First Round of Speakers Announced!

The #WCMSP 2019 Organizers are excited to announce the first round of speakers at WordCamp Minneapolis/St. Paul 2019! Stay tuned for our full schedule, which will be announced within the coming weeks.

And here we have it – Round 1 of 3 of speakers you will meet this August. You can grab your tickets to #WCMSP 2019 right here!

Andrea Endstrom

Andrea Edstrom is a Senior Web Developer and Designer at Minnesota Public Radio. She enjoys designing, illustrating, painting and using her creatives skills to do unique projects such as live sketching for the Terrible Thanks for Asking podcast. Andrea can be found on andreaedstrom.com and andreasartgallery.com

Andrew Norcross

when i was about 3 years old, my daycare was at a church, which my father was the minister of. i would sneak off from the group and hide behind the organ pipes, since i knew how to get in there. they’d find me asleep or laughing, and then take me to my dad for “punishment”.

i was never punished.

Courtney Deer

Courtney Deer is an experience designer and entrepreneur living in Minneapolis. She’s a Minnesota Business Magazine Mostly to Succeed and Twin Cities Startup Award recipient, and her work has earned multiple awards including SIlver at Ad Fed’s The Show, and a Webby Honoree. Awkward conversations for the greater good are her favorite kind of conversations to have.

Dan Flies

Dan Flies has been making large scale projects with WordPress since 2010 for the education and SMB markets. Currently working with Gannett and the LOCALiQ brand who’s mission is to simplify local marketing and provide businesses with a smarter way to reach local customers.

Dan has had a varied career starting as an IT auditor for KPMG, General Mills and Lawson Software. Dan then was co-founder of education startup Kidblog, using WordPress to teach students how to write for audience of the peers and the greater world. He then worked in the marketing world with Ciceron and Relationship One before joining Gannett to be the technical lead on it’s WordPress based Websites

James Grumish

James Grumish is a Minneapolis-based developer and account manager at Windmill Strategy where data-backed websites are built for smart-minded business marketers. Aside from creating and maintaining agency-built websites, James’ 10+ years of software experience includes specific roles in marketing/SEO and hosted e-commerce application development. James believes that the best developers work to improve their listening and analysis skills in order to identify systems and recognize patterns.

Justin Foell

In 2003 Justin started doing web development in Las Vegas, building the backend of several sites using home-grown PHP libraries.

After moving back to his home state of Minnesota in 2008, he attended WordCamp Minneapolis in 2010, and has been steeped in the WordPress world ever since. Justin helped reboot and co-organize WordCamp Minneapolis in 2013 after going dormant for a couple years. It has been going strong every year since.

Kathy Zant

Kathy Zant is a seasoned digital executive with over 20 years of web development experience for companies large and small. She’s been using WordPress for over a decade. For the last 3+ years, she’s been a security analyst for Wordfence, developing services for WordPress users to better understand and manage their site security.

Lon Koenig

Lon Koenig is a communications technologist with a broad background in education, advertising, and games. And he’s been at this awhile; writing his first programs on a teletype. A coder and writer who has embraced the dark disciplines of Marketing and Advertising. Dabbling in WordPress in the early days, it became his main platform about 10 years ago.

By day, he creates websites that scale, and manages Google Analytics and other integrations for commercial clients. Under cover of night, Lon uses the skills he picked up “in the early days” to develop for Arduino and similar IoT microcontrollers.

Mia Mian

Startup and Tech Enthusiast byways of San Diego, CA.

WordPress was my true entry point into the world of development and I wouldn’t have it any other way… from working in agencies to now as a client facing lead for a WP development firm. I’m stoked to represent and advocate for the non-technical WordPress user.

Nate Finch

Nate has been building websites since 2011. He loves web development because it is the perfect mix of problem solving, building, and lifelong learning. As VP of Development at The Digital Ring, Nate splits his time between developing websites and developing developers. Prior to joining TDR, Nate freelanced, working with dozens of clients through platforms like Toptal and Codeable, and completed a brief stint as a web engineer with 10up.

Nate collects masters degrees, has traveled to six continents, lived on four, speaks Spanish, and outside of work, family, friends, food, coffee, and cooking are his favorite activities. He lives in Wisconsin with his wonderful wife and two daughters.

Sherry Walling

Dr. Sherry Walling helps smart people do hard things. She works with leaders around the world to tackle the common mental health and relationship challenges that go along with running businesses, and disrupting the status quo. As a clinical psychologist, entrepreneur, keynote speaker, yoga teacher, podcaster and best-selling author, she draws from her professional expertise as well as her personal experience in the trenches. Her best-selling book, The Entrepreneur’s Guide to Keeping Your Shit Together, combines the insight and warmth of a therapist with the truth-telling mirth of someone who has been there. She can also be found at ZenFounder.com or SherryWalling.com.

Steve Persch

Steve is a Lead Developer Advocate at Pantheon with more than 12 years of experience building large-scale sites. He started out of college as a freelance developer building sites in WordPress 2. Steve built sites for a range of clients including The Joffrey Ballet, Foreign Affairs, Marketplace, Public Radio International, and many higher education institutions. You can find commits from Steve all over Pantheon’s WordPress plugins and example repositories.