Esther Derby - Author of 7 Rules for Positive Productive Change. Co-author of Behind Closed Doors: Secrets of Great Management and Agile Retrospectives.

I draw on four decades of experience leading, observing, and living organizational change. I work with a broad array of organizations. My clients include both start ups and Fortune 500 companies.

Based on experience and research, my approach blends attention to humans and deep knowledge of complex adaptive systems.

I have been called one of the most influential voices within the agile communities when it comes to developing organizations, coaching teams, and transforming management. My work over many years has influenced coaches and leaders across many companies.

Background
I started my career as a programmer. However, over the years I’ve worn many hats, including business owner, internal consultant and manager. From all these perspectives, one thing was clear: individual, team, and even organizational success depends greatly on the work environment and organizational dynamics. As a result, I have spent the last twenty-five years helping companies shape their environment for optimum success.

My formal education includes an MA in Organizational Leadership and a certificate in Human Systems Dynamics.

Follow me on Twitter @estherderby

Arty Starr - Author of Idea Flow, Founder, FlowInsight

Arty Starr is a recognized Flow Experience expert, researcher, speaker and thought leader, and author of Idea Flow, how to measure the friction in software development. Arty's PhD research is developing a theory of momentum in software development, and she is creator of the FLOWS platform designed to help developers thrive and find joy through more time in the flow state. The company she founded, FlowInsight, is on a mission to bring back joy to our everyday work.

Arty is also a 2D/3D animator and artist, and has spent the last couple years building 3D apps in AR. She loves to share about her experiences with these technologies.

Brian Sletten - Forward Leaning Software Engineer @ Bosatsu Consulting

Brian Sletten is a liberal arts-educated software engineer with a focus on forward-leaning technologies. His experience has spanned many industries including retail, banking, online games, defense, finance, hospitality and health care. He has a B.S. in Computer Science from the College of William and Mary and lives in Auburn, CA. He focuses on web architecture, resource-oriented computing, social networking, the Semantic Web, AI/ML, data science, 3D graphics, visualization, scalable systems, security consulting and other technologies of the late 20th and early 21st Centuries. He is also a rabid reader, devoted foodie and has excellent taste in music. If pressed, he might tell you about his International Pop Recording career.

Ken Sipe - Cloud Architect & Tech Leader

Ken is a distributed application engineer. Ken has worked with Fortune 500 companies to small startups in the roles of developer, designer, application architect and enterprise architect. Ken's current focus is on containers, container orchestration, high scale micro-service design and continuous delivery systems.

Ken is an international speaker on the subject of software engineering speaking at conferences such as JavaOne, JavaZone, Great Indian Developer Summit (GIDS), and The Strange Loop. He is a regular speaker with NFJS where he is best known for his architecture and security hacking talks. In 2009, Ken was honored by being awarded the JavaOne Rockstar Award at JavaOne in SF, California and the JavaZone Rockstar Award at JavaZone in Oslo, Norway as the top ranked speaker.

Nathaniel Schutta - Architect as a Service

Nathaniel T. Schutta is a software architect and Java Champion focused on cloud computing, developer happiness and building usable applications. A proponent of polyglot programming, Nate has written multiple books, appeared in countless videos and many podcasts. He’s also a seasoned speaker who regularly presents at worldwide conferences, No Fluff Just Stuff symposia, meetups, universities, and user groups. In addition to his day job, Nate is an adjunct professor at the University of Minnesota, where he teaches students to embrace (and evaluate) technical change. Driven to rid the world of bad presentations, he coauthored the book Presentation Patterns with Neal Ford and Matthew McCullough, and he also published Thinking Architecturally and Responsible Microservices available from O’Reilly. His latest book, Fundamentals of Software Engineering, is currently available in early release.

Pratik Patel - Developer Advocate @ Azul Systems

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

Rohit Bhardwaj - Director of Architecture, Expert in cloud-native solutions

Rohit Bhardwaj is a Director of Architecture working at Salesforce. Rohit has extensive experience architecting multi-tenant cloud-native solutions in Resilient Microservices Service-Oriented architectures using AWS Stack. In addition, Rohit has a proven ability in designing solutions and executing and delivering transformational programs that reduce costs and increase efficiencies.

As a trusted advisor, leader, and collaborator, Rohit applies problem resolution, analytical, and operational skills to all initiatives and develops strategic requirements and solution analysis through all stages of the project life cycle and product readiness to execution.
Rohit excels in designing scalable cloud microservice architectures using Spring Boot and Netflix OSS technologies using AWS and Google clouds. As a Security Ninja, Rohit looks for ways to resolve application security vulnerabilities using ethical hacking and threat modeling. Rohit is excited about architecting cloud technologies using Dockers, REDIS, NGINX, RightScale, RabbitMQ, Apigee, Azul Zing, Actuate BIRT reporting, Chef, Splunk, Rest-Assured, SoapUI, Dynatrace, and EnterpriseDB. In addition, Rohit has developed lambda architecture solutions using Apache Spark, Cassandra, and Camel for real-time analytics and integration projects.

Rohit has done MBA from Babson College in Corporate Entrepreneurship, Masters in Computer Science from Boston University and Harvard University. Rohit is a regular speaker at No Fluff Just Stuff, UberConf, RichWeb, GIDS, and other international conferences.

Rohit loves to connect on http://www.productivecloudinnovation.com.
http://linkedin.com/in/rohit-bhardwaj-cloud or using Twitter at rbhardwaj1.

Tim Berglund - VP Developer Relations at Confluent

Tim is a teacher, author, and technology leader with Confluent, where he serves as the Vice President of Developer Relations. He is a regular speaker at conferences and a presence on YouTube explaining complex technology topics in an accessible way. He tweets as @tlberglund, blogs every few years at http://timberglund.com. He has three grown children and two grandchildren, a fact about which he is rather excited.

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.

Erica Woods - Director, Contractor Programs & Philanthropy, Apex Systems

Erica Woods is the Director of Contractor Programs and Philanthropy at Apex Systems. Her focus is on overseeing programs, teams, communication channels, and other resources that support and add value to their IT Contractor Community of 16,000+. Erica also oversees corporate philanthropy efforts and acts as a technical community evangelist for various STEM programs/nonprofits.

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

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

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

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

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

Paul Wilhelm - Tech Leader and Arbinger Corporate Facilitator for MasterControl

Paul is a Software Engineering Manager for MasterControl and has worked with a wide variety of web, desktop, and mobile technologies over the last 15 years. Paul is passionate about building and maintaining a positive culture within organizations. He’s a corporate facilitator for The Arbinger Institute and also spends a portion of his time helping teach self-awareness and mindset change tools to others. Paul loves to camp, cook, and is a massive Nintendo fan.

Heidi Waterhouse - Developer Advocate with LaunchDarkly

Heidi 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 technologists 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.

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.

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.

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.

Baruch Sadogursky - Principal Developer Productivity Engineering Advocate, Gradle

Baruch Sadogursky (@jbaruch) did Java before it had generics, DevOps before there was Docker, and DevRel before it had a name. He started DevRel at JFrog when it was ten people and took it all the way to a successful $6B IPO by helping engineers solve problems. Now Baruch keeps helping engineers solve problems but also helps companies help engineers solve problems. He is a co-author of the “Liquid Software” and “DevOps Tools for Java Developers” books, serves on multiple conference program committees, and regularly speaks at numerous most prestigious industry conferences, including Kubecon, JavaOne (RIP), Devoxx, QCon, DevRelCon, DevOpsDays (all over), DevOops (not a typo) and others. After a tenure of eleven years in JFrog DevRel, Baruch is the Principal Developer Productivity Engineering Advocate at Gradle.

Johanna Rothman - Speaker, Consultant, Author for managing product development

Johanna Rothman, known as the “Pragmatic Manager,” offers frank advice for your tough problems. She helps leaders and teams learn to see simple and reasonable things that might work. Equipped with that knowledge, they can decide how to adapt their product development.

With her trademark practicality and humor, Johanna is the author of 18 books about many aspects of product development. She’s written these books:

• Project Lifecycles: How to Reduce Risks, Release Successful Products, and Increase Agility
• Become a Successful Independent Consultant
• Free Your Inner Nonfiction Writer
• Modern Management Made Easy series: Practical Ways to Manage Yourself; Practical Ways to Lead and Serve (Manage) Others; Practical Ways to Lead an Innovative Organization
• Write a Conference Proposal the Conference Wants and Accepts
• From Chaos to Successful Distributed Agile Teams (with Mark Kilby)
• Create Your Successful Agile Project: Collaborate, Measure, Estimate, Deliver
• Agile and Lean Program Management: Scaling Collaboration Across the Organization
• Manage Your Project Portfolio: Increase Your Capacity and Finish More Projects, 2nd edition
• Project Portfolio Tips: Twelve Ideas for Focusing on the Work You Need to Start & Finish
• Diving for Hidden Treasures: Finding the Value in Your Project Portfolio (with Jutta Eckstein)
• Predicting the Unpredictable: Pragmatic Approaches to Estimating Project Schedule or Cost
• Manage Your Job Search
• Hiring Geeks That Fit
• The 2008 Jolt Productivity award-winning Manage It! Your Guide to Modern, Pragmatic Project Management
• Behind Closed Doors: Secrets of Great Management (with Esther Derby)

In addition to articles and columns on various sites, Johanna writes the Managing Product Development blog on her website, jrothman.com, as well as a personal blog on createadaptablelife.com.

Justin Reock - Field CTO of Gradle Enterprise

Justin Reock is the Chief Evangelist and Field CTO of Gradle Enterprise, and is an outspoken blogger, speaker, and free software evangelist. He has over 20 years of experience working in various software roles and has delivered enterprise solutions, technical leadership, and community education on a range of topics.

Valarie Regas - Developer Advocate

Valarie Regas is a DevOps fanatic, a Georgia Tech coding bootcamp graduate, and a veteran mommy. She holds a BA in Psychology and currently works as a Developer Advocate. After years being a stay-at-home mom, she decided to change her life by entering tech, and has learned a lot along the way. Outside of work, she enjoys mixed martial arts fighting, table-top role playing games, public speaking, creating tiny humans, and activism of all sorts.

Andrei Rebrov - CTO & Co-Founder of Scentbird

Andrei Rebrov has worked in the technology field for more than 15 years. He is the CTO and Co-Founder of Scentbird, a subscription service for perfumes and colognes, and has helped it grow to more than 500,000 active subscribers.

At Scentbird, Andrei was responsible for building early versions of the platform, growing a remote engineering team and making sure that the company has technology advantages in every department, from marketing to operations. He is also a startup adviser in various industries, from aerospace to video games.

Prior to Scentbird Andrei worked as an agile engineering coach, helping various companies with their technology. Prior to that he worked as a software engineer for UBS Investment Bank and Avis UK.

Matthew Porter - Senior Partner & Co-Founder of Eonova

Matthew E. Porter is an entrepreneur, endurance athlete, and MS advocate. He is the Senior Partner and Co-Founder of Eonova, a growth advisory firm built by entrepreneurs for entrepreneurs, and serves on the boards of multiple companies, from high-growth startups to established enterprises. Porter founded Contegix in 2004, growing it from a bootstrapped startup to an industry leader in managed hosting, cloud computing, and Atlassian services. Under his leadership, Contegix expanded to over 350 employees and $100M in revenue before being acquired by Valiantys in 2024. He has also held executive roles at EmpowerMe Wellness, Clayco, and Invisibly and was inducted into the John Cook School of Business Smurfit-Stone Entrepreneurial Hall of Fame at Saint Louis University. Recognized for his leadership, he has been featured in the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, and Forbes and was named to Saint Louis Business Journal’s “30 Under 30” and “40 Under 40” lists.

Beyond business, Porter is an ultramarathoner who channels his endurance running into advocacy for multiple sclerosis, a disease he battles himself. Since taking up trail running in 2010, he has completed numerous 100-mile races, including Leadville Trail 100, and has raised funds for MS research through his races. In 2022, he and a fellow MS warrior ran 103 miles nonstop to Missouri’s state capital, Jefferson City, to engage policymakers in the fight against MS. Porter lives in Weldon Spring, Missouri, with his wife and three children, guided by his family’s mission: “We have a debt to those before us and an obligation to those after us. We maximize life and potential through heart, intelligence, and grit. We focus on our bond. We do all of this together because we are always stronger together. Mostest.”

Peter Pavlovich - CTO, Censinet

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

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

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

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

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

Andy Painter - Agile Technologist

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

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

Laine Minor - IT & Human Architect

Laine has been a developer, a technical lead, a stay at home mom, and an IT architect – and that last was a broad enough title that it let her do both technical things AND cultural things.

She realized then that that was her most favorite place to be, in that in-between place of technology and culture.

She also learned that enabling people and organizations is HARD work, and that explaining that in-between place can help.

Hunter Milligan - Technical Coach

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

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

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

Cynthia Maxwell - IT Thoughtleader

Cynthia Maxwell has led product teams that helped make it possible to use your phone for making video calls, reading books, communicating on Slack, or browsing Pinterest. With a path that has taken her from academic work in computer science through VR at NASA Ames Research Center to Apple, Pinterest, Yahoo and Slack, Cynthia has been a leader in the software industry for 20 years with a front-row seat to several major platform shifts.

Renato Mascardo - CTO of Recurly

Renato brings over 18 years of experience leading engineering organizations, with extensive experience taking to market enterprise software, cloud platforms, commerce and mobile products. Renato is the CTO at Recurly where he is responsible for all things technology. He has seen tremendous growth during his tenure and has the battle scars to prove it. Prior to that, he played technology leadership roles at Rosetta Stone, Atari, DigitalGlobe Hewlett-Packard, Borland Software and Scient. Renato holds a B.A. in Computer Science from the University of Richmond in Richmond, VA.

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.

John Lewis - Chief Architect - Scholastic

John Lewis is the Chief Architect for Scholastic, where he leads technology architecture for the enterprise-wide transformation initiatives delivering the digital business capabilities needed across the entire company. John is a 25+ year veteran of the software engineering industry, with a passion for large-scale enterprise architecture, education technology, open source, and agile development methods. John has been a significant contributor to open source projects and communities, including work as a core committer on the early versions of the Spring Framework where he developed the Portlet MVC modules. John was a founding member of the Apereo Foundation, which stewards a number of key open source projects and communities in education, and served on its board of directors for 10 years.

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.

Andrew Korbel - VP, R&D Operations & Chief of Staff

Ive never had a set destination when considering my careermy first job out of college was as a cartographer! Ive always gravitated toward opportunities that challenge me to think differently while bringing a balance between big-picture thinking and execution.

Unsurprisingly, my interests have led me to various roles within software companies. Today, I currently lead R&D Operations at Clari. Before this role, I was a VP in the Product & Technology Center of Excellence at Insight Partners. While at Insight Partners, I worked closely with portfolio company executives to accelerate growth and create operational capabilities through lean and agile processes and data-driven strategies. Being a part of the team at Insight allowed me to leverage all my learnings and failures throughout my career to give back to Senior Executives across their portfolio. Previously to Insight Partners, I was the VP of Product Operations at Carbon Black, where I designed and built their product operations capabilities. Ive also been Chief of Staff to product and engineering leaders, along with leading R&D Operations at Rally Software and SignalFx through their ScaleUp journeys. Ive also spearheaded engineering at other B2B SaaS companies.

I love sharing my knowledge and experiences in scaling and orchestrating R&D organizations. I live in Colorado but grew up in West Virginia. I enjoy spending time with my family and taking advantage of all that Colorado offers, including hiking, camping, skiing, and the Nuggets, to name a few. Im an avid bike rider and Pittsburgh sports fan, and I love to cook and read!

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.

Rajesh Jayaraman - CTO at Ellevest

Rajesh Jayaraman is a successful entrepreneur and technology executive. He has extensive experience leading and scaling technology and engineering organizations at startup & growth stage FinTech companies.

He is the CTO at Ellevest, an investing platform that is focused on closing the gender investing gap, where he is responsible for engineering, technical and financial operations. He has had previous stints co-founding or leading technology organizations at multiple financial technology companies including Andera, oFlows, Zopa, and Yodlee.

Leonid Igolnik - VP of Product Development w/Oracle

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

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.

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.

On Freund - Head of Europe & Asia @ WeWork Labs

On Freund Heads the European and Asian markets at WeWork Labs, WeWork's program for early stage startup. Prior to that he was VP Product and VP Engineering at WeWork, and VP Engineering at Handy. On is also an angel investor and advisor to startups.

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

Sasha Czarkowski (Rosenbaum) - Principal, Ergonautic

Sasha is a Principal at a new venture, Ergonautic

With a degree in Computer Science, an MBA, and two decades of experience across development, operations, product management, and technical sales, Sasha Rosenbaum brings a unique perspective to optimizing the organizational flow of work, bridging gaps with empathy and insight.

Pat Cullen - CTO of YearOne

Pat Cullen is a renowned technology leader whose expertise in scaling startups, engineering excellence, and strategic technology alignment has significantly impacted companies like Carrot Fertility and CommerceHub. As the SVP of Engineering at Carrot Fertility, Pat expanded the engineering team from 3 to over 60, leading pivotal projects like the innovative Carrot Card. His leadership facilitated the company’s exponential growth and robust product development, illustrating his ability to transform business challenges into technological breakthroughs.

During his tenure at CommerceHub, Pat spearheaded the transition to a cloud-based, microservices architecture, significantly contributing to the company's operational efficiency and successful IPO spinoff. His ability to navigate complex regulatory environments while fostering innovation was instrumental in this success.

Currently, as the CTO of YearOne, Pat leads the development of a platform that empowers engineering teams with data-driven insights. The platform’s mission is to serve as an AI copilot for engineering team dynamics.

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.

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.

Griffin Caprio - Experienced Entrepreneur & Tech Leader

Experienced entrepreneur & technology leader. He has experience with early and Series A stage startups as well as publicly traded companies. Most recently, Griffin was the head of engineering at Enova Financial, managing portfolio product development for products in 6 countries. Currently he’s the CEO and founder of a podcasting products company helping podcasters with distribution, analytics and monetization.”

Pete Behrens - Founder/CEO @ Agile Leadership Journey

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

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