Author: DeveloperWil

We’ve had a couple of speakers, Asif Rahman and Matt Knighton,  tell us they can’t make WordCamp Sydney – that’s sad.  Hopefully we can catch up with them another time.

Good news is that we have two new speakers:

Topher DeRosia is going to talk on the same subject as Asif, “Modern Local Environment for WordPress in 2018” and Ben Ramsden is replacing Matt’s slot with “The Challenges of Running a WordPress Plugin Business When You’re Not a Developer”

Topher DeRosia

I’ve been a web developer since before there were pictures on the web. I’ve been a WordPress developer since 2010, and currently work as a WordPress Developer Advocate for BigCommerce. I’m married, with two kids, two little dogs, and a little house in Grand Rapids MI.

Presenting: Modern Local Environment for WordPress in 2018

Topher will show you how to set up the best Local Development Environment for WordPress in 2018.

This will be a very helpful session anybody looking to drive deep into WordPress and who are already working in WordPress, they will be able to explore other better ways to improve their workflow.

Ben Ramsden

Ben Ramsden is a management consultant with a couple of WordPress businesses on the side. Regularly afflicted by “imposter syndrome” he hasn’t let that stop him venture into the world of WordPress plugins and now has paying customers in 40 countries. Join Ben for an engaging presentation about being an outsider on the inside of WordPress land.

Presenting: The Challenges of Running a WordPress Plugin Business When You’re Not a Developer

You don’t need to be a coder to run a WordPress plugin business, but it has implications (and opportunities).

Ben Ramsden shares his journey since 2014 with GFChart, a premium extension to Gravity Forms.

Unfortunately Evan Mullins is unable to come to the conference.  Sometimes life gets in the way even for WordCamps!  We’ll try to catch-up with Evan another time.

We’d like to announce new speaker Chris Bryant!  Thanks for helping us out Chris.

Chris Bryant

Chris Bryant is Director at OPMC Group. He founded OPMC in 2003 while at University in the cold and windy capital of New Zealand, Wellington. The business is now a 15 year old multi brand web services organisation, including OPMC and Web 105 Creative.

The OPMC brand focuses on the four areas of ecommerce, web hosting, plugin development and web security.

Chris lives in Sydney with his wife and 10 month old baby.

Continue reading “New Speaker” →

We’re excited to announce our final batch of speakers for WordCamp Sydney 2018.

Tim Butler

With over 20 years experience in IT, Tim has extensive experience with systems scaling to many thousands of simultaneous users. Currently managing the technology stacks within Conetix, Australian owned and operated hosting company.

Passionate about WordPress, Tim is actively involved with the WordPress community and currently co-organises the Ipswich Meetup. Tim is also a published author, with the release of the NGINX Cookbook via Packt last year.

Presenting: Diagnosing WordPress: What to do when things go wrong

Everyone hates seeing the White Screen of Death, especially if it’s discovered by the client calling to tell you their site is down. Even more frustrating can be intermittent error and/or slow response times, as these can be much harder to diagnosed.

Aimed at newer WordPress developers and advanced users, this talk will start with the basic diagnostics tools available and go all the way through to advanced debugging. Attendees should be able to leave this talk with an informed diagnostic approach to errors, rather than just panic.

Justin Yoo

Justin is a senior consultant working at Mexia in Melbourne. He has been Microsoft MVP since 2015 and helping developers around web technologies. He has presented several conferences including DDD Sydney.

Presenting: 6 Different Ways Deploying WordPress onto Azure

Have you used Microsoft Azure for your WordPress work? Azure is actually a very good platform to work with WordPress. As a cloud platform, Azure offers many different ways to host WordPress, from IaaS using virtual machines to PaaS using web app instances or container instances.

At the end of this session, audiences will learn 1) how to deploy WordPress on Azure virtual machines, 2) how to deploy WordPress on Azure App Service using git, 3) how to deploy WordPress on Azure Container Instances, and 4) how to deploy WordPress on Azure App Service using Docker Container, Docker Compose and/or Kubernetes.

M Asif Rahman

M Asif Rahman is a long time WordPress Enthusiast, Serial Entrepreneur and Tech Evangelist. Since 2004, he has been contributing towards the community and working closely with WordPress. He was the CEO of weDevs, a large WordPress product company, just recently retired (details below).

It’s not just about selling WordPress product, Asif is very well spoken about business in the WordPress industry. Apart from weDevs, he is the founder of ARCom, Analytify, Alo Ventures, WPDeveloper(a WordPress product marketplace) and many more.

A unique characteristics of Asif is that he likes to read and write a lot. This made him start some promising magazines including The Tech Journal and The Dhaka Times. With these amazing products, he is serving information to millions of people.

Besides that, Asif loves to invest and help startups. He is proudly involved with Trance App, Leanplum, FutureStartUp, Geeky Social, Facebook and several other companies from their early stage.

He always try to work on new and interesting things and this way he was an early Google Glass Explorer.

Asif proudly appeared in more than 80 WordCamps all around the world. And most importantly, he is a blessed Dad of two super cute little princesses, and husband of a lovely wife! Though he mostly lives in Orlando, Florida, but he’s originally from Bangladesh.

Interestingly, M Asif Rahman is retiring this year by the age of 34. He announced his retirement via a 10,000 word semi-autobiography in HeroPress, which you could read (pain) here – https://heropress.com/essays/retiring-young-bangladesh-thanks-wordpress/

He will be conducting a session on – Modern Local Environment for WordPress in 2018.

According to Asif – ‘In past 14 years I have seen many technological shift in WordPress. I would share with example and best use guide what I feel the best Local Development Environment for WordPress in 2018.’

This will be a very helpful session anybody looking to drive deep into WordPress and who are already working in WordPress, they will be able to explore other better ways to improve their workflow.

Presenting: Modern Local Environment for WordPress in 2018

In past 14 years I have seen many technological shift in WordPress.

I would share with example and best use guide what I feel the best Local Development Environment for WordPress in 2018.

This will be a very helpful session anybody looking to drive deep into WordPress and who are already working in WordPress, they will be able to explore other better ways to improve their workflow.

Richard Clement

Richard Clement is Head of Digital Communications for the Aspen Pharma Group, managing online infrastructure and technical strategy for the Group and its many International affiliates.

Richard has spent much of his career in Pharmaceutical Sales, Marketing and Training – but since 1997 has had a keen interest in web development. He built his first commercial website using Frontpage and his first database driven website with Drumbeat 2000.

Since joint Aspen in 2005 his focus has been increasingly towards digital – and moving ever closer to WordPress. In 2014 the decision was made to move all of Aspen’s websites onto WordPress and in 2016 the company’s global corporate site was rebuilt using Beaver Builder to modularise development efforts and bring affiliate sites online faster.

Presenting: Success with WordPress in Large Multinational Corporates

Learning and sharing the experience of how to use WordPress in large corporates, multiple sites , page builders, maintenance, ease of rollouts etc

Aspen Pharma only uses WordPress for all their sites.

Chris Ryan

Chris is a successful WordPress consultant, business entrepreneur and one of our WordCamp Sydney organisers.

Presenting: Success with WordPress in Large Multinational Corporates

Learning and sharing the experience of how to use WordPress in large corporates, multiple sites , page builders, maintenance, ease of rollouts etc

Aspen Pharma only uses WordPress for all their sites.

Panel: Gutenberg and General Q&A

With WordPress 5.0 and the new WordPress editor just around the corner we’re kicking off this year’s panel with questions on Gutenberg.

The new editor is going to be a huge change for WordPress and related businesses so bring your questions along and our panel of experts will try to answer them as best they can.

If we exhaust all the Gutenberg related questions we’ll jump in to general WordPress questions and answers.

You can always tweet your panel questions ahead of time to @WCSyd using hashtag #WCSydPanel.

Here are our panel of experts:

Luke Carbis

Luke is a trained teacher who decided to trade moody teenagers for programming. Today, he works to foster diversity, community, and possibility at XWP.

Cath Hughes

Cath Hughes is a Sydney-based web designer, WordPress consultant and WordPress tutor, speaker, mentor and an active member of the WordPress community here in Australia, and online.

Cath is also a coach at WP Elevation, where she trains and mentors website designers and web development professionals in business.

Cath founded her first business, Phase Creative, back in 2013, and launched Live By 5 with the aim of bringing quality sites to the freelance, consultant and soloist market.

Robert Anderson

I’m a JavaScript Engineer at Automattic and contribute to Gutenberg full-time.

I love traveling, cycling, skateboarding, warm weather, strong coffee, cold beer, and wearing loud shirts.