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.
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.
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.
Kate Wardin - Senior Engineering Manager @ Netflix
Kate Wardin is an Engineering Manager at Netflix and is based in Minneapolis, Minnesota. She enjoys exploring the psychology of happiness at work and is passionate about building inclusive and high performing teams via people-first leadership. She believes in the power of humor to bring people together to create a positive and cohesive workplace. In her free time, Kate enjoys unwinding by watching The Office or chasing her toddler and dog.
Alexander von Zitzewitz - Founder and Managing Director, Hello2morrow
Alexander von Zitzewitz is founder, managing director of the company and CEO of the US subsidiary. He has more than 20 years of project and management experience. In 1993 he founded ootec - a company focused on project services around object oriented software technology. This company was sold to the French Valtech group in March 2000 and served customers like Siemens, BMW, Thyssen-Krupp-Stahl and other well known names in German industry. From 2003 to early 2005 he was working as Director of Central Europe for the French company Xcalia S.A. Since the summer of 2008 he is living in Massachusetts. His areas of expertise are object oriented system design and large scale system architecture. Alexander has a degree in Computer Science from the Technical University of Munich.
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.
Matt Stine - I Enable Early-Career Enterprise Software Engineers to Continuously Improve
My passion is taking a metaphysical approach to software engineering: what is the nature of the collaborative game that we continuously play, and are there better, more contextually-aware ways to play that game?
By day I lead a team tasked with taking a first-principles-centric approach to intentionally enabling programming language usage at the largest bank in the United States.
By night I write and teach my way through a masterclass in software engineering and architecture targeting early-career software engineers working in large-scale enterprise technology organizations.
What is the primary goal?
To win the game. More seriously: to get 1% better every day at providing business value through software.
Who am I?
I'm a 22-year veteran of the enterprise software industry. I've played almost every role I can imagine:
- Software Engineer
- Software Architect
- Technical Lead
- Engineering Manager
- Consultant
- Product Manager
- Field CTO
- Developer Advocate
- Conference Speaker
- Author
- Technical Trainer
- Technical Marketer
- Site Reliability Engineer
- Desktop Support Specialist
I've worked at Fortune 500 companies, a tenacious teal cloud startup, and a not-for-profit children's hospital. I've written a book, and I've hosted a podcast. I've learned a lot along the way, including many things I wish I'd known when I first got started. And so now I want to pass those learnings on to you, especially if you've only just begun your career.
Sam Snyder - VP of Engineering @ Moderne
Sam Snyder has spent the past decade working on improving developer happiness with better tooling. At Tableau software, he used data from the development and deployment pipeline to systematically seize the greatest opportunities for improvement and eliminate the greatest pain points. At Gradle, he integrated that process and data visualization methodology into Gradle Enterprise. Now as VP of Engineering at Moderne, Sam leads development on the core refactoring technologies and teaches Moderne's customers how to automate away the tedious, repetitive parts of software development.
Josh Smith - Enterprise Architect
Josh has been in in IT for 15 years, as a developer, lead dev, tech lead, architect, and enterprise architect. He's worked on big teams, small teams, and been on a team of one. In the process of all of this, he's learned a ton, and he loves to mentor and share that information.
He also loves strategy – laying out plans and figuring out dependencies, which order to do things in. Included in this is a deep love of the complicated business + people + culture + tech (especially tech that makes people's lives easier) of IT strategy.
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.
Ryan Shriver - CTO of SingleStone
Ryan Shriver is the Chief Technology Officer of SingleStone, a tech consulting firm based in Richmond, Virginia that takes a human-centered approach to problem solving. At SingleStone, he leads the services team and focuses on architecture modernizations with clients ranging from start-ups to Fortune 100 companies. Shriver also teaches Human-Centered Design at VCU’s School of the Arts, where he helps students apply Design Thinking and Agile practices to solve real-world problems.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
Rebecca Parsons - Vice President of Global Innovation - Thoughtworks
Dr. Rebecca Parsons is ThoughtWorks’ Chief Technology Officer. She has more years of application development experience than she cares to admit, in industries ranging from telecommunications to emergent internet services. She has extensive experience leading in the creation of large-scale distributed object applications and the integration of disparate systems.
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.
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.
Laine Minor - IT & Human Architect
Laine has been a developer, a technical lead, a stay at home mom, and an IT architect – and that last was a broad enough title that it let her do both technical things AND cultural things.
She realized then that that was her most favorite place to be, in that in-between place of technology and culture.
She also learned that enabling people and organizations is HARD work, and that explaining that in-between place can help.
Chris Maki - Founder & Chief Architect of Rip City Software
Chris is the founder and Chief Architect of Rip City Software, a company dedicated to Java Microservices and building systems in AWS. He has more than 20 years of experience creating web scale enterprise systems. Throughout his career, Chris has been a user group leader, speaker, and author. He's passionate about inclusive leadership, empowering teams, focusing on differentiated work and streamlining the development, testing and deployment process.
Jeffrey Lee - Principal Architect at Natera
With over a decade of experience in Cloud Architecture, Jeffrey Lee has developed a deep understanding of Cloud Architecture, high-performance computing, and genomic pipeline platforms. His work primarily focuses on bridging the gap between complex technical challenges and strategic business objectives, enhancing organizational efficiency and scalability within the BioTech, Higher Education, and Retail sectors. Jeff is known for his collaborative leadership style, always striving to foster teamwork and operational excellence. As a speaker, he enjoys sharing insights and practical approaches to cloud technology, aiming to contribute constructively to discussions about future technological directions and best practices. Jeff's commitment to the field helps guide ongoing dialogue and innovation in cloud architecture.
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.
Javiera Laso - Lead Developer Consultant @ Thoughtworks
I am a biotech engineer who transition from the lab to the world of software. During my university years, I excelled in both fields becoming a teaching assistant in the IT engineering program while also pursuing my love for biotechnology. Post-graduation, I realized that working in lab environments with outdated software was limiting my potential to apply cutting-edge technology in biotech. So, I decided to take on a challenging journey to become a developer and bridge this gap. As a proud woman in tech my background enriches the landscape of software development. I am also an enthusiastic supporter of DDD as it can help us to bind the code with the business.
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.
Kirk Knoernschild - Software Developer & Mentor
Kirk is software developer with a passion for building great software. He takes a keen interest in design, architecture, application development platforms, agile development, and the IT industry in general, especially as it relates to software development. His recent book, Java Application Architecture was published in 2012, and presents 18 patterns that help you design modular software.
Dave Klein - Developer Advocate with Confluent
After 28 years as a developer, architect, project manager (recovered), author, trainer, conference organizer, and homeschooling dad, Dave Klein landed his dream job as a developer advocate at Confluent. Dave is marveling in and eager to help others explore the amazing world of event streaming with Apache Kafka.
Christina Kayastha - 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.
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.
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.
Dave Hendricksen - Senior Architect for Thomson Reuters, Author, and Mentor
Dave is a senior architect for Thomson Reuters and has worked for Thomson Reuters for over 20 years where his focus is on architecting and delivering enterprise hybrid big data systems.
Dave has written two books with Addison-Wesley, and is currently working on a third:
- 12 Essential Skills for Software Architects – this book focuses on the soft skills needed by software architects, and has also been translated to Chinese.
- 12 More Essential Skills for Software Architects – this book focuses on the day to day technical skills needed by software architects.
- (In Progress) Enterprise Big Data – this book focuses on how to architect and build enterprise big data systems.
Dave is also the head coach for the Eagan High School FIRST Robotics program with over 150 students and over 60 mentors. Dave also likes to build things like trebuchets, go carts, and rain barrel watering systems.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Dillon Gardner - Data Scientist at EnerNOC
Dillon is a principal member of EnerNOC’s data science team. In this position, he focuses on using the growing set of energy time series data to design innovative experiments, architect machine learning algorithms, and extract new-found business insights. He has worked on projects ranging from understanding how buildings apparent power and real power usage differs to architecting techniques for obtaining real-time electricity baseline estimations. Prior to joining EnerNOC, Dillon completed his Physics PhD at MIT, where he performed neutron and x-ray scattering experiments on novel electronic and magnetic materials. This worked launched his career in developing models based on massive sets of data.
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.
Martin Fowler - Chief Scientist with Thoughtworks
I'm an author, speaker… essentially a loud-mouthed pundit on the topic of software development. I've been working in the software industry since the mid-'80s where I got into the then-new world of object-oriented software. I got a call from ThoughtWorks in 1999 to consult on one of their projects and they rapidly became my favorite client. Within a year I was an employee.
My main interest is to understand how to design software systems, so as to maximize the productivity of development teams. In doing this I’ve looked to understand the patterns of good software design, and also the processes that support software design. I learn a lot from listening to the experiences of my fellow ThoughtWorkers: digging for useful ideas and communicating them to the wider world.
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
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.
Rod Cope - CTO of Perforce
Rod Cope is the CTO of Perforce Software. He provides technical vision and architectural leadership for the company’s globally distributed development teams. Rod came to Perforce from Rogue Wave Software, where he was CTO. He was also the Founder and CTO of OpenLogic, a profitable venture-backed company in the open source space, and joined Rogue Wave as CTO following the acquisition.
Previously in his 25+ year software career, he worked at IBM, IBM Global Services, General Electric, and for the CTO of Anthem. Rod has also led key technical teams working on mission-critical applications at Ericsson and Integral. For over 20 years, Rod has spoken on various technical and business topics at dozens of conferences around the world, including APIdays, API World, JavaOne, OSCON, Embedded World, ApacheCon, Strata/Big Data, LinuxCon, and the No Fluff Just Stuff tour.
Rod holds both a Bachelor’s and a Master’s degree in Software Engineering from the University of Louisville. He lives with his wife and dogs in Colorado where they all enjoy hiking, traveling, and dog sports.
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.
Jeff Brown - Grails Practice Lead - OCI Grails Team
Grails co-founder and OCI Grails Practice Lead, Jeff Scott Brown has been doing JVM application development for as long as the JVM has existed. He has spent most of the last decade focused specifically on work related to the Grails framework. Jeff co-authored The Definitive Guide to Grails Second Edition and The Definitive Guide to Grails 2, in partnership with Grails co-founder and OCI Grails Team Lead, Graeme Rocher. Jeff is also a regular public speaker on Grails, Groovy, and other JVM-related technologies.
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.
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.
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.
Jabez Abraham - Senior Cyber Security Cloud Architect
As a Senior Cyber Security Cloud Architect at Paige.ai, Jabez is passionate about cloud computing. He thrives on solving problems when leveraging native cloud services for building secure and supportable solutions. At Paige.ai, he helps in defining the strategies, roadmaps, and solutions to embrace the value of the public cloud as well as ensure the protection of Paige.ai infrastructure, applications, and data for Cloud Native, Hybrid, and inter-cloud deployments. He has spent an extensive amount of time working through the various aspects of adoption while embracing a #Cloudbydefault approach. Jabez also leads organizational transformation in Cloud and Security Domains.