Our Amazing Speakers

We've got premier experts from a variety of disciplines.

All 2008 speakers

Sean Buscay

With over 10 years in the interactive services industry, Sean pairs an intense focus on user experience and solution effectiveness with sharp development skills spanning Drupal, PHP, XHTML/CSS, Javascript, MySQL, SQL, and more. Sean's user- and client-focused approach to his role as a Sr. Developer for Tree House Agency draws from a rich history that includes experience in media, consumer products, and the early pioneering of online research and usability testing for clients like the US Departments of Treasury and Interior. Read more »

Joshua Katris

Joshua Katris is the Lead Interactive Developer for Tree House Agency and has been an integral part of the company's development and growth since his involvement began in 2006. Read more »

Eric Gundersen

Eric is President of Development Seed, an online strategy shop in Washington, DC. Eric has developed communications strategies and tools for organizations around the world, ranging from international development organizations to major media outlets. Recently he has been mapping food security projects in Africa, developing the intranet at the World Bank for their international communications team, and building decentralized data collection tools to survey public health organizations' capacity to respond to bird flu outbreak on the ground in Southeast Asia. Read more »

John VanDyk

In the Drupal community, John is best known for writing the actions and trigger system and the workflow module. With Dries Buytaert, he organized the first Drupal conference and was also part of the initial design team for the Content Construction Kit. John teamed with Matt Westgate to write the bestselling book Pro Drupal Development. The second edition has recently been released. Read more »

Moshe Weitzman

Moshe Weitzman has been a consistent contributor to Drupal core and contrib since November 2001 (before drupal.org was born). As such, he has pretty much been involved in one way or another with every line of code in Drupal core. He maintains the user.module, the bootstrap code, and the groups.drupal.org web site.

Moshe is the #2 Drupal developer on Ohloh. He is also a member of the Drupal Security Team and a permanent member of the Drupal Association. Read more »

Heather Champ

As the Director of Community at Flickr, Heather Champ oversees member activities for one of the world’s largest and most popular photo sharing communities. She joined the Flickr team in May 2005 and has seen the community grow to more than 23 million members who have shared more than 2.8+ billion photos and video. Read more »

Brian Oberkirch

BRIAN OBERKIRCH leads a social web consultancy and tries to make things people will truly love. He has thought thoughts and written words and scribbled diagrams and goaded people to use the Force for good in the service of companies like Nokia, Dow Jones, Sony and others. He loves startups and vintage cocktails, is from Louisiana, and, as such, is usually talking about what he is going to eat next. He is taken with words. He may blog overmuch at brianoberkirch.com.

Ed Sussman

Ed Sussman is the President of Mansueto Digital, a company that includes the Drupal sites FastCompany.com, FastCompany.tv, Inc.com, IncBizNet.com, IncTechnology.com, and Scobelizer.com. Ed leads what is believed to be the largest internal Drupal team in existence, and is a sought-after speaker on the future of social publishing, having interviewed or been interviewed by the likes of Matt Mullenweg and Robert Scoble. An attorney and journalist, Ed brings a broad understanding of the online world to DIWD.

John Albin Wilkins

John Wilkins has been a web developer for a long time. In April 1993, he was one of the lucky few to use the very first graphical web browser, Mosaic 1.0, and he’s been doing web development professionally since 1994. His CSS creds go back to 2001 when Jeffrey Zeldman said “to hell with bad browsers” and challenged web developers to take CSS layout seriously. Read more »

Gábor Hojtsy

Gábor Hojtsy is a 28 years old open source enthusiast and contributor. He is most active as a Drupal developer, working with and on the open source project itself at Acquia. He loves to spend time with his lovely wife, and is also passionate about singing, music and amateur acting.

John Resig

John Resig is a JavaScript Evangelist for the Mozilla Corporation and the author of the book Pro JavaScript Techniques. He's also the creator and lead developer of the jQuery JavaScript library.

Currently, John is located in Boston, MA. He's hard at work on his second book, Secrets of the JavaScript Ninja, due in bookstores Fall 2008.

Robert Douglass

Robert’s Drupal adventure started in 2003 with the creation of his personal website, RobsHouse.net. In 2005, Robert co-authored the book Building Online Communities with Drupal, phpBB, and WordPress (Apress). As the first book to be published that covered Drupal in depth, "Building Online Communities" has proven to be a valuable guide to Drupal newcomers and experienced Drupallers alike. Read more »

Drew Gorton

Drew is the President and CEO of Gorton Studios, an award-winning full-service web design and development company. Gorton Studios builds user-friendly, owner-friendly, results-oriented websites based on the Drupal platform.

Drew began working on the web in 1996. Since then, his work and company have won praise and attention from organizations including Newsweek, Time Magazine, USA Today and Yahoo. Read more »

Lane Becker

Lane Becker is co-founder and President of Get Satisfaction, a web startup dedicated to fostering new methods of communication and collaboration between companies and their customers. Read more »

James Walker

James Walker is Lullabot's Director of Education where he oversees the company's public workshops, seminars and private Drupal trainings, combining his passion for both technology and teaching, A leader in the Drupal community, James is a founding member of the non-profit Drupal Association and the Drupal security team. As a long time member of the Drupal community, James maintains over a dozen modules and has contributed countless patches to Drupal core. Read more »

Chris Messina

Chris Messina arrived in San Francisco five years ago and began volunteering for the Mozilla Foundation, leading the Spread Firefox community marketing project, helping to raise over $220,000 in microdonations to put a two-page spread, which he also designed, into the New York Times helping to increase Firefox's downloads to over 50 million in its first six months. Read more »

Aaron Winborn

The author of the book Drupal Multimedia, Aaron Winborn has been a Drupal developer for over three years, most of that time for Advomatic, where he has helped to develop media heavy sites for Air America, Sony, and Viacom. Before that, he had followed dual passions for teaching and web development for nearly a decade. He has contributed several modules to the Drupal community, such as Embedded Media Field, jQuery Media, and Views Slideshow. He has also been active in core development, most recently advocating and contributing to efforts for better media support in Drupal 7, such as the hook_file patch and a jQuery plug-in/library registryRead more »

Jeff Robbins

Jeff Robbins is co-founder and CEO of Lullabot. Jeff started one of the world's first web development companies in 1993 and has developed sites for Ringo Starr, MTV, and New York's Museum of Modern Art. Additionally, Jeff spent most of the 1990's fronting the band Orbit, toured with the Lollapalooza festival, and penned a top-10 modern rock single. Read more »

Jeff Robbins

Jeff Robbins is co-founder and CEO of Lullabot. Jeff started one of the world's first web development companies in 1993 and has developed sites for Ringo Starr, MTV, and New York's Museum of Modern Art. Additionally, Jeff spent most of the 1990's fronting the band Orbit, toured with the Lollapalooza festival, and penned a top-10 modern rock single. Read more »

Karen McGrane

Karen plays nicely in the content strategy, information architecture, and interaction design sandboxes. She is Managing Partner at Bond Art + Science, a UX consultancy she founded in 2006, and formerly VP and National Lead for User Experience at Razorfish. She also teaches Design Management in the Interaction Design MFA program at the School of Visual Arts.

Image Credit: Alison Grippo

Angela Byron

Angela Byron is an Open Source evangelist who lives and breathes Drupal. She got her start as a Google Summer of Code student in 2005 and since then has completely immersed herself in the Drupal community. Her work includes core coding and patch review, creating and contributing modules and themes, testing and quality assurance efforts within the project, improving documentation, and providing user support on forums and IRC. Read more »

Ryan Szrama

Ryan got his start in web development through an online sales company based in Louisville, KY, his home of over 10 years. It was there that he nursed Ubercart through its infancy to its use on over 20,000 websites as the Project Lead and community face of the project.

Ryan joined Commerce Guys in 2009 and continued to lead Ubercart until branching out into Drupal Commerce, a new initiative focusing on empowering users to build e-commerce sites with the best new features that Drupal 7 has to offer. He focuses most of his time developing the code base, growing the community of contributors to the project, and training new users online and at community events. Read more »

Jeff Eaton

Jeff Eaton has been building Internet and desktop software for over a decade. He's participated in projects ranging from web-portals for communities and nonprofits, to enterprise client-server applications for retail industries, to large-scale web applications for companies like Dow AgroSciences and the Chicago Board of Trade. Read more »

Nathan Haug

Nathan Haug is one of the foremost user-interface developers in the Drupal project. His interest in combining design and software implementation led him to undergraduate degrees in both Visual Communications and Computer Science. He developed significant UI improvements for the Drupal 6 release, including Drupal's drag-and-drop implementation and a framework for easy Ajax-like behaviors. Read more »

Karen Stevenson

Karen Stevenson has been a Drupal contributor since 2006. She is a co-maintainer of the Content Construction Kit (CCK) and author of the Date, and Calendar modules that use CCK and Views as the basis for highly flexible and configurable event management systems. She previously created content management systems for her own ElderWeb site and other organizations, including web-based calendar and class scheduling systems and a multi-lingual help desk web site. Read more »

Addison Berry

Addison Berry takes part in many aspects of both the Drupal software and community. In addition to being the Documentation Team Lead, she contributes patches to core Drupal, maintains several contributed modules, and is active in various mentoring programs such as the Drupal Dojo group and Google's Highly Open Participation (GHOP) program. Read more »

Matt Westgate

Matt Westgate is a co-founder of Lullabot. He graduated from Iowa State University in Computer Mediated Technologies, a degree program he literally built from the ground up to focus on the emerging field of web applications and information architecture. Matt enjoys teaching and has given presentations and workshops on many different facets of the web including Implementing RSS, Using Drupal as an E-commerce Platform and Understanding the Drupal APIsRead more »

Earl Miles

Earl Miles is a permanent member and founder of the Drupal Association. In 2005, Earl found Drupal and thought it was exactly the kind of thing that he wanted for a website he was building in his spare time. Then he found out that Drupal lacked a couple of features here and there; so Earl ignored work for about three weeks and created the Views module, which has been instrumental in Drupal's continued growth.

Earl has also been active in the community providing support here and there, as well as posting tips and tricks when the mood strikes him. Read more »

Nicole Lind

A 12-year veteran of the internet industry, Nicole Lind is SVP, Operations for Treehouse Agency. In this role, she applies her expertise across a spectrum of operations and people management areas including business process “re-engineering”; project, product, and program management; team building; and client support. She is driven by a desire to infuse excellence and passion into every aspect of her work, consistently seeking out new opportunities and approaches to doing so. Read more »