Speakers

We received a number of Speaker applications and are still processing them. We’ll reach out to you as soon as possible, thank you for your patience!

Andrew Liyanage

Andrew is a WordPress enthusiast and started working as a freelancer no too long ago. He lives in Zurich and loves to travel the world in order to get as much surf as possible. Andrew loves to get out and work from different places and therefore works on acquiring more knowledge and developing his skills to make a living out of freelancing in order to travel and work.

He can be found on Twitter @andrew_liyanage

Emir Kurtovic

I became a developer long time ago before the term “developer” was used for a
programmer. Often, when about to sleep I want to “backup” that day just in
case and always wonder why there is no “Save Day” button floating around in
midair. Recently, I discovered that there is real world behind computer
screen so I do get out occasionally to see the family (they seem like
really nice people) and sunlight, just to confirm i did not became allergic
to it.

After (finally) putting up together my company portfolio, WP came as most
used tool on the projects I created – either as a blog, or system itself,
and that modifications to the original system become so huge that sometimes
it redefines WordPress’ purpose – to be simple. So, I finally understood that I
became a WordPress developer.

Jaana Björklund

Jan Thiel

Jan Thiel is a developer with more than 12 years of experience and DevOps enthusiast. He is currently focussing on running WordPress for customers and talks about security, data privacy and tries not to get lost in technical details too much. Currently he lives in Hamburg in the northern part of Germany and is a co-organizer of the local WordPress Meetup there.

Karin Christen

Karin is a co-founder at required+, a Swiss based web company with focus on Interaction Design, Mobile Web and WordPress. As an Interaction Designer she is setting her focus on the user’s perspective. Clients hire her to either work on applications with usability issues or to integrate in teams where they start a project from scratch. In here free time she loves to be in the Swiss Alps with her downhill mountain bike.

Konstantin Obenland

Konstantin was the Release Lead for the just released WordPress 4.3. He’ll go over the things that went well, the things that didn’t go well, and what he’d do differently next time around. From selecting features, to the controversy Menus in the Customizer caused, to working on the release video. Join Konstantin for a behind the scenes look into creating a WordPress release.

Konstantin is originally from Konstanz, Germany, he now lives in Ventura, California, from where he works as a Code Wrangler at Automattic.

Marko Heijnen

Marko is a long term WordPress contributor from the Netherlands. He uses wordPress since 2006 and started contributing back to it in 2009. After years of freelancing he now works for his own agency CodeKitchen B.V. Part of his job is improving WordPress by contributing back to the community. He is also a lead developer of GlotPress since early 2013 which is a open source tool for collabrative translating.

He can be found on Twitter @MarkoHeijnen or one of his blogs at markoheijnen.com and wpunknown.com.

Mendel Kurland

As an outdoor enthusiast, Mendel loves backpacking, camping, gourmet coffee, and prototyping new web apps. From scrappy beginnings as an entrepreneur and Web consultant for local businesses, he found his way to corporate America as a developer, marketer, and inventor. As a GoDaddy Evangelist, he spends his time hanging out with developers, designers, entrepreneurs, and web pros around the world and making sure their opinions and suggestions are heard.

Michael Sebel

Michael is a WordPress developer and co-founderat comotive, a Swiss based web agency. He’s always keeping an eye at fast performance and is an enthusiast when it comes to clustering and high availablity solutions with WordPress. Michael may have written over a million lines of plugin code for customers at his former employer blogwerk and is therefore “the backend guy” at comotive. At home he gives food to his fish and his wife and cultivates tomatoes, carrots and other vegetables he’s never eating anyway.

Pascal Birchler

Pascal Birchler is a 21-year-old computer science student and web developer from Switzerland. He contributes to WordPress wherever he can, whether it’s by organizing the local meetups, WordCamp Switzerland, or by writing on his blog SpinPress. Follow him on twiter @swissspidy.

Petya Raykovska

Petya is a Senior Project Manager at Human Made where she helps large projects across big publishers and enterprise succeed. She is a huge WordPress enthusiast, active member of the WordPress community, contributing to the awesome Polyglots team alongside some of the most inspiring people in the world. Petya organised WordCamp Europe 2014 in Sofia and WordCamp Europe 2015 in Seville with a global team of WordPress volunteers from all over the continent. You can follow Petya on Twitter and on her blog.

Piotr Soluch

Piotr is a founder at WireDot (wiredot.com), a Zurich based WordPress development agency that specializes in working with small companies and non-profit organizations. He’s passionate about good design, UX and helping clients with their challenges. Piotr loves outdoors – hiking, skiing and mountain biking are on the top of his favorite activities.

Silvan Hagen

Silvan Hagen is co-founder of the UX and WordPress agency required+ and one of the organisers for WordCamp Switzerland. He helps his clients to build long-lasting and maintainable solutions, using UX to in the process of building WordPress solutions and plugins. Silvan keeps his mind open with travelling. He surfs and snowboards, takes photographs, and builds self-sustaining permaculture gardens.

Sonja Leix

Sonja is a location-independent WordPress front-end designer. She’s an active member of the WordPress community, co-organized WordCamp New York 2014 and WordCamp Europe 2015. She has a strong design background and is passionate about UX, the WordPress community and traveling.

Sven von Arx

Tomaz Zaman

Founder / CTO, Head of Product Development at Codeable. Tomaž spent years as a freelancer, building websites and applications for clients all over the world. He’s a completely self-taught developer who also likes to fiddle with servers.

At Codeable, he’s responsible for product development and promotion, so you might find him at a WP conference or UX workshop, where he’s trying to learn about users’ habits as much as possible.

In his free time, he spends time with his wife and four children, jumps out of perfectly working airplanes and enjoys a good movie.