We are so proud to be bringing over 20 local, national and international speakers to Halifax. These fine folks will be touching on topics around development, design, content, marketing, admin, community, mental health, business and more. So much variety to experience on May 27th!
See all their sessions in a schedule view
Adam W. Warner
Adam W. Warner discovered 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 WordPress Evangelist in spirit and personality, and that also happens to be his job title with SiteLock.com.
Adam is also passionate about his family, robots, and of course Life, the Universe and Everything. @SiteLock
Allison Tarr
Allison is a Front-end Developer at WebDevStudios, a distributed company that specializes in WordPress development. Originally from Southern California, she currently lives in Toronto. As a result of her own lived experience, Allison is a mental health advocate and wants to create a more open conversation to combat existing stigma and provide additional resources. She loves guacamole, hula hoops, and Dolly Parton (not necessarily in that order) and her favourite flightless bird is the kakapo. @allisonplus
Andrea Rennick
Andrea is a Customer Support Lead for Rainmaker Digital, the company that owns the Rainmaker platform, the Copyblogger content marketing blog and Studiopress, the company behind the Genesis framework. She’s also a grandmother of 3, and in her spare time makes quilts from Wordcamp tshirts. @andrea_r
Anthony D Paul
Now living and working in Chicago with GE transportation and the US railroad industry, Anthony helps build great digital experiences and software through usability research, IA concepts, and prototypes.
Outside the office, you’ll find him spread across regional meetups and conferences—evangelizing IA/UX, accessibility, and a variety of open source dev projects. Most recently, he organized WordCamp Baltimore. He’s currently organizing World IA Day DC and WordCamp Chicago, while unofficially advising the first-ever WordCamp DC. He’d divulge something funny from his past, but these days the Internet does a better job of surfacing our embarrassing moments; find him anywhere by Googling “anthonydpaul”.
Brad Touesnard
Brad Touesnard is founder and general manager of Delicious Brains Inc, creator of the popular WP Migrate DB Pro plugin, cohost of the Apply Filters podcast, and founder of the Big Snow Tiny Conf events. Although he was once an employee and then a freelance designer/developer, these days he spends all of his work time managing a fully remote team of 10 people located in the UK, USA, and Canada. @bradt
Brian Rotsztein
Brian is a renaissance man whose passion and enthusiasm as an experienced digital entrepreneur has shined over the last two decades. With a unique constellation of talents, he successfully multitasks between being a CEO, Internet \professional, author, conference speaker, consultant, content creator, mentor, photographer, web designer, idea generator, media guest (TV, radio, podcasts) and startup founder. His highly praised book, Content Marketing Ideas, is a complete guide to content creation and maintains an influential five-star rating on Amazon.
He is in demand as the head of established brands such as Uniseo.com and RedstoneX.com, President of the Canadian Internet Marketing Association, Editor-in-chief of Citynet Magazine, Founder of the #wplife movement, and Senior Editor at The WP Crowd, among other accolades. Brian holds two Master’s degrees and has taught at McGill University and Boston College. Please visit www.rotsztein.com for more.
Carl Alexander
Heya! I’m Carl.
I’m a PHP developer from Montréal, Canada. I live and breath advanced programming topics (and memes). I share a lot of my passion for those topics on my website where I publish articles on a regular basis.
It’s my way to help you with these hard-to-learn topics. That’s also why I’m excited to speak at WordCamp Halifax. It’s another way for me to help you.
Besides that, I’ve been a WordPress Montréal organizer since 2010. I also help organize other WordPress events during the year. You can find me on Twitter and GitHub.
Chris Van Patten
As founder and creative director of Tomodomo and Van Patten Media Inc., Chris Van Patten has helped build communities and websites for Broadway performers, small businesses, tech news publications, and countless others. Trained as a designer, Chris focuses these days on user experience and technical strategy, serving as a mediator between client dreams and technical realities. While living in Buffalo, NY, Chris created “BfloFRED,” the Buffalo Front-End Developers meetup (later expanded to include sister meetups in Manchester, UK and Toronto, ON) and co-organised Buffalo’s inaugural WordCamp. He regularly speaks at events around the world (including eleven WordCamps in cities around the world), and writes at chrisvanpatten.com. @ChrisVanPatten
Christina Varro
Christina owns and operates a creative design and commercial photography studio called Varro Creative based in Calgary, Canada. She has over 15 years of experience in graphic and web design, and has primarily focused on WordPress based projects for her web clients for the past 7 years. She has spoken at WordCamp several times, and is excited to collaborate and share knowledge with others in the WordPress community. @varrocreative
Crystal Picard
Crystal Picard is a Halifax-based graphic designer and hand-lettering artist behind Hello Sweetie Design. She graduated with the Highest Recognition Award from the Graphic Design program at NSCC Waterfront in 2015, where she developed her side hustle in the wee morning hours between homework and late nights at her part-time job. Passionate about building community and helping others become successful in their goals; Crystal utilizes her experience as a solopreneur to help others get more done outside their regular 9 to 5 grind. @crystalpicard
Dan Parker
Dan, from Halifax, is the local site director for http://ygorganization.com. After discovering WordPress in 2013 he finally was able to realize his dream of applying his formula to a website, starting with his most passionate hobby. Today that site sees the better part of 3 million hits a month. Dan likes video games, pizza, and chocolate milk. He is a proud member of the monthly WordPress Halifax Meetup.
Gavin Anderegg
Gavin is a Lead Developer at NATIONAL Public Relations, webmonkey, Apple fan, games nerd, coffee-fiend, and CMS critic. @gavinanderegg
Jean-Francois Arseneault
With over 20 years of experience, Jean-Francois has been building websites best viewed in 800×600 since the early 90’s. He co-founded SatelliteWP which is a WordPress maintenance service, runs a WP consulting agency which provides development & site management services, and co-founded a firm that specializes in SAAS solutions. Speaker, teacher, dad and wanna-be runner, he enjoys sci-fi, traveling and snail racing (ok, that last one is made up).
Kathryn Presner
Montrealer Kathryn Presner thrives on helping people get the most out of WordPress. After a career designing and building websites for clients, she joined Automattic as a Happiness Engineer in 2012. She’s currently Theme Whisperer on the Theme Team, where she helps folks with customization, configuration, and troubleshooting. She enjoys spreading her passion for WordPress and encouraging new public speakers at WordCamps, Girl Geeks, Ladies Learning Code, and other grassroots events. Non-WordPress obsessions include vintage Pyrex mixing bowls and growing garlic. @zoonini
Laura Hawkins
Laura is Director of Inbound Marketing at Kula Partners. She leads a team of marketers that work together with designers and developers to create and execute digital strategies that help clients across North America sell more. @lauraahawkins
Maxime Jobin
Maxime Jobin is the cofounder of SatelliteWP, a maintenance service for WordPress where business owners can forget about the technical aspect of running a website and focus on their business objectives. He manages several companies in various sectors where the same objective prevails: increase productivity through automation. He acts as a speaker to share his expertise and knowledge. Focusing on efficiency and return on investment, he is an expert in the analysis and development of computerized solutions. @maximejobin
Meagan Hanes
Meagan Hanes is a WordPress expert based in Ottawa with over 20 years creating websites by hand and over 10 years using WordPress. She creates elegant, high-performance, mobile-optimized web solutions – front-end, back-end, and everything in between. You may have seen her present talks across a variety of WordPress subjects. She gives back to local communities through organizing WordCamp Ottawa 2016 and 2017, running meetups such as the Ottawa WordPress Community, and teaching others to code via Ladies Learning Code. Meagan is a part of the OTGS family, makers of the WPML and Toolset plugins. 🙂 @mhanes
Mike Tanner
Mike Tanner is a writer, consultant and community builder in Halifax, NS. He has written for publications such as Yummy Mummy Club, Hustle & Grind and CBC while building his small digital agency, OneRedCat, over the past 5 years. He is also a full-time stay at home father of two and a director with Pocamp Halifax. When he’s not writing, building or breaking up toddler fights, he’s typically controlling a Level 11 Ronin in Dungeons & Dragons, trying to figure out how to do yoga or playing/designing board games. @oneredcatmedia
Mitch MacKenzie
Mitch MacKenzie is a PHP web developer from Prince Edward Island with a bit over a decade of experience building CMS websites. As our web development toolsets continue to grow and become more complex, Mitch is interested in exploring the delicate balance between simplicity in development processes with the needs of modern web experiences.
Pascal Martineau
As a young 80’s nerd, he discovered BASIC on the Tandy TRS-80 and kept on programming ever since. Currently he enjoys his position as lead developer at Le Web Simple, mostly doing WordPress stuff but also some DevOps R&D. As a Node.js enthusiast on the side, he is also having fun with real-time / full-stack application development.
Sarah Rennick
A coder for over a decade, I started tinkering with WordPress in 2005. My primary inspiration for learning to code was my passion for logic puzzles. Needless to say, troubleshooting is my favourite part of my job (along with implementing good UI!) In the past I’ve spent my time teaching others how to use WordPress, developing child themes and forking plugins. I’m currently living in Fredericton, NB and working as a front end developer for Lookbooks.com. In my spare time I attend a weekly bad movie watching club and play video games. @fevered
Shanta R. Nathwani
Shanta is an Instructor in Web Design and Capstone Project at Sheridan College and Mohawk College. She specializes in Web Development and Educational Training.
She is a problem solver and have been said to have the patience of a saint. She can explain even the most difficult concepts to the most basic user and has developed training that allow clients to learn for themselves. She thrives on understanding the needs of my clients and believes in making technology as simple as possible and making it fun, which allows our clients to seamlessly incorporate it into their organization.
Shanta holds a Certificate in Business Management and a Bachelors of Commerce Degree from Ryerson University in Information Technology Management. Some of her volunteer activities include being the Alumni Advisor for the Women In Information Technology Management program at Ryerson University, and Assistant Instructor at the Canadian Martial Arts Centre. She blogs at shanta.ca and can be found on Twitter @ShantaDotCa
Shawn Hooper
Shawn Hooper is the Director of IT at Actionable.co, where he enjoys combining code and data to build intelligent tools for teams and leaders. Hailing from Ottawa, Canada, Shawn has been building web applications since the late 90s, with a focus on WordPress since 2011. As a freelance developer, he has built sites for clients in the public and private sectors in both Canada and United States. He loves making use of great APIs, promoting web accessibility and secure coding practices. @shawnhooper
Shelly Peacock
Shelly Peacock is the founder of the Spinbird Group, a WordPress Consulting and Design Group. She has a “full-stack” professional background of over 15 years which includes sales, marketing, and social media training. An active member of the WordPress community, she has traveled and spoken at WordCamps both nationally and internationally. Her favorite things? Hole-in-the-wall eateries that rock and creating artwork … with blowtorches and code. @Spinbird