Anthony D Paul is a user experience researcher, designer, and prototyper at EightShapes, offering strategic, design, and full-stack development skills to clients large and small, spanning government, non-profit, and commercial. Anthony is speaking on Lean Requirements, Without Skimping on the Meat at WordCamp Minneapolis.

What got you into working with WordPress?

I taught myself PHP by writing plugins for phpBB. WordPress was a natural progression with a similar plugin and templating system, and ultimately matured into a better system.
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David Laietta is the owner of Orange Blossom Media, a web development and site health service and lead organizer of WordCamp Orlando. David is speaking on Remember to Breathe: Productivity Tips for Freelancers at WordCamp Minneapolis.

What got you into working with WordPress?

“I wanted to try my hand at affiliate marketing, as well as start my own blog talking about video games. I used to collect older games and consoles, and played a lot of terrible NES games while testing them out.

I had been building static websites for clients for years, and getting into WordPress made me realize how much easier it could be to continually update and edit content over time.”
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Dan Griffiths is an obsessive WordPress developer since 2007, known for founding Redux Framework and as a core developer for Easy Digital Downloads. Dan is speaking on Staying Sane: Writing Compatible Code at WordCamp Minneapolis.

What got you into working with WordPress?

Necessity. I’ve been a developer since the late 80’s, but for most of that time I did predominantly Linux work. In 2007, I realized that I couldn’t depend on the government for my income anymore after getting out of the Marines, but I had no education to speak of and few marketable skills. I’d been playing with developing websites since day one of the Internet, but hadn’t considered trying to make a living off of it. WordPress seemed like a good starting point, so I finally took the leap and never looked back.
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Joe Dolson is plug-in and theme developer, a contributing developer to WordPress, a web accessibility consultant, and most heavily involved with the Make WordPress Accessible team. Joe is speaking on Automating Accessibility at WordCamp Minneapolis.

What got you into working with WordPress?

Blogger.com. Basically, I’d built a blog using Blogger, and found it to be a horrible experience – so I needed to find something better. WordPress filled that slot very nicely.
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Nile Flores is a sassy Southern Illinois mom who is also a WordPress designer and developer. She’s been helping the WordPress community for years… like since it’s beginning. Nile runs Blondish.net and All About WordPress. Niles is speaking on Why You Should Be Blogging at WordCamp Minneapolis.

What got you into working with WordPress?

I got into WordPress because it was being forked from b2 cafelog. I enjoyed using b2 cafelog, and the community back then was awesome. It was just a natural choice to make the change to a project that was going to keep continuing to be developed. 🙂
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Mel Choyce is a Design Engineer at Automattic. She loves big type, cold brew coffee, and printmaking. Mel is speaking on Beautiful Web Type at WordCamp Minneapolis.

What got you into working with WordPress?

I was working as a contract designer and front-end developer, and the agency I was working for started doing a lot of projects on WordPress. I pretty quickly fell in love.
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Nikhil Vimal: I’m a 15-year-old WordPress Developer/Contributor involved heavily in the WordPress community for two years. I am the founder of TechVoltz.com and blog at nik.techvoltz.com. Nikhil is speaking on The Awesome Guide to Contributing to WordPress at WordCamp Minneapolis.

What got you into working with WordPress?

An interest for building websites. I found WordPress.com a few years ago and eventually found WordPress.org, got hosting, setup my site in five minutes, and was playing with all the fun features of WordPress.
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Lisa Sabin-Wilson is Chief Operating Officer and Co-owner of WebDevStudios, a design and development agency specializing in customized WordPress themes and plugins, and the author of WordPress For Dummies. Lisa is speaking on Multilingual WordPress at WordCamp Minneapolis.

What got you into working with WordPress?

Blogging with Movable Type back in 2002 — made the switch to WordPress in 2003 because I was tired of having to rebuild all of my archives manually every time I wanted to make a change to a template or stylesheet. The WordPress way was more dynamic and faster.
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