Meet the 2016 Magento Masters: Mentors

At MagentoLive France, we announced the Magento Masters program to recognize
top
contributors in our ecosystem. Last week we shared this
year’s
Movers with you. Today we reveal the
nine
Magento Masters selected as Mentors.

Mentors are top contributors to the Magento Community who
are
highly active educating others and developing resources
for
them. They have proven expertise in building successful
Magento
implementations.

I am delighted to introduce you to our Mentors for the
2016
Magento Masters program:

David
Alger

Director of Technology, Classy
Llama
United States

David Alger is Director of Technology at Classy Llama and is
an
active member of the development team. He has been working
in
the Magento eCommerce consulting space and active in the
Magento community since early 2009. David was involved in
the
creation of the first Magento developer certification, played
a
key part in building the Magento 1 responsive theme, and
enjoys
spending time exploring new tech. Also enjoys dabbling in
photography, learning new programming languages, and
experiencing the great outdoors.

David was selected as a Magento Master for 2016 based on
his
2015 contributions on Github and DevDocs, speaking
engagements
at PHP industry events to help introduce others to Magento
2.0
and his role on the Github Community Team processing
community
contributions by actively triaging comments, suggestions
and
issues being reported.

Fabrizio
Branca

Lead System Developer, AOE

United States

Fabrizio
Branca is the Lead System Developer at AOE. He, his
wife
Janine and their two children live in San Francisco,
California. On
his
website he’s blogging about Open Source, Magento,
Varnish,
Selenium and AWS. He focuses on innovative technologies,
high
performance applications and solid development, testing
and
deployment processes.

Fabrizio was selected as a Magento Master for 2016 based on
his
2015 community efforts through screencast tutorials on
MageCasts.io,
organizing community hackathons to innovate on the
Magento
platform and speaking engagements centered around deploying
the
Magento platform and building Magento modules.

Phillip
Jackson

Magento Practice Lead, Something
Digital

United States

Phillip has been developing eCommerce solutions since
1998.
With over 15 years of experience creating unique online
customer experiences, Phillip has both built and managed
Magento installations for some of the world’s most
recognizable
brands. He is the organizer of the Magento SoFla Meetup
and
hosts the successful podcast, MageTalk, with over 20,000
monthly listeners. Visit his blog.

Phillip was selected as a Magento Master for 2016 based on
his
2015 contributions as co-host of the community podcast
MageTalk,
being a
frequent speaker about the Magento platform at various
events,
organizing the South Florida Magento Developer
Meetup
group and moderating community posts on Magento
StackExchange. 

Vinai
Kopp

Freelance Developer & Trainer

Germany

Being a web developer for most of his life, Vinai
specialized
on Magento in 2008. He is an official trainer for the Magento
U
developer trainings. He loves learning and the Magento
community, two things that go together very well. He is
passionate about software craftsmanship and producing
high
quality solutions. When not working or studying, Vinai
enjoys
his family, beekeeping, running and traveling.

Vinai was selected as a Magento Master for 2016 based on
his
2015 contributions to Github, consultation on DevDocs,
efforts
with MageUnconference,
consistently helping others in the community on StackExchange and
his
role on the Github Community Team. Much of our community
has
been taught by Vinai at some point and would consider him
a
mentor.

Sander
Mangel

Technical Lead, FitForMe

Netherlands

Coffee and eCommerce enthusiast living in Rotterdam, The
Netherlands. Passionate about Magento and everything
involved
with the community. “Getting others involved and reaching
out
to new people is what drives me to do events like
MageStackDay,
user groups and help with Meet Magento. For me,
collaboration
is what drives true innovation. That goes for everything
in
life but especially the work I do with Magento development.”

Sander was selected as a Magento Master for 2016 based on
his
2015 contributions through organizing the Magento User Group Rotterdam, translating
the
Magento platform into Dutch, organizing MageStackDay
and
consistently helping others in the community on Magento
StackExchange.

David
Manners

CTO, Sitewards GmbH

Germany

David is CTO as Sitewards in Frankfurt Germany, who
specialize
in eCommerce solutions.

His main passion is with Magento and other eCommerce
software,
having worked in that field for the past eight years. He
also
likes to champion developer welfare and enjoys a challenge
with
regular expressions. Through the MageEngage youtube channel
he
finds out about the people behind the twitter handles.

David was selected as a Magento Master for 2016 based on
his
2015 contributions through spotlighting others in the
community
on MageEngage, educating others on
Mistake
Driven Development through speaking engagements,
organizing
MageStackDay and consistently helping others
in
the community on Magento StackExchange.

Brent
Peterson

Magento Evangelist, Wagento
Creative

United States

Brent W. Peterson is the Chief Magento Evangelist and
Agency
Coach at Wagento. He loves to run, bike and ski, in that
order.
He is often found at Magento events organizing running
meetups
with his wife Susan. You can tweet him @brentwpeterson.

Brent was selected as a Magento Master for 2016 based on
his
2015 speaking engagements on a variety of Magento topics
from
project management to kickstarting a Magento store, keeping
the
Magento community in shape by organizing running events
everywhere he goes and consistently helping the community
by
moderating, and answering questions on, the Magento
Forums.

Marius
Străjeru

Senior PHP Developer, Arnia Software

Romania

Marius has been a PHP developer for the past 10 years. He
has
been working on Magento since v1.0 was released in 2008,
and
he’s been addicted ever since. Mostly, Marius likes to work
on
tools to help Magento developers, mainly because he wants
to
help himself. His other addiction is
magento.stackexchange.com
where he’s been asking and answering questions since it
started
as he believes it’s a great place to share knowledge.
Since
December 2014, Marius has been a moderator on
magento.stackexchange.com and has been helping the
community
keep the website clean.

Marius was selected as a 2016 Magento Master based on his
2015
speaking engagements educating the community on Magento 2.0
as
well as organizing MageStackDay and consistently helping others
on
Magento StackExchange by answering questions
and
moderating as needed.

Anna
Völkl

Senior Magento Developer, LimeSoda
Interactive Marketing GmbH

Austria

Anna has been a professional software engineer since 2006
and
started working with Magento in 2011. She is passionate
about
securing IT systems, raising awareness and implementing
mechanisms to improve security. She likes to share her
knowledge and experience through her contributions to
magento.stackexchange.com/MageStackDay, giving talks at
Magento
events, interacting on Twitter and is an active member of
the
Magento developer community. Anna holds a Bachelor’s degree
in
IT & Telecommunications and a Master’s degree in
Information and IT Security.

Anna was selected as a 2016 Magento Master based on her
2015
contributions to Magento 2.0 security, helping to
organize
Magento-Stammtisch Wien, educating
the
community on Magento platform security through speaking
engagements, organizing MageStackDay and consistently helping
others in the community on Magento
StackExchange.
 

Meet the Makers

Meet the Movers