WordCamp Jacksonville is excited to announce our second set of confirmed speakers for this year’s conference! Stay tuned for announcements about the rest of our speakers.
If you missed them, check out the first round of speakers too.
Joseph LoPreste
Joe, a St Petersburg, Fla. native, is co-owner of St. Pete. Design. He brings over 10 years business and technology experience to the team. With St. Pete Design he has the opportunity to combine his passion for business and his obsession with pushing technology beyond its limits.
“If you do what you love, you’ll never work a day in your life.” This is how he feels about software development. He gets to wake up every day to a new set of challenges and the opportunity to solve these challenges with new and unique solutions. One of his favorite things in business is the feeling of satisfaction that he gets when the team is able to successfully create or do something that others said could not be done.
He has two amazing daughters Mekenzie and Kennedie who have taught him what’s important in life. They bring balance to him and his life/work ratio. Joe brings the mindset that as a company we should cultivate creativity and individuality so that allows us to create solutions at the highest levels while still loving what we do. Mary Baum
Mary is the founder and principal of RacquetPress, a digital consultant to the tennis industry. Trained as a print designer before the web was born, She built her first site (wrong) in 1999 and started to learn real CSS and HTML in 2007—at the tender age of 47. Today she’s a big fan of design in the browser (after a few thumbnail sketches!) and all the modern CSS the browsers will support.
Also high on her list: rare steaks, homemade hot fudge sauce, happy cats, high backhand volleys, high-contrast serif type, the Genesis Framework, fighter jets from Boeing, several new (well, sorta-new) features in Illustrator, Atomic Blocks for Gutenberg and the ad court.
Charlene Bond
Charlene is from Nashville, Tennessee and holds a Bachelor’s degree in Digital Media Communications from Middle Tennessee State University. Charlene is Creative Director for Prolific Xpressionz, a small and growing digital firm helping businesses sustain, retain, and expand through web design, branding, and CRM. Charlene also specializes in Instructional Design, creating training material and learning experiences for departments and organizations.
Young McQueen
Young’s experience is fashioned from his education (chemical engineering and marketing) and employment in large companies in the 1970’s and 1980’s. He has worked as a marketing director in the consumer goods industry, taught marketing at a local university and worked as a gemologist and small business developer mostly in the pre-internet era. Now retired, he concentrates on photography and WordPress (as hobbies).
Tom McCracken
Tom is a 20+ year web industry veteran. He has a blended background ranging across web development, UX, marketing, content strategy, data analysis, and agile project management. His passion is helping organizations leverage technology to drive measurable business impact.
Tom has consulted on over 100 interactive projects for organizations such as AT&T, U.S. Bank Corp, Simon & Schuster, IBM, Miami Dolphins, NEC, McDonald’s, SMU, Abbott Labs, Pratt & Whitney, ADP, E*TRADE, Nationwide Insurance, and Tektronics.
An avid open source contributor, he has built more than two dozen Drupal modules and WordPress plugins. Today, his core focus is developing results-oriented, data-driven tools to enable teams to deliver decisively better web experiences and ROI.