Adam Silverstein
Adam started programming in assembly code and wrote Java applets when Netscape Navigator ruled the web. He is a lead web engineer at 10up, a WordPress core committer, and lead developer of the WordPress REST API Backbone client. Adam loves long rafting trips, playing mbira, travel, taking walks, and tending his over-sized garden.
Adam Smith
Adam Smith started building websites in 1996. From Geocities tables to fully responsive JS frameworks, he continues to learn and push the boundaries of the web. Currently employed as lead developer at aCodeSmith in Asheville, North Carolina, he develops daily with WordPress for a wide range of client needs.
His passions are DRY programming, impressive user interfaces, brewing beer, and movies.
Adam Warner
Adam W. Warner first discovered WordPress in 2005 and has since founded several WordPress-focused businesses that provide education, plugins, and consulting services for online business owners. In 2016, he brought his passion for WordPress to SiteLock, where he became a product evangelist. Adam has since spread his zeal for WordPress to 20 different WordCamps all over the world and presented talks at 13 of them. In addition to WordPress, Adam is passionate about his family, robots, and, of course, life, the universe, and everything.
Aisha Adams
Aisha Adams is the blogger behind www.AishaAdams.com. Her written work has appeared in publications like The Asheville Citizen Times, The Asheville Grit, and The Final Call. Aisha has a BA in English with a concentration in creative writing from the University of Alabama at Birmingham (UAB). She also holds a Masters in post-secondary and adult education. Aisha is also a 2016 My Home, My Voice Fellow. Aisha is the author of Vegan Curious and the mastermind behind Aisha Adams Media, where she and her team help clients connect, converse, and convert their ideal clients.
Alisa Herr
Alisa loves flexing her skills in strategy, data analysis, writing, empathy, design, and development. She found her calling to lift up those who use their power as a force for good and established Unity Digital Agency in 2016 to connect mission-driven technologists, designers, and strategists to the organizations who need them the most. A North Carolinian to the bone, Alisa has a bachelor’s degree in psychology from Appalachian State University, a master’s degree in library and information science from UNC Chapel Hill, and ardently defends her preference for Lexington-style BBQ.
Boomer Sassmann
With a degree from ASU in Industrial Design and a lifelong passion for web development, Boomer Sassmann has been running Big Boom Design Inc, an Asheville-based design agency since 2007. Currently, Sassmann manages a team of eight employees and supports more than 300 companies across the United States. His passion for web development, coupled with a drive to “bridge the digital divide,” has resulted in a unique educational approach to empowering local business owners about the internet. He is a serial entrepreneur, designer, builder and all around maker.
Daniel Swain
Daniel is the founder of JDS WebDesign, a digital marketing strategy company that helps small- to mid-size companies. He’s been building websites for 16+ years and working as a freelance designer for JDS WebDesign since August 2007.
In his spare time, he loves hanging out with his family, playing a round of golf, listening to some jazz, writing blog material, and working on his podcast.
Doug Cone
Doug has been building for the web since 1997. He’s contributed code for WordPress core, and built dozens of custom WordPress plugins and themes for various customer implementations.
Edwin Leskin
Edwin began his career in 2011 as the founder and marketing director of an Asheville-based event production company responsible for festivals and concert tours across the southeastern United States. In 2013, he began working with clients as a social media marketing consultant, tackling new challenges, and learning vital skills. Over the years, he’s worked with companies and nonprofits across the country and around the world. He currently works for JB Media Group as their social media advertising and strategy specialist.
Emily Breedlove
Emily has been working in WNC since 2007 as a marketing and business development specialist. Her experience with WordPress has been mostly focused on the branding and design portion, offering her professional services to businesses, non-profits, and community programs across the Southeast. She loves WordPress because it allows her to spend more time working on strategy development than on the actual integration.
Eric Hoanshelt
Eric has either been involved with or developing in WordPress for about 10 years. Currently, he works at WP Engine, ensuring that its support team is constantly delivering a World Class Experience. His passion is creating processes and procedures that make people’s lives easier and less complicated. Whether this helps someone do a task more efficiently or turns a disaster into a paradise, he enjoys helping others have stress-free lives.
Ethan Butler
Ethan Butler is a freelance developer based in Durham, NC, as well as a lecturer at the UNC School of Media and Journalism. He’s passionate about using technology to solve the problems that technology creates. When he’s not hacking, Ethan loves cooking, biking, and nerding out about hip-hop.
Ethan Butler and Jordan Cauley
Jordan founded Cardinal Media, a digital product team focused on the publishing industry. For the last year and half Jordan has been building products for Our State Magazine and other clients using WP and the WP-API.
Ethan is a developer based in Durham, NC, as well as an adjunct faculty member at UNC’s School of Media and Journalism and a JavaScript hipster. He’s passionate about using technology to solve the problems that technology creates.
Evan Mullins
Evan Mullins uses WordPress daily at the office as well as for his own projects. He is currently Lead Web Developer at Brown Bag Marketing, an integrated marketing agency in Atlanta. He blogs at circlecube.com and has even been known to dream in WordPress. With a background in digital media art, he finds a strong creative outlet programming WordPress sites. He strives to make the web a prettier, more pleasant, and all-around better place for you and your grandma. Outside of WordPress, Evan is a dedicated husband, father of four, and soccer coach.
Jason Johnson
Jason is a WordPress developer and tech problem solver who works for FullSteam Labs — an Asheville tech cooperative working with nonprofits and small businesses.
Jason Knill
Jason is partner and head of Finance at WordImpress, a WordPress plugin company that developed GiveWP.com, a donation plugin. Jason has worked on brand development and financial forecasting since acquiring the company and becoming a partner in 2015. Prior to that, he was VP, Development at an integrated marketing agency in San Diego. He also dabbles in fishing, hunting, running, golf, and drinking fine craft beer.
Jeff Bowen
Jeff is an engineer at Automattic currently working on making publishing flows on WordPress.com as smooth as can be. He’s a usability nerd and is always looking for ways to make the web a better place!
His heart is in the WNC mountains, but the rest of him usually lives in north Florida.
Twitter: https://twitter.com/alapapa
Jeremy Proffitt
Jeremy is a UX guru who specializes in web-accessibility design and consulting. His passion is educating people on the importance of designing a user-friendly and accessible website. Jeremy currently is the owner of User Theory, LLC, a local accessibility consulting company. He and his team provide design and accessibility services to many businesses in the area.
Jodi Rhoden
Jodi is an author and entrepreneur with a focus on food systems and social justice. She is the founder and former owner of Short Street Cakes, and her book, Cake Ladies: Celebrating a Southern Tradition, was published by Sterling Publishing in 2011. Jodi offers classes and one-on-one mentoring through Mountain Bizworks and Birds Eye Business Planning and Adventures, where she relishes working with small-scale food producers and farmers, independent artists, healing arts practitioners, and other social entrepreneurs to discover meaning in their work through developing their mission and vision.
John Ragozzine
John is the lead communications manager at 10up. Having learned WordPress as a front-end developer, he knows the craft necessary to produce great websites. With an authentic desire to help people, he has acted as a client-facing strategist for small businesses, nonprofits, and multinational corporations. John’s academic background in writing, philosophy, and education—and an inherent artistic streak—helps him readily spot when a project is out of balance (or when a little asymmetry can help things along).
Jonathan Ross
Jonathan is an instructor for the Digital Media Technology program at A-B Tech. In the DME program he has created/taught curriculum for graphic design, animation, multimedia design, web design/development, user-interface design, commercial video production, filmmaking, and 3D design. Jonathan is also a freelance designer/consultant.
Jordan Cauley
Jordan, his wife, and two kids live in Greensboro, NC, where he founded Cardinal Media, a digital product team focused on the publishing industry. For the last year and half Jordan has been building products for Our State Magazine and other clients using WP and the WP-API. Jordan runs Triad JS and teaches CodeHQ, a 12-week web-development course from HQ Greensboro.
Julien Melissas
Julien Melissas is a web developer from Asheville, NC. He has been working with WordPress for 6+ years now and has grown quite fond of it. Julien is a co-founder and technical director at Craftpeak, a creative agency in Asheville, where he works on UI/UX projects, as well as full website and web application builds specifically for the Craft Brewing industry. He’s on the Roots.io development team and loves working on open source. Whenever he can get away from work you can find him exploring the world on a motorcycle, playing drums in his band Brucemont, cooking a tasty meal, or hiking with his dog Wilbur.
Justin Belleme
Justin Belleme is the founder and director of strategy at JB Media Group, a full-service Internet marketing agency, and also the co-founder and a lead trainer at the JB Media Institute, a comprehensive online marketing education program. He is committed to sharing his knowledge and helping individuals and organizations make informed decisions.
Karl Hudson Phillips
Karl is an accredited multi-disciplinary designer/developer, project manager, intrepid traveler, and voracious reader. He spends his days crafting experiences and interfaces as a web developer at BlueKey. In his spare time, he serves as the program curator for three events geared at making current and emerging industry trends and practices readily available to the web design, marketing, application-development, and creative communities. These events include Refresh Charleston, Revolve Conference, and Syntax Code & Craft Convention.
Micah Wood
Micah is the Technical Director at Narwhal Digital, an agency in Atlanta. He’s written and publicly released more than a dozen WordPress plugins, is a stealth core contributor, and specializes in enterprise WordPress development. He has a passion for learning best practices and sharing his knowledge with the greater WordPress community.
Michael Mizner
Lead Developer at a small WordPress firm in Knoxville. I’m passionate about modernizing WordPress, improving its speed and accessibility .
Twitter: @miznerism
Morgan Ryan
Morgan Ryan is the editor-in-chief of Layout, a design and WordPress publication by Flywheel. She collaborates with contributors to publish articles that provide designers, developers, and creatives the advice they need to grow their businesses and work more efficiently with WordPress. When she’s not writing or editing content, Morgan strategizes new ways to optimize the blog, increase conversions, and create a network of loyal subscribers.
Nick Romanos
Pat Eason
Pat is a software developer living in Asheville who creates software to solve problems and improve lives.
Rhonda Sterrett
Rhonda is part owner of a husband-and-wife-owned company that has been in business since 1999. Together, they have helped more than 300 companies with their websites and internet marketing needs. Rhonda loves to architect WooCommerce website solutions for her clients. Rhonda’s consultative approach helps her e-commerce clients achieve the results they want, along with allowing her to complete a successful WooCommerce project. Rhonda is also co-organizer of the WooCommerce Meetup Group in Marietta, GA.
Rich Owings
Rich is the owner of Local Is Where It’s At, an Asheville-based Internet marketing firm specializing in local SEO.
He has been an Internet marketer since 2005. After selling his tech blog in 2014, he now spends his time helping businesses improve their online presence.
Sarah Benoit
Sarah Benoit is an entrepreneur, web designer, educator, and communication junkie. She is president of Creative Original, Inc., and enjoys building small business websites on WordPress. She is also co-founder and lead instructor of the JB Media Institute, a comprehensive internet marketing training program available both online and in person.
Scott Saunders
Scott is the senior front-end developer for Red Letter Marketing in Greensboro, NC, where he’s worked for the past nine years. Nearly every site that RLM has built was done in WordPress. Scott also runs Dieselpunk Industries, where he hosts a constantly growing library of 400+ feature length films, 400+ serials, 111 shorts and cartoons, and 25,291 radio shows, a Roku channel, and a web-based streaming movie channel — all maintained using WordPress.
Sean Ainsley
Sean has been building custom WordPress websites for nonprofits and small businesses for five years. He’s spoken at WordPress Meetups here in Asheville and also teaches WordPress classes at A-B Tech that focus on partially decoupled and decoupled architectures using Angular and the WP-API. He enjoys being out in the woods, hunting, fishing, hiking, and sharing what he’s learned with others.
Sharon Dawson
Sharon Dawson is a marketing manager at TheeDesign. She plans and executes marketing campaigns to help small, local, and national companies get more customers and strengthen their branding. She keeps her client’s WordPress sites up to date with the latest version and plugins and not breaking that website when doing said updates. She also has her support team and GoDaddy on speed dial just in case. Prior to TheeDesign, Sharon was the webmaster at Burt’s Bees where she managed the B2B and B2C websites for the US, Canada, UK, and Australia.
Stephanie Rodrigue
Stephanie has been creating the marketing and sales strategies behind websites for more than 15 years. As the director of marketing, she creates customer-focused marketing plans detailing specific web tools to optimize the customer experience.
Steven Ayers
Steven has worked in various areas of IT for more than 20 years and also served in the U.S. military for more than 8 years. He has extensive military training in various aspects of security. His company, Sovereign Stack, specializes in WordPress security, web development, and hosting.
Tiffany Kuchta
Tiffany is lead developer at Quandarymat. She doesn’t like the term full-stack developer but thinks she might be one. She has been building web things since 1999 and WordPress since before the capital P (dangit). A woman who codes, Tiffany is passionate about inclusion in tech, solving problems with code, building things out of other things, empathy always, and sassy t-shirts usually.
Tony Zeoli
Tony lives in Asheville, NC, and operates Digital Strategy Works, a digital-strategy consulting company guiding small businesses on WordPress-related platform development. Tony has more than 13 years of experience working with WordPress. He’s also the resident digital strategist at Mountain BizWorks, a local lending and learning org assisting small business in WNC. He picks his topics based on issues that arise in his consultancy, which he loves to share with WordCampers.