Speakers

Ruan Fourie

Ruan has been working in digital marketing for nine years. He specializes in SEO, but also has a soft spot for content marketing and marketing funnels in general. Over the years he has worked with clients in the casino, sports betting, insurance, law, music and cannabis industries, just to name a few. Ruan has a strange affinity for highly competitive and often times taboo markets where traditional digital marketing doesn’t always fit the bill. Currently, he is the SEO specialist and digital strategist at Starbright Solutions while he is still running his constant side hustle gevaaalik.com.

Hanna Partridge

Founder of the Mammoth WordPress Site www.horze.co.za and currently the Lead Brand and Web Developer for it. Attained some pretty amazing $$ in the first year of launch. Chasing towards some intense goals over the next few years.

Challenger of Everything. Acceptor of Nothing. Attempting the impossible on WordPress and pushing its boundaries everyday.

Love The WordPress Community and Networking possibilities it provides

ankestow

Dynamics 365 Consultant by day, entrepreneur and WordPress website builder by night. I have been dabbling with WordPress websites for the last 5 years, ever since my husband and I started a computer repair company and we needed to make a website for it and start advertising online. My motto has always been, if you can learn how to do it yourself, then try!

Daine Mawer

A highly ambitious Frontend Engineer with over 9 years experience in web development and a recent love for all things JavaScript. Over the course of the past decade, Daine has worked with and contributed to a plethora of high profile companies across the globe, including brands like:

○ Puma ○ Pearson ○ Women’s Health ○ Men’s Health ○ Coca Cola ○ Flexfit
○ Happy Socks ○ Microsoft ○ Uber ○ Starter ○ Intercom ○ Old Mutual
○ Reddam House ○ Automattic ○ Google, ○ as well as award-winning author Ken Follett.

An avid supporter of open source, Daine has truly embraced the communities “giving back” mantra and regularly contributes tutorials and articles to major publications like:

○ Envato Tuts+, ○ Webdesigner Depot, ○ CSS Tricks and, ○ WordPress.com

Matty Cohen

I’m a WordPress professional, based at the tip of Africa in the sunny city of Cape Town. I work on WooCommerce at Automattic, and enjoy helping engineers do great work, and excel as teams, and individually.

Warrick Kernes

Serial eCommerce entrepreneur with 12 years eCommerce experience in South Africa and Europe. Winner of London’s 2009 Young Businessman of the Year Award. Founder of the SA award winning online store Action Gear (founded 2010, exited 2018). Guest lecturer on eCommerce at WITS Business School to MBA students and he has also talked on eCommerce for JP Morgan (S&P 500). Warrick is a regular contributing author for Entrepreneur Magazine and in 2018 he published his book on South African eCommerce. He also sits on the Education Committee for the eCommerce Forum Africa

In 2017 Warrick founded the Insaka eCommerce Academy and is now dedicated to growing SA’s eCommerce industry.

Selina Bieber

With a passion for communication, education and digitalization, Selina is the Regional Director for Turkey and MENA at GoDaddy EMEA. As the world’s largest cloud platform dedicated to small, independent ventures, Selina led GoDaddy’s go-to-market strategy for the two regions and continues to empower small businesses and entrepreneurs to unlock digital technologies to their advantage.

Before joining GoDaddy, Selina headed up media relations across Europe for a large-scale energy project headquartered in the Netherlands, and spent close to seven years in Turkey managing the communications activities for a range of foreign clients including Facebook, VeriSign Inc. and Euler Hermes. Selina also established the corporate communications department for infrastructure giant Makyol A.Ş at the beginning of her career.

Selina grew up in Australia, studying international studies and media at the University of Adelaide before completing a Master’s Degree in Political Science at Boğaziçi University. With English as her mother tongue, Selina additionally speaks Turkish and German and is the mother of an energetic 2-year old boy.

Martin Pieterse

Martin is a co-owner of Lonely Viking, an agency based in South Africa committed to helping overworked business owners grow their businesses and get their lives back. This is achieved through providing branding, marketing, business automation, and custom software development services. Martin loves to play guitar and is an avid gamer who enjoys any game with zombies in.

Martin is also a full-stack developer with more than 8 years of experience working as a senior developer at a major bank. Martin is exceptionally skilled at developing and implementing processes and seeing how systems and apps can be created and implemented to work together. These skills make him awesome at designing automation processes that increase productivity and profits. Martin is also really great at managing, understanding and explaining analytical data.

charlesmuzonzini

Charles Muzonzini is a Software Engineer specializing in the web and mobile applications. He has been developing websites using WordPress since 2013. He is one of the founding members and an active community member of the Harare WordPress meetup. Charles also creates video tutorial on his YouTube channel, codeswag.co.uk. He is currently working on a video course on Mobile App Developemnt using Ionic 4 for Pact Publishing.

https://www.linkedin.com/in/charles-muzonzini/

beth2303

Founder of ReBeth wines, Local Representative for SA expansion at GoDaddy, and award winner of Silicon Valley Startup Grind rising star 2018.

Beth Malatji is the Author of The Bootstrapper’s Lifesaving Hacks, an easy to read practical book about business process automation. Her entrepreneurial journey started when she founded Wealth Ladder Magazine (an online interactive publication which focused on entrepreneurship, startup success stories, financial literacy, and wealth accumulation), which was later sold to another media house.

Beth has interviewed CEOs, business influencers and decision makers. In 2017, Beth took over the role of Chapter Director at Startup Grind Johannesburg, the largest global independent startup community founded in Silicon Valley, actively educating, inspiring, and connecting over 1000000 entrepreneurs in over 600 cities, powered by Google for Startups.

sourourn

Sourour is an entrepreneur and Happiness Engineer at Automattic who is passionate about entrepreneurship. Before joining Automattic, she worked as a project manager for a number of global business incubator programs which aimed at supporting emerging entrepreneurs world-wide. Some of the business support programs that she has worked with include Endeavor, a leading high-impact entrepreneurship movement around the world and Trias – an entrepreneurial development platform that operates in over 12 countries worldwide.
In her spare time, she also runs an online store https://shaleel.com/ targeted for natural hair products and accessories.

Shane Rielly

Shane is the founder and co-owner of Lonely Viking. Lonely Viking is an agency based in South Africa which is committed to helping overworked business owners grow their businesses and get their lives back. That’s achieved through providing branding, marketing, business automation and custom software development services.

Shane loves surfing and the ocean and is a stoked husband and father. He has a great sense of humour and when he’s around you’re bound to see people laughing.

Shane has over 18 years experience in branding and graphic and web design and he loves clever design that solves problems. Shane is insatiably curious and has an intense drive to solve problems. This makes him very good at coming up with creative and effective solutions for design, branding, marketing, and business growth.

Praiz UX

I am a UX research specialist with experience working on over 26 digital products across different industries. Part of my job involves carrying out both qualitative and quantitative research and analysis to understand why and how people do what they do, in how many ways and how much time they do so, to uncover insights that help the business and customers achieve their goals.

I am a strong believer that observing carefully how and why people interact with digital products is key to making digital products more usable and valuable, thereby driving up conversion and revenue for the business.

I achieve product usability and value by paying keen attention to what people say (attitudes and emotions) and what they do (behaviours) and working with micro and macro data to drive design choices.

I love to collaborate with marketing/research teams on strategic work while also creating an optimization feedback loop knowing when to pivot from making products usable to making them valuable.

I currently work as a UX Researcher at Interswitch Group, Africa where I am constantly designing Fintech digital products with the best experiences for users across Africa.

bertrandvdb

Professional photographer and website developer. I have been developing websites and taking photos for more than 25 years. I studied mechanical engineering, but since 2012 I have turned my two hobbies of photography and building websites in to my full-time work. I have experience working with large brands and new artists and photographers. I have built photography websites, artist portfolio websites and e-commerce websites.

Job

Hallo! I’m a Belgian living in Cape Town with a passion for education, training and WordPress, trying to combine the three at WooCommerce (Automattic). In my spare time, I enjoy movies, music, photography, reading, travelling, good food and (Belgian) beer. I share some of my thoughts and photos on my personal site.

Arnold Blinn

Arnold Blinn is the senior vice-president and Chief Architect at GoDaddy with over 30 years’ industry experience. He is based in Bellevue, Washington, USA.
At GoDaddy, he is responsible for ensuring GoDaddy’s applications, platforms, and systems work together to meet the needs of its customers.This involves working with the application teams, the platform teams, GoDaddy marketing and business development teams and more.
Arnold worked at Microsoft for almost 17 years where he was the architect for the experiences team on the Windows Phone platform, building most of the visible applications (mail, calendar, photos, music) and system user interface (shell, utilities). His role was to define and build the experiences, working with the rest of the division and company for coordination and platform support. He was also the development manager and architect of several different teams in Microsoft Studios.
Outside of work, he enjoys spending time with family travelling, skiing and biking.

Jonathan Bossenger

Jonathan is an open source, freelance web developer from Cape Town, South Africa. He is lead developer at Castos, building beautifully crafted podcast hosting solutions, and where he also maintains the Seriously Simple Podcasting plugin for WordPress. Jonathan enjoys writing and sharing knowledge with others and regularly speaks and blogs about development or related topics, from hosting to freelance business practices.

Clare Petra Matthes

After years as a B2B journalist, then a news journalist and eventually an editor in various industries including forestry, architecture, hospitality, education and the EWN newsroom, Clare finally found herself at ITWeb covering a beat she never dreamed she would – IT, technology and gadgets – a grounding Clare now has expanded upon on a freelance basis.

Clare specialises in product reviews and news, gadgets, personality features and company profiles, new apps, old apps and security.

Clare has co-hosted the Talking Tech show on CliffCentral, chatted about tech news on the Gareth Cliff Show, SAfm and MixFM, and currently joins PowerFM’s Power Update on Fridays to talk tech and gadgets. She also wrote a humorous technology column in Brainstorm magazine and has a recurring byline in Popular Mechanics, in Brainstorm Magazine and on ITWeb.

Seagyn Davis

I am currently a software engineer at Leadhome where I spend my time building scalable web applications that assist in the renting, buying and selling of homes. In my spare time, I enjoy building tools, products and sites that live to my ideal of a scalable web. I’m a proud husband and father of 2 sleep eaters.

Anchen Le Roux

Anchen le Roux is the CEO and lead developer of Simply Digital Design a boutique studio in Pretoria Here she specialises in delivering solutions to photographers or creatives and the experience around creating a website.

She has a passion for everything WordPress and loves being part and contributing to the WP community.

Anchen is passionate about green, simple and nomadic living and occasionally find time to play the bass guitar.