WordCamp SLC Speaker Announcements: Round 3!

Speaker submissions are now closed (although stay tuned for another announcement in the next couple weeks — there may yet be a chance for you to present a lightning talk if you didn’t get a chance to get a talk submitted and still want to speak) but we’re still running through our awesome speaker lineup. Make sure to grab your tickets — the wcslc2017-earlybird promo code is valid through the middle of August!

Tevya Washburn

In 2007, Tevya completed his BS in History. He paid for much of that degree doing freelance work. Much of that work was building websites. After college he tried a few “real jobs,” but people kept asking him to build websites. In frustration with the very manual “HTML and FTP” method of managing content and design, he went searching for a better solution. He found WordPress in 2008.

He’s been building websites almost exclusively on WordPress since that time. Soon after, he decided to make these side projects into a business. He and his small team at Fiddler Online have now handcrafted over 100 unique WordPress websites, and actively maintain and manage 60+ of them.

Tevya is the founder and lead organizer of the Boise WordPress Meetup and hopes to one day help take his home state of Idaho off the list of a few remaining states that have not yet hosted a WordCamp.

Chris Reynolds

Chris is a Senior Engineer at Human Made and has been working with WordPress for over 10 years. Before joining the team at Human Made, Chris has been a Developer Lead for WebDevStudios, an author of online training videos for Pluralsight, a developer, project manager and support technician at Event Espresso, a freelancer, a one-person WordPress theme shop, and a Specialty Team member at Whole Foods. Though vegan, he can still be snobby about cheese and chocolate. Chris maintains a number of open source plugins on GitHub and WordPress.org and has been involved in WordCamp Salt Lake City since 2011.

When not coding, he may be found chanting for Utah’s own Major League Soccer team, Real Salt Lake.

Susan C. Daniero

Founder and President of Materiell and NeatlyPressed. Materiell has designed and developed WordPress websites for enterprise, government, and education clients throughout the U.S. since 2011.

NeatlyPressed provides comprehensive WordPress site support services, code reviews and audits, and site migrations.

Susan loves coffee, deadlines, snow skiing, Park City, UT, her dog, friends, and family. (not necessarily in that order!)

Garth Mortensen

Garth is a software engineer at Sucuri. He’s passionate about information security and pizza.

Dhanushka Samarakoon

Dhanushka received his undergraduate degree in Computer Science and started the career as a .net developer at Virtusa Corporation, developing business solutions for clients, such as Siemens Energy Automation and Xerox. At Kansas State University Libraries, he worked with platforms and frameworks such as Drupal, WordPress, Omeka, Solr, and CodeIgniter. Dhanushka was able to use WordPress to replace some legacy custom coded products at the library. In 2016 he moved to the J. Willard Marriott Library at the University of Utah. As the Assistant Head of Software Development, he provides the leadership to the Software Development unit. His main responsibilities are developing and maintaining in-house software solutions, customization and adaptation of open source software, and administration of enterprise systems at the library.

Joelle Reeder

I am the owner and creative director of Moxie Design Studios, where I’ve worked to create fabulous online brands for best-selling authors, award-winning businesses, academic institutions and creative entrepreneurs since 2003. I specialize in creative consultation, online branding, and creating responsive WordPress websites from design to development and I especially love working with Genesis framework.

Once upon a time, I was an an award-winning blogger, and I am also co-author of the book, “The IT Girl’s Guide to Blogging with Moxie” (Wiley & Sons Publishing) and have spoken on panels at industry events such as SXSW Interactive and appeared in several publications, podcasts and radio programs, including Entrepreneur Magazine, BlogTalk Radio and The Derek & Romaine Show.

I’m a retrophile who sings jazz, and a brunch enthusiast on a quest for the perfect bottomless mimosa.

Natalie Osborne

Natalie owns a boutique web development company called WONDERBUILD.com, designing and developing solely on the WordPress platform (with exception of a handful of Shopify clients).

Natalie began her career in early 2000’s working tech support and product development at one of the largest virtual-shared hosting companies. She rode out the first boom-bust of the DotCom era working in front-end production for some big-named online companies that you’ve probably never heard of now: HotelNet, Invite Internet, and KBKids.com (now eToys). Most notably was her tenure at MLB.com (Major League Baseball). After seven years of producing online campaigns for baseball clubs, she left the comfort of a pension, 401k and health insurance plan to start her own small web dev agency – WONDERBUILD.com.

Natalie chose WordPress as her platform of choice for a variety of reasons and credits the success of her business to the WordPress community.