Want to find out who you’ll be learning from at WordCamp Cape Town 2014? Well, here’s our list of speakers and workshop instructors. We’ll update this list as we confirm more details!

Masters of Ceremony

We are proud to welcome back our esteemed MCs from last year’s WordCamp:

Derick Watts & The Sunday Blues

Derick Watts & The Sunday Blues have made waves both locally & internationally with their unique brand of comedy, using YouTube as their platform of choice. Known for their tongue-in- cheek parody music videos (“Braaiday”, “The Car Guard Song”, “Movember Song”) as well as their original animated series (“Chat Sandwich”, “Hippo & Croc”), their work has been featured on sites such as TIME Magazine, Huffington Post, The Telegraph and Will Ferrell’s Funny or Die.

They were also adjudged by Marvel Comics creator Stan Lee as winners of the international Movember video competition in 2012, beating out hundreds of entrants worldwide.

The duo, consisting of Nicholas Smal & Gareth Allison, recently signed with Los Angeles-based network The Collective, and have worked with local favourites Ard Matthews, Dr. Michael Mol, Rob van Vuuren & even Derek Watts himself on some of their videos.
They are currently stealing the hubcaps off your car as you are reading this.

Session Speakers

We will have 9 sessions at WordCamp Cape Town 2014 – all presented by top speakers from Cape Town and around the world.

Chantelle Bowyer

Managing Director at Metis Marketing Solutions

Chantelle’s major strength lies in the lethal combo of WordPress, Adwords and Analytics. Since founding her business, Metis Marketing, four years ago, she’s helped countless SMEs not only start their digital journey, but also improve it. She’s got Google on speed dial, loves a round of Futsal, believes that working remotely is best practice and isn’t afraid to take on (and fire for that matter) any client thanks to her Mixed Martial Arts (MMA) training.

Mark Forrester

Co-founder of WooThemes

Mark is a proud co-founder of WooThemes. Over the last 6 years their business has grown from a team of 3 passionate theme designers, to a distributed team of 40+ staff developing WordPress’s most popular eCommerce plugin.

Mark is also an amateur dad, avid sports fan, photographer and digital designer.

Matt Cohen

Chief Product Officer at WooThemes

Matt is WordPress and web developer, musician and blogger. He is a lover of punk rock, innovation, business and 80s/90s cartoons.

Nic Haralambous

Founder of the online fashion company, NicSocks.com

Nic was the CEO and co-founder of Motribe, the mobile community platform, before the company was successfully acquired by Mxit in October, 2012. He also founded ForeFront Africa consulting firm before exiting to Imperial Holdings.

He was selected as one of the 200 young South Africans to take to lunch by the Mail&Guardian, featured on GQ’s list of top 30 men in media and was also a finalist in the Men’s Health Best Men Awards. The company he co-founded, Motribe, was named by Forbes as one of the top 20 startups in Africa.

His career included roles at the Sunday Times, Financial Mail, 702, Mail & Guardian as well as Vodacom SA.

Dave Perel

Co-founder of Obox Themes

Obox Themes was launched in 2009. David has been involved with design and development since 2004, he is currently the CEO of Obox as well as their lead designer.

David’s passions include design, CSS, cars and motorsport. His CV includes designing templates for Posterous, Tumblr, WordPress.com, Eventbrite and many more.

Emma Dicks

Director of New Initiatives at Innovate South Africa

Emma is passionate about seeing young South Africans creating their own solutions to important problems and believes that WordPress is a powerful tool to this end. She runs the Code4CT Challenge which aims to introduce high school girls to coding for the Web and get them building solutions to local challenges.

Noel Tock

Product at Human Made

Noel is a Swiss nomad wandering the globe. He’s one of the owners at Human Made, a WordPress.com VIP partner, where he heads up Product Development. If he’s not working on product design, he’s having a gin and tonic. Or more recently, both.

Tomaž Zaman

Founder / CTO, Head of Product Development at Codeable

Tomaž spent years as a freelancer, building websites and applications for clients all over the world. He’s a completely self-taught developer who also likes to fiddle with servers.

At Codeable, he’s responsible for product development and promotion, so you might find him at a WP conference or UX workshop, where he’s trying to learn about users’ habits as much as possible.

In his free time, he spends time with his wife and four children, jumps out of perfectly working airplanes and enjoys a good movie.

Scott Basgaard

Technical Project Lead at Human Made

Scott lives somewhere in the mountains of beautiful Southern Norway. Born and raised in New Jersey, he moved there to live with his wife Renate and son. He loves all things WordPress and organized the first WordCamp Norway in 2012. At Human Made, Scott takes a hands-on approach towards organising and executing projects within their growing client list. He’s very passionate about helping others and also organizes a free 24-hour-long WordPress event called WordSesh.

Workshop Instructors

Alongside the talks we will be running separate workshops for which you can sign up at the registration desk on the day of WordCamp – workshop spots are given on a first come, first served basis, so make sure you arrive early enough to secure your spot!

Scott Basgaard

Technical Project Lead at Human Made

Hugh Lashbrooke

Lead Developer at WooThemes

Hugh is a self-taught geek, PHP developer and father from Cape Town currently working as a lead developer at WooThemes. Outside of his work at WooThemes he has numerous plugins in the WordPress.org repo and is heavily involved in the local WordPress community. He is also a new father and loving the joys and challenges that come with that.

Jeffrey Pearce

Senior Developer at WooThemes

Jeff is a senior developer at WooThemes where he focuses on PHP and JQuery. He works on the Theme Team, while also dabbling in applications written in NodeJS & AngularJS. Education is his passion!