Matt Cohen is the Chief Product Officer at WooThemes, market leaders in premium WordPress products and the creators of WooCommerce. He spends his day managing his engineering team and a growing team of product managers.
With a deep love of web development, Matt began tinkering with HTML4 in high school (before CSS existed) and developed a strong bond with early web development languages and principles. Then, he worked as a senior developer at a handful of agencies before joining WooThemes as a senior web developer in late 2010. A love for product creation, customer experience, and well-architected products led Matt to move into the chief product officer's role, where he now oversees the design and creation of all products developed within WooThemes.
Matt loves WordPress deeply and is an engineer at his core, with a strong interest in creating amazing customer experiences. In his free time, he enjoys nature, punk rock, and forgotten 90s television.
Cyril Pierron is a tech-savvy and life-curious engineer and web addict. He started programming at the age of 8 and has been working in the field of telecommunications for 12 years. He has been a solution architect in the e-commerce sector since 2011. He is married and the father of a lovely girl.
As an e-commerce expert, Cyril has noticed an increasing requirement to blend both the online store and marketing content into one consistent unified experience for consumers.
Olivier Pons is a senior developer who's been building websites since 1997. He's a teacher at IngeSup (École Supérieure d'Ingénierie Informatique, http://www.ingesup.com/ and http://www.y-nov.com); the University of Sciences (IUT) in Aix-en-Provence, France; ISEN (Institut Supérieur de l'Électronique et du Numérique); and École d'Ingénieurs des Mines de Gardanne, where he teaches state-of-the-art web techniques: MVC fundamentals, Symfony, WordPress, PHP, HTML, CSS, jQuery / jQuery Mobile, Node.js, AngularJS, Apache, NoSQL, Linux basics, and advanced VIM techniques. He has already done some technical reviews, including Ext JS 4 First Look, jQuery Hotshot, jQuery Mobile Web Development Essentials, WordPress Complete, and jQuery 2.0 for Designers Beginner's Guide, all by Packt Publishing. In 2011, he left a full-time job as a Delphi and PHP developer to concentrate on his own company, HQF Development (http://hqf.fr). He currently runs a number of websites, including http://krystallopolis.fr, http://artsgaleries.com, http://www.battlesoop.fr, http://www.livrepizzas.fr, http://www.papdevis.fr, and http://olivierpons.fr, which is his own web development blog. He works as a consultant, teacher, project manager, and sometimes helps big companies as a senior and highly skilled developer.
Ardian Yuli Setyanto, S.Kom, has been programming since his high school days. He featured in the national selection for Tim Olimpiade Komputer Indonesia (TOKI, which means Indonesia Computer Olympiad Team) twice, in 2002 and 2003. This persuaded him to study computer science at Gadjah Mada University (UGM). He graduated in 2009, the first among his other friends, with a score of 3.5 out of 4. He also used WordPress for his essay during his bachelor's degree. Ardian developed his own plugin and combined it with a GSM phone to read and send SMS (text messages), instead of the usual e-mail service used to manage WordPress comments, which he discussed in his essay.
After graduating from the university, he started working as a freelancer using WordPress and PrestaShop. These CMSes are widely used in his home country, Indonesia. Ardian was a technical reviewer for PrestaShop 1.3 Beginners Guide, Packt Publishing, written by John Horton. He was also selected as a local moderator for the PrestaShop forum in the Indonesia region.
Nowadays, he works as a backend developer, using PHP and Ruby. Some of his favorite frameworks are Symfony2, Rails, and Sinatra. You can read his blog at http://www.ardianys.com, which discusses programming and his beloved family—Niela, Dzulqarnain, and Nusaibah. If you have any technical questions about this book, you can contact him via Twitter at @ardianys.