Speakers

Ana-Maria Udriste

Ana-Maria Udriste is a lawyer and entrepreneur. She graduated from the Faculty of Law of the University of Bucharest, with a master’s degree in Judicial Career and is currently pursuing a PhD in competition law. In 2016, she left the traditional legal services market and founded U-Legal (a law firm offering legal services in the field of law of competition, business law, IP law & tech law), respectively Avocatoo (where students and professionals explain legal notions in plain language). That same year she became co-founder of Jurio, the biggest case-law platform with an advanced search engine designed to make legal research easier and less time consuming.

Her qualities as an entrepreneur brought Ana’s entry for Forbes 30 under 30 top (April 2017) and the Financial Times: New Europe 100: Eastern Europe’s Emerging Technology Stars (November 2017). At the same time, she is a lenient attorney in competition law and business law. Passioned by technology, she always tried to pursue her dreams of #makinglawsimple, and thus co-authored, with Ruxandra Sava (LegalUp) the first Romanian complete GDPR KIT.

The topic of Ana-Maria’s presentation is “Is GDPR such a boo-hoo for online businesses?“.

Emanuel Blagonic

For the past 15 years, Emanuel worked with worldwide clients ranging from small, family-owned businesses to global corporations. He designed websites and applications to deliver solutions that are now being used by millions of users. As one of the pioneers of the web standards movement in Croatia, he is active in the community where he works on building a better understanding of the design process and educates clients as much as possible.
Although primarily a designer, he’s been in love with WordPress for more than 10 years, being one of the biggest promoters in Croatia – writing articles about WordPress and the importance of open source in general. He helps organize WordCamps and Meetups in Croatia and was part of WordCamp Europe organizing team three years in a row.
Can be found on Twitter as @eblagonic.
The topic of Emanuel’s presentation is “How to find peace and change the world“

Ivana Ćirković

Ivana Ćirković is a Digital Marketing, PR and Social Media consultant with over ten years experience in the field. She is also a WordPress enthusiast, one of the WCEU 2018 organizers and an active member of the WordPress community who lives online almost 24/7.

The topic of Ivana’s presentation is “What’s your story?“.

Vineet Talwar

Vineet found his love for WordPress after he was introduced to it by a friend. This led him to develop numerous websites and making him want to crave for more to learn in WordPress. He has been associated with WordPress since 2012. He co-founded his first company at the age of 20. He is the Co-Founder and Technical Lead of FireMud FM, which is an online radio station based purely out of WordPress. and Indicium Crest – A remote web – development agency which is, again focused on WordPress. Now handing both the companies on technical front, his love for WordPress has just grown if nothing else. He has worked with over 55 projects remotely managing and developing them. He has also been associated with various ventures consulting and guiding them with technical resources and is currently located in Frankfurt, Germany.
Apart from developing the websites, he is a hobbyist photographer.

The topic of Vineet’s presentation is “Progressive Web Apps: The future of Mobile Apps“

Mario Peshev

Mario Peshev is a tech entrepreneur and the founder of DevriX, a distributed team of 35 scaling large WordPress platforms. He’s been hacking code over the past 15 years (including 30+ patches in the WordPress Core), teaching tech and business courses at universities and companies like VMware, SAP, Saudi Aramco, blogging on WordPress and management topics, and everything in-between. Mario is a proud supporter of dog-friendly office environments and the father of Tina, a cute 10-month old girl.

The topic of Mario’s presentation is “Tips For Successful Enterprise WordPress Projects“.

Mitko Kochkovski

Mitko started working with WordPress in 2010. He is a Codeable expert and founder of webpigment.com. He loves creating unusual websites, especially with WooCommerce.

The topic of Yannick’s presentation is “AJAX-ing your ( Woocommerce ) website“.

Georgios Gkouvousis

Georgios Gkouvousis is a talented Full Stack Developer, with more than 10 years of WordPress development experience.

He is managing some of the most serious WordPress projects within Greece & London, serving world wide web, tons of megabytes every single day through awesome websites.
Co-founder of 8web.gr, WPML Contractor and rtCamp’s EasyExpert. Occasional speaker at technology conferences, Google Partner and Huffpost’s author.
The topic of Georgios’s presentation is “Setting up the ideal webserver for WordPress: from zero to hero!“.

Yannick Gaultier

Initially trained as a mechanical engineer, I spent 20 years in a non-IT industry. I then started some web projects, mostly PHP and various CMS, and 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 an advanced WordPress AMP plugin at the end of 2016 to enable AMP pages on sites with both a lot of ease and high degree of customization.

The topic of Yannick’s presentation is “AMP: it’s getting faster!“.

Andrey Savchenko

Andrey “Rarst” Savchenko is a WordPress contractor from Kiev, Ukraine.

He believes in a Web of content sites that are a delight to discover, read, and navigate. For that, he works with other developers on complex tasks and long–term value goals. His services include: make it fast, automate menial, stare down a legacy codebase, fix the world (one bug at a time).

In his free time he likes to drink tea, read science fiction and every tweet in his timeline.

The topic of Andrey’s presentation is “WordPress breaks time (and how to fix it)“

Horia Neagu

Horia Neagu is Owner & Digital Marketing Consultant at Napoleon. Digital, with over 12 years of experience in SEO, with a focus on technical optimization, SEO auditing, SEO strategy, content marketing and CRO. He has had a passionate love affair with WordPress since 2007, back when it was nicknamed “Ella” and the autosave feature was an amazing novelty.
Horia is a hopeless geek, with a passion for public speaking, who honestly believes that bad web design ought to be criminalized. It is his conviction that WordPress can save the world, one site at a time and his motto is “plans are useless, planning is everything.”
The topic of Horia’s presentation is “WordPress & SEO – At Long Last Love“.

Calin Don

Calin Don is a perfectionist, language-agnostic day-and-night code tinkerer, loving and hating WordPress since 2005. Since 2011 he has been building a complex infrastructure to host demanding WordPress sites, in the CTO’s and co-founder’s shoes of Presslabs. Now he’s on a mission to simplify and open a scalable WordPress setup that powers millions of pageviews. He likes skiing in the Austrian Alps, swimming and making road-trips with his family.

The topic of Calin’s presentation is “Automating WordPress Operations with Kubernetes“

Aleksandar Savkovic

Google helped me to understand that WordPress is the next big thing in my life.
So I reconsidered my profession and from the construction site supervisor, I became the Web “WordPress” developer at the age of 34.
I believe that BIO should be seen as an ongoing process.
Rather than a static snapshot, whereby we are perpetually re-framing, re-thinking and re-considering ourselves.
At the moment I’m Western Balkans Manager at Enartia.com, a group of brands and coaching the dev team in a better tasks execution. Thank you, Scrum.
The topic of Aleksandar’s presentation is “Agile habits not frameworks“.

Catalin Matei

Catalin Matei is an entrepreneur and the CEO of Increase Media, a full-service social media agency that works with International and Romanian brands to help them adapt their marketing for digital and social media. He chose the entrepreneurial road when he was only 16 years old, founding e-commerce and software businesses. Catalin believes in the importance of helping others and thinks that every day is an opportunity to learn something new.
The topic of Catalin’s presentation is “Why And How to Use Social Media to Create a Brand and Revenue!“.

Andrei Lupu

Andrei Lupu is a backend developer at ThemeIsle who loves to tackle to most challenging tasks and to grind on unsolvable puzzles. With more than eight years of experience in web development and a dozen WordPress plugins and themes created, Andrei finds real value in open-source code and shareable knowledge.
Because his mantra is “Learn a new thing every day” he has the perfect excuse to lose a fair amount of time on StackOverflow and Slack channels but is the same mantra that guides him to love WordCamps and WordPress.
The topic of Andrei’s presentation is “Before and Beyond Gutenberg“.