Sprekers / Speakers

Maik Gruppen

Maik has been working with WordPress since 2010. At first as a freelance web designer and currently at Savvii Managed WordPress Hosting. Maik is Savvii’s ‘travelling consultant’. His talks with partners and clients do not only concern technical details, but mostly focus on exploring possibilities for growth. Because growth for partners and clients equals growth for Savvii!

Yvette Sonneveld

Yvette Sonneveld trains, coaches & consult business owners and professionals, like you, but mainly in the financial services and real estate industry in building a magnetic online presence (also called Inbound Marketing). I help you define a marketing strategy that energizes you instead of one that wears you out. We will accomplish that by defining ideal client profiles (buyer persona). These are the clients that you, with your unique combination of personality and expertise, are best suited to serve. After all, don’t we all prefer to work with people who appreciate us for who we are as a person and what we bring to the table as a professional? By telling us so and by paying us well and promptly? Next, we’ll select and plan only those marketing activities that you’ll enjoy and that you’ll almost do effortlessly or those that are easily outsourced. We’ll mainly create and promote content that shows your buyer persona that you get where they are now, that you’re well qualified to help them reach their goals or solve their problems and that you’re fun to work with. The result will be more exposure, leads, clients, and revenue.
Connect with her on her website, inboundmarketingbliss.com, or connect with her on social media, like LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter or Slack.

Chathu Vishwajith

I work as the Co-Founder of Genius Soft Pvt Ltd and Auth0 Ambassador.
I like contributing to the community. I currently act as Co-Organizer of Colombo JS Meetup and Organizer of Sri Lanka Unity Developers User Group.
I lead two teams of my startup who are working on Full stack development and WordPress services.
I started using WordPress in 2008 and created my first live Sinhala WordPress blog in 2009 (Domain is now expired so that site is no longer exists.). After some time I founded a start-up with my schoolmates which had WordPress Web Site Development as one of its services. I have done more than 20 WordPress websites, custom themes, and plugins for local and international clients. I learned hard way the Art of hardening the WordPress. Earlier stage I had several security-related problems and I managed to overcome them by learning. I have experienced and handled massive DDOS attacks.

Marieke van de Rakt

I studied Sociology and Communication Sciences at the Radboud University in Nijmegen. I obtained my PhD in Social Sciences in January 2011. Since then, I worked as a researcher as well as a teacher at multiple universities. Since the beginning of Yoast, I have been involved in the company. As of September 2013, I gave up my position at the university and decided to focus solely on my activities at Yoast.

I am now one of the partners at Yoast. Together with Joost, Michiel and Omar, I run Yoast. My main focus is on Academy; I develop products that help people to set up their own SEO strategy. I write blog posts, eBooks and develop online courses. My expertise is on SEO copywriting and site structure.

I’m married to Joost de Valk and we have four amazing children together.

Thomas Maier

I am working with WordPress since 2010 after finishing my studies of history. First I needed a website for my business then, then I started a blog, finally started coding, was a freelance backend developer for some time, a publisher for even more time and now run a company where we manage our sites and also have a premium WordPress plugin (Advanced Ads).

Lenon Mazzarelo Furtado Leite

Technology lover, Software Engineer and Research Security.
Free software developer, creator system how PHP octopus and PHP Avenger, tools for offensive security and others libs for security. All written in PHP.
Special affection by CMS with Joomla, Drupal and WordPress.

Yannick Gaultier

Initially trained as a mechanical engineer, I spent 20 years in a non-IT industry. I then started some web projects, mostly centered around SEO. This was a hobby in 2006, but 3 years later, and to this date, it became my full time job. I run a small company handling development and support for our open source CMS plugins.

Seeing how important Accelerated Mobile Pages was to become we developed weeblrAMP (https://wordpress.org/plugins/weeblramp/), an AMP plugin for WordPress, as well as a Joomla AMP extension, from the start of 2016, to enable AMP pages on sites with both a lot of ease and high degree of customization.

Juliette Reinders Folmer

Juliette Reinders Folmer is an all round consultant and web-developer who tries not be a geek. Juliette is a long-standing member of PHPWomen which helped her immensely to find her feet in the PHP world. She is ZCE, actively contributes to a number of open source projects, has published several articles and speaks at conferences when given the chance. She loves it when you give her a chance to refactor spaghetti-code to something elegant and maintainable.

Juliette is self-employed and based in the Netherlands.

Thomas Bruehl

I earn my money as an IT-Security Officer in an insurance company in Cologne. In my spare time I’m administrating a growing number of WordPress installations. I’ve begun with WordPress in 2004 with my own blog https://her.ein.de

David de Boer

David is internet-ondernemer sinds 2003 en heeft veel ervaring met verschillende e-commerce oplossingen. Hij is ondernemer, programmeur en iDEAL expert. Momenteel werkt hij aan Paytium, de eenvoudigste manier om iDEAL betalingen in WordPress te ontvangen.

Hij is dagelijks bezig met het ontwikkelen, verkopen en ondersteunen van zijn software producten. Hij is een iDEAL expert geworden door sinds 2008 duizenden Nederlandse webwinkels te helpen met hun iDEAL integratie.

Taco Verdonschot

When Taco joined Yoast in 2013, he had hardly worked with WordPress, so joining ‘a WordPress company’ was a true adventure. Only weeks later, Yoast sent Taco to his very first WordCamp: WordCamp Europe in Leiden, where he made a ton of new friends. The love for the WordPress community was instant, and never faded away. The more WordCamps and meetups Taco attended and spoke at, the bigger his love became. This lead to him joining the organizing teams of WordCamp The Netherlands in 2016, and WordCamp Europe’s in 2017. In 2017, he became the lead organizer of the first WordCamp Nijmegen.

Meanwhile at Yoast, he grew from doing Customer Support alone to leading a distributed team of amazing Support Engineers. With his team, he aims to provide the best experience to all those customers who help to grow the company that brought him so much.

The Open Source mindset at Yoast really affected the way Taco views the world around him, and encouraged him to ‘give back’ even more. Aiming for the Victory of the Commons encouraged Taco to join the WordPress Polyglots team, and later the Community team.

In the spare free time, you can find Taco with his family, on his trials bike, organizing computer events (LAN parties) or working as a First Aider at festivals.

Edmund Turbin

Edmund Turbin is Senior Solutions Engineer at WPEngine, London. Over the past ten years he has built websites with content management systems and has held technical roles in media, publishing and ad tech in New York City.Edmund is passionate about front end coding, development workflow and architecting scalable WordPress solutions for enterprise. Edmund enjoys speaking about technology and is grateful for the opportunity to talk at more than fifteen events throughout Europe over the past two and a half years. In his free time, Edmund enjoys electronic music production,snowboarding, cycling and discovering new places across the globe to explore with his family & kids. Follow him on Twitter @spicecadet.

Akshat Choudhary

I am the founder of BlogVault, a popular WordPress backup and security service. We have built the most powerful anti-virus solution for WordPress. This can detect complex malware and remove them with the click of a button.

Luc Princen

Luc Princen is an independent developer and designer specializing in WordPress and frontend development. He loves open source, elegant code, fast load times, barbecueing caveman meals and playing the occasional (grand) strategy game. You can find him on Twitter with the handle @lucp.

Dave Loodts

Dave Loodts is CEO of his one-men-business since 2006 and creates custom WordPress websites for smaller business. Even though he started a webdesign business with no technical skills whatsoever, he managed to stay floated and grew his skills to a professional level and was able to take on bigger projects.

Dave is active in the Belgian WordPress Community as co-founder of WordCamp Antwerp, Meetup Antwerp and Meetup Hasselt.

Carole Olinger

Carole is a former Luxembourgish government agent on a four-year sabbatical to take care of her health and to find new professionally enjoyable challenges. She lives in the German Eifel since 2014 for self-discovery, together with her husband Alain Schlesser and her three French bulldogs.
She is also a certified dog’s behaviour and health trainer and all-over passionate about dogs. Furthermore, she’s a committed “lipedema fighter” for herself and other affected women in Germany and Luxembourg with regular appearances in print, online and TV media.

The magic of WordCamp Europe 2016 in Vienna made her become a true WordPress Community-Junkie. Through several WordCamps as a passionate volunteer, she got involved in the early organization of WordCamp Retreat Soltau (Germany) without even having used WordPress before. Later, she built her first WordPress websites and is currently leveling skills to see how far she can get.

Meanwhile, besides organizing three different WordCamps and a WordPress Meetup, she works as a WordPress Community Manager for Plesk.

Alain Schlesser

Alain is a freelance software engineer and WordPress consultant living in Germany.

He started out as a government agent working in prison administration in Luxembourg, and has recently made the switch to self-employment to enjoy productive work without the bureaucratic hurdles.

He has worked with numerous platforms and programming languages for the past 25 years, and is now trying to settle down on modern web development with the WordPress platform. He is passionate about software architecture and code quality and never misses an opportunity to share best practices.

He offers his WordPress services and expertise through his company Bright Nucleus, while you can catch some of his more personal ramblings at https://www.alainschlesser.com.

Rogier Gigengack

Ik ben 28 met 12 jaar werkervaring. School was niks voor mij. Ik wilde werken en leren van de praktijk. Een echte autodidact dus, die zijn sporen heeft verdient in de sales en marketing. De meeste kennen mij van Savvii of van mijn huidige bedrijf Eigenlijk Alles. Bij Savvii was ik Key Accountmanager en heb ik samen met een dedicated team het bedrijf nationaal en internationaal op de kaart gezet. Nu fungeren we bij Eigenlijk Alles met een team van 5 fte en ikzelf als commercieel partner voor diverse online bureau’s en hun opdrachtgevers.

WordPress is opensource en we werken er allemaal mee of aan. Maar samenwerken vinden we vaak nog lastig en weten we daar niet altijd een goede en werkbare vorm aan te geven. Daar ga ik je bij helpen middels een pragmatische visie leg ik je uit waarom samenwerken beter werkt en biedt ik je de handvatten om samenwerking met andere partijen vorm te geven.

Gero Nikolov

My name is Gergan (known as Gero) Nikolov. Originally born in Sofia, Bulgaria but as a programmer I’m coming from the darkest realms of the Codding World 😀

By degree I’m software developer. By passion I’m a person who loves to create things, from the beautiful interface of the application to the hardcore algorithms which are driving the real thing!

My hobby are the languages! I love to speak a lot, most of which are not commonly used on the street (PHP, JS, etc.) 😀

Currently working in the casino & business development industry. My latest big project is 11hub which is meant to develop your business in a new way! Would like to share more with you guys at WordCamp Utrecht!

Theo van der Zee

As the founder of https://www.monitormore.com, Theo van der Zee helps organizations to improve their landing pages, SEO and A/B tests through website monitoring. Theo is a psychologist, keynote speaker and loves spending time at the beach.

Arnoud Engelfriet

Mr.ir. Arnoud Engelfriet is ICT-jurist, gespecialiseerd in internetrecht waar hij zich al sinds 1993 mee bezighoudt. Hij werkt als partner bij juridisch adviesbureau ICTRecht. Zijn site Ius mentis is één van de meest uitgebreide sites van Nederland over internetrecht, techniek en intellectueel eigendom. Sinds 2007 blogt Arnoud dagelijks over internetrecht.
Arnoud is medewerker van het Tijdschrift voor Internetrecht en werkt parttime als docent aan de Vrije Universiteit. Hij was secretaris van de Stichting Copyright en Nieuwe Media.

Arnoud is actief op tientallen websites en forums, waaronder Zibb, Netkwesties, Security.nl, Marketingfacts, Tweakers, Netters en Rechtenforum.

Arnoud spreekt regelmatig over internetrecht en heeft hierover ook in diverse tijdschriften gepubliceerd.

Sjoerd Blom

Sjoerd BlomSjoerd (1968) is a WordPress freelancer from the Netherlands. He’s been working with WordPress since almost the very beginning. In his day to day life Sjoerd develops and builds websites voor SMEs. He manages many many WordPress websites, likes to restore hacked websites and prefers to think out of the box. He’s an internet visionary, open source advocate and likes to show off his polyglot skills (he speaks 7 languages).

WordCamp Utrecht 2017: lead organizer
WordCamp Netherlands 2017 (canceled): organizer
WordCamp Europe 2017 (Paris): volunteer
WordCamp Netherlands 2016: volunteer
WordCamp Europe 2016 (Vienna): volunteer