To get WordPress help from experts for free.
What’s a Happiness Bar?
A Happiness Bar is a WordCamp tradition.
It’s where you bring WordPress-related questions and an expert responds—one-on-one, in a relaxed setting—with answers that reflect knowledge and experience.
You might want to know about installing WordPress or how to get it to behave in a certain way. Your question might be about setting up a small, personal site or sorting out an issue on the type of complex installation a large company uses to face the world.
No question is too big or too small. And while our Happiness Bar pros may not have an answer for every technical question, they’ll surely sit down with you, listen and do their best to help.
You can think of the Happiness Bar as a live help desk.
Who staffs the Happiness Bar?
Our Happiness Bar experts are friendly volunteers. They may be WordCamp speakers. They may build and maintain WordPress sites for a living. They know their stuff, and they’re here for many reasons, one being to give back to WordPress and the WordPress community.
What should you bring to a Happiness Bar?
Questions.
Sometimes showing is better than telling. If it can help you explain a question, by all means show the Happiness Bar expert your site.
But this isn’t always necessary. If you don’t plan to bring a PC or another device to WordCamp Ottawa 2014, just approach the Happiness Bar, ask your question and see what you can learn.
Mike Corkum is seasoned web developer with over 14 years of experience. Currently, he works at Carleton University where he and a small team manage 250+ WordPress sites. When he’s not up to his neck in code or banging his head against his desk, he enjoys playing music and jumping out of perfectly good airplanes. 
Mike got involved with marketing in general and aerospace marketing in particular in 1980 and has been active in that field ever since. He has also developed and licensed GPS mapping software. His marketing activities got him involved with website development 2005. Since incorporating WordPress into his toolbox, this aspect has become increasingly significant. All client websites are now based on WordPress.
Elida is slightly obsessed with creating delightful user experiences and determining the best way to do just about anything. She has been WordPressing since 2006. This is her second WordCamp appearance, having spoken last year on ‘Essentials for a Solid WordPress Foundation’. She has 15 years’ experience spanning commercial photography, digital media, design, fine arts and teaching. By day, Elida is a UX Designer at Sid Lee, an acclaimed creative agency based in Montreal. By night, she enjoys sampling fine liquids such as new world wines, craft beers and gourmet balsamics.
Troy is a passionate WordPress theme developer who enjoys finding new ways to push the envelope and provide more powerful, yet even more simplistic tools and options for clients with each new project. With over ten years of experience in creative environments, Troy has dedicated the last six years, both professionally and personally, to working with WordPress in a variety of ways. Currently a web developer at Carleton University, Troy is heavily involved in assisting a small team to enhance and strengthen the universities online brand and web presence and provide hundreds of content editors with intuitive tools to help promote their various initiatives and activities.
Paul is a senior WordPress Developer currently working on WordPress VIP themes for Metro News and a supper secret WordPress Start-up.
Tony Perez is one of three co-founders at Sucuri, Inc. Sucuri is a globally recognized organization committed to making the interwebs safer, one website at a time. Tony functions as the Chief Operating Officer at Sucuri, managing the growing staff of 30+ employees, 20,000 + clients and over 200,000 unique domains, performing over 2,000,000 unique website malware scans a month. He is very passionate about website security awareness and education, with a special passion for intrusion forensics and attacker psychology. Tony is a former Marine Corps veteran with two combat tours in Iraq, and holds an undergraduate degree in Technology Management and spends most of his spare time on the mats refining his Jiu Jitsu technique.
Ariadni Athanassiadis is an attorney advising entrepreneurs and professionals about their opportunities to make their expertise, innovations and creativity work for their enterprises and the communities they serve. Drawing upon her combined experience in science, the arts, teaching and business, she established Kyma Professional Corporation to focus on custom intellectual property solutions for small to medium size enterprises. In the community, Ariadni teaches part-time at the University of Ottawa, and is active in the Women’s Business Network, the Ottawa Chapter for Women in Science and Engineering and the Algonquin College Marketing and Management Studies Advisory Committee.
Joey is a Code Wrangler at Automattic, where he works on partnerships, third party integrations, APIs and other projects for WordPress.com. He contributes to several open-source projects including WordPress.org plugins and WordPress core. Joey’s also an enthusiastic world traveller and has been working on the road for several months.
