Bryan Petty — WCSLC Speaker Profile

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Bryan Petty works full-time developing WordPress core for Bluehost. “I don’t actually have any specific WordPress-powered sites I’m in charge of building and maintaining anymore. This leaves me with the full day every day to address tickets in the WordPress issue tracker, help improve project infrastructure, and help build new features into WordPress.” Bryan found WordPress around 2.1 – 2.3; before that he built a few sites on TextPattern and NewsPHP. His favorite part of WordPress is “definitely custom post types.”

One of the projects that he’s worked on that he’s most proud of is for the Cole Holland Training Center. “The Cole Holland Training Center was the first website that really expanded my experience with custom post types and taxonomies. This site turned around my entire perspective on what WordPress is, and what it can be used for…and opened up a lot of possibilities for features I could add to every new site I built after that.”

Bryan’s presentation is a highly technical session on plugin testing. “The WordPress team has worked especially hard on the unit tests system in the last few months, and nearly all the the main system built around the tests themselves has actually been completely rewritten…I feel like it’s important that plugin authors get in the habit of writing unit tests for their plugins…I wanted to take the time to get a presentation out there on how they can do this quickly and easily, and take advantage of the new unit test framework built for WordPress.”

When he’s not hacking on WordPress core, Bryan loves taking trips to southern Utah during the summer, and during the winter, he heads up to Snowbird with his snowboard. He responded with a solid “no” on the jazz topic, preferring, instead, electronic artists like Infected Mushroom, C-Mon & Kypski, Shpongle, and Radiohead.

George Ortiz — WCSLC Speaker Profile

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George Ortiz is the founder of PressTrends, a WordPress theme and plugin analytics platform. He got his start in WordPress on 2.7 after being introduced to it by Matt Jones. Shortly thereafter, they started posting themes on Themeforest and eventually launched Storefront Themes.

George launched PressTrends to tackle the massive amount of data being produced by WordPress and try to make it valuable for everyone. Since then, PressTrends has amassed a significant data set of metrics. “The integration between the API and WordPress core has been tricky, but working through it has been the most rewarding.” Like many other users and developers, his favorite part of WordPress is the ease of use leading to WordPress supporting almost 17% of the entire web. “It’s a truly amazing platform and the continued focus on the end user experience will continue to drive that percentage up. From the New York Times to that student publishing their first post with WordPress, it’s awesome.”

George’s presentation is about best practices for WordPress plugin development. “My goal is to share some development best practices…and encourage people to develop and design better themes and plugins.”

When not working on WordPress, George spends enjoys travelling and the outdoors. “I love experiencing new cultures and ways of life.” George’s favorite jazz musician is John Coltrane.

Mike Payne — WCSLC Speaker Profile

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Mike is a junior partner and Development Director at Punchline Advertising where he builds custom CMSs for his clients based on WordPress using custom post types and fields. He also spends time as a WordPress consultant, helping companies and individuals better understand how to utilize open source projects for long term scalable platforms.

Mike got his start on WordPress 2.6 while in high school at the Academy of Information Technology. When he first started web developing, he was coding every page by hand in HTML/CSS. “I wasn’t very enthusiastic about the career path until I started using PHP to make my sites more dynamic, and understanding how to move sections of the site into templated files. Suddenly everything became way easier! WordPress cranks that ease of use and excitement to 11!”

His favorite part of WordPress is the community of developers and users. “With so many people continuously looking for easier ways to make a free piece of software do what they want, it is becoming easier and easier to find solutions that used to be impossible.” One of his recent projects that he’s proud of is Salt City Glass. “I built that site from the ground up. I took product photography, built out the ecommerce solutions, developed the site branding and feel, and helped the client to understand how to easily input new products and zone in on SEO friendly content.”

Mike’s presentation topic is the Psychology of Web Design. “I’ve always been intrigued by the psychology of interaction. Salesmen learn basic psychologic techniques to persuade customers into not only buying from them, but upselling them toward more expensive products. Your website is your best — and sometimes only — salesman. By understanding your visitors intentions you can funnel them to specific content, persuade them into believing, wanting, and buying.”

When Mike isn’t working on WordPress, he loves robots, motorcycles and video games. He recently built an arcade cabinet from scratch with his brother, wiring the controls to a computer from which they can play thousands of emulated arcade games from one machine. His favorite jazz musician is Miles Davis, though he doesn’t listen to jazz most frequently.

John Levandowski — WCSLC Speaker Profile

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John LevandowskiJohn does Business Intelligence and Data Warehousing at the University of Utah. His responsibilities include: project planning, gathering requirements, dimensional modeling, development, solution deployment, and support. John started using WordPress at version 1.5 — so long ago that he’s forgotten how he came across it. Before WordPress he was hand-coding HTML in Notepad.

His first commercial application of WordPress was the Financial and Business Services website for the University of Utah which was originally built on WordPress 1.5 as a blog to deliver internal campus news. Since then it has turned into a full fledged CMS for the Financial and Business Services division at the University of Utah with hundreds of pages and posts. His favorite things about WordPress are the ease of use and the WordPress community. He also likes how easy it is to extend and customize via plugins and themes.

John will be speaking about WordPress performance optimization. He chose this topic as a way to give back to the community. “I want to get everyone up to speed on the basics of optimizing a WordPress site for performance. I see too many websites out there that don’t even do the basics. This will be a discussion for beginners and those who have never thought about performance optimization.”

When John is not working with WordPress, what he does for fun can be summed up by three things: Road Cycling, Good Beer, and Blackjack. While he does appreciate jazz music, it’s not what he listens to most and he doesn’t have a favorite jazz performer.

Jason Gill — WCSLC Speaker Profile

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Jason GillJason is a veteran web developer with over 12 years of experience and is currently working with the Department of Veteran Affairs. Before he was introduced to WordPress by a co-worker, he was using Mephisto. “Mephisto was horrible, but it was much better than the blog I tried programming myself from the ground up.” Once he started working with WordPress, however he “never looked back.”

One of the projects Jason has worked on that he’s most proud of is Utah UPSTART which he developed the theme for as well as the bilingual functionality. When asked about his favorite part of WordPress, his response is “Plugins. Plugins. Plugins.”

At WordCamp SLC 2012, Jason will be talking about WordPress multisite. “Having implemented WordPress multisite at an enterprise level more than once, I know it can be daunting.” He hopes to share how easy it is to get started and the awesomeness of managing multiple WordPress powered-sites.

When not building WordPress-powered sites, Jason admits to staying up “way too late” playing Modern Warfare 3 on the XBox. Occasionally he ventures outside to stay up way too late longboarding. Jason would rather listen to rock than jazz.

Why jazz?

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If you’ve been reading our speaker profiles in the blog, you may have noticed that in each one I list what the speaker’s favorite jazz artist is (if they have one). Why am I asking about jazz, you might ask, or why should you care?

Since WordPress 1.0, major releases have been named after jazz musicians. WordPress core developers — and co-founder Matt Mullenweg most notoriously — share a common love of jazz music. It made sense and seemed fun to see where our speakers fall into the spectrum of jazz appreciation.

Jazz is a unique style of music where the performers play off of each other and the written music doesn’t matter as much as making sure there is a nonverbal communication with the other players through the music. It’s a lot like WordPress itself — there are millions of people using WordPress worldwide, thousands of people developing for WordPress or participating in the forums or the community. While these people may never speak to each other directly, all of it together plays into what WordPress is, why it is unique from other platforms, and ultimately determines where WordPress is going.

Last year, Matt launched jazz-quotes.com, a repository of quotes from various jazz musicians. It started with quotes that Matt had collected over the years, but soon added a form to submit quotes by a specific performer. While many of the quotes are specifically about music or other jazz musicians, many of them are inspirational nuggets that transcend music and can be applied to anything. I encourage you to visit Jazz Quotes if you’re curious about jazz, the performers, who a particular artist that the latest WordPress version was named after was, or if you are looking for inspiration. I promise that you won’t be disappointed; there’s something for everyone.

What’s your favorite jazz quote or jazz musician? Let us know in the comments!

Chris Reynolds — WCSLC Speaker Profile

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Chris ReynoldsI am a project manager, developer and support monkey for the premium WordPress event management plugin, Event Espresso. I’m also a WordPress theme and plugin developer and I launched a web design studio in 2007 with my wife, called Arcane Palette Creative Design. In 2010 we debuted Museum Themes, a premium WordPress theme shop. I volunteered to help with the WCSLC preparations this year, and have been working on the web site, content, and the theme (which uses _s).

To the best of my knowledge, I started on WordPress 2.1. Before that I was using a software called Sblog, but I was frustrated by the lack of updates. Before that I maintained a web-log the old-fashioned way, with HTML and manual FTP updates. I used to say that my favorite part of WordPress was its ease-of-use, but lately my answer has changed to how easy it is to develop for it. A few years ago I would never have considered myself a developer. I have since dived into code — for custom themes, plugins, for Event Espresso, as well as plugins (and one theme) in the WordPress.org repositories — and am constantly amazed at the wealth of tools and documentation at my disposal.

When I’m not doing things related to WordPress, I’m an avid gamer. I love gaming on the computer, but even more than that, I love tabletop gaming. Castle Panic, Settlers of Catan, Munchkin and Forbidden Island are some of my current favorites.

A project I’m most proud of right now is the new Event Espresso website. I did a lot of little, back-end things, custom plugins, and a lot of the initial development for what’s now the product system. I’ve also done quite a bit with the bbPress forums which have received significant amount of hacking. The site is also using 2 of my plugins: WordPress Wiki That Doesn’t Suck (used for the Documentation pages) and my Progress Bar plugin (used on various pages on the site).

My presentation at this year’s WordCamp will build off of what I presented last year, which was an introduction to the idea of doing theme development and/or light theme modifications. This presentation is going to get into the nitty gritty of theme development and is largely informed by my own experience getting my theme, Museum Core, added to the WordPress.org repository, and what I learned through the theme review process.

While I don’t listen to jazz all the time, I do listen to some, and my favorite jazz musician is John Coltrane.

Brian Rogers — WCSLC Speaker Profile

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Brian RogersBrian spends his days playing Tetris on his work computer and eating Cheetos and his current aspiration is to remove one of his cubicle walls. Before taking a job at Bluehost in 2007, he was completely new to web hosting and development but he now loves how open WordPress is.

Brian built and writes on DitoForge and he’s most happy with making it look Android-themed. When he’s not working on WordPress, he likes doing “front-end stuff. That is evolving into a beast of its own.”

Brian’s presentation is on WordPress plugin development. “I like to try to simplify every day processes,” he says, and he’s hoping people will see plugin development “in a new light.”

Brian admits to not listening to much jazz, but his favorite jazz musician is Frank Sinatra.

Patrick Cox — WCSLC Speaker Profile

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Patrick CoxBy day Patrick is a UI developer for an enterprise event management software company, Active Network, where he customizes and brands mobile applications. By night (instead of sleeping) he spends his time working on freelance, consulting and personal web projects.

Patrick started working with WordPress in 2009 with WordPress 2.7. “I really just found WordPress online from design and development blogs. Everybody was talking about it and so I figured I’d give it a shot.” He started with a WordPress.com blog before discovering the power of WordPress.org. Before using WordPress he worked mostly with Drupal but dropped everything altogether with the release of Custom Post Types. He says his favorite part of WP is the simplicity and scalability of it. “It’s really only as complicated as you want to make it…A non-coding designer can easily build a very professional and functional website or a hard core developer can use it right out of the box without losing any power of flexibility.”

When Patrick isn’t coding or writing about coding, he enjoys spending time with his family and doing things outdoors like mountain biking, playing golf (horribly) and snowboarding, “all of it performed to a punk rock soundtrack” (though he admits to appreciating Frank Sinatra — if Sinatra can be considered jazz). He also loves pizza.

Patrick will be talking about tools that you can and should be using in WordPress development. “When I first started out I really didn’t know the best tools to use. I sort of discovered them over time through other developers or blogs.” He hopes that people can learn about some new ideas or resources that will help people develop more efficiently and effectively.