Hi, I’m a full-stack developer and open tech evangelist. I’m a developer at the design company Grain & Mortar, and I’m Director of New Media at AIGA Nebraska, an organization focused on connecting designers.

I’m passionate about educating people on the direction tech has been, and is going, through good design.

Wearables, The Internet of Things, location-based services, mobile, and serendipitous social discovery: Those are my focuses among others, and tend to be grouped into the term “context.”

Hometown: Omaha, Neb.

Contact: williamriley.me | @bill_riley

Session: WordPress for Web Developers

WordPress is a great framework, but other frameworks have great ideas inside of them. In this talk, we’ll take a comparative look at the tools and philosophies in WordPress, and compare these to other PHP, Ruby, and .NET frameworks and how we can take advantage of those inside of WordPress right now.

WordCamp Omaha 2015 is happening Oct. 10-11 at Metropolitan Community College’s Fort Omaha Campus. Get tickets today!

Dan Beil has been working with WordPress since 2009 and loves focusing on clean and performant code.  At Alley Interactive, he spends his time making enterprise level themes and plugins for large media clients.  His free time is mostly taken up with his two Siberian Huskies, video games, and the “joy” of home ownership.

Hometown: Minneapolis, Minn.

Contact: alleyinteractive.com | @add_action_dan

Session: Theme Building (The Right Way)

So you know how to write a theme, but do you know how to organize one? Let’s look at some techniques you can use to keep your code separated into logical groups, make it more reusable, and help you sleep better at night. This will not only help you to better maintain your projects, but it will also help with collaboration and the general speed of your work. Whether you are just starting to write themes and plugins, or have been doing it for years, these practices will add to your development chops.

WordCamp Omaha 2015 is happening Oct. 10-11 at Metropolitan Community College’s Fort Omaha Campus. Get tickets today!

I am a designer and a developer. I spend my time creating new and exciting things with WordPress and am a Core Contributor. Since I was 8 years old I have been obsessed with design and programming. I worked in advertising from the age of 15 to 22 and since then I have shifted my focus to the world wide web and am working at WP Engine to make WordPress more awesome!

Hometown: Austin, Texas

Contact: antpb.com | @antpb

Session: Helping Core

This talk will highlight the many different ways to give back to Core WordPress. At a high level I will go over the core trac ticketing system and how to talk within tickets. I will even be diving into Vagrant and show how to set up a development environment and create a patch. This talk will take some of the ambiguity out of contributing to Core and focus mainly on teaching how to do the little things that lead to bigger impacts.

WordCamp Omaha 2015 is happening Oct. 10-11 at Metropolitan Community College’s Fort Omaha Campus. Get tickets today!

Josh Collinsworth is a graphic designer and WordPress developer from Omaha, Nebraska. In his free time he serves as Director of Communication and Marketing on the board of AIGA Nebraska, dabbles in illustration, and blogs on design-related topics on his website. Josh’s outside passions include iced coffee, craft beer, local food and growing a beard — so in order to avoid being mistaken for a hipster, he listens to pop music on a regular basis.

Hometown: Omaha, Neb.

Contact: joshcollinsworth.com | @jjcollinsworth

Session: Be Classless: Optimizing Your CSS for WordPress

It’s easy to get caught up adding HTML classes (and IDs) to each and every element we want to style, but the fact is, WordPress helps us out with specific targeting by adding its own classes and IDs to certain elements on every page and post. Cleverly utilizing WordPress’s default page build along with CSS’s pseudo classes and combinators makes it possible to be highly specific with our targeted styles while leaving the original HTML completely alone. In short, if we look for ways, we can often avoid adding more classes and wrapping text in spans to have WordPress and CSS do the work for us.

WordCamp Omaha 2015 is happening Oct. 10-11 at Metropolitan Community College’s Fort Omaha Campus. Get tickets today!

Michelle Schulp is an independent graphic designer in Minneapolis (formerly Chicago). Her formal education is in design including print, branding, packaging, etc., with additional education in Psychology and Sociology, all tying together in a love of How To Solve Problems. Lately she has been specializing in WordPress websites and high-end presentations for her clients. She loves the WordPress community and speaks/volunteers/organizes at WordCamps and events around the country.

Hometown: Minneapolis, Minn.

Contact: marktimemedia.com | @marktimemedia

Session: Discovering Design: Break It Before You Build

Whether you have experience with design, development, or are ready to build your first theme, there is a lot of planning to be done before you open your favorite design program or code editor. WordPress themes are designed for two audiences: the end user (in the browser), and the site administrator (in the Dashboard), and it’s our job to account for both sets of needs. We will explore some workflows in the design and discovery process, including content mapping, wireframes and general WordPress logic. Whether you’re building a theme for yourself, for your client, or for sale, you can use these methods to build a map for your project before you begin.

WordCamp Omaha 2015 is happening Oct. 10-11 at Metropolitan Community College’s Fort Omaha Campus. Get tickets today!