Speakers

Mike Amundsen is an internationally known author and speaker who travels the world discussing network architecture, web development, and the intersection of technology and society. He’s helped companies large and small capitalize on the opportunities provided by APIs, microservices, and digital transformation. He’s authored numerous books and papers and contributed to the O’Reilly book Continuous API Management. He’s the author of RESTful Web Clients and coauthor of Microservice Architecture. His latest book is Design and Build Great APIs (Pragmatic Publishing).

Biharck Muniz Araújo is a principal engineer at ThoughtWorks focused on performance and algorithm design. He has 16 years’ experience in computer science and has been a software architect and lead programmer for the past 12 years, focusing on technology in relation to large-scale problems associated with web projects that demanded high-security standards for information transmission in companies in a variety of sectors, including telecoms, health, and finance. Passionate about technology and academic research, he’s the author of Hands-On RESTful Web Services with TypeScript 3. He holds a master’s degree in electrical engineering and a PhD in bioinformatics.

Nimisha Asthagiri is a chief architect at edX, a global nonprofit, open source platform for education and learning, where she drives strategic initiatives to implement an intentional architecture for the next generation of large-scale online learning. She’s spent countless hours tackling problems of distributed computing and scalability. Now, she focuses on taming a monolithic architecture, redesigning the platform for the future of learning, and aligning the edX development community on sound design principles and practices. Nimisha is passionate about education as an avenue to inspire and improve the lives of many.

Matt Auburn is a passionate software developer at Morgan Stanley, where he works as an API developer. Matt owns the DevOps and Security API components. He’s a Java developer at heart, but he also writes automated tests in Python and has an interest in Go. He enjoys learning new technologies, mentoring, and teaching developers.

Joel Barciauskas is the director of engineering at Datadog, where he leads its distribution metrics team, providing accurate, low-latency percentile measures for customers across their infrastructure. He’s an experienced engineering lead and technical manager with an extensive engineering and technical consulting background.

Vittorio Bertocci is a principal architect for Auth0. Previously, he worked with Fortune 100 and Global 100 companies at Microsoft, including time spent as a principal program manager on the Azure Active Directory team, focusing on the developer experience. He also contributed to the inception and launch of Microsoft’s claims-based platform components (Windows Identity Foundation and ADFS, ADAL and MSAL SDKs, ASP.NET middleware). He’s a well-known speaker, educator, and published author.

Andy Bonham is a distinguished engineer at Capital One with over 18 years of experience building real-time high-transaction decisioning and workflow applications. His application architecture areas of expertise include microservices, reactive architecture, case management, BPMS products, rules engines, imaging solutions, and enterprise common capabilities. He holds both an undergraduate and a master’s degree in computer science with a concentration in information security as well as several industry certifications, including AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Associate, CISSP, and CSSLP. He recently spoke at the Red Hat and Reactive Summit conferences and has written a number of microservice articles for Capital One Tech, published on Medium.

Allard Buijze is the founder and chief technical officer at AxonIQ, a microservices communication platform for building event-driven, distributed applications, where he helps customers reach appropriate future-proof technical decisions. A former software architect within the fields of scalability and performance, he’s worked on several projects where performance is often a recurring theme. Allard is convinced that a good domain model is the beginning of contributing to the overall performance of an application and developed the Axon framework out of this conviction. He regularly gives workshops and trainings on frameworks, best practices, and architecture and is a frequent speaker at conferences, seminars, and meetups.

Paris Buttfield-Addison is a cofounder of Secret Lab, a game development studio based in beautiful Hobart, Australia. Secret Lab builds games and game development tools, including the multi-award-winning ABC Play School iPad games, the BAFTA- and IGF-winning Night in the Woods, the Qantas airlines Joey Playbox games, and the Yarn Spinner narrative game framework. Previously, Paris was a mobile product manager for Meebo (acquired by Google). Paris particularly enjoys game design, statistics, blockchain, machine learning, and human-centered technology. He researches and writes technical books on mobile and game development (more than 20 so far) for O’Reilly; he recently finished writing Practical AI with Swift and is currently working on Head First Swift. He holds a degree in medieval history and a PhD in computing. Paris loves to bring machine learning into the world of practical and useful. You can find him on Twitter as @parisba.

Rob Cameron is the technical director of cloud services at Roblox. As a self-described “tech nerd who wants to make gaming infrastructure amazing,” Rob chose to leverage containers to power Roblox’s infrastructure at massive scale. Rob has been solving hard technical challenges for nearly 20 years in the industry, consulting with over one thousand different organizations around security and scalable infrastructure. Before focusing on the technical challenges facing the gaming industry, he spent most of his career working for Juniper Networks in the security space.

Maggie Carroll is a senior engineer at MAG Aerospace, putting together a system of systems and enabling vendors to play well together. Maggie has been a software architect and enterprise architect for the last six years and has worked in software engineering for the last 30 years. She helped launch two successful startups and has helped with several large real-time systems in the aerospace industry. Maggie loves leaning up processes and has a passion for improving team dynamics to get great results.

Lucas Cavalcanti is a principal engineer at Nubank, the most influential Brazilian fintech, built as a service-oriented architecture leveraging Clojure and Datomic. Lucas is a functional programming enthusiast and proponent of best practices in software development with vast experience in real production applications written in Java, Scala, Ruby, and now Clojure. He holds a BS in computer science from the University of Sao Paulo.

John Chapin is a cofounder of Symphonia, an expert consultancy based in New York City that helps companies of all sizes use serverless and cloud technology to deliver value quickly and effectively. Along with Symphonia cofounder Mike Roberts, John authored the O’Reilly report What Is Serverless? His and Mike’s highly regarded talks and workshops are regularly featured at conferences such as the O’Reilly Software Architecture Conference, the O’Reilly Velocity Conference, OSCON, QCon, ServerlessConf, and AWS re:Invent. John can be reached at john@symphonia.io.

Wes Chow is the director of engineering in advanced analytics at Cortico and a researcher at the MIT Media Lab. He’s an advisor to Chartbeat, where he was CTO for more time than healthy. Previously, he built early infrastructure for high-frequency trading shops and led the team that created Songza Radio, which was acquired and merged into Google Music.

Doug Davis is a Knative operations manager in the Hybrid Cloud Division at IBM. He’s worked on cloud-related technologies for many years and with many of the most popular OSS projects, including OpenStack, Cloud Foundry, Docker, and Kubernetes. He cochairs the CNCF’s Serverless Working Group and the Cloud Events project.

Scott Davis is a web architect and developer advocate at ThoughtWorks, where he focuses on the leading-edge, innovative, emerging, and nontraditional aspects of web development, such as serverless web apps, mobile web apps (responsive PWAs), HTML5-based smart TV apps, conversational UIs (like Siri and Alexa), and building IoT solutions with web technologies. He’s also the founder of Thirstyhead.com, a Denver-based training and software development consultancy. Scott has been writing about web development for over 10 years. His books include Getting Started with Grails, Groovy Recipes, GIS for Web Developers, The Google Maps API: Adding Where to Your Web Applications, and JBoss at Work. He’s also the author of several popular article series at IBM developerWorks, including Mastering MEAN, Mastering Grails, and Practically Groovy. His videos include Architecture of the MEAN Stack, Responsive Mobile Architecture, and On the Road to Angular 2. Scott is also the cofounder of the Denver HTML5 User Group.

Sasha Jolich is the director of engineering at Kater, a mobility-as-a-service company. Previously, he founded PersistR, an EDD framework and SaaS platform, and worked closely with organizations to design and implement innovative, enterprise-grade API and microservices solutions. An experienced software architect, Sasha has worked extensively in the field of integration and real-time transaction processing.

George Fairbanks is a software engineer at Google and the author of the book Just Enough Software Architecture and the Pragmatic Designer column for IEEE Software magazine.

Nicholas Fong is a full stack engineer working at IBM. When not working on delighting users, he enjoys exploring New York City for new restaurants and playing with his cat, Miko.

Neal Ford is a director, software architect, and meme wrangler at ThoughtWorks, a global IT consultancy that thinks disruptively to deliver technology to address the toughest challenges, all while seeking to revolutionize the IT industry and create positive social change. Neal focuses on designing and building large-scale enterprise applications. He’s an internationally recognized expert on software development and delivery, especially in the intersection of Agile engineering techniques and software architecture. Neal has authored magazine articles, seven books (and counting), and dozens of video presentations and has spoken at hundreds of developers conferences worldwide on the topics of software architecture, continuous delivery, functional programming, and cutting-edge software innovations. Check out his website at Nealford.com. He welcomes feedback and can be reached at nford@thoughtworks.com.

Martin Fowler is an author, speaker, consultant, and self-described loud-mouthed pundit on the topic of software development. He works for software delivery company ThoughtWorks, where he has the exceedingly inappropriate title of chief scientist. Martin has written half a dozen books on software development, including Refactoring and Patterns of Enterprise Application Architecture. He writes regularly about software development on Martinfowler.com. Martin’s main interest is to understand how to design software systems to maximize the productivity of development teams, which includes both the patterns of good software design and the processes that support software design. He has become a big fan of Agile approaches and the resulting focus on evolutionary software design. Martin doesn’t come up with original ideas but does a pretty good job of recognizing and packaging the ideas of others—or, as Brian Foote puts it, he’s “an intellectual jackal with good taste in carrion.”

Ethan Garofolo is a software architect at Berkadia Commercial Mortgage. He’s been a professional programmer since 2006 and has worked both ends of the abstraction hierarchy, from device drivers to web-based systems. For the past few years, he’s been working exclusively on microservices projects and is the author of Practical Microservices (Pragmatic Bookshelf). He was also lead vocalist in a punk rock band.

Marina (Mars) Rose Geldard is a researcher from Down Under in Tasmania. Entering the world of technology relatively late as a mature-age student, she’s found her place in the world: an industry where she can apply her lifelong love of mathematics and optimization. When she’s not busy being the most annoyingly eager researcher ever, she compulsively volunteers at industry events, dabbles in research, and serves on the executive committee for her state’s branch of the Australian Computer Society (ACS). She’s currently writing Practical Artificial Intelligence with Swift for O’Reilly.

Amanda Gilbert is a systems engineer for Confluent, with copious experience in Hadoop and streaming applications. With over five years’ experience in the big data space, she’s passionate about building architecture that lasts and balancing the excitement around new technologies with models that will scale over time. She lives in Charlotte, North Carolina, and in her free time enjoys running, playing poker, and reading.

James (Jim) Gough is an executive director and developer at Morgan Stanley, where he’s focused on building customer-facing technology. A Java developer and author, Jim first became interested in Java during his degree program at the University of Warwick; after graduating, he became a member of the London Java Community. Community has remained central to Jim’s contributions, which include working on the design and testing of JSR-310 and serving on the Java Community Process Executive Committee for several years. Jim’s a regular conference speaker and spent four years teaching Java and C++ around the world.

Chris Guzikowski is the senior content director at O’Reilly, where he manages the acquisition and development of content in software architecture and software development. He’s also the cochair of the O’Reilly Software Architecture Conference. Chris has been working on technical content and technology marketing for more than 30 years. He and his family reside in suburban Boston, MA.

Luiz Hespanha is a principal engineer at Nubank, the most influential Brazilian fintech, built as a service-oriented architecture leveraging Clojure and Datomic. He’s been in microservices since before they were called that and has also built useful systems using RESTful principles and messaging-centric architectures.

Tom Hofte is an IT architect at Xebia. Tom has been working as a lead architect in IT for more than 10 years, focusing on integration architectures and distributed system design. He began his career as a developer and over the years has taken on a number of roles within project teams, giving him a deep knowledge and understanding of IT technology and delivering IT projects throughout the complete lifecycle, from concept to grave.

Gregor Hohpe is an advisor at ArchitectElevator.com, where he advises CTOs and technology leaders in the transformation of their organization and IT infrastructure. Riding the architect elevator from the engine room to the penthouse, he connects corporate strategy with technical implementation by making complex topics engaging and approachable without compromising technical accuracy. Previously, Gregor was a technical director at Google Cloud’s Office of the CTO and a chief architect at Allianz, one of world’s largest insurance companies. Having established accelerated innovation and complexity and cost reduction as architecture goals, he oversaw a global data center consolidation and deployed the first on-premises cloud and software delivery platform. He’s a coauthor of the seminal book Enterprise Integration Patterns, which is widely cited as the reference vocabulary for asynchronous messaging solutions. His book 37 Things One Architect Knows about IT Transformation tells stories from the trenches of IT transformation, while his articles have been featured in Best Software Writing by Joel Spolsky and 97 Things Every Software Architect Should Know. He’s an active member of the IEEE Software advisory board.

Kai Holnes is a software developer at ThoughtWorks. In between bits of her lifelong odyssey of finding out what area of technology she truly loves, she can be found cycling through various creative pursuits such as embroidery, casual short-film making, cooking, and waking up her neighbors while reconnecting with her long-lost love, the clarinet.

Allen Holub is one of the country’s foremost software architects and Agile-transformation consultants. Allen speaks internationally about all things Agile and software architecture and provides in-house training and consulting in those areas. He’s also an expert-level programmer, specializing in Swift, Java, and Web 2.0 applications and microservices. Allen can build highly dynamic websites (along the lines of Gmail) from front to back: both the frontend code—JavaScript, JQuery, Angular, HTML5, and CSS3—that runs in the browser and the backend code—Java, PHP, MySQL, Ruby, Mongo, C++, ZeroMQ, and EC2—that runs either on your server or in the cloud. Allen is widely published. His works include 10 books, hundreds of articles in publications ranging from Dr. Dobb’s Journal to IBM DeveloperWorks, and video classes for Agilitry.com (Agility with Allen), Pluralsight (Swift in Depth, Picturing Architecture, Object-Oriented Design), O’Reilly (Design Patterns in the Real World), and Lynda/LinkedIn.

Hillery is CTO of IBM Cloud, responsible for technical strategy for IBM’s cloud-native and infrastructure offerings. Prior to this role, she served as Director of Accelerated Cognitive Infrastructure in IBM Research, leading a team doing cross-stack (hardware through software) optimization of AI workloads, producing productivity breakthroughs of 40x and greater which were transferred into IBM product offerings. Her technical interests have always been interdisciplinary, spanning from silicon technology through system software, and she has served in technical and leadership roles in-memory technology, Systems for AI, and other areas. She is a member of the IBM Academy of Technology and was appointed as an IBM Fellow in 2017. Hillery is a BS, MS, and Ph.D. graduate of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

Katerina Iliakopoulou is a senior software engineer in the Messaging Group at the New York Times, where she maintains the platform that delivers newsroom produced messages, being either a newsletter or a push notification. She’s interested in machine learning, information retrieval, and system design—especially if they’re applied in a news media context. In her three years at the New York Times, she’s led the architectural design of one of the team’s main frameworks for serving recommendations and worked on a variety of projects that facilitate the use of recommendations on the New York Times’s platforms, either by building microservices or collaborating with data scientists to productionalize recommender models.

Jesus Jackson is the senior director of technology strategy at eGlobalTech and head of eGT Labs, eGlobalTech’s tech innovation hub; he leads product development at the company. He specializes in big data, distributed systems, microservices, data science, and full stack development and integration, with expertise in leading, building, and deploying user-centric and scalable products to millions of users. Jesus holds a BS in computer science and mathematics from the University of Maryland, College Park.

Ryan Jarvinen is a developer advocate at Red Hat, who focuses on developer experience and usability in the cloud native ecosystem. Previously, he was at CoreOS. He’s a frequent conference speaker and workshop leader who enjoys discussing distributed solutions architecture and helping teams develop strategies for maximizing their productivity using Kubernetes. He works remotely from Sacramento, CA, as a part of Red Hat’s OpenShift team; you can reach him online as RyanJ via Twitter, GitHub, or IRC.

Steven W Jones is the lead architect of messaging and AI for the inbound marketing channel on IBM.com, cloud platform, and in-app infusing AI into chat, messaging, scheduler, chatbots, and transcript analysis.

Amanda Kabak is the CTO and principal architect at CleanSpark, a startup focused on monitoring, control, and optimization of electric microgrids. She’s been architecting and developing cloud native, industrial IoT solutions for the last six years. For a decade and a half previously, she developed enterprise-level line-of-business applications.

Devangana Khokhar is lead data scientist and strategist at ThoughtWorks. She brings 6+ years of experience in building intelligent systems and defining data strategy for clients across multiple domains and geographies. Devangana has a research background in theoretical computer science, information retrieval, and social network analysis, and she’s written a book on network sciences, Gephi Cookbook (Packt Publishing London). Her interests include data privacy and security, the role of data in humanitarian sector, ethics and responsibilities around data, reinforcement learning, and data-driven intelligence in low-resource settings. Devangana frequently consults for and guides nonprofit organizations and social enterprises on the value of data literacy and holds workshops and boot camps on various dimensions of data. She earned her master’s degree in theoretical computer science specializing in social network analysis from PSG College of Technology, Coimbatore, India.

Vladik (Vlad) Khononov is a software engineer with over 15 years of industry experience at companies large and small in roles ranging from webmaster to chief architect. A longtime proponent of domain-driven design and evolutionary architecture, Vlad helps companies make sense of their business domains, untangle monoliths, and tackle complex architectural challenges. He maintains an active media career as a public speaker and blogger and has spoken at numerous industry conferences—including O’Reilly Software Architecture, Domain-Driven Design Europe, and NDC Conference—about subjects such as domain-driven design, microservices, and software architecture in general. In addition to his media work, he co-organizes the Domain-Driven Design Israel and Tel Aviv Software Architecture meetup groups. He lives in northern Israel with his wife and an almost-reasonable number of cats.

Rachel Laycock is the chief technology officer for North America at ThoughtWorks, where she’s accountable for driving technology strategy and defining areas of focus for the North American business, steering technical capabilities and solutions, and serving as a conduit between global leadership and technology teams on the ground. She’s worked on a wide range of technologies and the integration of many disparate systems and advises clients on technology strategy and identifying and prioritizing technical trends and solutions. She has many years of experience coaching organizations on Agile and continuous delivery technical practices at scale. She’s a member of the technical advisory board to the global CTO, which regularly produces the ThoughtWorks Technology Radar. Her ultimate passion is problem-solving and in her 16+ years of delivering software has discovered that people challenges are often more difficult to solve than software ones.

Robert (r0ml) Lefkowitz is a frequent speaker on the intersection of software and literacy. Previously, he was a CTO at a fintech startup and held senior technology positions in the telecommunications and financial industries. He’s a distinguished engineer of the ACM.

Luca Mezzalira is the vice president of architecture at DAZN. In his 16-year career, Luca has worked on cutting-edge projects for mobile (iOS, Android, and Blackberry), desktop, web, TVs, set-top boxes, and embedded devices. Luca believes the best way to learn any programming language is by mastering its models, so he’s spent a lot of time studying topics like object-oriented programming, functional programming, and reactive programming. As a result, he’s able to swap easily between different programming languages, apply best practices, and drive any team to success. Luca is a Google Developer Expert on web technologies, the author of Front-End Reactive Architectures (Apress), and manager of the London JavaScript community.

Lisa-Marie Namphy is a developer advocate and community architect at Portworx, a cloud native startup in the container ecosystem. She’s a longtime open source contributor, advocate (and fan), and community architect of the SF Bay Cloud Native Containers User Group (currently the world’s largest CNCF user group), personally hosting the monthly meetup for the past five years. Previously, Lisa led the global developer community team focused on open source across HPE. She’s an advocate and spokesperson for diversity and inclusion, she’s an avid sports fan, and she loves wine and dogs…and of course architecting developer communities. Follow Lisa at @SWDevAngel.

Sonya Natanzon is an integration solutions architect at Guardant Health, where she’s passionate about helping patients by writing software. Sonya has over 15 years of experience in the healthcare industry. She started out as a software developer and bounced around a number of industries before invariably returning to healthcare.

Tim Nugent pretends to be a mobile app developer, game designer, tools builder, researcher, and tech author. When he isn’t busy avoiding being found out as a fraud, Tim spends most of his time designing and creating little apps and games he won’t let anyone see. He also spent a disproportionately long time writing his tiny little bio, most of which was taken up trying to stick a witty sci-fi reference in…before he simply gave up. He’s writing Practical Artificial Intelligence with Swift for O’Reilly and building a game for a power transmission company about a naughty quoll. (A quoll is an Australian animal.)

Megan O’Keefe is a developer programs engineer at Google Cloud, where she works on building end user experiences for Kubernetes, Istio, and all things containers. A graduate of Wellesley College, her previous experience includes building edge-computing platforms at Cisco. She’s passionate about hybrid cloud, open source, and inclusion in technology.

Austin Parker has been solving—and creating—problems with computers and technology for most of his life. He’s the principal developer advocate at LightStep and a maintainer on the OpenTracing and OpenTelemetry projects. His professional dream is to build a world where we’re able to create and run more reliable software. Austin has taught college classes, spoken about all things DevOps and distributed tracing, and even found time to start a podcast. He’s also the coauthor of Distributed Tracing in Practice from O’Reilly.

Mary Poppendieck started her career as a process control programmer, moved on to manage the IT department of a manufacturing plant, and then ended up in product development, where she was both a product champion and department manager. Mary considered retirement but found herself managing a government software project where she first encountered the word “waterfall.” She decided the time had come for a new paradigm and wrote the award-winning book Lean Software Development: An Agile Toolkit (2003). Mary has found retirement elusive as she lectures and teaches classes with her husband, Tom. Based on their ongoing learning, they wrote a second book, Implementing Lean Software Development: From Concept to Cash (2006); a third, Leading Lean Software Development: Results are Not the Point (2009); and a fourth, The Lean Mindset: Ask the Right Questions (2013). A popular writer and speaker, Mary continues to bring fresh perspectives to the world of software development.

Christian Posta is a global field CTO at Solo.io and well known in the community as the author of Istio in Action (Manning), Istio Service Mesh (O’Reilly), and Microservices for Java Developers (O’Reilly), a frequent blogger, a speaker, an open source enthusiast, and a committer on various open source projects including Istio, Kubernetes, and many others. Previously, he was a chief architect at Red Hat. He enjoys mentoring, training, and leading teams to be successful with distributed systems concepts, microservices, DevOps, and cloud native application design. You can find him on Twitter as @christianposta.

Charles Pretzer is a field engineer at Buoyant, where he spends his time collaborating and engaging with the open source community of the CNCF service mesh Linkerd. He also enables production-level adoption by helping companies integrate Linkerd into their Kubernetes-based applications. Charles has spoken at meetups and conferences hosted by ABN AMRO, Macnica, and NGINX Conf. When he’s not presenting or in front of a computer, he’s riding a motorcycle or making a delicious mess in the kitchen.

Lucas Reis is a Senior Software Engineer at Compass, where he is tackling big challenges in the real estate market. He’s curious at heart, always learning and pragmatically applying new ideas. Previously he worked for Zocdoc and B2W. Fun fact: before becoming a developer, Lucas was a professional musician for more than ten years, and even played on a Grammy-nominated album.

Mark Richards is an experienced hands-on software architect involved in the architecture, design, and implementation of microservices architectures, service-oriented architectures, and distributed systems. He’s been in the software industry since 1983 and has significant experience and expertise in application, integration, and enterprise architecture. Mark is the founder of Developertoarchitect.com, a website devoted to helping developers in the journey to software architect. He’s the author of numerous O’Reilly technical books and videos, including several books on microservices, the Software Architecture Fundamentals video series, Enterprise Messaging video series, Java Message Service, second edition, and a contributing author to 97 Things Every Software Architect Should Know. Mark has a master’s degree in computer science and numerous architect and developer certifications from IBM, Sun Microsystems, The Open Group, and Oracle. He’s spoken at hundreds of conferences and user groups around the world on a variety of enterprise-related technical topics.

Mike Roberts is a partner at Symphonia, a cloud technology consultancy based in New York City. Mike’s a longtime proponent of Agile and DevOps values and is excited by the role that cloud technologies have played in enabling such values for many high-functioning software teams. Mike can be reached at mike@symphonia.io.

Bernd Rücker is a cofounder and developer advocate at Camunda, an open source software company reinventing workflow automation, where he focuses on new workflow automation paradigms that fit into modern architectures around distributed systems, microservices, domain-driven design, event-driven architecture, and reactive systems. Previously, Bernd helped automate highly scalable core workflows at global companies including T-Mobile, Lufthansa, and Zalando and contributed to various open source workflow engines. He coauthored Real-Life BPMN, a popular book about workflow modeling and automation, writes for various magazines, and regularly speaks at conferences.

Juan Saavedra is the cofounder and vice president of technology at Octobot, where he oversees technical proposal and execution of outstanding digital products for several verticals, both at home and abroad. With a degree in software engineering, he used to enjoy his spare time being an instructor in computer architecture and networks, where he went too much full stack. He’s the father of one and a football (soccer) fan, and he rarely thinks a beer has too much hops.

Simone Sassoli is the chief customer officer at Robin.io, where he’s responsible for helping customers deliver a self-service experience for enterprise workloads with automated workflows, scaling, and lifecycle management. Simone has over 20 years of experience in management, sales and marketing, engineering, and customer support. He’s built high-performance teams worldwide and led global product strategy and management for leading companies, including Cisco, RGB Networks, SeaChange International, and General Instrument.

Asa Schachar is the lead developer advocate at Optimizely. Previously, Asa was the engineering manager for Optimizely’s full stack product, responsible for leading multiple cross-functional engineering teams in charge of Optimizely’s fastest growing product to enable companies to experiment more across websites, apps and every level of the stack, and he was at Microsoft as a software developer, where he built the Internet Explorer site recommendation algorithm. He studied mathematics and computer science at Harvard University and is an avid break dancer.

Damian Schenkelman is a principal engineer at Auth0, where he focuses on making its architecture reliable and scalable. He loves to solve hard problems of any type, especially those related to making software and teams scale. Previously, Damian spent many years at Microsoft on Azure, media and patterns, and practices-related initiatives. He spends his spare time with family and friends, exercising, and catching up on all things NBA.

Nathaniel T. Schutta is a software architect focused on cloud computing and building usable applications. In addition to his day job, he’s an adjunct professor at the University of Minnesota, where he teaches students to embrace dynamic languages. A proponent of polyglot programming, Nate is the author of multiple books, including Presentation Patterns, with Neal Ford and Matthew McCullough, written to rid the world of bad presentations. He’s also appeared in various videos and is a seasoned speaker, regularly presenting at conferences worldwide, No Fluff Just Stuff symposia, meetups, universities, and user groups.

Vanya Seth is a lead architect at ThoughtWorks, where she works with clients from various domains and markets, guiding them on building evolutionary architectures. She’s a passionate technologist with a knack for solving complex problems. She brings 10 years of experience in building cloud native applications designed for scale. In her additional role as the technology principal for the Hyderabad office of ThoughtWorks, she formulates technology strategy for the clients and consults them on various aspects such as scalability, security, etc. She has a strong product background, having worked with product-based companies in the past. She also has extensive experience in working with open source communities, particularly with District Health Information System (DHIS2), a widely used open source health platform used across Africa, Asia, and the Indian subcontinent.

Alex Silva is a chief data architect at Pluralsight, where he leads the development of the company’s data infrastructure and services. He’s been instrumental in establishing Pluralsight’s data initiative by architecting a platform to capture valuable insights on real-time video analytics while integrating several data sources within the business. He’s built a reputation as a passionate and pragmatic data evangelist. Previously, Alex was a principal data engineer at Rackspace, leading a team of developers building its data initiative, while establishing its big data platform by helping architect a solution to drive actionable insight on consumer behavior and product-usage trends and designing analytical models, APIs, and frameworks to deliver fanatical support, including a computational linguistics library to analyze and classify support chat logs; a principle software engineer at ESPN Emerging Technologies, where he architected and developed a distributed application to help basketball operators collect play-by-play records; and several senior-level engineering positions at Walt Disney World Internet Group, Pentaho, OutStart, and Travelatro.com. He’s Sun Certified as an enterprise architect for the J2EE platform and is a web component developer and a Java 2 programmer. He earned his bachelor’s degree in molecular biology and an MBA from the University of Central Florida in Orlando. When Alex is not programming, you’ll probably catch him with an athletic bag on his shoulders. He’s a little bit of a sports junkie, particularly a CrossFit addict, who’s been known to create an epidemic of fitness recovery, smoking cessation, and weight loss around him.

Padmavati (Padma) Sridhar is a vice president at Morgan Stanley, where she leads a team in developing client-facing web technology for hedge fund clients. She focuses on delivering secure, user-friendly, and holistic solutions for clients across different business units. She’s streamlined several manual workflows with automated technology solutions that provide clients transparency into their day-to-day business operations. She’s passionate about solving challenging problems and mentoring developers to grow in business-facing roles. In her spare time, she enjoys leading a Toastmasters chapter at the firm that helps participants build public-speaking skills.

As a product manager at Tidelift, Keenan has he the opportunity to partner with both enterprise development teams depending on open source, as well as hundreds of independent open source maintainers. That marriage of experiences lends a unique understanding of the critical role that open source packages play in the modern software development lifecycle.

Prior to his role as a product manager, Keenan has worked as a data scientist (using many open source packages himself), for Tidelift, the Minnesota Twins, and Major League Baseball.

Cristina Turbatu is an architect on the games innovation team at Playtech, where she works on growing projects from seeds to trees or flowers or birds…you never know what a proof of concept might evolve into. She’s also the managing director of the Girls in Tech chapter in Gibraltar. Cristina has been involved in all aspects of software design and delivery for the past nine years. She has experience in the design, implementation, and quality assurance of complex, high-volume transactional and entertainment platforms and is now deeply entrenched and responsible in the design and architecture of disruptive and innovative next generation of products. Some of her passions include continuous learning and advocating for women in technology.

Marco van der Linden is a Netherlands-based IT solutions architect and consultant at Xebia. Marco has more than 15 years’ experience in IT. Previously, he was at IBM and consulted for multiple companies. He’s worked on all kinds of systems using various technologies but is especially interested in distributed systems design. He hosts meetups on RESTful API design, microservices design, and reliability engineering and leads DASA DevOps training. In his spare time, Marco likes to take long walks with his family, do a bit of fencing (épée), and read books.

Vaughn Vernon is the founder, principal architect, and developer of vlingo/PLATFORM at Kalele. A software developer and architect with more than 35 years of experience in a broad range of business domains, Vaughn is a leading expert in domain-driven design (DDD) and champion of simplicity and reactive systems. The open source, DDD-friendly, reactive vlingo/PLATFORM is one example of his commitment to balancing the right technology choices with every essential and unique business vision. He consults on and teaches DDD and reactive software development, helping teams and organizations realize the potential of business-driven and reactive systems as they transition from technology-driven legacy web implementation approaches, putting a strong emphasis on embracing simplicity whenever possible. Vaughn is the author of three books: Implementing Domain-Driven Design, Domain-Driven Design Distilled, and Reactive Messaging Patterns with the Actor Model, all published by Addison-Wesley.

Alexander is co-founder and managing director of hello2morrow and CEO of the US subsidiary. He has more than 25 years of project and manangement experience. In 1993 he founded ootec – a company focused on project services around object oriented software technology. In March 2000 this company was sold to Valtech group, a French company, and served customers like Siemens, BMW, Thyssen-Krupp-Stahl and other well known names in German industry. From 2003 to early 2005 he worked as company Director for Central Europe for a French software vendor.

Alexander has a degree in Computer Science from Technische Universität, Munich.

James Wallace is the director of software development at EBSCO LearningExpress, where he’s both the senior architect for the company and the manager of the development team. James is a skilled, multifaceted, and pragmatic hands-on software engineering manager with 24 years of broad experience in building enterprise applications and architectures across multiple platforms and technologies.

Heidi Waterhouse is a developer advocate with LaunchDarkly. She delights in working at the intersection of usability, risk reduction, and cutting-edge technology. One of her favorite hobbies is talking to developers about things they already knew but had never thought of that way before. She sews all her conference dresses so that she’s sure there is a pocket for the mic.

Phil Wells is a senior software engineer for the games team at the New York Times, which maintains the most popular crossword product in the world. People have all sorts of funny ideas about what Phil does every day. Phil does not construct the puzzle content for the crosswords. Phil does not program an AI to solve crosswords, although that would be awesome. Phil does not know Will Shortz. Instead, he works to ensure his team builds quality into every new feature and game they deliver. He’s been a software quality practitioner for over a decade and likes to go beyond writing tests and building infrastructure for delivery. He also acts as a coach for his peers in web development, teaching and advocating for modern test practices and technologies. If you see him walking around the conference, feel free to say, “Hi, Phil!”

Erik Wilde works on the Catalyst team at Axway. His goal is to make clients more successful by providing them with insights and guidance on their path toward API-centric architectures in particular, and on their digital transformation journey in general. Previously, he was an adjunct professor at UC Berkeley and worked at EMC, Siemens, CA Technologies, and Good API. Erik is active in the IETF and W3C communities. He holds a PhD from ETH Zurich.