Bill Bennett
Bill Bennett is a New Zealand technology journalist. He started in 1980 as a writer on Practical Computing magazine. He left the UK in 1987 to work in Wellington on The Dominion as Computer Page editor.
He spent a decade working in Sydney, Australia. There he was managing editor of two regional editions of PC Magazine. He also wrote news, features and columns for The Australian Financial Review and The Sydney Morning Herald. On returning to New Zealand he edited and became associate publisher of New Zealand Reseller News.
Today Bennett works as a freelance journalist. In recent months his work has appeared in The New Zealand Herald and NZ Business. His writing also appears on Scoop.co.nz and Geekzone. Bennett is a regular on The NZ Tech Podcast and on television.
He is co-author of the best-selling Usborne Guide to the Microcomputer.
Bennett has a Physics BSc from Manchester University and remains interested in science. He lives in Auckland.
Peter Wilson
Peter Wilson is a web developer with 20 years experience and a guest core committer for WordPress since 4.6. He has a healthy obsession with CSS, PHP and keeping the web fast.
Peter is a WordPress developer at Human Made where he makes websites that scale. He has worked with WordPress since 2009 creating sites for the smallest to largest businesses.
Nik Cree
Nik is a Gold Coast / Brisbane based WordPress web developer specialising in Digital Strategy for SME’s using WordPress & a variety of online marketing tools. He uses WordPress & the StudioPress Genesis Framework to create effective high performing web solutions.
He owns a digital agency Positive Business Online, created after 10 years in the financial services industry having started a small Mortgage Broking business & building it to a national company on the back of a successful website and online marketing strategy.
Nik enjoys working to grow businesses online with the tools available & is an avid online explorer.
Maria Skatova
Maria Skatova, public relations and media professional since 1997, WordPress fan since 2009 and a new freelance developer will share how she uses email writing, mind reading, and Game of Thrones knowledge when dealing with clients. Originally from Russia, Maria now lives and Wellington and works as WordPress developer at Castlenet.
Ngaire Ackerley
Ngaire has over 9 years experience designing and developing websites in New Zealand and the UK. She was a co-organiser of the WordPress London Meetup Group and has spoken at many WordCamps and conferences across the UK, USA and NZ. Ngaire works in Digital Design by day and freelances designing and developing custom WordPress-based websites.
Travel and Photography Site: http://kiwifootprints.com
Design and Development of WordPress Websites: http://designack.com
Kristen Symonds
Kristen Symonds, aka kristarella, works as a Happiness Engineer for Automattic. She is a WordPress fanatic with a love for photography, craft, SciFi and Fantasy, board games, and more.
Kristen is married to Dave and has two pet rabbits named Monty and Zoë. She is also a Christian and plays flute and guitar.
WordPress Origin Story
Craig Martin
Craig Martin is the Founder & Managing Director of Performance Foundry & Indie Travel Media.
Performance Foundry does web strategy, design, development and maintenance for companies worldwide (http://performancefoundry.com).
Through Indie Travel Media, Craig and his team run several travel sites including the Lonely Planet award-winning Indie Travel Podcast (http://indietravelpodcast.com).
Jack Skinner
Jack Skinner is a Senior Software Engineer turned API Evangelist who’s been coding over half his life.
Jack Skinner brings a youthful energy that is engaging and captivating. With over 11 years of software development under his belt, Jack knows code, APIs and developers.
As API Evangelist at MYOB, Jack is responsible for over 4,000 developer partners who build add-on solutions connected to MYOB software. Jack is passionate about connected solutions, customer experience and great results for your clients.
Deborah Beckett
Deborah Beckett has been building web sites and training site owners for over ten years. She lives with her husband and two kids in the Research Triangle region of North Carolina, USA. When not engineering happiness for WordPress.com users, she enjoys running, travel, and spending time with her family.
Deborah’s coming all the way from the USA… what are YOU waiting for? Buy a ticket
Pam Kocke
New Orleans resident Pam Kocke works for Automattic, spending her days engineering happiness for WordPress.com users and hiring more Happiness Engineers.
She started blogging over a dozen years ago while training for her first marathon. In her free time, she enjoys photographing and blogging about her identical triplet sons Linus, Oliver, and Miles.
She is an organizer of the New Orleans WordPress Meetup, and enjoys traveling to other places to speak about WordPress. Pam blogs at pyjammy.blog.
Pam’s coming all the way from the USA… what are YOU waiting for?
Gavin Botica
Gavin is the owner of WP NET, NZ’s first dedicated WordPress host. I’ve been working with WordPress since 2005.
Prior to launching WP NET Gavin worked as a freelance developer for 13 years in Australia and NZ. He’s built countless WordPress sites, including WooCommerce, business sites, portfolios and more.
Gavin has also done a lot of integration, security and performance enhancement and hack-repair work.
Robert Wilde
Robert Wilde has worked with Technology for 20+ years. PHP for 10+ years and working with WordPress 5+ years building custom Themes and Plugins.
Also work heavily with Laravel and AngularJS and a number of Cloud based applications.
Love teaching my Son all things WebDev and I have a mad interest in Liquid fluoride thorium reactors.
See one of Robert’s previous talks from WordCamp Sydney on From Dev To Staging To Production.
Matthew Knighton
Matthew has been creating Websites and Web Apps for over 10 years and with that maturing of WordPress it has become his go to choice for the websites and more and more it is his team’s go to choice for web apps.
Dee Teal
Dee is an expatriate Kiwi who has been using WordPress as a blogger since 2008, as a web developer since 2009 and transitioned recently to being a project manager for large scale WordPress projects with Human Made.
Dee is a huge fan of the WordPress community, organises WordPress events in Australia, and speaks at them where she gets the opportunity both in her home ground of Australia and New Zealand, around the world.
Dee drives an English classic car, owns a Burmese cat, and drinks black coffee.
Mock Dee for leaving the homeland for the West Island – get your Ticket!
Karan Khanna
Karan is a self-confessed nerd with a passion for programming and WordPress development. Impressively, he taught himself web development, starting from everyone’s favourite “Hello World” all the way to building and maintaining custom web solutions. Alongside his WordPress experience, Karan also works on other platforms too, including Symfony.
As a backend-focused developer, Karan has an unconditional love for API and would prefer to converse in JSON over CSS. In his free time, Karan likes to play tennis, go for long drives or experiment with BLE devices and connect them with Node and Onion Omega. What did we tell you? #100%nerd
Johanna Bennett
Johanna has a background in journalism and have also set up six WordPress blogs. Her interest in writing – especially children’s literature is shown in my Murder Your Darlings (https://murderyourdarlings.net/ blog.
She has done a lot of business blogging and other related marketing – useful for business bloggers; hence this ‘business blogging’ lightning talk topic was created!
What a Line up!!! Don’t miss out, grab a ticket for you and a friend!