients a powerful and unique set of websites for industry, government, education, and learning environments.

Angie Meeker

Angie Meeker (http://mynameisangie.com) helps small business live and die by their customers’ goals.

She is the host of the Persona podcast, where real life business owners share what’s working (and NOT working) to reach their customers.

Marketing wasn’t Angie’s first career. 12 years ago, she was a pastor, helping guests get connected to the people and programs of the church. When she suddenly started having seizures and couldn’t drive to those same programs, she realized she needed a new job working from home. She found she could apply the same exact skills she used to help grow churches’ membership to helping small businesses build relationships with their customers online, and to grow their revenue.

She is also an organizer of WordCamp Columbus, an annual conference for users and developers of WordPress, with over 200 attendees and thirty speakers. She has taught over 600 entrepreneurs and business owners how to get started using WordPress to share their stories online.

She enjoys hanging out with her husband, Robert, and nine year old daughter in Columbus, OH-io. She is the biggest fan of America’s Funniest Videos and in case you’re wondering, yes, she did break her addiction to sweet tea.

Sherryl Wilson

Sherryl has been using WordPress since 2010 and has a background in Accounting before venturing into the world of blogging and website creation. Currently, I manage several sites, work as a social media manager, brand ambassador, travel writer, and motivational speaker. As the mom to seven children and an homeschooling advocate, she is real comfortable with the chaos of multitasking.

Ben Keith

Gery Deer

A Pulitzer-nominated, 20-year veteran freelance journalist, copywriter, IT professional, and entrepreneur, Gery has provided both code and content for website over the years and has always maintained content over keywords. “If the idea is to sell something or drive traffic to and through a website, the only option is to offer visitors the highest quality, user-focused content possible.”

Nathan Tyler

Nathan runs an agency (Tyler Digital), maintains several plugins on wordpress.org, and has recently launched a web app built on WordPress. He likes working with APIs and backend development, but has been studying up on more advanced javascript because Matt said so. When Nathan’s not at the computer, he’s probably playing soccer.

Dustin Hartzler

Dustin is a Happiness Engineer at Automattic, providing support for the popular eCommerce plugin, WooCommerce. He is also the host of the weekly WordPress podcast at Your Website Engineer. When not spending time with WordPress, he can be found traveling around the world, biking and reading.

Kyle Maurer

Kyle is the co-founder of a Jackson, Michigan based firm called Real Big Marketing which specializes in using WordPress to solve complicated problems for businesses. He is also the author of and a contributor to dozens of WordPress plugins, is the co-organizer of the Jackson WP meetup, is a co-organizer of WordCamp Ann Arbor, plays in a band and is an aspiring beer snob.

Mike Hale

Mike Hale is a WordPress developer at Rainmaker Digital where he helps build the Rainmaker Platform. He has over 15 years of software development experience and started working with WordPress in 2010 building custom plugins and sites using the Genesis Framework. He is also a writer, podcaster and co-organizer of the WordPress Naperville meetup.

Adam Schweigert

Adam Schweigert is Senior Director of Product and Technology with the Institute for Nonprofit News. Previously, he founded Media Toybox, a consultancy specialized in working with news and media companies. He has also served as Director of Strategy for Mindset Digital, a Columbus, Ohio-based firm providing social media training and strategic consulting to Fortune 500 companies and institutions of higher education. Before that he worked in public media for eight years heading up digital efforts at NPR/PBS member stations WOSU in Columbus, Ohio and Indiana Public Media in Bloomington, Indiana. He holds degrees in music composition, music theory and oboe performance from Ohio State University, did his graduate work at Indiana University and currently resides in Columbus, Ohio.

Adam W. Warner

Adam W. Warner discovered the world of WordPress in 2005 and has been working within the community ever since. To feed his entrepreneurial spirit, he founded several WordPress-focused businesses that provide education, plugins and consulting services for online business owners. He is a true product evangelist for WordPress in spirit and personality, and that also happens to be his job title at SiteLock. In addition to WordPress, Adam is passionate about his family, robots and of course, life, the universe and everything.

Taylor Howard

• Librarian of Electronic Resources
• Freelance Web Developer
• Master of Library & Information Science, University of Kentucky, December 2014
• Bachelor of Arts (Philosophy), University of Kentucky, August 2013
• Associate of Arts, Kentucky Community and Technical College System, May 2009
• Information Science research focus; with coursework in information architecture, information retrieval technologies, and cybersecurity