Welcome our first group of speakers!

WordCamp London returns to the London Metropolitan University from 13 to 15 April 2018, and it brings together, on one stage, more than 40 speakers eager to share their knowledge with the WordPress community.

London Metropolitan University, main hall.

If you haven’t seen the schedule yet, you can find it here. Themes explored at this year’s edition of WordCamp London range from content to security, accessibility, the REST API, and of course current trends such as Gutenberg, GDPR and Blockchain, which have been given a dedicated Hot Topic category.

With just a few weeks to go, over the next few days we’ll be introducing our amazing speakers to the world. Say hello to the first group!

Stef Mattana

Stef works at Automattic as a Happiness Engineer. She helps users who need support for products mainly on the WordPress.org area such as Jetpack, VaultPress, Akismet, Polldaddy etc.

WordPress evangelist, Stef is active in the International and Italian communities, and had also being involved in the organisation of WordCamps.

When she’s not lifting heavy weights, Stef likes stalking dogs and extinguishers, or ending up people on fiction.

Talk: 1:1 with customers – a troubled approach, with a happy end

Felix Arntz

Felix is a freelancer and WordPress core committer based in Germany, where he has been implementing client solutions and plugins for several years now. He is a backend developer with a major focus on multisite environments.

On the open source end, he is heavily involved in core development, as a core committer and component maintainer for Multisite, Capabilities and Post Thumbnails. He furthermore writes plugins and libraries, focusing on developing clean and sustainable solutions.

When not doing WordPress stuff, he spends his time producing music and playing the piano as well as soccer. He does all of that while drinking a lot of Mountain Dew.

Talk: How To Sustain Long-Term Contributions to WordPress Core

Thomas Vitale

Systems Engineer at Systematic A/S, a Danish software company which develops software and systems solutions to customers in healthcare, defence, law enforcement, the public sector, finance and service industries.

Thomas has a Master’s degree in Computer Engineering specialising in Software. IT Security, Software Engineering and Web Development are some of his main interests.

He started using WordPress many years ago and he’s never stopped working with it. Proud member of the beautiful WordPress community, he contributes to Support, Polyglots, Community and Meta teams. He has been one of the organisers of WordPress Meetup Torino and WordCamp Torino 2017.

He loves reading, travelling and playing the piano. As a volunteer, he’s the Managing Director and Communications Manager for Avventure Magiche, a no-profit cultural organisation based in Turin (Italy) that, among other things, has been organising the Wizard Academy for 12 years.

Talk: Security Is a Process, Not a Plugin

Jim Bowes

Jim Bowes is the CEO and co-founder of Manifesto, the London-based award-winning digital agency specialising in agile consultancy, technology, content and strategic user experience designed around the needs of users.

Talk: When One Size Doesn’t Fit All: Leveraging A Secondary CMS

Sabrina Zeidan

WordPress lover since 2010. Seven years ago she installed WordPress for the advertising agency she was working at and it was love at first sight. Since that time there was a long way through design, SEO and marketing career to what she’s really excited with — WordPress Multisite development.

She specializes in helping dev teams implement WP Multisite and get the most out of its functionality.

Talk: Complex projects made easy with WordPress Multisite

Anca Mosoiu

Anca Mosoiu is the founder of Tech Liminal, where people with various skills and backgrounds come together to learn and build using technology. She is a programmer and consultant who loves complex, large-scale technology projects, where her curiosity and ability to translate between technical and non-technical helps teams get things done. She is a graduate of MIT who has worked on the web with companies like Razorfish, Cisco Systems, the Lawrence Berkeley Lab, and many, many startups.

Talk: Tired of building disposable websites? Learn to build with maintenance in mind

Steve Honeyman

Steve is a Junior Developer at Tomango, a Web, Brand and Digital Marketing agency in Lewes where we use WordPress to build bespoke websites for local, national and international businesses. Before this he worked at the University of Leeds where he managed the WordPress multisite for the Faculty of Arts (roughly 100 sites) and built their first responsive website using WordPress as a CMS.

Steve has an MA in Interactive Multimedia which he gained in 2004, a time when Flash sites and table layouts still roamed the internet. Away from design and development he’s a passionate rock-climber and spent several years wandering round the Northern Hemisphere seeking out some of the best bouldering in the world, all whilst living in a van. His move to the South Coast has marked the end of this itinerate life (for the time being at least) and been about picking up my career in Web Development. Steve loves WordPress for its easy of use, versatility and community. Learning WordPress gave him a first break as a developer trying to re-establish his career and as a result he’d love to be able to give something back where possible.

As a designer and developer he’s passionate about CSS, graphics, typography, layout and WordPress (of course!). His formative influences came through music and counter culture; via the album sleeves of Reid Miles, Swifty, Futura 2000, Will Bankhead, Jamie Reid and magazines such as Raygun, Straight No Chaser, Level and Document, his lightning talk will be draw on all this to some degree.

Talk: Hero CSS blends, custom backgrounds and responsive typography in WordPress with Advanced Custom Fields

Borek Bernard

Borek is a developer and lead idea generator at VersionPress, a tool hoping to bring full version control to WordPress. When away from computer (and more importantly, Slack!), Borek loves spending his time with his young family.

Talk: Git in 10 minutes

Sean Blakeley

Sean Blakeley discovered WordPress in early 2006 and has never looked back. He loved the flexibility it gave him and the control it gave his clients.

From those early, simple websites he’s grown to become Tech Lead & Producer on large, enterprise projects for household names.

Alongside working with WordPress, Sean spent a decade working in the film industry – working as a sculptor on some blockbuster films including Tomb Raider, Batman Begins, Harry Potter, Prometheus and more.

Talk: When to Use the API

Heather Burns

Heather Burns is a digital law specialist in Glasgow, Scotland. She researches, writes, publishes, consults, and speaks extensively on internet laws and policies which affect the crafts of web design and development. She has been designing and developing web sites since 1997 and was a professional web site designer from 2007-2015. She is a co-organiser of WordPress Glasgow, a member of the WordCamp Edinburgh organising team, and a survivor of numerous WordCamp afterparties.

Talk: Getting your privacy notices ready for GDPR

Alain Schlesser

Alain is a freelance software engineer and WordPress consultant living in Germany.

He started out as a government agent working in prison administration in Luxembourg, and has recently made the switch to self-employment to enjoy productive work without the bureaucratic hurdles.

He has worked with numerous platforms and programming languages for the past 25 years, and is now trying to settle down on modern web development with the WordPress platform. He is passionate about software architecture and code quality and never misses an opportunity to share best practices.

He offers his WordPress services and expertise through his company Bright Nucleus.

Talk: Uncommon (Ab)Uses of Composer

#wcldn is ready to welcome you.

Tickets are still available, so if the prospect of interacting with these speakers is appealing to you, purchase a ticket now before they sell out.

On the sponsorship side, beyond our microsponsorship options, there is still an Arena spot available, which gives your company plenty of space to expose your brand, meet the community, and demo your products. If you’re interested, check out our Call for Sponsors and fill out our sponsor request form.