A lover of learning and all things WordPress, Lydia designs and develops WordPress websites with her company Lydia Roberts Design. She also advises on email marketing best practices and gets clients set up with MailChimp and custom email templates. When she’s not in front of a glowing screen, Lydia likes to garden, read sci-fi, and travel with her husband. Their most recent adventure led them to Iceland.

Julien Melissas is a web developer from Asheville, NC, with a passion for clean, efficient code, and re-doing things until they’re just right. Julien loves to learn about new technologies and development workflows. He has been working with WordPress for 5+ years now and has grown quite fond of it.

Julien is a co-founder and technical director at Craftpeak, a creative agency in Asheville, and is on the Roots development team. Julien loves JavaScript, UX, information architecture, open source, and Pit Bulls. When Julien is not in front of the screen working you can find him making music, cooking, wrenching on a car, or out in the yard gardening with his girlfriend, Hana, and their dogs, Dina and Wilbur.

Steven Slack has been working with WordPress for 8+ years and during that time has worked with a many different businesses and agencies from large to small. Steven has built a countless amount of custom themes and plugins. Steven is passionate about front-end performance and optimization as well as proper site planning and architecture. He is currently working out of the Craftpeak office in downtown Asheville which affords an incredible amount of collaboration with fellow developers and designers. You can find Steven on twitter at Slacktronic, on his website at stevenslack.com and out in the world on a bicycle.

With a degree from ASU in Industrial Design and a lifelong passion for web development, Boomer Sassmann has been running Big Boom Design Inc, an Asheville based Design agency since 2007. Currently, Sassmann manages a team of seven employees and supports over 300 companies across the United States. His passion for web development, coupled with a drive to “bridge the digital divide,” has resulted in a unique educational approach to empowering local business owners about the internet. He is a serial entrepreneur, designer, builder and all around maker.

I’m a graphic designer in Asheville, NC. I specialize in designing for identity, mobile, web, UI and UX.

I also love helping great people figure out how to take their business, project or cause to the next level.

Lisa is still playing with creating WordPress websites for both fun and profit. Not being able to draw stick figures or understand code – this is an interesting experience to say the least. However most of the websites are for private education groups; so if anything goes seriously wrong it’ll only affect a small class of senior citizens. She still has to work in other fields to pay the bills; is tackling a larger, more complex public website that will force her to learn many new WordPress skills this year; and remains philosophical about how her life will turn out as she follows one rabbit hole after another just for the fun of learning. And of course organizing and attending WordCamp is one of her favorite adventures.

Web Designer, Social Media Momma and part time Raft Guide, out of the corporate world and into the woods. It’s good to be well rounded. Denise has a long & varied background, ask her on any given day what she does for a living, if she’s found herself and where she’s volunteering and you’re bound to get different answer. It’s good to be well rounded.

A former academic, Jeff is on the Data team at Automattic — currently working on user behavior analysis & features for WordPress.com users’ site stats. He’s a usability nerd and is always looking for ways to make the web a better place! Find him on the web, on Twitter, and in various coffee-serving establishments about Asheville.

As an ex-corporate junkie, Alicia moved to Asheville to live a simpler life. Not knowing anyone in town she decided to go to a local WordPress meetup where she realized — “these are my type of people!” and wanted to work with them to bring WordCamp to the mountains. She’s the founder and editor of BalancingMotherhood.com where she writes about work-life balance issues facing modern parents, and occasionally showcases her mad baking skills on the blog. She also helps small businesses with their social media strategy. Find her on Facebook, Pinterest, Twitter, and Instagram.

Rich Owings is the owner of Local Is Where It’s At, an Internet marketing agency located in Asheville. When he isn’t helping local businesses improve their online presence, you can often find him mountain biking, gardening, enjoying local brews and spending time with his family.

John started the Asheville WordPress Meetup group in 2012  and is the IT Coordinator for USDA SARE. He does development on the side mostly using PHP/MySQL and is learning Laravel and MongoDB.