Speakers

Asanka Abeysinghe’s goal is to connect humans and technology by helping organizations implement digital transformation programs that result in consumer-driven digital applications. He drives efforts to create, refine, and enhance WSO2’s corporate reference architecture and is responsible for spearheading a thought-leadership outlook that defines WSO2’s corporate reference methodology for development, customer success, and implementation. Working closely with customers, partners, and analysts, he evangelizes WSO2’s technology vision. Asanka has over 20 years of industry experience, which includes designing and implementing highly scalable distributed systems, SOA and microservice architectures in the financial domain, mobile platforms, and various business integration solutions. He is also a committer of the Apache Software Foundation. Asanka is a regular speaker at numerous events, including ApacheCon, QCon, O’Reilly, API Days, API Strategy, LinuxFoundation, Gartner, WSO2Con, and many tech meetups.

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).

Sarah Aslanifar is a software engineer and technical lead with over 14 years of experience at companies ranging from over 75,000 employees to her own two-person startup. In addition to programming roles, she’s also served as a project manager, business analyst, and architect. This breadth of experience allows her to manage tough projects with a collaborative, systems-based approach that starts with the delivery of value to end users and customers. Sarah enjoys teaching, coaching, and mentoring—skills she leverages to help clients that value data-driven decisions, a growth mindset, and curiosity. Her technical specialties include Java, Ruby on Rails, and React/Redux. (You name it, she’ll learn it.) She’s also exploring ways to teach computational thinking, solving problems algorithmically with or without a computer. She’s even experimented on her two young sons.

Jeff Beck is a software architect at SmartThings, where he’s been working in IoT and microservices for the last four years, building the company’s platform from its single-region start to a worldwide system. Based in Minneapolis, Minnesota, Jeff’s an active member of the local Groovy and Cassandra communities as well as an open source contributor, contributing to Ratpack in his free time. Find him on Twitter and GitHub as beckje01.

Samir Behara is a solution architect with EBSCO and builds software solutions using cutting-edge technologies. He’s a Microsoft MVP with over 13 years of IT experience working on large-scale enterprise applications involving complex business functions, web integration, cloud migration, and data management in various domains like insurance, manufacturing, and publishing. Samir is a frequent speaker at technical conferences and is the cochapter lead of the Steel City SQL Server User Group, Birmingham. He’s the author of www.dotnetvibes.com.

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.

Eric Brewer is a vice president of infrastructure at Google. He pioneered the use of clusters of commodity servers for internet services based on his research at Berkeley. His CAP theorem covers basic trade-offs required in the design of distributed systems and followed from his work on a wide variety of systems from live services to caching and distribution services and to sensor networks. He’s a member of the National Academy of Engineering and winner of the ACM Infosys Foundation award for his work on large-scale services. Eric was named a “Global Leader for Tomorrow” by the World Economic Forum and “most influential person on the architecture of the Internet” by InfoWorld.

For nearly 20 years, Michael Carducci was a software engineer moonlighting as a magician. Now, he’s a magician moonlighting as a software engineer. In both endeavors, he’s dedicated himself to mastery and has gained deep insights from his eclectic interests, entrepreneurial spirit, and experience that spans the full stack, the entire project lifecycle, and several technologies. His background and breadth of skills has yielded many unique insights, which he’s happy to share with you. Michael divides his time equally between performing around the world, jumping out of perfectly good airplanes, and building software that doesn’t suck.

Jeff Carpenter is the director of developer advocacy at DataStax, where he uses his background in system architecture, microservices, and Apache Cassandra to help empower developers and operations engineers build distributed systems that are scalable, reliable, and secure. Jeff has worked on large-scale systems in the defense and hospitality industries and is the author of Cassandra: The Definitive Guide, second edition (with the third edition on the way).

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.

Seth Dobbs is the vice president of engineering at Bounteous, where he directs the development of ecommerce, web, and mobile applications; digital transformations; and other solutions for numerous clients. This work includes architecting an ecommerce system that grew to be the fourth-largest transactional commerce system on the internet. Seth sets the technology direction at Bounteous and drives the technical skill development by organizing and presenting deep dives into new languages, database platforms, and methodologies. He’s also developed several internal architecture and leadership training courses and blogs. Seth was named Chicago’s best technology manager for 2016 by Tech in Motion. He began his career as a software engineer at Motorola, where he was first exposed to complex architectures and where he designed and implemented a service-based framework enabling data services to be distributed and recoverable across multiple servers. Seth holds a BS in computer science from Illinois Tech.

Hany Elemary is a software consultant at ThoughtWorks, where he solves challenging business problems through clean, testable design and architecture. Over the past 11 years, Hany has worked on a number of different layers of the technology stack for highly trafficked applications. Most recently, he authored a video series, TDD with React and Redux in an Isomorphic Application. When he’s not chained to his computer, Hany enjoys traveling to new places and sipping on coffee with no lid, as he firmly believes the lid compromises the integrity of the coffee’s flavor profile.

Michael Feathers is director at R7K Research and Conveyance. Michael is an active member of the software development community and a member of the ACM and IEEE. He regularly speaks at software conferences around the world. His key passion is helping teams surmount problems and connect with practices that make software development fun and enriching. When he isn’t engaged with a team, he spends his time investigating new ways of altering design over time in code bases.

Derek Ferguson is Head of Technology for Fitch Solutions, where he is responsible for the development of Fitch Connect, the flagship service from Fitch Solutions which brings together ratings, research and extensive coverage of bank fundamental data into a single platform to enable analysis. He graduated with honors from Chicago’s DePaul University , has authored best-selling software development books such as Broadband Internet Access for Dummies, and spoken at events all over the world from JavaOne to Microsoft’s TechEd.

Rustem Feyzkhanov is a machine learning engineer at Instrumental, where he creates analytical models for the manufacturing industry. Rustem is passionate about serverless infrastructure (and AI deployments on it) and is the author of the course and book Serverless Deep Learning with TensorFlow and AWS Lambda.

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.

Noah Gift is lecturer and consultant at both the UC Davis Graduate School of Management MSBA Program and the Graduate Data Science Program at Northwestern, where he designs and teaches graduate machine learning, AI, data science courses and consults on machine learning and cloud architecture for students and faculty. These responsibilities including leading a multicloud certification initiative for students. As the founder of Pragmatic AI Labs, he also consults with companies on machine learning, cloud architecture, and CTO-level concerns. In the last 10 years, he’s been responsible for shipping many new products at multiple companies that generated millions of dollars of revenue and had global scale. His previous roles have included CTO, general manager, consulting CTO, consulting chief data scientist, and cloud architect, at companies such as ABC, Caltech, Sony Imageworks, Disney Feature Animation, Weta Digital, AT&T, Turner Studios, and Linden Lab. As an SME on machine learning for AWS, he helped created the AWS machine learning certification.

Noah is a Python Software Foundation Fellow, AWS Subject Matter Expert (SME) on machine learning, AWS Certified Solutions Architect and AWS Academy Accredited Instructor, Google Certified Professional Cloud Architect, and Microsoft MTA on Python. He has published close to 100 technical publications, including two books on subjects ranging from cloud machine learning to DevOps, for companies like Forbes, IBM, Red Hat, Microsoft, O’Reilly, and Pearson. He’s also led workshops and talks around the world, for organizations including NASA, PayPal, PyCon, Strata, and Foo Camp. His most recent book is Pragmatic AI: An Introduction to Cloud-Based Machine Learning (Pearson), and his most recent video series is Essential Machine Learning and AI with Python and Jupyter Notebook LiveLessons. He holds an MBA from UC Davis, an MS in computer information systems from Cal State Los Angeles, and a BS in nutritional science from Cal Poly San Luis Obispo.

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.

Adron Hall is a developer advocate at DataStax.

Lena Hall is a senior software engineer and developer advocate at Microsoft working on Azure, where she focuses on large-scale distributed systems and modern architectures. Lena has more than 10 years of experience in software engineering with a focus on distributed cloud programming, real-time system design, highly scalable and performant systems, big data analysis, data science, functional programming, and machine learning. Previously, she was a senior software engineer at Microsoft Research. She’s an elected member of the F# Software Foundation’s board of trustees, co-organizes a conference called ML4ALL, and is often an invited member of program committees for conferences like Kafka Summit, Lambda World, and others. Lena holds a master’s degree in computer science.

VP Product & Co-founder at OverOps

Christian Hernandez is a Principal OpenShift Technical Marketing Manager at Red Hat with experience in infrastructure engineering, systems administration, tech support, enterprise architecture, and management. He’s passionate about open source, Kubernetes, microservices, and cloud native architecture.

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.

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.

Rezaul Hoque is a senior software engineer at Microsoft leading the architecture design for some of the services that power people’s experiences in Office 365, including OWA Business, Outlook, Outlook Mobile, Sharepoint, and OneDrive. Previously, he worked on the development of the Microsoft Office Graph and the Enterprise Search Engine, which powers Exchange and Sharepoint Server.

Kasun Indrasiri is the director of integration architecture at WSO2 and an architect with over nine years of experience in enterprise integration and microservices. He’s an author and an evangelist on microservices architecture; his books include Microservices for Enterprise (Apress) and Beginning WSO2 ESB (Apress). Previously, he was an architect and the product lead of WSO2 ESB and a committer and PMC member of the Apache Software Foundation. He founded the Silicon Valley Microservice, APIs, and Integration Meetup, a vendor-neutral microservices meetup in the San Francisco Bay area. He’s a regular speaker at most WSO2 conferences and has conducted talks on microservices topics in most of the Bay Area meetups.

J.R. Jasperson is the CTO at Twilio SendGrid. A senior technology leader and strategist with a focus on architecture and engineering, he has over 20 years of experience working at internet services and SaaS companies as well as experience leading, designing, developing, and supporting enterprise-level, mission-critical infrastructure, OLTP, data warehouse/DSS, finance/reporting, marketing, CRM, and human resources systems at Fortune 50 companies.

Robert Jordan is a visionary architect with over 20 years designing, implementing, and deploying production applications for some of the world’s largest media and scientific customers. He has successfully led projects on all major cloud platforms and is currently certified on both AWS and GCP platforms.

Mik Kersten spent a decade creating open source developer tools before realizing that programing was not the bottleneck of large-scale software delivery. Since that time, he has been working on creating a model and tools for connecting the end-to-end software value stream. He’s the CEO of Tasktop, where he helps IT leaders transform how software is built. He has been named a JavaOne Rock Star speaker and one of the IBM developerWorks Java top 10 writers of the decade. He was selected as one of the 2012 Business in Vancouver 40 under 40 and has been a World Technology Awards finalist in the IT Software category. Mik is the editor of the IEEE Software Department on DevOps. He created the Eclipse Mylyn open source project as part of his PhD in computer science, pioneering the integration of development tools with the delivery pipeline.

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.

Wendy Knox Everette is a senior security advisor at Leviathan Security Group. She has more than 15 years of experience as a software developer, software quality assurance engineer, and information security professional. She’s been involved in all aspects of the system development lifecycle (SDLC) from requirements definition through implementation and operation as well as compliance gap analysis and risk assessment. As an information security consultant, she’s guided clients through FedRAMP, DISA SRG, and HIPAA/HITRUST audits, along with assisting both technical and nontechnical personnel to meet the challenges of regulatory compliance. She regularly develops secure development training sessions for clients and advises on all stages of application security and incident response. Wendy is a Certified Information Systems Security Professional (CISSP) and is admitted to the practice of law in Washington State and the District of Columbia. Wendy graduated with honors from the George Mason School of Law with a concentration in national security law. She’s spoken at a variety of security conferences, including Black Hat, ShmooCon, BSides Las Vegas, the DEF CON SkyTalks, and DEF CON’s Crypto and Privacy Village.

Aleksandra Kudriashova leads data product integration at Astro Digital, a platform for fast and easy access to satellite imagery. Previously, she was a cofounder of ImageAiry, an online marketplace for satellite imaging services, and worked on B2B software solutions at Dell. Her interests are open source, big data, and business intelligence. She honed her computer science and technical leadership expertise at MIT.

Sarah LeBlanc is a software consultant at ThoughtWorks, where she works on projects focusing on using machine learning for fraud and anomaly detection; she recently helped a global financial institution create a platform and its first product, a new system for consumer loans. Sarah finds the most joy in coaching and mentoring other developers and learning from her fantastic team members but is not averse to debating coworkers (and gracefully accepting defeat in the face of sufficient evidence). Sarah continues to recognize the merits of coffee lids.

Jonny LeRoy is head of technology in North America at ThoughtWorks, where he’s responsible for championing and progressing the company’s brand as an outstanding technology organization for its clients, employees, and the industry at large. Jonny is tasked with expanding the surface area of new technology offerings and capabilities that ThoughtWorks can bring to the market while maintaining and progressing the culture and craft that lies at the company’s core. He championed the introduction of mobile and IoT capabilities into the business and is currently shepherding the embedding of security thinking and practices into the software delivery culture. He’s a vociferous participant in framing and progressing ThoughtWorks’s technology strategy, with particular focus on ensuring that the wider societal consequences of technological progress are factored in. A technology generalist with expertise in helping organizations become more effective at using software to their strategic advantage, Jonny has advised clients across many sectors on architecture, delivery, collaboration, innovation, and organizational design. He started as a software developer, but during his 13 years at ThoughtWorks, he’s played delivery, advisory, commercial, and operational roles. Previously, Jonny was a founder and CTO of a successful UK startup. A self-taught technologist, Jonny draws on his diverse intellectual background, which includes studying ancient languages and philosophy at university and training as a lawyer.

Edwin Maldonado is an independent software architect who enjoys talking about integration, information architectures and the organization structures that builds them.

He has experience working with media companies the fintech industry, where he spent several years working with ACH (Americas) and SEPA (Europe). Besides the daily work, Edwin loves to talk about software architecture, coffee, watch history documentaries, and learn about urban planning.

Matt McLarty (@mattmclartybc) leads API Strategy for MuleSoft, a Salesforce company. He works closely with organizations to design and implement innovative, enterprise-grade API and microservices solutions. An experienced software architect, Matt has worked extensively in the field of integration and real-time transaction processing for software vendors and clients alike. He has coauthored Microservice Architecture and Securing Microservice APIs for O’Reilly.

Russ Miles is CEO of ChaosIQ.io, where he and his team build commercial and open source products and provide services to companies applying chaos engineering to build confidence in the resilience of their production systems. Russ is an international consultant, trainer, speaker, and author. His most recent book, Antifragile Software: Building Adaptable Software with Microservices, explores how to apply chaos engineering to construct and manage complex, distributed systems in production with confidence.

Ray Mitchell is vice president of architecture at Fairway Technologies, where he assists companies like PayPal, eBay, Netflix, and LPL with the success of their software projects. Ray is an experienced teacher, mentor, and trainer with over 15 years of software industry experience in all phases of software development including business analysis, architecture, development, deployment, and production support, and he has extensive experience developing enterprise applications using Java, .NET, C, and C++, with AWS and Azure cloud infrastructures. Ray also teaches advanced and intermediate C, C++, data structures, and algorithms at the University of California, San Diego. Previously, he worked at Intuit, NCR, HP, and Indyme. Ray holds a BS in computer science from the University of California, San Diego.

Andrew Morgan is an independent consultant, currently focusing on architecture and design, microservices, and continuous delivery. He has experience working with many different types of organizations, primarily in development and operations roles. He’s also involved in the wider technology community, contributing to a number of open source projects, presenting at international conferences, and writing for InfoQ and is soon to become a Pluralsight author.

Ken Mugrage is a technology evangelist at ThoughtWorks, where he teaches others how to get better at building, testing, and deploying software. Ken has more than 25 years of experience in the IT industry, with the last nine spent at ThoughtWorks. Over his entire career, Ken has focused on using technology to increase business effectiveness as opposed to using the latest cool thing. For most of the past decade, he’s been focused on continuous delivery and DevOps, working with organizations all over the world ranging from startups to Fortune 50 companies.

Anuar Nurmakanov is a software craftsmanship practitioner with more than nine years of experience in mobile, web, enterprise development, architecture, Scrum, and XP approaches and who likes public speaking and knowledge sharing.

Marco Palladino is CTO and cofounder of Kong, the most widely adopted OSS API and microservice gateway. He’s Kong’s coauthor, responsible for the design and delivery of the company’s products while also providing technical thought leadership around APIs and microservices within both Kong and the external software community. Marco is an inventor, software developer, and internet entrepreneur based in San Francisco. Previously, he cofounded Mashape, which became the largest API marketplace(acquired by RapidAPI in 2017).

Rebecca Parsons is CTO at ThoughtWorks. Rebecca has more than 30 years’ experience leading the creation of large-scale distributed, services-based applications and the integration of disparate systems. Previously, she was an assistant professor of computer science at the University of Central Florida, where she taught courses on compilers, program optimization, distributed computation, programming languages, the theory of computation, machine learning, and computational biology, and a director’s postdoctoral fellow at the Los Alamos National Laboratory, where her research included work on parallel and distributed computation, genetic algorithms, computational biology, and nonlinear dynamical systems. Rebecca’s interests include parallel and distributed computation, programming languages, domain-specific languages, evolutionary architecture, genetic algorithms, and computational science. She is the coauthor of Domain-Specific Languages, The ThoughtWorks Anthology, and Building Evolutionary Architectures. A strong advocate for diversity in the technology industry who is committed to increasing the number of women in coding and STEM fields, Rebecca has served on the board of CodeChix and acted as an advisor to Women Who Code. A sought-after speaker, she has been a featured presenter at well-known conferences, including Collision Conference, Web Summit, YOW!, the Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing, and more. She was chairwoman of the Agile Alliance board of directors for four years and has served the organization over a total of six years. Rebecca holds a BS in computer science and economics from Bradley University and both an MS and a PhD in computer science from Rice University.

Paula Paul is a Distinguished Engineer with Slalom Build, where she helps organizations adopt cloud native technology and serves the community as an ABI Syster, diversity speaker, and mentor. Paula entered the workforce as a software engineer at IBM in the early ’80s, where she shipped her first product on magnetic tape. She’s shipped many software products since then, evangelized .NET with Microsoft, held executive positions in technology architecture and operations, and taught people of all ages to code. Paula is passionate about equal opportunities for technical literacy and enjoys (half) joking that Kubernetes reminds her of IBM/370 systems programming.

Steve Pember is a principal engineer and team lead at Toast, a creator of systems and point of sale devices for managing restaurants. Previously, he was a director of engineering, a CTO, and a principal consultant, all the while pushing for and building reactive, event-driven, microservices-based platforms. Steve is obsessed with highly scalable distributed systems, software architecture, and alternative data storage techniques like event sourcing, and he loves telling the world about them.

Christian Posta is field CTO at solo.io, where he helps companies create and deploy large-scale, resilient, distributed architectures—many of what we now call serverless and microservices. Previously, Christian spent time at web-scale companies. He’s well known in the community as an author—of Istio in Action (Manning) 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 and Kubernetes. He enjoys mentoring, training, and leading teams to be successful with distributed systems concepts, microservices, DevOps, and cloud native application design. You can find Christian on Twitter as @christianposta.

Thomas Rampelberg is a software engineer at Buoyant. He’s made a career of building infrastructure software that allows developers and operators to focus on what’s important to them. Previously at Mesosphere, he helped create DC/OS, one of the first container orchestration platforms used by many of the Fortune 500. He has moved to the next big problem in the space: providing insight into what’s happening between services, improving reliability between them, and using best practices to secure the communication channels between them.

Isobel Redelmeier works on open source software at LightStep, where she focuses on OpenTracing and other observability solutions to improve performance management across distributed systems. She learned firsthand how difficult, and how valuable, observability can be when working at Pivotal, where she pushed code in about 10 languages to different production systems while working with Pivotal Labs. She later focused on security in Cloud Foundry.

LN is a technology leader who has helped bring to life several data and ML products over the past 15 years. As the Head of Data Science and ML Architecture at Workday, he is helping Workday build cutting edge Enterprise AI products on a secure ML Platform. He believes in ethical AI development and regularly partners with Privacy, Legal and Security experts to codify complex compliance rules into concrete software services. In the past, he was a researcher at IBM T.J. Watson research center, where he built cloud anomaly detectors and ML driven compiler optimizations and was a Director at Symantec, where he helped build a real-time streaming analytics service.

LN holds a Ph. D. in computer science with 40+ publications/patents and his work has had strong innovation and business impacts with awards from ACM, IBM, and HP. Outside of his passion for technology, LN loves chocolates, will drive miles for a good coffee, and an avid practitioner of meditation.

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.

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 writing the book Microservice Patterns, which is available as a Manning MEAP. He provides microservices consulting and training to organizations that are adopting the microservice architecture and is working on his third startup Eventuate, an application platform for developing transactional microservices.

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.

Valentina is enthusiastic and passionate about technology with a particular interest in software architecture and management and enjoys discovering and promoting good development practices. She has a background in engineering and computer science, including more than 14 years of experience defining system architectures and developing enterprise software, most of them based on Java and the Spring Framework. She’s a certified Spring Professional, a certified ScrumMaster, and a certified Project Management Professional.

Jochem Schulenklopper is a Netherlands-based IT architect at Xebia, an international IT consultancy company.

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.

Priyanka Sharma is the director of technical evangelism at GitLab and serves on the board of the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF). She has deep expertise in DevOps and observability. A former entrepreneur with a passion for growing developer products through open source communities, Priyanka advises startups at HeavyBit industries, an accelerator for developer products. She holds a BA in political science from Stanford University and loves reading and playing with her dog, Ollie, in her spare time.

Laura Schornack is an expert engineer and lead design architect for shared services at JPMorgan Chase. Previously, she worked for world-renowned organizations such as IBM and Nokia. She holds a degree in computer science from University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

Cassie Shum is the technical director and principal consultant for the east portfolio in North America at ThoughtWorks. A software engineer and architect, she’s spent the last nine years focusing on architectures including event-driven systems and microservices, a wide range of technologies with an emphasis on mobile and software delivery excellence, and she’s helped grow delivery practices and technical strategy and support the next generation of technologists. Some of her passions include advocating for women in technology and public speaking. She’s involved in promoting more female speakers in technology.

Stefania Stefansdottir is a lead developer and consultant with ThoughtWorks. She’s passionate about delivering business value while building quality software. Stefania has experience across multiple industries from education to automobile to retail.

Thiagarajan Subramanian is an information technology professional with extensive experience designing and developing applications at Capital One, a Fortune 200 financial service company. A technical manager with a strong focus on results, he leads designers and developers on offshore and onshore projects through the whole software development lifecycle to achieve business goals and has diverse technical experience derived from rapid learning and effective application of technologies.

Cat Swetel is a technology leader specializing in Lean-inspired, data-informed coaching for technology organizations. She’s passionate about increasing diversity in STEAM as a means of creating possibilities for a more equitable human future based on generative institutions. In her leisure time, Cat enjoys making jokes about Bitcoin, hiking, and reading feminist literature.

James Thompson is a principal software engineer at Mavenlink, where he is committed to helping engineering teams become more deliberate in how they build software through developing strong learning cultures, principled engineering practices, and holistic architectural thinking. He has worked with web technologies since 2003.

Adam Tornhill is the founder of Empear, where he designs tools for software analysis. A programmer who draws on his degrees in both engineering and psychology, he’s also the author of Software Design X-Rays, Your Code as a Crime Scene, Lisp for the Web, and Patterns in C. Adam’s other interests include modern history, music, and martial arts.

Nick Tune is a strategic technical leader at Navico. He has a passion for delighting users, creating business impacts, crafting quality software, and building world-class engineering teams. He’s the coauthor of two books, Patterns, Principles and Practices of Domain-Driven Design (Wrox) and Designing Autonomous Teams and Services (O’Reilly), and frequently blogs about technical leadership at ntcoding.co.uk.

Ian Varley is a principal architect and a founding member of the architecture strategy team at Salesforce. Ian holds a master’s degree in software engineering from the University of Texas at Austin.

Gero Vermaas is a Netherlands-based IT architect at Xebia, a boutique IT consultancy firm.

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 von Zitzewitz is a serial entrepreneur in the software business and one of the founders of hello2morrow, an ISV specializing in static analysis tools that can enforce architecture and quality rules during development and maintenance of software systems. He’s worked in the industry since the early 1980s and focuses on the role of software architecture and technical quality on successful project outcomes. He moved from Germany to Massachusetts in 2008 to develop hello2morrow’s business in North America.

Mandy Waite is a developer advocate for the Google Cloud Platform.

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.

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.

Rebecca Wirfs-Brock is the president of Wirfs-Brock Associates and an object design pioneer who invented the set of design practices known as responsibility-driven design (RDD)—and by accident started the x-driven design meme. Along the way, she authored two popular object-design books that are still in print and was the design columnist for IEEE Software. You can find her design columns, papers, and writing on her website. In her work, Rebecca helps teams hone their design and architecture skills, manage and reduce technical debt, refactor their code, and address architecture risks. She’s the program director of the Agile Alliance’s Experience Report Initiative and furthers her interest in software patterns by serving on the board of the Hillside Group and writing essays about the relationship between patterns and heuristics, patterns about how to create and manage magic backlogs, sustainable architecture, agile QA, and adaptive systems architectures.

Phillip Wittrock is staff software engineer at Google, a member of the Kubernetes Steering Committee, and a Kubernetes SIG CLI technical lead. Phillip’s hobbies include debating how kubectl is pronounced and talking about Kubernetes at social events.

Simon Zeltser is a software engineer at Google. Simon has over a decade of experience building services at planet scale. He loves creating tools that improve deployment, application performance, and testing in production of cloud services. Previously, he was a software engineer at Microsoft. In his spare time, Simon is an active Manchester United fan, helping to establish two of its official supporters clubs around the world.