The Team
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Shawn Hooper
Shawn Hooper has been a member of the WordPress community since 2009. During this time he has contributed to WordPress Core and WP-CLI. He has developed plugins, and has been a speaker at meetups and WordCamps in Canada, the United States and Australia.
During the day, Shawn is the Director of Engineering and Security at Actionable.co. Shawn is an advocate for an open web, data privacy and web accessibility. He blogs about web development at ShawnHooper.ca.
Shawn is looking excited to welcome you to his hometown of Ottawa for the inaugural WordCamp Canada.
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Matt Graham
With over a decade of rich experience in WordPress development, Matt has established himself as a slightly prominent figure in the WordPress community. Beginning his journey 14 years ago, he has spent the last ten years as a dedicated WordPress developer, creating custom solutions for diverse sectors including Environmental Solutions, Health, Education, Food Services, and Telecom. Specializing in custom theme and plugin development, Matt has a knack for crafting tailored experiences that cater to the specific needs of each industry. His expertise is not just limited to development; he has also spoken at several WordCamps across Southern Ontario and Western New York.
Matt’s affinity for WordPress stems from its user-friendly nature, but it is the vibrant and supportive community that has truly captivated his dedication. This community connection has fostered strong friendships and a network that thrives on mutual support and knowledge sharing. Presently, Matt devotes most of his as a Senior Web Developer at Sandbox Software Solutions, where he specializes in developing bespoke websites for the health, education, and non-profit sectors. Concurrently, he imparts his knowledge as a part-time instructor at Durham College, teaching Enterprise Web Development and Client-Side Scripting. Matt is a lifelong learner, continually updating his arsenal with the latest technologies and techniques to enhance his WordPress projects.
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Kiera Howe
Kiera is an entrepreneur and software developer with skills developed over the last 20 years across a wide variety of endeavors. She has been a business owner since 2005 focusing on technology solutions to make businesses and their staff and customers more efficient. She has also taught part time college classes and has spoken at, and organized WordCamps, conferences for WordPress.
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Paul Bearne
Paul Bearne is an enthusiast who loves to vision ways to make WordPress do things it doesn’t normally do. Having engaged with WordPress almost from the start, he specializes in the creation of highly performant scalable, accessible and SEO friendly code, supports a growing list of plugins including his own commercial pro plugin, Matador Jobs.
He has contributed consistently to WordPress Core since version 3.9 as well as setting up a local meetup and speaking at WordCamps. He is currently being sponsored by Hostinger to work part-time on Core as part of their Five for the Future pledge.
Paul and his wife live on a lake in Southern Ontario and, when he’s not up to his ears in code, can often be found out on the water, taking the boat to buy ice creams, paddling the quiet bays, or, in winter, snowshoeing across the ice.
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Shanta Nathwani
Equipped with a Bachelor of Commerce in Information Technology Management and a Black Belt in Karate, there’s nothing Shanta Nathwani can’t do. She is a full-stack developer who specializes in WordPress, Node and React with a love for life and learning.
A natural teacher, Shanta spent six years teaching WordPress courses at Sheridan College as well as having given more than 40 WordCamp talks. Her topics include data architecture, custom post types and ACF, as well as beginner topics like posts versus pages and how to create a website in 30 minutes. She served as a QA Supervisor at a software company for 2 years before starting her own company, Namara Technologies Inc., where she served as the President & CEO. After being accepted at Codeable.io as an expert, she is now the Project Liaison Manager for the platform.
When she’s not working, she can be found volunteering as a Co-organizer for the Hamilton WordPress Meetup Group, taking stunning photographs, singing karaoke, and, of course, practicing martial arts.
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Jamie Oastler
Whether it is helping customers automate their business processes through his work with Rocket Genius (Gravity Forms, Gravity Flow and Gravity Experts), or creating custom t-shirts, woodworking and other bespoke products from his workshop with Idealien Studios, Jamie always brings a creative and enthusiastic perspective with him.
He learned layout and design from first principles – in no small part to growing up with a Vandercook proof printing press in the basement. As the technology for print changed to digital, so did his skillset with a first resume job doing student newspaper production layout in Quark XPress while getting his Bachelor of Commerce degree at Carleton University. When content and commerce shifted to online tooling he levelled up his digital skills again. First, by helping Lee Valley Tools launch their eCommerce site, followed by deploying multiple WordPress projects within the Canada Post Group of Companies as a mix of analyst, developer and process automation expert.
He is equally capable and comfortable working with small business clients to help them scale their limited resources as he is with getting enterprise-scale initiatives to deliver solutions to their staff and customers in a cost-effective manner.
Jamie has contributed to WP core, presented multiple times at WordCamps around Ontario, and now is enjoying helping to instigate the inaugural WordCamp Canada eh!
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Rick Radko
Rick began building web sites and web applications in 1996 with HTML and Perl. Since then, he worked with many open source PHP/MySQL platforms until finding WordPress in 2008.
Rick is the founder and lead developer/designer at R-Cubed Design Forge (R3DF). At R3DF, he develops custom WordPress plugins, themes, and multilingual websites for a diverse range of clients.
He is active in the WordPress community as a core contributor, a WordCamp organizer, a WordCamp speaker. Rick is the founding organizer of the Ottawa WordPress Group (Meetup), and was lead organizer of the first 2 Ottawa WordCamps in 2013 and 2014. Rick often presents at the Ottawa WordPress Meetup, and has spoken frequently at WordCamps in Ottawa, Toronto, and Montreal.
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Gina Bearne
Gina is an experienced project leader, administrator, writer, catalyst, community builder and connector. Her career has spanned a a wide range of settings, but the focus has always been creating environments in which individuals and/or organizations can grow and change, and making connections – between people and to information.
Currently, her strong background in operations management and administration, together with experience in writing, editing and content management, are bringing new dimensions to a co-owned freelance Web consultancy specializing in high-end WordPress development.
She loves living rurally, surrounded by nature, enjoys kayaking, hiking and just soaking up the ‘noisy’ peace!
Oh, and she has two WordPress blogs:
https://www.passagetojoy.com/
https://canada.bearne.com/
