Mel is a Design Engineer at Automattic and WordPress core contributor. She loves big type, cold brew coffee, and printmaking.

Follow @melchoyce on Twitter.

Mel will be giving a talk titled “WordPress Design Trends“.

What is your favorite improvement to WordPress this past year?

I’m loving a lot of the smaller improvements to the editing experience. For example, you can now paste a link on top of a highlighted work or sentence in the editor and it’ll make that into a link! It’s pretty handy.

Why did you decide to speak at WordCamp Montreal?

It’s so close to Boston, but I’ve never actually been before. I keep hearing great things about the community in Montreal, so I decided to come check it out. :) I’ve only been to Canada once before as a kid, so I’m excited to cross over the border!

What is your talk going to be about?

I’m going to be talking about some common and new design trends in the WordPress ecosystem, including some up-and-coming features, like the WordPress API, that are sure to change the landscape. It’s going to be mostly a show-and-tell style presentation.

What is the one thing you want people to walk away with from your talk?

“Wow — WordPress can do that? WordPress can look like that?” and “Ooh… Maybe I shouldn’t do that, too.”

Who in the WordPress community inspires you? Who do you follow?

There’s a lot of awesome women in the WordPress community I find inspiring and like to follow, such as Helen Hou-Sandí, Ella Van Dorpe, Rachel Baker, Michelle Schulp, Sara Cannon, Tammie Lister, Cami Kaos, Andrea Middleton, and Jen Mylo.

What new feature would you like to see in the future?

I’d love to see more incremental updates to the editor (since it’s where I spend a lot of my time) and definitely continual UX improvements to the Customizer. I’m looking forward to being able to handle the majority of site setup in one place.

I also have some personal pet peeves I’d like to see changed, like having comments turned off on pages by default, and adding a media widget to core.