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.

Juergen Hoeller - Spring Framework co-founder and project lead

Juergen Hoeller is co-founder of the Spring Framework open source project and has been serving as the project lead and release manager for the core framework since 2003. Juergen is an experienced software architect and consultant with outstanding expertise in code organization, transaction management and enterprise messaging.

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 @ Bosatsu Consulting

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, AI/ML, 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 & Tech Leader

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.

Pratik Patel - Developer Advocate @ Azul Systems

Pratik Patel is a Java Champion and developer advocate at Azul Systems and has written 3 books on programming (Java, Cloud and OSS). An all around software and hardware nerd with experience in the healthcare, telecom, financial services, and startup sectors. He's also a co-organizer of the Atlanta Java User Group and North Atlanta JavaScript meetup, frequent speaker at tech events, and master builder of nachos.

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 Confluent

Tim is a teacher, author, and technology leader with Confluent, 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. He has three grown children and two grandchildren, a fact about which he is rather excited.

Peter Bell - Evangelist/hacker for hackNY

Peter is an evangelist and hacker for hackNY - a not-for-profit that aims to federate the next generation of hackers for the New York innovation community.

Peter is a regular presenter at national and international conferences on ruby, nodejs, NoSQL (especially MongoDB and neo4j), cloud computing, software craftsmanship, java, groovy, javascript, and requirements and estimating. He is on the program committee for Code Generation in Cambridge, England and the Domain Specific Modeling workshop at SPLASH (was ooPSLA) and reviews and shepherds proposals for the BCS SPA conference.

He has presented at a range of conferences including DLD conference, ooPSLA, RubyNation, SpringOne2GX, Code Generation, Practical Product Lines, the British Computer Society Software Practices Advancement conference, DevNexus, cf.Objective(), CF United, Scotch on the Rocks, WebDU, WebManiacs, UberConf, the Rich Web Experience and the No Fluff Just Stuff Enterprise Java tour.

He has been published in IEEE Software, Dr. Dobbs, IBM developerWorks, Information Week, Methods & Tools, Mashed Code, NFJS the Magazine and GroovyMag. He's currently writing a book on managing software development for Pearson.

He is an organizer of the CTO School http://www.ctoschool.org - an organization in NYC devoted to creating the next generation of technical leaders. He also organizes the node.js meetup in New York and co-organizes the Domain Driven Design and Grails meetups.

He is a regular instructor at General Assembly in New York. His presentations cover managing software development, NoSQL, mobile development, Javascript development, Twitter Bootstrap and Javascript frameworks.

He tweets regularly as @peterbell.

Craig Walls - Author of 'Spring in Action' and 'Building Talking Apps'

Craig Walls is a Principal Engineer, Java Champion, Alexa Champion, and the author of Spring AI in Action, Spring 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 @ 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.

Oleg Zhurakousky - Principal Architect w/Hortonworks

Oleg is a Principal Architect with Hortonworks responsible for architecting scalable BigData solutions using various OpenSource technologies available within and outside the Hadoop ecosystem. Before Hortonworls Oleg was part of the SpringSource/VMWare where he was a core engineer working on Spring Integration framework, leading Spring Integration Scala DSL and contributing to other projects in Spring portfolio. He has 17+ years of experience in software engineering across multiple disciplines including software architecture and design, consulting, business analysis and application development. Oleg has been focusing on professional Java development since 1999. Since 2004 he has been heavily involved in using several open source technologies and platforms across a number of projects around the world and spanning industries such as Teleco, Banking, Law Enforcement, US DOD and others.
As a speaker Oleg presented seminars at dozens of conferences worldwide (i.e.SpringOne, JavaOne, Java Zone, Jazoon, Java2Days, Scala Days, Uberconf, and others).

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.

Billy Williams - Speaker, Seeker, Writer, Igniter, and Global Poverty Fighter

Billy is a husband, father, marathoner, writer, and passionate global poverty fighter born in the hills of Appalachia. He continues to make his home amid the natural beauty of West Virginia with his wife and two children. 

Billy has more than 20 years of experience both leading and developing leaders from a wide array of career fields and professional disciplines including finance, healthcare, nonprofit, technology, and higher education. 

Billy developed a hunger for listening to and telling good stories at a young age, and has been invited to share at events around the globe. He is passionate about seeing individuals and organizations transform themselves to bring their very best to make the world a better place, and is committed to doing the same in his own life. 

Billy serves as Strategic Partnerships Director of Nuru International, a social enterprise working to equip marginalized farmers with the tools and knowledge they need to lead their families and communities out of extreme poverty for good. He also founded Archegos Coaching in 2016, an executive and leadership coaching company. 

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.

Johnny Wey - Vice President, Engineering at MapVine

Johnny has been working with web technologies for over ten years. He is currently the head of software engineering at a sales intelligence startup in Denver call MapVine.

MapVine is an advanced sales demand software platform built on the JVM and NodeJS. It allows companies to map products, rules and customers across their enterprise to generate interest before even contacting the target user.

Before coming to MapVine, he functioned as the lead engineer on the Common Services Tier at Time Warner Cable. This tier provided services and a common API for everything from streaming video to scheduling billing orders and had over a dozen constituent applications. Combined with other customer-facing portals, the traffic on sites Johnny was responsible for was well into the millions of requests per day. Prior to working at Time Warner Cable, Johnny helped create the primary OSS at Dash Carrier Services resulting in a VOIP platform that powered the nations leading next generation emergency network.

Johnny lives in Denver with his wife and two sons. He enjoys riding his bike and playing music and volunteers monthly at a local recovery organization in the north Denver area.

Chris Wensel - Author of Cascading Data Processing Open Source Project

Chris Wensel is the founder of Concurrent, Inc., and the author of the Cascading data processing open-source project, an alternative API to MapReduce for Apache Hadoop.

He also co-founded Scale Unlimited, the first Hadoop and “Big Data” related professional services and training company, where he mentored and trained companies like Sun Microsystems, Apple, and numerous startups in the Bay Area.

Chris bootstrapped his first Internet startup in the early 90's, creating an early Web server-side scripting language used in the real estate and insurance verticals. During the late 90's, Chris focused on distributed-agent based systems where he received several patents on
distributed computing. From there he became Chief Architect for the fastest growing business unit at Thomson Reuters. Just prior to Concurrent, Chris was a Consulting Architect to TeleAtlas geo-content management group in Belgium.

Chris also advises several startups in the “Big Data” and “Big Audience” technology space.

Eric Wendelin - Cactus Dweller @ Gradle Inc.

I want to make building software easier.

Leads the Build Tool Core Team @ Gradle. Areas on significant contribution: console, completion, and daemon.

Creator of stacktrace.js.

Jim Webber - Co-author of "REST in Practice"

Dr. Jim Webber is Chief Scientist with Neo Technology the company behind the popular open source graph database Neo4j, where he works on graph database server technology and writes open source software. Jim is interested in using big graphs like the Web for building distributed systems, which led him to being a co-author on the book REST in Practice, having previously written Developing Enterprise Web Services - An Architect's Guide. Jim is an active speaker, presenting regularly around the world. His blog is located at http://jimwebber.org and he tweets often @jimwebber.

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.

James Ward - Developer Advocate for GCP

James Ward is a software developer who shares what he learns with others through presentations, blogs, demos, and code. After over two decades of professional programming, he is now a self-proclaimed Typed Pure Functional Programming zealot but often compromises on his ideals to just get stuff done. After spending too many sleepless nights in data centers repairing RAID arrays, he now prefers higher-level cloud abstractions with appropriate escape hatches. James is a huge Open Source proponent, hoping to never get burned by lock-in again.

Kai Wähner - IT Consultant at MaibornWolff

Kai Wähner works as an IT Consultant at MaibornWolff et al in Munich, Germany. His main area of expertise lies within the fields of Java EE, SOA, Cloud Computing and Enterprise Architecture Management. He is speaker at international IT conferences such as JavaOne or Jazoon, writes articles for professional journals, and shares his experiences with new technologies on his blog.

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.

Mark Vieira - Principal Engineer at Gradle Inc

Mark works as a core developer at Gradle. He brings over a decade of software development experience across many projects in the public and defense sectors. In addition to working on the Gradle project, Mark spends much of his time assisting organizations across the world adopt Gradle and streamline their build and delivery processes.

When not pondering about continuous integration, Mark spends his days hiking or snowboarding in his home state of Colorado with his wife and two dogs.

Vaughn Vernon - Principal Architect, Consultant - ShiftMethod

Vaughn Vernon is the author of the book Implementing Domain-Driven Design, published by Addison-Wesley. Vaughn is a veteran software craftsman with more than 25 years of experience in software design, development, and architecture. Vaughn is a thought leader in simplifying software design and implementation using innovative methods. Vaughn has been programming with object-oriented languages since the 1980s and applying the tenets of Domain-Driven Design since his Smalltalk domain modeling days in the early 1990s. His experience spans a wide range of business domains. He has also succeeded in technical endeavors creating reusable frameworks, libraries, and implementation acceleration tools.

Vaughn consults and speaks internationally, and has taught his Implementing Domain-Driven Design Workshop on multiple continents. He teaches both public and private classes and workshops, and has presented at conferences such as: SpringOne 2gx; PulsoConf in Bogota, Colombia; QCon; UberConf; IASA ITARC. As an author, Vaughn has contributed to industry literature and software patterns and is a founder of the DDD Denver Meetup group.

His IDDD Tour commences in Europe in April 2013: idddtour.com You can read more about his latest efforts at VaughnVernon.co and follow him on Twitter here: @VaughnVernon

Matt Vaughn - Author of "Angular Architecture Patterns"

Matt Vaughn is a Colorado native who has been developing web-based applications since 1998. Matt is the designer and architect of the Build Motion enterprise framework and rule engine since 2008. Most recently he has released a suite of Angular libraries/packages to allow for the implementation of rich business logic. Matt is the author of a new book “Angular Architecture Patterns”.

Matt is a full-stack software engineer and is currently working on a new State Machine/State Chart framework to simplify the complexity of Angular component state management. Matt's other technical hobbies include building code generators and scaffolding tools for Angular and Web API backend applications.

When Matt doesn’t have a laptop in front of him or isn’t dreaming of code, he can be found standing in Colorado streams fly fishing or jamming with his band on his tenor sax.

Dave Townsend - Principal Software Engineer @ Matson

Dave Townsend is a Principal Software Engineer in the Innovation & Architecture group at Matson, Inc. where he specializes in designing and delivering end-to-end cloud based software solutions. Dave also leads Matson’s mobile product team. A 15-year software veteran, Dave is passionate about cloud and mobile architecture.

Adam Tornhill - Founder of CodeScene & Author of "Your Code as a Crime Scene"

Adam Tornhill is a programmer who combines degrees in engineering and psychology. He’s the founder of CodeScene where he designs tools for code analysis. Adam is also the author of multiple technical books, including the best selling Your Code as a Crime Scene and Software Design X-Rays. Adam’s other interests include modern history, music, retro computing, and martial arts.

Burr Sutter - Director of Developer Experience, Red Hat

A lifelong developer advocate, community organizer, and technology evangelist, Burr Sutter is a featured speaker at technology events around the globe—from Bangalore to Brussels and Berlin to Beijing (and most parts in between)— he is currently Red Hat’s Director of Developer Experience. A Java Champion since 2005 and former president of the Atlanta Java User Group, Burr founded the DevNexus conference—now the second largest Java event in the U.S.— with the aim of making access to the world’s leading developers affordable to the developer community. When not speaking abroad, Burr is also the passionate creator and orchestrator of highly-interactive live demo keynotes at Red Hat Summit, the company’s premier annual event.

John Steven - Security Expert & Architect @ Cigital

John Steven is the Senior Director, Advanced Technology Consulting at Cigital, Inc. His experience includes research in static code analysis and hands-on architecture and implementation of high-performance, scalable Java EE systems. John has provided security consulting services to a broad variety of commercial clients including two of the largest trading platforms in the world and has advised America’s largest internet provider in the Midwest on security and forensics.

John led the development of Cigital’s architectural analysis methodology and its approach to deploying enterprise software security frameworks. He has demonstrated success in building Cigital’s intellectual property for providing cutting-edge security. He brings this experience and a track record of effective strategic innovation to clients seeking to change, whether to adopt more cutting-edge approaches, or to solidify ROI. John has served on numerous conference panels regarding software security, wireless security and Java EE system development. He holds a B.S. in Computer Engineering and an M.S. in Computer Science from Case Western Reserve University.

Rob Spieldenner - Senior Software Engineer at Netflix

Rob is a Senior Software Engineer on the Engineering Tools team at Netflix. He spends his days writing Gradle plugins and Grails apps to help the developers at Netflix produce an awesome experience for its customers. A reformed government contractor, he is now bringing his passion for test driven development and continuous delivery to other parts of the industry.

Bruce Snyder - Co-Author of ActiveMQ In Action

Bruce Snyder has a unique skill set with a deep background in software architecture and engineering and the ability to liaise with the business side. With nearly 20 years of professional experience in enterprise and open source software, Bruce has a passion for creative problem solving, a strong work ethic and the ability to bridge the gap between business leaders and software development teams.

Bruce is a member of the Apache Software Foundation and has worked on several Apache projects. He has also authored books on Apache ActiveMQ, the Spring Framework, Apache Maven and Apache Geronimo, spoken at numerous software conferences and has helped to build communities around open source software.

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.

John Smart - Author of Java Power Tools

John is an experienced consultant and trainer specialising in Enterprise Java, Web Development, and Open Source technologies, currently based in Wellington, New Zealand. Well known in the Java community for his many published articles, and as author of Java Power Tools, John helps organisations around the world to optimize their Java development processes and infrastructures and provides training and mentoring in open source technologies, SDLC tools, and agile development processes.

David Sietz - Systems Architect, Open Source Contributor

David Sietz is a solutions architect at International Association of Privacy Professionals with more than 25 years of hands-on experience. Starting his IT career in Munich Germany, his professional history as a data architect, system designer, and adult educator, instilled in him a sense of IT with the business customer in mind.

David's specialty is architecting, designing, and constructing of viable solutions that are properly engineered for their purpose and longevity. His breadth of knowledge of data management, microservice architecture, and building cloud platforms allows him to bridge disciplines and provide MVP solutions.

Stuart Sierra - Clojure/core

Stuart Sierra is an actor/writer/coder who lives in New York City. He is a member of the Clojure/core team at Relevance, Inc. Stuart is the co-author of Practical Clojure (Apress, 2010). He received an M.S. in Computer Science from Columbia University and a B.F.A. in Theatre from New York University.

Arash Shokoufandeh - Senior Software Engineer at the National Football League

Arash Shokoufandeh is a Senior Software Engineer at the National Football League with over 10 years experience designing and building robust web systems. Currently he is most interested in scalability, creating intuitive APIs and the implication of web traffic shifting to mobile.

Alan Shalloway - Lead Author of Design Patterns Explained, Essential Skills for Agile Developer

Al Shalloway is the founder and CEO of Net Objectives. With over 40 years of experience, Al is an industry thought leader in Lean, Kanban, product portfolio management, Scrum and agile design. He helps companies transition to Lean and Agile methods enterprise-wide as well teaches courses in these areas. Al is a SAFe Program Consultant as well as a certified Kanban instructor by the Lean Kanban University. Al has developed training and coaching methods for Lean-Agile that have helped Net Objectives' clients achieve long-term, sustainable productivity gains. He is a popular speaker at prestigious conferences worldwide. He is the primary author of Design Patterns Explained: A New Perspective on Object-Oriented Design, Lean-Agile Pocket Guide for Scrum Teams, Lean-Agile Software Development: Achieving Enterprise Agility and Essential Skills for the Agile Developer. Al has worked in literally dozens of industries over his career. He is a co-founder and board member for the Lean Software and Systems Consortium. He has a Masters in Computer Science from M.I.T. as well as a Masters in Mathematics from Emory University.

Jonathan Schneider - Co-Founder & CEO @ Moderne

Jonathan is co-founder and CEO at Miami-based Moderne which automates software maintenance activities at scale. He founded OpenRewrite at Netflix and went on to found the Micrometer project as a member of the Spring Team. Jonathan is the author of SRE with Java Microservices (OReilly). He is an Army veteran and two time bronze star recipient.

Brian Sam-Bodden -

Brian Sam-Bodden is a developer advocate at Redis Labs as well as an author, instructor, speaker, and hacker who has spent over twenty years crafting software systems. He holds dual bachelor’s degrees from Ohio Wesleyan University in computer science and physics. Brian is a frequent speaker at user groups and conferences nationally and abroad and is the author of “Beginning POJOs: Spring, Hibernate, JBoss and Tapestry”, co-author of the “Enterprise Java Development on a Budget: Leveraging Java Open Source Technologies” and a contributor to O'Reilly's “97 Things Every Project Manager Should Know”.

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.

Terry Ryan - Author of 'Driving Technical Change'

Terry Ryan is a Worldwide Developer Evangelist for Adobe. The job basically entails helping developers using Adobe technologies to be successful. His focus is on web and mobile technologies including expertise in both Flash and HTML. Previous to that, he spent a decade working in various technical roles at the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania.

Terry is also the author of Driving Technical Change, a Pragmatic Bookshelf title. It's about convincing reluctant co-workers to adopt new tools and ideas.

He blogs at http://terrenceryan.com/blog and is tpryan on Twitter.

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.

Ian Robinson - Co-author of REST in Practice

Ian Robinson (@iansrobinson) is Director of Customer Success for Neo Technology, the company behind Neo4j, the world's leading open source graph database. He is a co-author of 'REST in Practice' (O'Reilly) and a contributor to the forthcoming books 'REST: From Research to Practice' (Springer) and 'Service Design Patterns' (Addison-Wesley). He presents at conferences worldwide on the big Web graph of REST, and the awesome graph capabilities of Neo4j, and blogs at http://iansrobinson.com.

Simon Roberts - Java Expert

Simon Roberts wrote his first program in 1978 in high school on punched cards. He started his career as a programmer building embedded control systems in a variety of assembly languages, C, and C++. Alongside programming, Simon taught part-time at a local college. In 1994 his career transitioned to full-time teacher and part time programmer, and he joined Sun Microsystems in 1995 where he worked until going independent in 2004

While at Sun he created training courses on a diverse range of Java topics, developed the original Sun Certified Java Programmer and Developer exams, and presented at JavaOne and other conferences on Java and Java performance topics.

Today, Simon is president of Dancing Cloud Services, LLC., based in Westminster Colorado, and he provides training, course development, and mentoring services in Java, Scala, JavaScript, Python, Go, along with design, and software architecture topics. Simon is equally comfortable offering training in classroom, recorded video, and live, remote-access, formats.

Mike Roberts - Architect, Tech Lead, Co-founder of Symphonia

Mike Roberts is an engineering leader and co-founder of Symphonia - https://www.symphonia.io - a serverless and cloud technology consultancy. Mike is a long-time proponent of Agile and DevOps values and is passionate about the role that cloud technologies have played in enabling such values for many high-functioning software teams. He sees serverless as the next technological evolution of cloud systems and as such is excited about its ability to help teams, and their customers, be awesome.

John Riviello - Engineering Fellow @ Comcast

John Riviello created his first hypertext document on the Internet in 1996 and has been obsessed with building for the web ever since. He spends his days as Engineering Fellow and Lead Frontend Developer at Comcast, where he works on the Xfinity customer websites and web applications. He is a Google Developer Expert in Web Technologies and
the author of the LinkedIn Learning course “CSS to Sass: Converting an Existing Site.” In his free time, he prefers surfing waves over surfing the Internet.

Chris Richardson - Creator of Microservices.io

Chris Richardson is a developer and architect. He is a Java Champion, a JavaOne rock star and the author of POJOs in Action, which describes how to build enterprise Java applications with frameworks such as Spring and Hibernate. Chris was also the founder of the original CloudFoundry.com, an early Java PaaS for Amazon EC2.

Today, he is a recognized thought leader in microservices and speaks regularly at international conferences. Chris is the creator of Microservices.io, a pattern language for microservices, and is the author of the book Microservices Patterns. He provides microservices consulting and training to organizations that are adopting the microservice architecture and is working on Eventuate, which is an open-source microservices collaboration platform.

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.

Abdelmonaim Remani - Playing with Big Data @ Think Big Analytics

Abdel is a software developer and technology enthusiast at heart and by profession. Particularly interested in large distributed systems and enterprise software architecture in general. An active open-source advocate and contributor. President and Founder of a number of organizations namely The NorCal Java User Group, and The Silicon Valley Dart Meetup. Abdel is a JavaOne RockStar and a frequent speaker at a number of developer conferences including JavaOne, JAX Conf, OsCon, OREDEV, 33rd Degree, NFJS, and many user groups and community events.

Paul Rayner - Founder and Owner at Virtual Genius LLC

Paul is a seasoned design coach and leadership mentor, helping teams ignite their design skills via Domain-Driven Design (DDD) and Behavior-Driven Development (BDD). He gets teams unstuck through intensive coaching workshops and hands-on pair programming, combined with focused one-on-one leadership mentoring. His company Virtual Genius, provides training and coaching in collaborative design for agile teams. Paul actively serves the community: teaching classes in BDD and DDD, contributing to OSS, and co-leading the DDD Denver Meetup group.

Look for him speaking at user groups and at local and international conferences. Paul is from Perth, Australia, but chooses to live, work and play with his wife and two children, in Denver, Colorado. He tweets with an Australian accent at @ThePaulRayner and blogs at thepaulrayner.com

Nilanjan Raychaudhuri - Author of "Scala in Action"

Nilanjan is a consultant and trainer for Typesafe. He started his professional career as a software developer in 2000 using object oriented programming languages. Nilanjan has previously worked with IBM, ThoughtWorks and LivingSocial where he gained a lot of experience in managing and developing software solutions in Java/JEE, Ruby, Groovy and also in Scala. He is zealous about programming in Scala ever since he got introduced to this beautiful language. Currently he spends his spare time working on the scala-webmachine open source project (restful resource framework). In the past Nilanjan worked on other open source projects and libraries. At Typesafe he is mainly teaching and designing Scala and Play courses and helping customers to adopt these technologies. Nilanjan enjoys sharing his experience via talks at various conferences. He is also the author of the “Scala in Action” book.

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.

Eric Pugh - Co-author of "Solr 1.4 Enterprise Search Server"

Fascinated by the “craft” of software development, Eric Pugh has been heavily involved in the open source world as a developer, committer, and user for the past 5 years. He is an emeritus member of the Apache Software Foundation and lately has been mulling over how we move from the read/write web to the read/write/share web.

In biotech, financial services and defense IT, he has helped European and American companies develop coherent strategies for embracing open source software. As a speaker he has advocated the advantages of Agile practices in software development.

Eric became involved in Solr when he submitted the patch SOLR-284 for Parsing Rich Document types such as PDF and MS Office formats that became the single most popular patch as measured by votes! The patch was subsequently cleaned up and enhanced by three other individuals, demonstrating the power of the Free/Open Source Model to build great code collaboratively. SOLR-284 was eventually refactored into Solr Cell as part of Solr version 1.4.

Eric co-authored “Solr 1.4 Enterprise Search Server”, the first book on Solr.

He blogs at http://www.opensourceconnections.com/blog/.

Paul Preiss - CEO & Founder of Iasa

Paul Preiss is the CEO and Founder of the Iasa, one of the largest Enterprise and IT architect associations in the world. Through his time at Iasa, Paul has taken the association from a single user group in Austin Tx to an international organization with chapters in over 25 countries. Paul's vision is a unified architecture profession with effective education, credentials and ethics which fully supports corporate strategy and delivery. He is a tireless advocate for the field and speaks on topics ranging form architecture ethics to best the best setup and structure for architecture teams. Paul has spoken at hundreds of events as well as held conferences and training for architects all over the world. He is an expert software and enterprise architect in practice and continues to work with companies on optimizing their technology strategy.

Prior to developing Iasa, Paul was the chief architect for Dell Pan Asia where he helped to integrate the technology strategy across 14 countries. He also served as the chief architect for the Sears point of sale replacement in North America consisting of 2000 stores and thousands of suppliers as well as the chief architect for a digital asset management firm, Ancept.

Steven Pousty - Helping you understand and implement technology

Steve is a dad, partner, son, and founder of Tech Raven Consulting. He can teach you about Data Analysis, Java, Python, PostgreSQL, Microservices, Containers, Kubernetes, and some JavaScript. He has deep subject area expertise in GIS/Spatial, Statistics, and Ecology. Before founding his company, Steve was a developer Advocate for VMware, Crunchy Data, DigitalGlobe, Red Hat, LinkedIn, deCarta, and ESRI. Steve has a Ph.D. in Ecology and can easily be bribed with offers of bird watching or fly fishing.

Brian Pontarelli - CEO of FusionAuth.io

I am a Technology Entrepreneur with a software development background. Currently, I am focused on solving the technology issues that many companies face for login, registration, and user management. My team and I built FusionAuth: A modern customer identity and access management (CIAM) platform that comes with features not seen in the marketplace today. It allows companies to focus on their core product not the plumbing of identity and user management.

Adi Polak - Director of Advocacy and Developer Experience Engineering, Confluent

Adi is an experienced Software Engineer and people manager. For most of her professional life, she has worked with data and machine learning for operations and analytics. As a data practitioner, she developed algorithms to solve real-world problems using machine learning techniques and leveraging expertise in Apache Spark, Kafka, HDFS, and distributed large-scale systems.

Adi has taught Spark to thousands of students and is the author of the successful book — Scaling Machine Learning with Spark. Earlier this year, she embarked on a new adventure with data streaming, specifically Flink, and she can't get enough of it.

Prasanna Pendse - Technical Principal at ThoughtWorks

Prasanna has been programming since 1994. He was involved in such adventures as creating India's first search engine and an on-line music and video store before getting a real job.

Prasanna's development skillz went up a notch when he learned about TDD in the early 2000s. In fact, TDD (along with pair programming, CI and other XP practices) is a major reason why he still writes code. In 2006, he joined ThoughtWorks.

His coding adventures took him around the US to places such as Chicago (IL), Atlanta (GA), Albany (NY), Warren (NJ), Malvern (PA), San Francisco (CA) as well as around the world to Krakow (Poland), Bangalore (India), Tokyo (Japan), Beijing (China), Pune (India), Hong Kong (China) and Johannesburg (South Africa)!

Prasanna plays any of many roles including developer, tech lead, software architect, agile coach, QA, project lead, enterprise architect, technical principal, infrastructure automation and build monkey. He has programmed professionally in JavaScript, Ruby, C#, Java, Perl, PHP, Tcl/Tk, C, C++, Bash and PowerShell.

Besides coding, he enjoys eating different types of food and photography.

Peter Pavlovich - CTO, Censinet

Peter is the CTO of Censinet, based in Boston, MA.

Before joining Censinet, Peter was the Chief Software Architect at Embue Technologies, an Apartment Building Intelligence platform provider based in Boston, MA. Before joining Embue, Peter was the Principal Architect for EnerNOC Labs, a dedicated R&D group within EnerNOC, a Global provider of Demand Response and Energy Inteligence software located in Boston, MA. Prior to EnerNOC, Peter was a Principal Cloud Engineer with Kronos Incorporated, a global provider of on-premise and cloud-based workforce management solutions. Before Kronos, Peter held the position of Technical Director with Brokat Technologies, a global provider of mobile payment solutions. Prior to that, Peter was a Sr. Architect with GemStone Systems, providing distributed, enterprise-ready data grid and object persistence solutions and J2EE application server technologies.

Peter has a Honors degree in pure mathematics from McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario, Canada. He is a technology addict and evangelist and has led many grass-roots efforts to introduce leading edge, advanced technologies and development processes.

A lifetime learner, Peter thrives on digesting new technologies and sharing his discoveries with others. He has authored and delivered numerous technical seminars on a variety of topics including React, VueJS, Angular, Ruby on Rails, Grails, Git, Meteor, Flex, GWT and AOP.

To find out more about Peter, check out his LinkedIn profile: https://www.linkedin.com/in/peterpavlovich

Andy Painter - Agile Technologist

Andy Painter is the Co-Founder of Institute Success and Institute Agility. Institute Success focuses on helping leaders become an Engaged Company™ by developing their leaders and teams. Institute Agility focuses on helping organizations ignite the spirit of agility in one heart, one team, one organization at a time.

Andy has over 25 years of software development experience as a developer, architect, tester, manager and executive. Over the two decades, Andy has coupled deep technology experience with Agile practices to create teams and environments that are hyper-productive. Over the last decade, Andy has added a focus of developing leaders and organizations to unlock their potential to achieve new levels of success. Andy helps and inspires leaders to take a people-first approach to both leadership and agility.

Earl Nolan - Senior Software Engineer at the National Football League

Earl Nolan is a Senior Software Engineer with the National Football League. He has over 30 years experience in angsting over APIs. His interests include concurrency, domain driven design, Agile methodologies and anything that involves building more robust code. He spoke at JavaOne 2010 on Enterprise Service Bus and at JavaOne 2011 on Practical Performance.

Peter Niederwieser - Principal Software Engineer at Gradleware & Creator of Spock

Peter Niederwieser is a computer language enthusiast from Austria who has been using Java since the early days. Peter's work experience ranges from small start-ups to large enterprises like Siemens. His passion for software quality and continuous delivery invariably leads him to take the build master role on new projects, pushing project automation as far as he can. It also lead him to create Spock, an innovation-packed developer testing framework that is seeing increasing adoption around the globe.

Peter is an active member of the Groovy community, and can't sleep without his daily dose of Scala. When Peter isn't coding, you can find him speaking at conferences around the world, or pondering over a chess board.

Sam Newman - Technologist with ThoughWorks

Sam Newman is a technologist at ThoughtWorks, where he currently splits his time between encouraging and sharing innovation globally and helping design and build their internal systems. He has worked with a variety of companies in multiple domains around the world, often with one foot in the developer world, and another in the IT operations space. If you asked him what he does, he'd say 'I work with people to build better software systems'. He has written articles, presented at conferences, and sporadically commits to open source projects. He is currently writing a book, Building Microservices, which is available in early access form now, and dead tree version very soon.

Ann Mwangi - Architect/Developer with Thoughtworks

Ann Mwangi is a software developer and consultant at ThoughtWorks for projects across different domains mainly in Uganda and Australia. She had a stint as a quality analyst to understand the challenges of maintaining quality in a system.

Ann contributes to open source projects and has served as a mentor with groups like Rails Girls, coaching and working with young people interested in IT. Ann is an international speaker with experience speaking across 4 continents. She is intrigued by the complexity of life, people, and how teams effectively work together.

Ann hates being stagnant in life and thus keeps seeking for opportunities to grow both personally and professionally.

Benjamin Muschko - Independent Consultant, Automated Ascent

Benjamin Muschko is a software engineer, consultant, and trainer with more than 20 years of experience in the industry. He specializes in cloud-native application development and transformation, container solutions, DevSecOps, and Continuous Integration/Continuous Delivery implementations. Ben is an author, a frequent speaker at conferences, and an avid open source advocate.

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.

Hunter Milligan - Technical Coach

Hunter has worked and consulted at Fortune 500 companies and has experienced the full spectrum of challenges in software development. As a long time developer turned manager, he’s navigated the high-stress chaos of tight deadlines, shifting priorities, and working with diverse personalities.

For the past 15+ years, Hunter has been coaching teams and individuals to not only survive but thrive. His secret sauce? Practical strategies and easy-to-use meditation techniques tailored to the daily lives of developers and managers. Hunter is focused on assisting engineers to find calm in the chaos, boost productivity, and think with newfound clarity — all while remembering to breathe. After all, the code may be complicated, but staying calm doesn’t need to be.

When not traveling the states or the rest of the world, Hunter greatly enjoys mountain biking, snowboarding, and tai chi.

Tom Marrs - Lead Architect at LivingSocial

Tom Marrs is a Technical Architect at Perficient, where he specializes in RESTful Web Services and Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA). He designs and implements mission-critical web and business applications using the latest SOA, Ruby on Rails, JSON, HTML5, JavaScript, Java/EE, and Open Source technologies.

Tom is the author of the JSON Refcard for DZone, and the upcoming book, JSON at Work for O’Reilly. Tom is also a speaker at the Great Indian Developer Summit (GIDS) conference.

An active participant in the local technical community, Tom helps emcee at the HTML5 Denver User Group, helped found the Denver Open Source User Group (DOSUG), has served as President of the Denver Java Users Group (DJUG), and speaks at other local user groups.

Kito Mann - Principal Consultant at Virtua, Inc.

Kito D. Mann is the Principal Consultant at Virtua, Inc., specializing in enterprise application architecture, training, development, and mentoring with microservices, cloud, Web Components, Angular, and Jakarta/Java EE technologies. He is also the co-host of The Stackd Podcast and the author of JavaServer Faces in Action. Mann has participated in several Java Community Process expert groups (including CDI, JSF, and Portlets) and is an internationally recognized speaker. He is also a Java Champion and Google Developer Expert in Web Technologies. He holds a BA in Computer Science from Johns Hopkins University.

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.

Christopher Lorenzo - Distinguished Engineer @ Comcast

Chris has worked at Comcast since 2007 – currently as a Distinguished Engineer. He enjoys building/motivating teams and ramping up new projects including Xfinity Home and Xfinity xFi using the latest patterns and web primitives. Outside of Comcast I am a Google Developer Expert in Web Technologies and I love hiking and chilling on the beach.

Josh Long - Spring Developer Advocate @ Broadcom

Josh (@starbuxman) has been the first Spring Developer Advocate since 2010. Josh is a Java Champion, author of 7 books (including “Reactive Spring”) and numerous best-selling video training (including “Building Microservices with Spring Boot Live lessons” with Spring Boot co-founder Phil Webb), and an open-source contributor (Spring Boot, Spring Integration, Axon, Spring Cloud, Activiti, Vaadin, etc), a Youtuber (Coffee + Software with Josh Long as well as my Spring Tips series ), and a podcaster (“A Bootiful Podcast”).

Andrew Lombardi - Owner, Mystic Coders - Entrepreneur

Andrew Lombardi is one of a new breed of businessmen: the enlightened entrepreneur. He has been writing code since he was a 5-year old, sitting at his dad’s knee at their Apple II computer. Having such a deep affinity for the computer model, it is no surprise that at the age of 17 he began to delve deeply into the inner workings of the human mind. He became a student of Neuro Linguistic Programming and other mind technologies, and then went on to study metaphysics. He is certified as an NLP Trainer, Master Hypnotherapist and Time Line Therapy practitioner.

Using all of his accumulated skills, at the age of 24, Andrew began his consulting business, Mystic Coders, LLC. Since the inception of Mystic in 2000, Andrew has been building the business and studying finance and economics as he stays on the cutting edge of computer technology.

Howard Lewis Ship - Creator of Apache Tapestry

Howard Lewis Ship is the original creator of the Apache Tapestry project, and is a noted expert on Java framework design and developer productivity. He has over twenty years of full-time software development under his belt, with over fifteen years of Java. He cut his teeth writing customer support software for Stratus Computer, but eventually traded PL/1 for Objective-C and NeXTSTEP before settling into Java.

Howard has been developing financial and e-commerce applications in 100% Clojure since 2012.

Howard currently works for Wal-Mart's Global E-Commerce division. He lives in Portland, Oregon with his wife Suzanne, and his children, Jacob and Olivia.

Greg Leonard - Security Expert

Gregory Leonard has over 13 years of experience in software development, with an emphasis on writing large-scale enterprise applications. He has worked with several government agencies, including designing and developing applications for the U.S. Treasury. Greg's current responsibilities include application architecture and security; performing infrastructure design and implementation, security analysis, code reviews, and evaluating performance diagnostics.

Tiffany Lentz - Principal Consultant & Program Manager with Thoughtworks

Tiffany Lentz, a Principal Consultant and Program Manager, is proudly employed at ThoughtWorks, a global IT services firm focused on end-to-end software delivery. She has worked extensively for large clients in the US, Canada, and China, delivering solutions for both disparate system delivery projects and agile enablement and organizational transformation efforts to incorporate and enhance efficiency and delivery processes. She is an author, mentor, coach and trainer of agile methodologies, processes, and practices. Tiffany is the author of Iteration Management Chapter in the ThoughtWorks anthology book and believes that the Iteration Manager's job is to build a well-oil delivery machine.

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, experienced corporate technology developer and leader, and founder and president of Tech Skills Transformations LLC. I've been working with and presenting at NFJS events for many 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 2 small dogs in Cary, North Carolina where I design and conduct 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.

Olga Kundzich - Co-founder & CTO @ Moderne

Olga Kundzich is Co-founder and CTO at Moderne, which automates software refactoring at scale. She has extensive experience building enterprise software solutions. Previously, she worked as a technical product manager at Pivotal, focused on application delivery and management solutions (e.g., Spinnaker), and was a lead software engineer and manager at Dell EMC, working closely with enterprise users on implementing data protection practices.

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.

Billy Korando - Developer Advocate with the Java Platform Group

Billy is a Java Developer Advocate with the Java Platform Group at Oracle. With over a decade of experience in Java, Billy brings a passion for helping developers find ways to reduce tedious work; such as project initiation, deployment, testing and validation, through automation and adopting the latest features and tools in the Java ecosystem.

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.

Ryan Knight - Technical Thought Leader

Ryan is a technical thought leader with extensive experience in cloud
native architectures, large scale distributed systems and data
pipelines. He first started Java Consulting at the Sun Java Center and
has since worked and consultant at a wide variety of companies such as
Oracle, Riot Games, Deloitte, LightBend, DataStax and Starbuck. From
the diverse number of projects he has gained extensive experience with
a wide variety of technologies including Scala, Java, Cassandra,
Vault, Istio and Kubernetes. He enjoys working with clients helping
them to solve their most difficult challenges. Ryan regularly does
trainings and has spoken at conferences around the world, such as
Scale by the Bay, QCon, JavaOne, Devoxx, JavaZone, Cassandra Summit
and many others.

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.

Frank Kim - Author of Secure Coding in Java/JEE

Frank Kim is a security leader with over 17 years of experience in information security, risk management, and enterprise IT. He has a passion for developing security strategies and building teams focused on practical solutions to business risks. He currently serves as the curriculum lead for application security at the SANS Institute and is the author and an instructor for the Secure Coding in Java course. Frank is a popular public speaker and has presented at security, software development, and leadership events around the world and was twice named a JavaOne Rock Star.

Heath Kesler - Open Source Evangelist

Heath Kesler is an open source software evangelist, developer and architect; he has created Java architectures for large scalable, high transaction load systems for such companies as Health Language, LeapFrog Enterprises, AT&T, Timera, and IBM.

Heath has been a team lead in many project recovery implementations, helping to rescue systems on the verge of collapse. He was recently involved with the implementation of the customer account creation and third-party integration on mission-critical systems for the largest educational products provider in the United States. Heath enjoys pushing the envelop by finding new ways to implement solutions using cutting edge technologies for old problems.

Heath has spoken at conferences all over the world and enjoys any opportunity to discuss the latest technologies with those who share in his passion.

Christina Kayastha - Domain Architect/Innovation Engineer w/Vista

Christina Kayastha is a Principal Software Engineer with nearly a decade of industry experience. Originally from Nepal, she is currently working in Boston, USA as a Domain Architect leading innovation initiatives at Vista. Christina is an inventor on 11 patents, has given 50+ conference talks, and won 13 hackathon competitions. In her free time, she loves nerding out about emerging tech, building interactive art installations, and is an active leader in her local cultural and tech communities.

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.

Heinz Kabutz - Publisher of The Java Specialists Newsletter

Heinz is the mastermind behind The Java Specialists' Newsletter. He has a PhD in Computer Science. Heinz has programmed significant portions of several large Java applications and has taught Java to thousands of professional programmers. He is a regular speaker at all the major Java conferences. Heinz was chosen as a Java Champion by Sun Microsystems, the inventors of Java, for his work in advancing Java. Heinz presents our Java training courses anywhere in the world, either in person or via remote teaching technologies. He is the author of all our courses, including Java Specialist Master, Design Patterns and Concurrency Specialist Courses.

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.

Eric Johnson - Senior Security Consultant @ Cypress Data Defense

Eric Johnson (Twitter: @emjohn20) is a Senior Security Consultant at Cypress Data Defense, Application Security Curriculum Product Manager at SANS, and a certified SANS instructor. He is the lead author and instructor for DEV544 Secure Coding in .NET, as well as an instructor for DEV541 Secure Coding in Java/JEE. Eric serves on the advisory board for the SANS Securing the Human Developer awareness training program and is a contributing author for the developer security awareness modules. Eric's previous experience includes web and mobile application penetration testing, secure code review, risk assessment, static source code analysis, security research, and developing security tools. He completed a bachelor of science in computer engineering and a master of science in information assurance at Iowa State University, and currently holds the CISSP, GWAPT, GSSP-.NET, and GSSP-Java certifications.

Leonid Igolnik - VP of Product Development w/Oracle

Leonid Igolnik is self proclaimed a unix bigot and a java evangelist. In his current role as a Vice President of Product Development with Oracle he is responsible for product development of several SaaS applications. He has spent his entire professional career building on-line applications starting at one of the earliest internet service providers in Israel. Leonid first started building large scale applications in Java in 2002 while working for the 2nd largest domain registrar at the time at Tucows/OpenSRS where he led the platform team. Subsequently to that he held several technology leadership roles with companies in Canada and US. Most recently Leonid has been responsible for engineering teams at Taleo (acquired by Oracle) building applications that help millions of people find jobs that have propelled the company to a position of one of the 4 largest SaaS companies in the world.

Jez Humble - Author of 'Continuous Delivery'

Jez Humble is a Principal Consultant with ThoughtWorks, and author of Continuous Delivery, published in Martin Fowler's Signature Series (Addison Wesley, 2010). He got into IT in 2000, just in time for the dot-com bust. Since then he has worked as a developer, system administrator, trainer, consultant, manager, and speaker. He has worked with a variety of platforms and technologies, consulting for non-profits, telecoms, financial services, and online retail companies.

Since 2004 he has worked for ThoughtWorks and ThoughtWorks Studios in Beijing, Bangalore, London, and San Francisco. His focus is on helping organisations deliver valuable, high-quality software frequently and reliably through implementing effective engineering practices in the field of Agile delivery. He also serves as Product Manager for Go, ThoughtWorks Studios agile release management platform. He holds a BA in Physics.

Software Passion: Helping organizations release useful, high quality software fast through better collaboration and automation. Writing small, useful libraries. Being a loudmouth.

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.

Erik Hatcher - co-author of "Lucene in Action"

Erik advocates for Atlas Search at MongoDB, these days. Prior to this, he co-founded Lucidworks, innovating solutions for customers with Solr and Lucene. He has been a committer on various ASF projects, sits on the Lucene and Solr PMC, and a Member of the ASF.

Erik has spoken at conferences, events, and meetups around the world, entirely on open source projects. He has spoken at JavaOne, Uberconf, the NFJS circuit, Devoxx, Berlin Buzzwords, Lucene Revolution, and many other events and user group meetings.

Chris Hansen - Software Architect

Chris Hansen is a technology leader and software architect with experience working on web applications of all shapes and sizes, from static sites in the 90s to a billion-dollar e-commerce platform and covering a lot of ground in-between. Chris started his career at Overstock.com, where he helped them break up their monolithic web app into services at scale. Since then, he has been working on microservice architectures at some tech startups in the Salt Lake City area, aka Silicon Slopes. As CTO of PeopleKeep, Chris built the product team that created the PeopleKeep platform from scratch and helped it grow to millions in revenue.

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.

Arun Gupta - Director of Developer Advocacy at Red Hat

Arun Gupta is Director of Developer Advocacy at Red Hat and focuses on JBoss Middleware. As a founding member of the Java EE team at Sun Microsystems, he spread the love for technology all around the world. At Oracle, he led a cross-functional team to drive the global launch of the Java EE 7 platform through strategy, planning, and execution of content, marketing campaigns, and program. He is a prolific blogger since 2005 and have authored 1500+ blogs on technology. Arun has extensive speaking experience in ~40 countries on myriad topics and is a JavaOne Rockstar. He also founded the Devoxx4Kids chapter in the USA and continues to promoting technology education amongst kids. An author of a best-selling book, an avid runner, a globe trotter, a Java Champion, JUG leader, he is easily accessible at @arungupta.

Jerry Gulla - Senior Development Manager at Sonos

Jerry Gulla a senior development manager at Sonos, helping to fulfill their mission to “fill every home with music.” Previously we was the Architect for SaveLocal.com from Constant Contact - Massachusetts‘ largest SaaS company. He fell in love with hacking both hardware and software more than 20 years ago after getting his first computer, a TRS-80 Model I. He’s worked at companies large and small, including Sun/Javasoft, as well as several small startups. Jerry is passionate about technology and has developed software for everything from the simulator for the B-2 stealth bomber all the way to HTML5 applications for modern smartphones.

His latest interests brings him into the mobile web as well as the world of alternative languages on the JVM, where he’s leveraging the power of dynamic languages and modern frameworks to rapidly deliver new applications for both mobile devices and the desktop.

Mary Grygleski - Java Champion

Mary is a Java Champion, and the AI Practice Lead at Callibrity, a consulting firm based in Ohio. She started as an engineer in Unix/C, then transitioned to Java around 2000 and has never looked back since then. After 20+ years of being a software engineer and technical architect, she discovered her true passion in developer and customer advocacy. Most recently she has serviced companies of various sizes such as IBM, US Cellular, Bank of America, Chicago Mercantile Exchange, in topic areas that included Java, GenAI, Streaming systems, Open source, Cloud and Distributed messaging systems. She is also a very active tech community leader outside of her day job. She is the President of the Chicago Java Users Group (CJUG), and the Chicago Chapter Co-Lead for AICamp.

Carson Gross - CEO and Co-Founder of LeadDyno

Carson Gross has been programming professionally since 1999, doing web development, web infrastructure work and programming language design. He is currently splits his time between being CEO and co-founder of LeadDyno (http://leaddyno.com), an online affiliate marketing tool, and work in the Programming Languages Group at Guidewire Software, where he works on the Gosu JVM programming language (http://gosu-lang.github.io). He is the main developer of intercooler.js (http://intercoolerjs.org) which allows developers to create modern AJAX-based web applications with almost no client-side code. He did his undergraduate work (BS) at Cal and his graduate work (MS) at Stanford. He currently lives in Sacramento, California.

Travis Gosselin - Distinguished Software Engineer, SPS Commerce

Travis is a Distinguished Software Engineer at SPS Commerce, the world's largest retail network, where he leads innovation, drives meaningful change, and amplifies team productivity. With a passion for technology and a talent for simplifying complex architectures, Travis focuses on creating seamless Developer Experiences and fostering high-performing teams. A seasoned speaker, architect, and blogger, he thrives on sharing insights, exploring emerging technologies, and championing impactful development practices.

Brian Goetz - Author of Java Concurrency in Practice

Brian Goetz has been a professional software developer for 20 years. He is the author of over 75 articles on software development, and his book, Java Concurrency In Practice, was published in May 2006 by Addison-Wesley. He serves on the JCP Expert Groups for JSRs 166 (concurrency utilities), 107 (caching), and 305 (annotations for safety analysis). He is a frequent presenter at JavaOne, OOPSLA, JavaPolis, SDWest, and the No Fluff Just Stuff Software Symposium Tour. Brian is a Sr. Staff Engineer at Sun Microsystems.

Tudor Gîrba - CEO/software environmentalist at feenk.com

Tudor Gîrba (tudorgirba.com) is a software environmentalist and co-founder of feenk.com where he works with an amazing team on the Glamorous Toolkit, a novel IDE that reshapes the Development eXperience (gtoolkit.com).

He built all sorts of projects like the Moose platform for software and data analysis (moosetechnology.org), and he authored a couple of methods like humane assessment (humane-assessment.com). In 2014, he also won the prestigious Dahl-Nygaard Junior Prize for his research (aito.org). This was a surprising prize as he is the only recipient that was not a university professor, even if he does hold a PhD from the University of Bern from a previous life.

These days he likes to talk about moldable development. If you want to see how much he likes that, just ask him if moldable development can fundamentally change how we approach software development.

Jeff Genender - Java Open Source Consultant

Jeff Genender is a Java Champion, Apache Member, and Java Open Source consultant specializing in SOA and enterprise service implementation. Jeff has over 23 years of software architecture, team lead, and development experience in multiple industries. He is a frequent speaker at such events as Uberconf, JavaZone, Java In Action, JavaOne, JFokus, and numerous Java User Groups on topics pertaining to Enterprise Service Bus (ESBs), Service Oriented Architectures (SOA), and application servers.

Jeff is an active committer and Project Management Committee (PMC) member for Apache ServiceMix, CXF, Geronimo, a comitter on OpenEJB and Mina, and author of several very popular Mojo (Maven plugins). He is the author of Enterprise Java Servlets, Professional Apache Geronimo, and Professional Apache Tomcat. Jeff also serves as a member of the Java Community Process (JCP) expert group for JSR-342 (Java Platform, Enterprise Edition 7 (Java EE 7) Specification).

Justine Gehring - Research Engineer @ Moderne

Justine Gehring is a talented researcher in the field of Machine Learning (ML) for code and Graph Neural Networks (GNNs). Her focus lies in generating code under challenging circumstances, specifically in scenarios such as sparse data where library-specific code is required, as well as managing a substantial amount of code at a time. Justine is a research engineer at Moderne.

Trisha Gee - Developer Advocate for JetBrains

Trisha has developed Java applications for a range of industries, including finance, manufacturing, software and non-profit, for companies of all sizes. She has expertise in Java high performance systems, is passionate about enabling developer productivity, and dabbles with Open Source development. Trisha is a leader of the Sevilla Java User Group and a Java Champion, she believes healthy communities and sharing ideas help us to learn from mistakes and build on successes. As a Developer Advocate for JetBrains, she gets to share all the interesting things she’s constantly discovering.

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.

Connie Finkelman - Front-end Experience Architect

Connie has been developing websites for over fifteen years and is currently the Senior UI Architect for Vitacost/Kroger, where she is architecting the front-end of Kroger's new responsive online storefronts. Before joining Vitacost, she developed websites and mobile applications for Office Depot, and for agency corporate clients including Coca-Cola and AT&T. Connie has developed enterprise websites in languages as diverse as Arabic and Japanese, and has won numerous awards for her use of innovative techniques, including 3 American Advertising (Addy) Awards for responsive website design and development.

She is co-founder of the digital agency Pixelslave, Inc. and is a passionate evangelist for performance, user experience and accessibility. She is also the pseudonymous author of six novels in which she explores the dark side of technology.

Michael Feathers - Author of "Working Effectively with Legacy Code"

Michael Feathers is the founder and Director of R7K Research & Conveyance, a company specializing in software and organization design. Michael is also the author of the book Working Effectively with Legacy Code.

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

Yakov Fain - Author of two editions of "Angular Development with TypeScript"

Yakov Fain is a co-author of Manning's books “TypeScript Quickly”, “Angular Development with TypeScript” as well as a number of other technical books on programming. A Java Champion, he has taught multiple classes and workshops on the web and Java-related technologies, presented at international conferences, and published more than a thousand blog posts (see https://yakovfain.com).

Szczepan Faber - Engineering Leadership @ AirBnB

• Humble maker of great tools for engineers
• Founder of Mockito framework, member of Shipkit team
• Core engineer of Gradle 1.x and 2.x.
• Tech Lead of Development Tools at LinkedIn
• Obsessed with software quality (via clean tests!!!) and continuous delivery (via Gradle automation!!!)
• User of GitHub, Twitter, and LinkedIn

Ben Ellingson - Lead Developer NoFluffJustStuff.com

Ben is a full-stack web developer and mobile app developer. He is the developer behind nofluffjuststuff.com, uberconf.com, archconf.com, several other NFJS websites, and NFJS mobile apps (iOS and Android). He is fluent in JavaScript, Angular, Groovy, Java, Objective-C, Swift, Kubernetes, and Front-end engineering. He has over 20 years of development experience and is constantly learning new technologies. He is also a Certified Kubernetes Application Developer (CKAD).

Todd Ellermann - VP of Engineering for VirtualTourist.com

Todd is a 15 year veteran of the Java development and has 4 years of professional Grails development experience. He is currently the V.P. of Engineering for VirtualTourist.com a TripAdvisor Media Group Company. In 2008, VirtualTourist.com was acquired by TripAdvisor/Expedia(EXPE), and Todd was brought in to lead a team of Java/Groovy/Grails engineers in the redevelopment effort. A graduate of the University of Arizona, with a B.S. in Computer Engineering, and an MBA from ASU with an emphasis on management of the creative software engineering process. When he is not actively writing code for his own startup ideas, you will find him entertaining his daughters or getting lost in a glass of wine, both of which usually lead to other crazy coding ideas like this one: “What would happen if I did a screencast of writing the same web application in eight different languages?” – www.betterwebapp.com

Micaela Eller - Agile Transformation Leader @ IBM

Micaela is a Sr Program Manager and Agile Transformation Leader at IBM. Her dream is to make the world better by building organizational cultures infused with compassion, courage and empathy. She’s worked in a variety of industries, from music and entertainment to biotechnology to software to AI, and, as a result, she developed the unique ability to see beyond differences and identify the common threads to bring ideas and people together. She is an engaging and adept Storyteller and uses her personal experiences and expertise as an Agile Coach, Leadership Coach, Teacher and Speaker to inspire others to work together to solve big problems. She’s a sought out speaker on Organizational, Cultural and Agile Transformation, Facilitation, Scrum, and Servant Leadership. She also speaks about Women’s Issues, Women in Agile and about her own Mental Health journey

Johan Edstrom -

Johan Edstrom is an open source software evangelist, Apache developer and seasoned architect; he has created Java architectures for large scalable, high transaction monitoring, financial and open source systems.

Johan has worked as development lead, infrastructure manager, IT lead, programmer and guided several large companies to success in the use of open source software components.

Lately he has been helping some of the worlds largest networking companies and medical startups achieve high availability, scalability and dynamically adapting SOA systems.

Hamlet D`Arcy - Sr. Java/Groovy Developer, Groovy Committer

Hamlet D'Arcy has been writing software for over a decade, and has spent considerable time coding in C++, Java, and Groovy. He's passionate about learning new languages and different ways to think about problems. Hamlet is the founder of the Basel-based Hackergarten open source coding group, and regularly participates and speaks at local and international user groups and conferences. Hamlet is a committer on the Groovy and CodeNarc projects, and is a contributor on a few other open source projects (including JConch and the IDEA Groovy Plugin). He blogs regularly at http://hamletdarcy.blogspot.com and can be found on Twitter as HamletDRC (http://twitter.com/hamletdrc).

Ksenia Dmitrieva - Web Security Consultant

Ksenia Dmitrieva-Peguero is a Principal Consultant at Cigital with over six years of experience in securing web applications and five years of development experience. She performs penetration testing and code review for clients in financial services, entertainment, telecommunications, energy, and enterprise security industries. Her current concentration is on researching HTML5 technologies and new JavaScript frameworks, their security implications, vulnerability discovery and remediation. Ms. Dmitrieva-Peguero has delivered presentations and training sessions at conferences around the world, including BSides Security in London, Nullcon in India, AppSec California in the USA, RSA Asia Pacific & Japan in Singapore, AppSec Europe in Italy, and several NFJS shows.

Mark DeBeer - Developer Productivity Engineer at SPS Commerce

Mark is a Lead Software Engineer specializing in Developer Productivity Engineering at SPS Commerce. He's passionate about building tools and solutions that help developers work more efficiently. With over a decade of experience in both front-end and mid-tier development, Mark enjoys sharing his expertise through speaking at tech conferences and contributing to SPS Commerce's internal technology podcast.

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.

Luke Daley - Lead Engineer, Gradle Cloud Services

Luke works @ Gradle Inc. building Gradle Enterprise. He's also an open source tragic and is the creator of Ratpack https://ratpack.io. When not hitting the keyboard, he's likely drinking IPA or playing guitar.

Aaron Cure - Senior Security Consultant with Cypress Data Defense

Aaron is a senior security consultant at Cypress Data Defense, and an instructor and contributing author for the CDD Introduction to Internet Security in .NET course. After ten years in the U.S. Army as a Russian Linguist and a Satellite Repair Technician, he worked as a database administrator and programmer on the Iridium project, with subsequent positions as a telecommunications consultant, senior programmer, and security consultant. Other experience includes developing security tools, secure code review, vulnerability assessment, penetration testing, risk assessment, static source code analysis, and security research. Aaron holds the GIAC GSSP-.NET, GWAPT, GMOB, and CISSP certifications and is located in Arvada, CO.

Adrian Cole - Cloud Engineer at Twitter

Adrian is an active member of cloud interoperability, REST, and DevOps circles. He is the founder of a few popular open source projects, notably Apache jclouds and Netflix denominator, both of which java libraries that help create portable cloud deployments. Adrian maintains the http/2 implementation of Square okhttp. Adrian's currently focused on cloud computing at Twitter.

Cliff Click - CTO & Co-Founder of 0xdata

Cliff Click is the CTO and Co-Founder of 0xdata, a firm dedicated to creating a new way to think about web-scale data storage and real-time analytics. Cliff wrote his first compiler when he was 15 (Pascal to TRS Z-80!), although my most famous compiler is the HotSpot Server Compiler (the Sea of Nodes IR). I helped Azul Systems build an 864 core pure-Java mainframe that keeps GC pauses on 500Gb heaps to under 10ms, and worked on all aspects of that JVM. Before that Cliff worked on HotSpot at Sun Microsystems, and am at least partially responsible for bringing Java into the mainstream.

Cliff is invited to speak regularly at industry and academic conferences and has published many papers about HotSpot technology. He holds a PhD in Computer Science from Rice University and about 15 patents.

John Chapin - Tech Executive, Engineer, Co-Founder of Symphonia

John Chapin is a cofounder of Symphonia, a Serverless and Cloud Technology consultancy based in New York City. He has over 15 years of experience as a technical executive and senior engineer, and was previously VP Engineering, Core Services & Data Science at Intent Media, where he helped teams transform how they delivered business value through Serverless technology and agile practices. John also co-organizes the NYC Clojure meetup. Outside of Symphonia, he can be found running along the west side of Manhattan, surfing at Rockaway Beach, or planning his next trip abroad.

Michael Carducci - Holistic Software Architect @ Truly Magic

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.”

Charles Bradley - Agile and Scrum Coach

Mr Bradley is an experienced Scrum Coach, Certified Scrum Professional, Certified ScrumMaster, and Certified Professional ScrumMaster I. In addition to his Scrum credentials, Mr. Bradley is also a highly capable, full lifecycle experienced, software development team lead that prefers XP for good engineering practices. He is Sun Certified in Java, and has 13 years of experience in J2EE application development across all tiers. More recently he has also picked up some good C# experience as well. In his spare time, he enjoys driving his wife crazy by talking about Scrum, especially when he refers to his “honey do” list as his “personal backlog” and asks his wife to prioritize her requests. He lives in Denver, Colorado, and he is easily found on LinkedIn.

Jeanne Boyarsky - Java Champion

Jeanne Boyarsky is a Java Champion from New York City and has been a Java developer for more than 20 years. She has co-authored Wiley's Oracle Java 8, 11, and 17 certification books. Jeanne volunteers at CodeRanch and mentors the programmers on a high school robotics team in her free time. She has spoken at numerous conferences including Dev Nexus, KCDC, QCon and JavaOne.

David Bock - Principal Consultant, CodeSherpas Inc.

David Bock is a Principal Consultant at CodeSherpas, a company he founded in 2007. Mr. Bock is also the President of the Northern Virginia Java Users Group, the Editor of O'Reilly's OnJava.com website, and a frequent speaker on technology in venues such as the No Fluff Just Stuff Software Symposiums.

In January 2006, Mr. Bock was honored by being awarded the title of Java Champion by a panel of esteemed leaders in the Java Community in a program sponsored by Sun. There are approximately 100 active Java Champions worldwide.

David has also served on several JCP panels, including the Specification of the Java 6 Platform and the upcoming Java Module System.

In addition to his public speaking and training activities, Mr. Bock actively consults as a software engineer, project manager, and team mentor for commercial and government clients.

Ola Bini - Language Geek, author of "Practical JRuby on Rails Projects"

Ola Bini works as a language geek for ThoughtWorks in Chicago. He is from Sweden but don't hold that against him. He is one of the JRuby core developers and have been involved in JRuby development since 2006. At one point in time, Ola got tired of all existing programming languages and decided to create his own, called Ioke. He has written a book called Practical JRuby on Rails Projects for APress, talked at numerous conferences, and contributed to a large number of open source projects.

His main passion lies in implementation languages, working on regular expression engines, trying to figure out how to create good YAML parsers.

Emad Benjamin - Chief Technologist, Application Platforms, VMware

Emad has spent the past 25 years in various software engineering positions involving software development of application platforms and distributed systems for various industries such as finance, health, IT, and heavy industry – in various international locations. Emad is currently the Sr. Director and Chief Technologist of Application Platforms with Office of the CTO at VMware, focusing on building hybrid cloud distributed runtimes that are application aware.

Pete Behrens - Founder/CEO @ Agile Leadership Journey

Pete Behrens is the Founder and CEO of the Agile Leadership Journey, dedicated to inspiring leaders, empowering teams and driving change to improve business performance. Through education and coaching, they equip leaders to shift mindset and culture so change becomes an asset rather than a liability.

For over three decades, Pete has been guiding organizational development and fostering a network of trusted professionals that do the same. Pete is also the creator and host of the Relearning Leadership podcast. Along with expert guides and his guests, Pete explores leadership challenges, discussing paths for new awareness and growth for leaders to improve their leadership in highly complex and rapidly changing environments.

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.

Scott Bain - Author of "Emergent Design"

Scott Bain is a 35+-year veteran in computer technology, with a background in development, engineering, and design. He has also designed, delivered, and managed training programs for certification and end-user skills, both in traditional classrooms and via distance learning. Scott teaches courses and consults on Agile Analysis and Design Patterns, Advanced Software Design, and Sustainable Test-Driven Development. Scott is a frequent speaker at developer conferences. He is the author of “Emergent Design: The Evolutionary Nature of Professional Software Development” which won a Jolt Productivity Award. He is also one of the co-authors of Essential Skills for the Agile Developer. Both books are available from Addison Wesley/Pearson Education. He is currently writing, with Amir Kolsky, Sustainable Test-Driven Development.

Alex Antonov - Principal Engineer on the Technical Initiatives team at Orbitz Worldwide

Alex has joined Orbitz in 2004 and is responsible for providing technical leadership and guidance in the development of foundational technologies, core libraries and APIs for the enterprise-wide use, as well as establishing and maintaining common design principles and standards used within the company and integration of new software development practices within the development community.

Previously Alex was a Lead Engineer on the same team responsible for web application frameworks and developing common practices and additional functionality on top of Spring MVC & Webflow.

Alex is a graduate of Loyola University of Chicago, with a B.S. in Computer Science and M.S. in Computer Science specializing in Software Architecture. He currently resides in Evanston, IL and when not coding, Alex enjoys playing tennis, hiking, skiing, and traveling.

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

Dan Allen - Software Developer, Author and Open Source Advocate

Dan is an open source advocate, community catalyst, software generalist, author and speaker. Most of the time, he's hacking using some JVM language. He leads the Asciidoctor project and serves as the community liaison for Arquillian. He builds on these experiences to help make a variety of open source projects wildly successful, including Asciidoctor, Arquillian, Opal and JBoss Forge.

Dan is the author of Seam in Action (Manning, 2008) and has written articles for NFJS, the Magazine, IBM developerWorks, Java Tech Journal and JAXenter. He's also an internationally recognized speaker, having presented at major software conferences including JavaOne, Devoxx, NFJS, UberConf, RWX, JAX and jFokus. He's recognized as a JavaOne Rock Star and Java (JVM) Champion.

After a long conference day, you'll likely find Dan geeking out about technology, documentation and testing with fellow community members over a Trappist beer or Kentucky Bourbon.

Husain Al-Mohssen - PhD, Data Scientist/Architect

Husain's main focus is in the area of engineering science and it's application to create profitable products that serve 10's or 100's of thousands of users. Husain's work at MIT focused on extracting faint signals from super-computer scale gas simulations close to equilibrium. He later built on this background to start a user-facing email analytics company that serviced thousands of paying customers in near-real time. Husain has extensive software engineering experience both as a developer, maintainer and architect in the areas of enterprise software, high performance computing, as well as the “Big Data” domain. Husain is also an accomplished mechanical engineer, with many years of hands-on experience in the oil and power industries.