The Talks
Keynote: Allie Nimmons
She/Her/They/Them, USA
Keynote
Changing the World, One Slide at a Time
In this keynote, Allie shares how real, human-centered projects like Tech Differently can reshape the future of tech in a post-AI world. Through her time mentoring the conference speakers for Tech Differently, she’s observed inspiring amounts of creativity, support, and growth.
This talk invites attendees to feel the deep significance of these kinds of events: the connection, courage, and meaningful change when more voices feel supported enough to step up. People will leave with a clearer sense of how an event like Tech Differently can be the blueprint for events to come that bring different lived experiences and ideas to the forefront of our workspaces.
Bio:
In 2014, after dropping out of theater school, Allie Nimmons started teaching herself to code. In 2015, she was introduced to WordPress, and the rest is history. Between 2016 and 2019, Allie built websites and provided WordPress support independently under the name Pixel Glow Web Design and spoke at more than a dozen tech events. She spent time providing plugin support at GiveWP, traveling as a speaker ambassador for GoDaddy Pro, leading the Community team at WP Buffs, producing digital content for MasterWP, and providing editing, voice-over, and production services to companies like Mattel, Automattic, Kinsta, and WP 101. Currently, she is the Chief Web Officer at Web Pro Geeks LLC, SEO Lead at SEO Pro Geeks, and the instructor of the WordPress Essentials course on LinkedIn Learning.
Awesome Akinfenwa
He/Him, Nigeria
The Edge Case Is a Person: What Widely-Used Tools Get Wrong About Users They’ve Never Met
We keep building tools for a global audience as if access is universal. It isn’t.
My nonprofit in Nigeria, TechAid Connect, qualified for Anthropic’s nonprofit discount on Claude: $16 for two seats. By the time the payment cleared my card and converted, it cost nearly 24,000 naira. It was a real discount from someone who never had to ask what a dollar becomes once it crosses a border.
Working from Nigeria, I’ve hit the same wall in three shapes: a price, a postcode, a verification form. None of them meant to exclude me. Two cost me time and money that the next person was never billed for. One cost me the job. Every time, I was somebody’s untested edge case.
If you build or recommend tools for people you’ll never meet, this talk is for you.
You’ll leave with three questions. Each one would have caught one of these before it shipped.
Bio:
Awesome Akinfenwa is a full-stack developer and the founder of TechAid Connect, a platform connecting nonprofits with technical volunteers. He has spent four years building with PHP, WordPress, and WooCommerce. He started TechAid Connect in 2024 to make it easier for nonprofits to find technical help and for developers to find work worth doing. Running it from Nigeria taught him something else: the tools built to help are usually priced, verified, and designed for somewhere else.
Daniel Bertoldi
He/Him, Brazil
So… We Broke Production
No matter how experienced you are, shipping software means things will eventually break in production. What really tests a team is how they handle the chaos once it happens.
In this talk, I’ll share what happened when a stealth breaking change slipped past our team’s safety nets, alongside a few well-known incidents from across the tech world. We’ll look at the rush to find a fix, how to communicate while everything is crashing, and how to build a healthier engineering culture out of a bad deploy.
Bio:
Based in Brazil, Daniel started in Android development at iFood before joining Touchlab as a Kotlin Multiplatform developer. Now he gets to broaden his mobile expertise by fixing bugs not just on Android, but on iOS too–and occasionally Desktop or Web. There are two things Daniel loves most: food and videogames.
Heather Gray
She/They, Canada
Making a climate-friendly website, it’s not what you think
What makes a website “climate-friendly”?
Is it climate-friendly if the hosting uses renewable energy? If you buy carbon offsets? If you plant trees?
The solutions that spring to mind for most people are incomplete, and a few are close to greenwashing. In this talk, we’ll dig into the often-overlooked roles that hosting, caching, optimizing, taking ownership, and being transparent have to play in reducing a website’s carbon footprint. You’ll leave with a framework for building a climate strategy for your website that’s grounded in how the internet actually works, not in what sounds good on most sustainability pages.
For developers, site owners, and site creators who want to answer this question with confidence instead of guesswork.
Bio:
Heather Gray went from studying Environmental Science at the University of Guelph, to becoming a Freelance WordPress Developer and Consultant. They have been developing websites with WordPress for over 20 years, and they focus on creating websites that are climate-friendly, inclusive, and accessible. Heather lives and works in Guelph, Ontario, surrounded by board games, knitting projects and coffee.
Lumi Ciobanu
She/Her, Romania
From professional musician to web designer, a journey of becoming and discovering my best self
Today, Lumi is a fulfilled and thriving web designer. This wasn’t always the case. She used to be a piano teacher and musicologist until one day she decided it was time for a new chapter.
Lumi will share her 10-year career journey, from then to now, with the struggles, happy moments, and the best lessons learned along the way.
Attendees will explore how pursuing a new career can transform our lives, open unexpected paths and help us discover new ways to contribute, connect and grow within the tech community.
Bio:
Lumi Ciobanu is a web designer, based in Bucharest, with a rare blend of creativity, structure, and efficiency. She is particularly passionate about WordPress Core Blocks, pushing their flexibility to develop cohesive design systems. Beyond creating websites, she is dedicated to building communities and believes in the power of creating together. As a meetup co-organiser, she enjoys fostering long-term relationships, meaningful connections, and memorable experiences that bring people together.
Nicolas Demers
He/Him, Canada
Staying Human In A World of Shortcuts
Improving your skills at any craft takes regular effort and practice. Over the course of Nicolas’s career, he gained experience in all sorts of languages and frameworks, as well as documentation and communication skills. Likewise, his years as a wildlife photographer have taught him about light, composition, and animal behaviour.
Lately, we’ve all seen tools that aim to shortcut this process, particularly in building tech products, but they pose the risk of removing your skills foundation and fostering stagnation, especially if you’re just starting out as a coder/developer. We learn by doing, and we need to suck before we get better. Frustration and discomfort are a part of the process, not a sign you’ll never get it right.
In this opinionated talk, drawing on his experience as a web developer and nature photographer, Nicolas will make the case for nurturing creativity, continual growth, and your unique voice – in other words, staying human – in a world of shortcuts.
Bio:
Nicolas is a longtime WordPress developer, amateur photographer and birder living in Vancouver, BC.
Rachel ‘Win’ Winchester
She/Her, USA
Web Design, Art History, And Staying Resilient Through Tech Change
My story inspires hope in the minds of website builders everywhere. I started in art, studying art history and working in the art world. Then I found web design and WordPress, and my work shifted toward the internet. Over time, I noticed that my career was following the same pattern as my passion for art: new tools were making new kinds of work possible. In art, artists use new tools to explore new mediums. On the web, I used WordPress to build websites in new ways. The tools were changing, and so was the work.
Now the web has changed again. Building a website is no longer a special skill for a small group of web designers. It has become a basic tool for entrepreneurs, artists, and businesses. More people can make websites than ever before. Art has gone through a similar change, with more multimedia work and more artists combining different technologies to create experiences. Looking at both histories gives me confidence about what comes next, despite the ongoing platform wars.
Bio:
Rachel Winchester, or Win for short, is an independent product designer, public speaker, and the founder of The Focus Assistants, a peer-to-peer service-based startup. Catch her hosting the Philadelphia WordPress Meetup and The WWW (Work with Win) Livestream on LinkedIn. Win started Visual Webmaster L.L.C., where she pursues a variety of internet projects as well as hosts art & design workshops, showcases, and related events. She always looks to collaborate with other technologists, creatives, and entrepreneurs in innovative ways.
seeley quest
sie/hir, Canada
Folk Tech: Public-Good Alternatives to Big Tech Need You
Big Tech, driven by profit and competition, exploits workers, product users, and the environment. Workers for these companies are often uncomfortable with these impacts, and many would rather build technology that shares power instead of concentrating it, but they rely on Big Tech’s income.
Many average users feel uneasy with how Big Tech companies operate, but alternatives: open source tools, decentralized platforms, are often too hard to learn, so people stay tied to corporate platforms that are easier to use.
“Folk Tech” is a growing framework for daily-used digital tools, built on open source and often decentralized foundations, without the extraction, exploitation, and surveillance of most proprietary tech. These projects enable independence from Big Tech with tools that serve the public good.
This talk covers Folk Tech as a commons-oriented, power-distributing option, hurdles to a stronger ecosystem of these public-good tools, and shifting funding and design efforts to help adoption.
Bio:
seeley quest is an environmentalist, trans, disabled designer, artist, and educator in Toronto who researches accessibility, ecological, and social impacts in digital and material technologies to promote best practices. Sie created hir first digital narrative Inkle game in 2020 and has recently contributed to research on alternatives to Amazon and Substack for small press print/digital publishing in the US, UK, and Canada. Sie’s supported user testing research of open source alternatives to Big Tech office and media programs for Montreal feminist media/art centre Ada X and is currently researching proprietary genAI to aid efforts toward a “public AI” model in Canada and elsewhere. Occasionally involved with Civic Tech TO https://civictech.ca, in spring 2025, hir transmedia project “Holofuturist Outlooks” received development support as part of https://incubator.1rg.space, and in spring 2026, sie completed a mostly Canadian cohort of the “AI Stewardship Practice Program” focusing on genAI choices and climate impacts.
More coming at: https://forensembledesign.org/ and https://www.linkedin.com/in/seeley-q/
Special Guest: Michael Persimmon
Canada
Meditation For Tech Nerds
Recharge in the afternoon break with a guided meditation built for analytical minds. Michael Persimmon, a meditation teacher of twenty years and former game developer, offers a grounded, practical technique you can use right away, whether or not you’ve ever meditated before.
Jill has studied with him for 14 years, and she is looking forward to bringing him to our “different” conference.
Bio:
Michael Persimmon teaches meditation for tech nerds. He spent years as a successful game developer before giving up everything he owned to pursue meditation full-time, including 5 years as a non-religious monk teaching in 3 countries. He’s been a meditation teacher for twenty years, and his work today centers on practical meditation for techies: simple, grounded techniques that fit the way analytical minds learn. https://technerds.needmeditation.com