Speakers
Jessica Kerr - Lead Engineer at Atomist
Jessica Kerr is a developer of development systems. She works remotely from St. Louis, for Atomist, where she writes automations and automation infrastructure in TypeScript, Clojure, and whatever else is needed. She is a back-end developer who believes the front-end is most crucial. Jessica speaks at conferences in the US and Europe; find her on the >Code podcast (greaterthancode.com) and on Twitter and Medium as @jessitron.
Lyndsey Padget - Solutions Architect at VMLY&R Kansas City
Lyndsey is a technology leader with nearly 20 years of software and web development experience at both mega-corporations and startups. She enjoys sharing in-depth knowledge on topics such as Git & release management, MERN stack development, microservices & REST, test-driven development, agile & kanban, healthy teams, diversity & inclusion, public speaking, and more. Lyndsey is involved in local organizations that encourage women, young and old, to explore careers in math and science. She believes that the difference between a good software engineer and a great one often has little to do with code.
Esther Derby - Author of 7 Rules for Positive Productive Change. Co-author of Behind Closed Doors: Secrets of Great Management and Agile Retrospectives.
I draw on four decades of experience leading, observing, and living organizational change. I work with a broad array of organizations. My clients include both start ups and Fortune 500 companies.
Based on experience and research, my approach blends attention to humans and deep knowledge of complex adaptive systems.
I have been called one of the most influential voices within the agile communities when it comes to developing organizations, coaching teams, and transforming management. My work over many years has influenced coaches and leaders across many companies.
Background
I started my career as a programmer. However, over the years I’ve worn many hats, including business owner, internal consultant and manager. From all these perspectives, one thing was clear: individual, team, and even organizational success depends greatly on the work environment and organizational dynamics. As a result, I have spent the last twenty-five years helping companies shape their environment for optimum success.
My formal education includes an MA in Organizational Leadership and a certificate in Human Systems Dynamics.
Follow me on Twitter @estherderby
Arty Starr - Author of Idea Flow, Founder, FlowInsight
Arty Starr is a recognized Flow Experience expert, researcher, speaker and thought leader, and author of Idea Flow, how to measure the friction in software development. Arty's PhD research is developing a theory of momentum in software development, and she is creator of the FLOWS platform designed to help developers thrive and find joy through more time in the flow state. The company she founded, FlowInsight, is on a mission to bring back joy to our everyday work.
Arty is also a 2D/3D animator and artist, and has spent the last couple years building 3D apps in AR. She loves to share about her experiences with these technologies.
Brian Sletten - Forward Leaning Software Engineer
Brian Sletten is a liberal arts-educated software engineer with a focus on forward-leaning technologies. His experience has spanned many industries including retail, banking, online games, defense, finance, hospitality and health care. He has a B.S. in Computer Science from the College of William and Mary and lives in Auburn, CA. He focuses on web architecture, resource-oriented computing, social networking, the Semantic Web, data science, 3D graphics, visualization, scalable systems, security consulting and other technologies of the late 20th and early 21st Centuries. He is also a rabid reader, devoted foodie and has excellent taste in music. If pressed, he might tell you about his International Pop Recording career.
Ken Sipe - Cloud Architect
Ken is a distributed application engineer. Ken has worked with Fortune 500 companies to small startups in the roles of developer, designer, application architect and enterprise architect. Ken's current focus is on containers, container orchestration, high scale micro-service design and continuous delivery systems.
Ken is an international speaker on the subject of software engineering speaking at conferences such as JavaOne, JavaZone, Great Indian Developer Summit (GIDS), and The Strange Loop. He is a regular speaker with NFJS where he is best known for his architecture and security hacking talks. In 2009, Ken was honored by being awarded the JavaOne Rockstar Award at JavaOne in SF, California and the JavaZone Rockstar Award at JavaZone in Oslo, Norway as the top ranked speaker.
Nathaniel Schutta - Architect as a Service
Nathaniel T. Schutta is a software architect and Java Champion focused on cloud computing, developer happiness and building usable applications. A proponent of polyglot programming, Nate has written multiple books, appeared in countless videos and many podcasts. He’s also a seasoned speaker who regularly presents at worldwide conferences, No Fluff Just Stuff symposia, meetups, universities, and user groups. In addition to his day job, Nate is an adjunct professor at the University of Minnesota, where he teaches students to embrace (and evaluate) technical change. Driven to rid the world of bad presentations, he coauthored the book Presentation Patterns with Neal Ford and Matthew McCullough, and he also published Thinking Architecturally and Responsible Microservices available from O’Reilly. His latest book, Fundamentals of Software Engineering, is currently available in early release.
Mark Richards - Independent Software Architect, Author of Fundamentals of Software Architecture
Mark Richards is an experienced, hands-on software architect involved in the architecture, design, and implementation of microservices architectures, service-oriented architectures, and distributed systems. He has been in the software industry since 1983 and has significant experience and expertise in application, integration, and enterprise architecture. Mark is the founder of DeveloperToArchitect.com, a website devoted to helping developers in the journey to software architect. He is the author of numerous technical books and videos, including the recently published Fundamentals of Software Architecture, Microservices AntiPatterns and Pitfalls, Microservices vs. SOA, the Software Architecture Fundamentals video series, The Enterprise Messaging video series, Java Message Service, 2nd Edition, and contributing author to 97 Things Every Software Architect Should Know. Mark has a master’s degree in computer science and is a regular conference speaker at the No Fluff Just Stuff (NFJS) Symposium Series. He has spoken at hundreds of conferences and user groups around the world on a variety of enterprise-related technical topics.
Rohit Bhardwaj - Director of Architecture, Expert in cloud-native solutions
Rohit Bhardwaj is a Director of Architecture working at Salesforce. Rohit has extensive experience architecting multi-tenant cloud-native solutions in Resilient Microservices Service-Oriented architectures using AWS Stack. In addition, Rohit has a proven ability in designing solutions and executing and delivering transformational programs that reduce costs and increase efficiencies.
As a trusted advisor, leader, and collaborator, Rohit applies problem resolution, analytical, and operational skills to all initiatives and develops strategic requirements and solution analysis through all stages of the project life cycle and product readiness to execution.
Rohit excels in designing scalable cloud microservice architectures using Spring Boot and Netflix OSS technologies using AWS and Google clouds. As a Security Ninja, Rohit looks for ways to resolve application security vulnerabilities using ethical hacking and threat modeling. Rohit is excited about architecting cloud technologies using Dockers, REDIS, NGINX, RightScale, RabbitMQ, Apigee, Azul Zing, Actuate BIRT reporting, Chef, Splunk, Rest-Assured, SoapUI, Dynatrace, and EnterpriseDB. In addition, Rohit has developed lambda architecture solutions using Apache Spark, Cassandra, and Camel for real-time analytics and integration projects.
Rohit has done MBA from Babson College in Corporate Entrepreneurship, Masters in Computer Science from Boston University and Harvard University. Rohit is a regular speaker at No Fluff Just Stuff, UberConf, RichWeb, GIDS, and other international conferences.
Rohit loves to connect on http://www.productivecloudinnovation.com.
http://linkedin.com/in/rohit-bhardwaj-cloud or using Twitter at rbhardwaj1.
Tim Berglund - VP, Developer Relations at StarTree
Tim is a teacher, author, and technology leader with StarTree, where he serves as the Vice President of Developer Relations. He is a regular speaker at conferences and a presence on YouTube explaining complex technology topics in an accessible way. He tweets as @tlberglund, blogs every few years at http://timberglund.com, and lives in Littleton, CO, USA. He has three grown children and two grandchildren, a fact about which he is rather excited.
Craig Walls - Author of 'Spring in Action' and 'Building Talking Apps'
Craig Walls is an engineer with VMware, Java Champion, Alexa Champion, and the author of Spring in Action, Spring Boot in Action, and Build Talking Apps. He's a zealous promoter of the Spring Framework, speaking frequently at local user groups and conferences and writing about Spring. When he's not slinging code, Craig is planning his next trip to Disney World or Disneyland and spending as much time as he can with his wife, two daughters, 1 bird and 2 dogs.
Venkat Subramaniam - Founder of Agile Developer, Inc.
Dr. Venkat Subramaniam is an award-winning author, founder of Agile Developer, Inc., creator of agilelearner.com, and an instructional professor at the University of Houston.
He has trained and mentored thousands of software developers in the US, Canada, Europe, and Asia, and is a regularly-invited speaker at several international conferences. Venkat helps his clients effectively apply and succeed with sustainable agile practices on their software projects.
Venkat is a (co)author of multiple technical books, including the 2007 Jolt Productivity award winning book Practices of an Agile Developer. You can find a list of his books at agiledeveloper.com. You can reach him by email at venkats@agiledeveloper.com or on twitter at @venkat_s.
Hans Dockter - Founder of Gradle
Hans Dockter is the founder of Gradle Inc., a company whose purpose is to empower software development teams to reach their full potential for joy, creativity, and productivity. To address his own personal frustrations as a developer, Hans co-founded the Gradle Build Tool project which was named by TechCrunch as one of the top 20 most popular OSS projects. Gradle Build Tool is now downloaded more than 23 million times a month. He then led the development of Gradle Enterprise which today is the leading enabling solution for the practice of Developer Productivity Engineering.
Previous to Gradle, Inc, Hans successfully led numerous large-scale enterprise builds and emerged as a thought leader in project automation. He is an advocate of Domain Driven Design, having taught classes and delivered presentations on this topic together with Eric Evans. Hans was also a committer for the JBoss project and founded the JBoss-IDE.
Aimee Knight - Full Stack Software Engineer @ Built Technologies
Aimee Knight is a Nashville-based full stack software engineer at Built Technologies. Currently, she specializes in JavaScript, React, and CSS but has worked extensively in Angular, Node.js, and Ruby on Rails as well. As a former professional figure skater, she has a tremendous amount of energy and grit. Outside of work, Aimee is a Google Developer Expert in web technologies, a panelist on the JavaScript Jabber podcast, and an international keynote speaker. She has been a weekly panelist on the Angular Air podcast, a co-organizer for CharmCityJS, and a mentor for Baltimore NodeSchool and Rails Bridge.
Avdi Grimm - Code Cleric
In his 20-year software development career, Avdi Grimm has worked on everything from aerospace embedded systems to enterprise web applications. He’s a consulting pair-programmer, the author of several popular Ruby programming books, and a recipient of the Ruby Hero award for service to the Ruby community. Since 2011 he has been teaching developers how to work more effectively (and have fun doing) it at RubyTapas.com.
Dan Woods - JVM and Cloud Enthusiast
Dan Woods is a Senior Engineer with The Groundwork. He is passionate about software architecture and best practices. Dan is active in the Java and Groovy communities and is a core team member for the Ratpack web framework open source project.
Scott Wierschem - Founder: Keep Calm & Refactor Project
Scott Wierschem has been coding for 35 years now. He loves nothing more than to dig into an old, crufty ball of mud codebase and refactor it to be more flexible and robust.
His Keep Calm and Refactor project is created to help developers get their unruly code under control so they can work on fun and rewarding projects.
Kate Wardin - Senior Engineering Manager @ Netflix
Kate Wardin is an Engineering Manager at Netflix and is based in Minneapolis, Minnesota. She enjoys exploring the psychology of happiness at work and is passionate about building inclusive and high performing teams via people-first leadership. She believes in the power of humor to bring people together to create a positive and cohesive workplace. In her free time, Kate enjoys unwinding by watching The Office or chasing her toddler and dog.
Alexander von Zitzewitz - Founder and Managing Director, Hello2morrow
Alexander von Zitzewitz is founder, managing director of the company and CEO of the US subsidiary. He has more than 20 years of project and management experience. In 1993 he founded ootec - a company focused on project services around object oriented software technology. This company was sold to the French Valtech group in March 2000 and served customers like Siemens, BMW, Thyssen-Krupp-Stahl and other well known names in German industry. From 2003 to early 2005 he was working as Director of Central Europe for the French company Xcalia S.A. Since the summer of 2008 he is living in Massachusetts. His areas of expertise are object oriented system design and large scale system architecture. Alexander has a degree in Computer Science from the Technical University of Munich.
Sam Snyder - VP of Engineering at Moderne
Sam Snyder has spent the past decade working on improving developer happiness with better tooling. At Tableau software, he used data from the development and deployment pipeline to systematically seize the greatest opportunities for improvement and eliminate the greatest pain points. At Gradle, he integrated that process and data visualization methodology into Gradle Enterprise. Now as VP of Engineering at Moderne, Sam leads development on the core refactoring technologies and teaches Moderne's customers how to automate away the tedious, repetitive parts of software development.
Josh Smith - Enterprise Architect
Josh has been in in IT for 15 years, as a developer, lead dev, tech lead, architect, and enterprise architect. He's worked on big teams, small teams, and been on a team of one. In the process of all of this, he's learned a ton, and he loves to mentor and share that information.
He also loves strategy – laying out plans and figuring out dependencies, which order to do things in. Included in this is a deep love of the complicated business + people + culture + tech (especially tech that makes people's lives easier) of IT strategy.
Mansi Sheth - Principal Security Researcher at Veracode
Mansi Sheth is a Principal Security Researcher at Veracode Inc. In her career, she has been involved with breaking, defending and building secure applications. Mansi researches various languages and technologies, finding insecure usages in customer code and suggests automation measures in finding vulnerabilities for Veracode's Binary Static Analysis service. She is an avid traveller with the motto “If not now, then when?”
Maxim Salnikov - Azure Developer Technical Lead at Microsoft
Maxim Salnikov is Oslo-based cloud and web front-end geek with the strong passion to the developer community building. He architects and builds complex web applications since the end of the last century, and has extensive experience with all aspects of web platform focusing on the apps managing real-time data from IoT devices, and Progressive Web Apps. He is a Google Developer Expert in Web Technologies & IoT, and a former Microsoft MVP in Development Technologies.
Maxim is a founder and active contributor to two conferences: Mobile Era and ngVikings - Nordics’ main conferences for mobile and Angular developers respectively. Also, he leads Norway’s largest meetups dedicated to web front-end and mobile: Angular Oslo, Mobile Meetup, Oslo PWA.
Maxim is passionate about sharing his web platform experience and knowledge with the community. He travels extensively for visiting developers events and speaking/training at conferences and meetups around the world.
Baruch Sadogursky - Principal Developer Productivity Engineering Advocate, Gradle
Baruch Sadogursky (@jbaruch) did Java before it had generics, DevOps before there was Docker, and DevRel before it had a name. He started DevRel at JFrog when it was ten people and took it all the way to a successful $6B IPO by helping engineers solve problems. Now Baruch keeps helping engineers solve problems but also helps companies help engineers solve problems. He is a co-author of the “Liquid Software” and “DevOps Tools for Java Developers” books, serves on multiple conference program committees, and regularly speaks at numerous most prestigious industry conferences, including Kubecon, JavaOne (RIP), Devoxx, QCon, DevRelCon, DevOpsDays (all over), DevOops (not a typo) and others. After a tenure of eleven years in JFrog DevRel, Baruch is the Principal Developer Productivity Engineering Advocate at Gradle
Johanna Rothman - Speaker, Consultant, Author for managing product development
Johanna Rothman, known as the “Pragmatic Manager,” offers frank advice for your tough problems. She helps leaders and teams learn to see simple and reasonable things that might work. Equipped with that knowledge, they can decide how to adapt their product development.
With her trademark practicality and humor, Johanna is the author of 18 books about many aspects of product development. She’s written these books:
- Project Lifecycles: How to Reduce Risks, Release Successful Products, and Increase Agility
*Become a Successful Independent Consultant - Free Your Inner Nonfiction Writer
- Modern Management Made Easy series: Practical Ways to Manage Yourself; Practical Ways to Lead and Serve (Manage) Others; Practical Ways to Lead an Innovative Organization
- Write a Conference Proposal the Conference Wants and Accepts
- From Chaos to Successful Distributed Agile Teams (with Mark Kilby)
- Create Your Successful Agile Project: Collaborate, Measure, Estimate, Deliver
- Agile and Lean Program Management: Scaling Collaboration Across the Organization
- Manage Your Project Portfolio: Increase Your Capacity and Finish More Projects, 2nd edition
- Project Portfolio Tips: Twelve Ideas for Focusing on the Work You Need to Start & Finish
- Diving for Hidden Treasures: Finding the Value in Your Project Portfolio (with Jutta Eckstein)
- Predicting the Unpredictable: Pragmatic Approaches to Estimating Project Schedule or Cost
- Manage Your Job Search
- Hiring Geeks That Fit
- The 2008 Jolt Productivity award-winning Manage It! Your Guide to Modern, Pragmatic Project Management
- Behind Closed Doors: Secrets of Great Management (with Esther Derby)
In addition to articles and columns on various sites, Johanna writes the Managing Product Development blog on her website, jrothman.com, as well as a personal blog on createadaptablelife.com.
Justin Reock - Field CTO of Gradle Enterprise
Justin Reock is the Chief Evangelist and Field CTO of Gradle Enterprise, and is an outspoken blogger, speaker, and free software evangelist. He has over 20 years of experience working in various software roles and has delivered enterprise solutions, technical leadership, and community education on a range of topics.
Matt Raible - Developer Advocate at Okta
Matt Raible is a Java Champion, Web Developer, and Developer Advocate at Okta. He loves to architect and build APIs and slick-looking UIs using CSS + JavaScript. When he's not advocating Okta and open source, he likes to ski with his family, drive his VWs and enjoy craft beer.
Reza Rahman - Java EE Evangelist @ Oracle
Reza is a recovering independent consultant and now Java EE evangelist at Oracle. He is the author of the popular book EJB 3 in Action. Reza is a frequent speaker at developer gatherings worldwide including JavaOne and NFJS. He is an avid contributor to community sites like JavaLobby and TSS. Reza has been a member of the Java EE, EJB and JMS expert groups. He implemented the EJB container for the Resin open source Java EE application server.
All views voiced are squarely mine alone, not Oracle's.
Laine Minor - IT & Human Architect
Laine has been a developer, a technical lead, a stay at home mom, and an IT architect – and that last was a broad enough title that it let her do both technical things AND cultural things.
She realized then that that was her most favorite place to be, in that in-between place of technology and culture.
She also learned that enabling people and organizations is HARD work, and that explaining that in-between place can help.
Chris Maki - Founder & Chief Architect of Rip City Software
Chris is the founder and Chief Architect of Rip City Software, a company dedicated to Java Microservices and building systems in AWS. He has more than 20 years of experience creating web scale enterprise systems. Throughout his career, Chris has been a user group leader, speaker, and author. He's passionate about inclusive leadership, empowering teams, focusing on differentiated work and streamlining the development, testing and deployment process.
Rachel Laycock - Architect with ThoughtWorks, Inc.
Architect with ThoughtWorks, Inc.
Brent Laster - Global author, trainer and founder of Tech Skills Transformations LLC
Hi, I'm Brent Laster - a global trainer and book author, DevOps director at a top technology firm, and founder and president of Tech Skills Transformations LLC. I've been working with and presenting at NFJS events for ten years now and it is always exciting and interesting.
Through my decades in programming and management,I've always tried to make time to learn and develop both technical and leadership skills and share them with others Regardless of the topic or technology, my belief is that there is no substitute for the excitement and sense of potential that come from providing others with the knowledge they need to help them accomplish their goals.
In my spare time, I hang out with my wife Anne-Marie, 4 children and a small dog in Cary, North Carolina and design trainings and write books. You can find me on LinkedIn (linkedin.com/in/brentlaster), Twitter (@brentclaster) or through my company's website at www.getskillsnow.com.
Kenneth Kousen - President, Kousen IT, Inc.
Ken Kousen is a Java Champion, several time JavaOne Rock Star, and a Grails Rock Star. He is the author of the Pragmatic Library books “Mockito Made Clear” and “Help Your Boss Help You,” the O'Reilly books “Kotlin Cookbook”, “Modern Java Recipes”, and “Gradle Recipes for Android”, and the Manning book “Making Java Groovy”. He also has recorded over a dozen video courses for the O'Reilly Learning Platform, covering topics related to Android, Spring, Java, Groovy, Grails, and Gradle.
His academic background include BS degrees in Mechanical Engineering and Mathematics from M.I.T., an MA and Ph.D. in Aerospace Engineering from Princeton, and an MS in Computer Science from R.P.I. He is currently President of Kousen IT, Inc., based in Connecticut.
Steve Kosten - Security Consultant @ Cypress Data Defense
Steve Kosten is a security consultant at Cypress Data Defense and an instructor for the SANS DEV541 Secure Coding in Java/JEE: Developing Defensible Applications course. He's previously performed security work in the defense and financial sectors and headed up the security department for a financial services firm. He is currently the Open Web Application Security Project (OWASP) Denver chapter leader and is on the board for the OWASP AppSec USA conference. He has presented security talks before numerous conferences. He is experienced in secure code review, vulnerability assessment, penetration testing, risk management. He holds a bachelor of science in Aerospace Engineering from the Pennsylvania State University and a Master of Science in Information Security from James Madison University. He currently maintains GSSP-JAVA, GWAPT, CISSP, and CISM certifications. Steve resides in Golden, Colorado. In his spare time, Steve enjoys attending his childrens' sporting events with his wife, road and mountain biking, snowboarding, golfing, volleyball, and paragliding.
Kirk Knoernschild - Software Developer & Mentor
Kirk is software developer with a passion for building great software. He takes a keen interest in design, architecture, application development platforms, agile development, and the IT industry in general, especially as it relates to software development. His recent book, Java Application Architecture was published in 2012, and presents 18 patterns that help you design modular software.
Dave Klein - Developer Advocate with Confluent
After 28 years as a developer, architect, project manager (recovered), author, trainer, conference organizer, and homeschooling dad, Dave Klein landed his dream job as a developer advocate at Confluent. Dave is marveling in and eager to help others explore the amazing world of event streaming with Apache Kafka.
Christina Kayastha - Professional JS Nerd
Hello World, I'm Christina!
By day I'm a Senior Software Engineer at Vistaprint in the Greater Boston Area, USA. By night I working on a range of side projects, and am active in the tech community (:
In my free time I love competing in hackathons, attending and speaking at meetups and conferences, and enjoy mentoring and volunteering for community events. As a software engineer I like having the power to build anything from rapid prototypes to complex applications. I believe in learning by doing, and found myself learning Angular 2 by working on the ParkAbler project - a webapp that shows accessible parking in Boston.
In my talks I'll be sharing with you some of the valuable lessons that I've learned and tips and tricks to get your own Angular 2 app up and running!
Sia Karamalegos - Web Performance at Shopify
Sia Karamalegos is a developer, international conference speaker, and writer. She is a Google Developer Expert in Web Technologies, a Cloudinary Media Developer Expert, and a Stripe Community Expert. She co-organizes the Eleventy Meetup which won the 2021 Jammies Award for Outstanding Community Meetup. She currently works on web performance at Shopify.
She graduated from Texas A&M University with a BS in chemical engineering and received her MBA from Harvard Business School. When she's not coding, speaking, or consulting, Sia likes to write short stories and dabble in charcoal figure drawing. She's also an avid endurance athlete.
Christopher Judd - CTO of Manifest Solutions
Christopher Judd is CTO and partner at Manifest Solutions (http://www.manifestcorp.com), an international speaker, Java Champion, an open source evangelist, and the Central Ohio Java Users Group (http://www.cojug.org) leader. He is an accomplished writer having co-authored Beginning Groovy and Grails (Apress, 2008), Enterprise Java Development on a Budget (Apress, 2003) and Pro Eclipse JST (Apress, 2005) as well as the author of the children’s book “Bearable Moments”. Based in Columbus Ohio, he has spent over 20 years architecting and developing software for organizations ranging from Fortune 50 companies to start-ups across various industries including insurance, health care, education, retail, government, manufacturing, service, and transportation. Mr. Judd spends most of his time consulting while continuing to focus on mentoring and training in Java, mobile and related technologies.
Jonathan Johnson - Software Architect
Jonathan Johnson is an independent software architect with a concentration on helping others unpack the riches in the cloud native and Kubernetes ecosystems.
For 30 years Jonathan has been designing useful software to move businesses forward. His career began creating laboratory instrument software and throughout the years, his focus has been moving with industry advances benefitting from Moore’s Law. He was enticed by the advent of object-oriented design and applied it to financial software. As banking moved to the internet, enterprise applications took off and Java exploded onto the scene. Since then, he has inhabited that ecosystem. After a few years, he returned to laboratory software and leveraged Java-based state machines and enterprise services to manage the terabytes of data flowing out of DNA sequencing instruments. As a hands-on architect, he applied the advantages of microservices, containers, and Kubernetes with a laboratory management platform.
Today he enjoys sharing his experience with peers. He provides perspective on ways to modernize application architectures while adhering to the fundamentals of modularity - high cohesion and low coupling.microservices, containers, and Kubernetes to their laboratory management platform.
Sean Hunter - Lead Developer at Onset Design
Sean is a software developer with a passion for learning and sharing what I know with the community. He recently moved back to Melbourne Australia after two years working in the West Midlands UK, and is currently working as lead developer for Onset Design on their next generation of web and cloud products for engineering teams.
Daniel Hinojosa - Independent Consultant
Daniel is a programmer, consultant, instructor, speaker, and recent author. With over 20 years of experience, he does work for private, educational, and government institutions. He is also currently a speaker for No Fluff Just Stuff tour. Daniel loves JVM languages like Java, Groovy, and Scala; but also dabbles with non JVM languages like Haskell, Ruby, Python, LISP, C, C++. He is an avid Pomodoro Technique Practitioner and makes every attempt to learn a new programming language every year. For downtime, he enjoys reading, swimming, Legos, football, and barbecuing.
Douglas Hawkins - Lead Developer Java Performance Monitoring at Datadog
Douglas Hawkins has been passionately developing software for the past 20 years.
Throughout Doug's career, he has focused on creating performance intensive applications
in Java ranging from bioinformatics to financial exchanges.
After 10 years as a Java developer, Doug transitioned to working on Azul's Java Virtual Machine.
Today, Doug continues his interest in building performance tools for developers as the
Lead Developer of Datadog's Java Application Performance Monitoring.
While Doug's passion for developing software remains, his true passion is in sharing his
interest in low-level details and JVM performance with others.
Ben Hall - Founder of Katacoda
Building http://katacoda.com , online interactive learning platform for software engineers, focusing on #cloudnative, #docker and #kubernetes @teamKatacoda
Gary Hale - Senior Software Engineer at Gradle
Gary is a software engineer at Gradle Inc and a compulsive automator. He is the author of several Gradle community plugins and is currently working on ways to make the Gradle open source build tool faster and more resource efficient.
Gary is an IT generalist with over 20 years experience in software development, operations, architecture and everything in between. He regularly conducts training classes on Gradle and speaks on topics related to devops, software development, and project automation.
Raju Gandhi - Founder, DefMacro Software
Raju is a software craftsman with almost 20 years of hands-on experience scoping, architecting, designing, implementing full stack applications.
He provides a 360 view of the development cycle, is proficient in a variety of programming languages and paradigms, experienced with software development methodologies, as well an expert in infrastructure and tooling.
He has long been in the pursuit of hermeticism across the development stack by championing immutability during development (with languages like Clojure), deployment (leveraging tools like Docker and Kubernetes), and provisioning and configuration via code (toolkits like Ansible, Terraform, Packer, everything-as-code).
Raju is a published author, internationally known public speaker and trainer.
Raju can be found on Twitter as @looselytyped.
In his spare time, you will find Raju reading, playing with technology, or spending time with his wonderful (and significantly better) other half.
Jack Frosch - Software Developer and Architect
Jack Frosch has been developing software professionally for almost three decades and has seen many great, and horrible, projects. He enjoys sharing what he has learned with others in exchange for hearing their stories of victory and defeat.
Jack runs the St. Louis Serverless Meetup, now with more than 600 members, focusing on serverless application architectures and implementations. He is certified as an AWS Solutions Architect Associate and regularly talks on serverless and cloud-native architecture topics.
Software development is actually Jack's second career. His first was as an aviator flying civilian and military aircraft, including the venerable McDonnell-Douglas F-4 Phantom. Please don't ask him about this as that's all he'll talk about, often with his hands illustrating some mock dogfight he once engaged in. Like that time in Germany when he dropped through a hole in the clouds only to be jumped by two F-15 Eagles out of nearby Bitburg AB. There he was, new to the European theater… Told ya. Don't get him started.
Sualeh Fatehi - Sr. Software Engineer & Dev Manager
Sualeh is an experienced software engineer and development manager. He is an open source enthusiast, and runs his own project, SchemaCrawler, which is a Java library to work with database metadata. He also contributes enhancements to other open source projects. He loves organizing and participating in hackathons, and harnessing the energy to produce innovative product ideas. He has presented several times at the New England Java Users’ Group and the Cincinnati Java Users’ Group. Sualeh has enthusiastically followed the mobile computing movement, and his app won the Pocket PC Magazine Best Software Award way back in 2003. He is currently engaged in understanding how legacy systems can be migrated to the cloud.
Sualeh has a degree in Software Technology (which he likes to say has the same relationship to computer science as pure science has to engineering), and a degree in civil engineering.
Llewellyn Falco - Independent Agile Coach
Llewellyn Falco is an independent agile coach. He discovered strong-style pair programming. He is creator of the open source testing tool ApprovalTests( www.approvaltests.com ). He spends most of his time programming in Java and C# specializing in improving legacy code.He is the co-founder of TeachingKidsProgramming.org & co-author of Mob Programming Guidebook
Jeremy Deane - Chief Architect at Foundation Medicine
Jeremy Deane is innovative technology leader, conference speaker, and technical author with diverse experience, in premier technical settings, with proven expertise in Enterprise Architecture, Software Architecture, and Software Process Improvement.
Sunita Chaudhary - Full stack developer and designer, IT visionary
Born as Java developer , I am a passionate IT professional who believes in magic and power of technology. I have over 14 years of experience in development and designing.
Was fortunate to work with different businesses over these 14 years which exposed me to different technologies new and old.
I learned how businesses are applying IT to deal with their big and small challenges and How IT is changing businesses, this keeps me motivated and feeds my curiosity to explore new technologies. My growing appetite includes Java, Spring, Angular JS, Node , No sql DB, Microservices, Containers , AWS , AI…..
Michael Carducci - Holistic Software Architect
Michael Carducci is a seasoned IT professional with over 25 years of experience, an author, and an internationally recognized speaker, blending expertise in software architecture with the artistry of magic and mentalism. His upcoming book, “Mastering Software Architecture,” reflects his deep understanding of the multifaceted challenges of building resilient, effective software systems and high-performing teams. Michael's career spans roles from individual contributor to CTO, with a particular focus on strategic enterprise architecture and digital transformation.
As a magician and mentalist, Michael has captivated audiences in dozens of countries, applying the same creativity and problem-solving skills that define his technology career. He excels in transforming complex technical concepts into engaging narratives, making him a sought-after speaker, trainer, and emcee for internal and tech events worldwide.
In his consulting work, Michael adopts a holistic approach to software architecture, ensuring alignment with business strategy and operational realities. He empowers teams, bridges tactical and strategic objectives, and guides organizations through transformative changes, always aiming to create sustainable, adaptable solutions.
Michael's unique blend of technical acumen and performative talent makes him an unparalleled force in both the tech and entertainment industries, driven by a passion for continuous learning and a commitment to excellence.
Danny Brian - Designer, Developer, Mentor
Danny Brian got his programming start as a backend developer, wrangling Perl to do all sorts of things for which it was never intended. He wrote some books on software development and document-oriented databases. Eventually he found his true calling: Front-end development. In this “new career” Danny has worked as a designer, Flash developer, and application architect. Today Danny's projects include mobile game development with both HTML5 and the Unity platform. His goal? “To build stuff that people actually like, that stick around for more than a few years, and to help others do the same.”
John Borys - Agile Technical Coach at Accenture Digital Interactive
John Borys has developed Enterprise Java applications for 16 years in the Chicago Metropolitan area. He has consulted for small start-ups and Fortune 50 companies. Introduced to Agile in 2004 while working on a maintenance system for the F-22 Raptor Engine, he has been an agile Proponent ever since. During that time he has been an Agile Developer, Scrum Master, Technical Lead, Java Architect, and for the last four years, an Agile Coach.
He is currently with Accenture specializing in Agile Transformation in the Large Enterprise and teaching teams XP Fundamentals.
John is a Certified Scrum Professional and a Certified Scrum Master.
Rafael Benevides - Director of Developer Experience at Red Hat
Rafael Benevides is Director of Developer Experience at Red Hat. With many years of experience in several fields of the IT industry, he helps developers and companies all over the world to be more effective in software development. Rafael considers himself a problem solver who has a big love for sharing. He is a member of Apache DeltaSpike PMC - a Duke’s Choice Award winner project, and a speaker in conferences like JavaOne, Devoxx, TDC, DevNexus and many others.
Aaron Bedra - Senior Engineer at DRW
Aaron Bedra is a Senior Engineer at DRW, where he works at the intersection trading and technology. He has served as a Chief Security Officer, Chief Technology Officer, and Principal Engineer/Architect. He has worked professionally on programming languages, most notably Clojure and ClojureScript. Aaron is the creator of Repsheet, an open source threat intelligence toolkit. He is the co-author of Programming Clojure, 2nd and 3rd Edition and a contributor to Functional Programming: A PragPub Anthology.
Andres Almiray - Developer Advocate for Gradle & Java Champion
Andres is a Java/Groovy developer and a Java Champion with more than 20 years of experience in software design and development. He has been involved in web and desktop application development since the early days of Java. Andres is a true believer in open source and has participated on popular projects like Groovy, Griffon, and DbUnit, as well as starting his own projects (Json-lib, EZMorph, GraphicsBuilder, JideBuilder). Founding member of the Griffon framework and Hackergarten community event. https://ch.linkedin.com/in/aalmiray