Check out our amazing speakers for WordCamp Omaha 2017! If you are interested in speaking, please fill out our application here.
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Jim Wolf
Jim Wolf is a member of the full-time faculty in the Design, Interactivity & Media Arts program at Metropolitan Community College in Omaha, NE. He teaches a range of courses in the graphic design and web design degrees. Prior to teaching, he worked in Chicago as a designer and account manager for a design studio.
Rob Ruiz
Rob Ruiz has been doing web design/development for over 10 years now and a WordPress user for four years. He’s been developing plugins and themes for a little over three years now. Rob also does a lot of graphic design, UI/UX design, and teaching. Rob has spent the last 2 years working on an extremely customized WordPress site, High School Impressions, that features around 7 custom plugins. The plugins needed to achieve desired functionality for the online business range from advanced custom post types to larger plugin-based mods for Woocommerce.
He now has a full-time position at Orion Advisor Services as a WordPress Software Engineer developing custom WordPress-based solutions that integrate a variety of web services and REST APIs with an industry leading Investment Advisor software platform. He is also the owner of Bizzle Designs, which specializes in extremely customized WordPress-based websites for small-to-medium-sized businesses of all kinds.
Dave Navarro, Jr.
I am a paid WordPress Geek. I work for a large media broadcasting company as a WordPress Developer and Social Media Director. I am a photographer and multimedia geek. I have the most amazing fiance in the world that I do not deserve. I am a father of three amazing young ladies and the grandfather of three even more amazing young girls.
Rebecca Sharkey
I work at small company in downtown Lincoln called Three Pillars Media where I’m the do-it-all wordpress gal. From designing to developing, I touch every aspect of a website and solve problems as I go.
Josepha Haden
Since college, Josepha has gathered together people with similar interests to learn more and create better communities. In 2008 that passion for connecting people spread to technology and she’s never looked back. With a training in music, and a background in data, she is a digital literacy advocate who talks about WordPress, the Open Source Software community, and non-traditional paths to STEM fields. Josepha works at Automattic as a community organizer for the WordPress open source project.
Amy Ebbeka
Amy Ebbeka is co-owner of Ebbeka Design Co. in Lincoln. With a passion for helping clients succeed, Amy and her team has built hundreds of WordPress websites for clients over the past 16 years of business. Amy has tons of ideas and is fearless in finding ways to carry them out to the great benefit of her clients.
Tyler Goldberg
Tyler is a Minnesotan that loves biking and playing with his son, Sullivan. The time in between he is passionate about tinkering with WordPress and helping businesses find a home on the web with CYBERsprout.
Rebecca Haden
Rebecca has been writing for the web since 1998, and has been an SEO professional since 2006. Her B.A. and M.A. degrees from UCSD and SDSU are in Linguistics, and she has taken additional college coursework in web design. Rebecca has numerous certificates from Google in Google Analytics and Adwords, as well as certification from HIPAA compliance training. Featured in the Wall Street Journal in 2009, Rebecca has optimized websites and provided SEO strategy and content for clients on four continents. Rebecca is a frequent speaker on SEO, analytics, WordPress, and social media.
Josh Collinsworth
Josh Collinsworth is a Happiness Engineer at Flywheel, a WordPress instructor for Interface School, a freelance graphic designer and web developer, and all around a pretty decent guy once you get used to his puns.
Chloe Markham
Chloe is a User Experience Designer at Gallup, primarily in mobile app design and Enterprise UI design. She also teaches part-time at Metropolitan Community College.
Andrew Tuzson
Andrew Tuzson, founder and CEO of Evol Empire Creative, has been growing companies, leading entrepreneurs, and working in the web for over a decade.
Having lived in Lincoln in his youth, Tuzson identified the Silicon Prairie as a massive opportunity for Evol Empire Creative. Evol has experienced explosive growth since its launch in May of 2016. The company has grown its team to 24 and is known for its “culture of hustle” – a topic Andrew speaks about often.
Travis Pflanz
Organizer for WordCamp Kansas City since 2014 and co-organizer of WordPress KC – the Kansas City area WordPress enthusiasts Meetup group – Travis is well versed in WordPress development. He is not only a search engine optimization strategist for WebWorks of Kansas City, but he is also the owner. He specializes in SEO for small businesses that target local customers and clients. But when he isn’t busy building WordPress sites and creating SEO strategies, he volunteers for Wayside Waifs Humane Society, Spay and Neuter KC, and organizes the Kansas City Dog Club.
Stacy Carlson
Stacy Carlson started out as an accidental entrepreneur when she created a website for her hobby, digital scrapbooking, that ended up turning into an active community and eCommerce platform for over 70,000 avid digital scrapbooking fans. This was back in 2005 and it is no longer an accident that she continues to play in the entrepreneurship space. She is a 2014 Alumni of the InMotion Accelerator and she is currently a co-facilitator of nMotion’s pre-incubator program, Prelaunch, which helps entrepreneurs validate their early business ideas through customer development and validated learning. Her nerdy passion though, is systems and processes and the workflows that are built around them.
Dusty Davidson
Dusty is a technology entrepreneur located on the Silicon Prairie. Over the past 10 years he has launched a number of ventures, including Tripleseat, Silicon Prairie News / Big Omaha, and most recently Flywheel – a platform built specifically for web designers and agencies building WordPress websites – and one of the fastest growing technology startups in Nebraska. Dusty has been building WordPress websites for nearly 10 years as well, and now with Flywheel gets to build products and solutions for fellow WordPress designers and developers around the globe.
Abby Langner
Abby is a part-time freelance web developer and technical trainer, specializing in custom front-end web development and one-on-one career training. Since her very first web site back in 1998, she knew the web was home. She has also taught high school math, and likes to keep one foot in the education world. Offline, Abby likes to cook, fly kites, and stay active in politics. She lives in Omaha with her husband and young daughter.
Ben Moore
Professionally, I’ve spent the last 4 years working at WP Engine and am currently the Customer Experience Operations Business Intelligence Developer.
Personally, I’ve been developing with WordPress since 2010. My first project was embedding an existing Vanilla Forum ( https://vanillaforums.com/en/software ) into a company’s WordPress site.
I am the Founder, Owner, and Operator of SkyPress, a WP Consulting company; and am developing the WAR Framework ( https://github.com/SkyPressATX/war-api ): a solution for creating Web Applications with WordPress.
Carl Steffen
Carl Steffen created Stone Fin Technology in 2010, based on the belief that technology should make what we do every day easier. Stone Fin thrives on creative development projects such as custom integrations, WordPress plugins and everything in between. Carl graduated from the University of Nebraska – Lincoln, in 2004 with a Bachelor’s of Science in Computer Engineering and was a member of the Nebraska Army National Guard from 1997-2005. Carl volunteers for the UNL Raikes Program as a Design Studio coach helping student teams build software systems for companies across the country. In his free time, Carl enjoys spending time with his wife and three boys.