We are a workers’ collective, a partnership of professionals who pool our talents and tools . We met through the WordPress NYC Meetup, brought together by our mutual appreciation for simplicity and the evolution of small things.
Each member brings a unique set of skills and experiences to the Collective, but we all share a strong belief in open-source software, collaborative effort and empowering the individual WordPress user.
Together, we are a mighty force that you can harness to grow your business, spread your message and know that real people have your back. Here’s a bit more about what each of us does in our “real” lives and our special capabilities and areas of expertise:
Dana Skallman
Came to WordPress by way of tinkering with the outer-space of the Internet and all the possibilities it holds for communicating, archiving information and displaying what’s of interest to people. It wasn’t long before she realized that her zeal for promoting equitable access to technology, without big business-reliance.
With Tadpole Dana’s expertise is in developing and integrating organizational workflows using WordPress as a Content Management System (CMS) & configuring CiviCRM as a core Constituent Resource Manager (CRM). She takes pride in providing individuals and organizations with the freedom to focus on their mission while leveraging all that open-source technology has to offer.
Rindy Portfolio
Is a front-end web developer and writer who has been using WordPress since 2005, when he discovered its incredible ease of use and started learning how to code his own themes. The power that WordPress gives the individual user was immediately apparent to him.
Rindy has held previous jobs in media and publishing, and when he is not wrangling themes and plugins for Tadpole, he works in the tech department of a global market research firm. Previously a regular at the WPNYC meetups, as well as an organizer of WordCamp NYC, he is now based in Malaysia and helping to organizer WordCamp Kuala Lumpur.
Melissa Cahill
Her background is in web marketing/communications projects for clients in a variety of industries. From 2011-2017 she ran Panoptic Online Marketing, LLC., a full-service Internet Marketing Agency providing integrated solutions for small businesses seeking to leverage their online presence through SEO, paid search advertising, email, social media and SMS (text message) marketing.
Melissa supports Tadpole with all kinds of tasks: responding to RFPs, drafting and reviewing proposals, working on Tadpole’s content marketing strategy, and occasionally consulting with Tadpole’s clients on their SEO needs. Building a new WordPress website (or redesigning an old one) is the perfect opportunity to develop your SEO strategy — which is essentially a content marketing strategy. What is she talking about? Ask her.
Kevin Cristiano
Watches over the Tadpole servers and infrastructure. He has a strong background in SQL databases and has not met a command line he did not like. Kevin came to WordPress in 2005 by chance and has stayed with it ever since. Having spent many years working on hand coded sites, the ability to give bloggers, site owners and just about everyone the ability to not only control their content, but to manage it themselves is the greatest strength of WordPress.
Tadpole is privileged to partner with…
Christian Wach, author of two plugins we use regularly on our client sites: CiviCRM WordPress Member Sync, and a plugin for syncing Event Organiser events with CiviCRM events. With a background in the visual and performing arts, and training in math and sciences, Christian focus on ways to use narrative, usability and accessibility to enhance the viewer’s experience. His understanding of object–orientated programming techniques allows him to develop software in which complex behaviors emerge from simple components.
Andrei Mondoc, author of Caldera Forms CiviCRM integration. Having studied electronics and technical drawing, Andrei’s main passion has always been to figure out how things work and has done so by crafting, building, creating (and breaking) stuff, from wood sculpting to guitar pedals, including auto repair and figuring out how to fix a toilet. He wrote his first line of code trying to port Linux drivers to Mac OS (in the PowerPC era). When he’s not punching code, he’s vandalizing the legal walls of London with street art, or smashing the guitar while listening to Led Zeppelin.