Davor Altman – From Call Centre to Automattic

Happiness Engineer at Automattic, trying to make the web a better place every day. Also a Customer Support addict and chess fanatic. A host of Customer Happiness meetups in Serbia.

Before Automattic worked as a Head of Customer Happiness team at ManageWP. Found his home at Automattic where he can combine his two greatest passions – WordPress and Customer Support.

Twitter: @izuvach

Mason James – What Happens After Launch? Becoming a Rockstar at Support, Management, and Infrastructure for WordPress

Mason James is the Founder & CEO of Valet and wearer of a great many hats, including overseeing business development and fostering agency and team growth.

He started Valet, originally known as the WP Valet, in 2011 as the original WordPress support company, because he couldn’t find high-end help for clients who needed it. Since no one was offering the caliber of support he envisioned, he decided it was time to hang his sign out—becoming a trailblazer in the digital realm.

Mason built the company to provide top-tier holistic support & strategy, and customers kept coming back. Since 2012, its employed a vast array of services, ranging from digital strategy, migrations, maintenance and support to custom design and development. The 18 team members at Valet work tirelessly to truly know and care about every client—and offer recommendations for their success based on intimate understanding of their needs, goals, and strategic vision…truly working as digital partners.

Twitter: @masonjames

Ivelina Dimova-Gancheva – The WordPress Developer’s Toolkit

Web developer with passion for WordPress, currently working at Crowd Favorite where we develop web solutions for big enterprise companies. I enjoy learning new stuff and playing with different automation scripts to fasten the development process. I like to spend my spare time doing yoga, photography, hiking and swimming.

Twitter: @iv_wp

Nevena Tomović – How to grow your business by producing quality blog posts

I am a Growth Engineer at Devana Technologies and ManageWP. My main focus is on producing quality SEO content, and driving traffic to our sites. I come from a multilingual background, and my education was centered on Languages (German and Italian), as well as communication. I like communicating through writing and speaking.

Twitter: @NNotsoclueless

Sibin Grašić – Developing WordPress plugins

I’ll be speaking about best ways to develop WordPress plugins, current state of WP plugin repo, and offer additional tips, tricks and share my experiences.

Twitter: @ETFovac

Emanuel Blagonić – How WordPress changed the face of Croatian politics

The basic idea of WordPress was to redefine online publishing with allowing anyone to easily publish their articles. More than 10 years later, we used WordPress as an open source publishing platform to build a website for one of the largest cities in Croatia.

I’ll tell you a story of how the city of Rijeka decided to go with open source software and how the people reacted to a fact that everything will be open sourced as well. One of the first large-scale “design in the open” projects in Croatia is defining standards for future web development. We’re discussing the web design process, sharing knowledge with the public and asking citizens to be a part of the redesign effort.

By delivering designs, HTML and CSS, WordPress theme and documents like Content Strategy and Accessibility Guidelines – we’re redefining how the public website should look like. And with the help of WordPress, we’re promoting the power of publishing and transparency.

Serbia and Croatia share similar transparency problems and we can only start to solve them if we step out from our comfort zone. And not only us, but the local governments as well. It can be done, though – if we invest in it – so we can make a better world for our children.

Twitter: @eblagonic

Luca Sartoni – Growth methodologies in a distributed environment

Testing activities are effective only under strict circumstances. When I started my adventure at Automattic, the welcome message was: “Welcome to the chaos”. This presentation narrates the journey we had to conduct to implement strict growth methodologies in a distributed environment.

Twitter: @lucasartoni

Ivan Bjelajac – The importance of being first

Why is innovation important for business and marketing?

It’s better to be first than it is to be better. It’s much easier to get into the mind first than to try to penetrate an existing market.

If you can’t be first in a category, set up a new category, you can be first in.

The story of ManageWP and other products that created their own markets.

Twitter: @ivanbjelajac