Speakers

Lyndsey Padget

Solutions Architect at VMLY&R Kansas City

Lyndsey is a technology leader with nearly 20 years of software and web development experience at both mega-corporations and startups. She enjoys sharing in-depth knowledge on topics such as Git & release management, MERN stack development, microservices & REST, test-driven development, agile & kanban, healthy teams, diversity & inclusion, public speaking, and more. Lyndsey is involved in local organizations that encourage women, young and old, to explore careers in math and science. She believes that the difference between a good software engineer and a great one often has little to do with code.

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.

Craig Walls

Author of 'Spring in Action' and 'Spring AI in Action'

Craig Walls is a Principal Engineer, Java Champion, Alexa Champion, and the author of Spring AI in Action, Spring in Action, and Build Talking Apps. He's a zealous promoter of the Spring Framework, speaking frequently at local user groups and conferences and writing about Spring. When he's not slinging code, Craig is planning his next trip to Disney World or Disneyland and spending as much time as he can with his wife, two daughters, 1 bird and 2 dogs.

Mark Richards

Independent Software Architect, Author of Fundamentals of Software Architecture

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 has 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 is the author of numerous technical books and videos, including the recently published Fundamentals of Software Architecture, Microservices AntiPatterns and Pitfalls, Microservices vs. SOA, the Software Architecture Fundamentals video series, The Enterprise Messaging video series, Java Message Service, 2nd Edition, and contributing author to 97 Things Every Software Architect Should Know. Mark has a master’s degree in computer science and is a regular conference speaker at the No Fluff Just Stuff (NFJS) Symposium Series. He has spoken at hundreds of conferences and user groups around the world on a variety of enterprise-related technical topics.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Michael Carducci

Software Architect & Magician

Michael Carducci spent years learning to see things as they actually are; first as a magician, then as a software architect, now as both simultaneously. And somehow that’s not even the whole story.

He’s the author of Mastering Software Architecture (Apress, 2025) and is currently writing The Semantic Layer. He has spent over 25 years following interesting problems; through roles from individual contributor to CTO and back again, across industries and continents.

As a speaker, he applies the same toolkit he uses in close-up magic: attention, misdirection, timing, storytelling, and the instinct to take the long way around when that’s where the truth lives. Audiences at hundreds of conferences across four continents have described his talks as the kind that change how you think about a problem rather than just what you know about it.

He also makes YouTube videos about technology and curiosity with his wife Kate, because some ideas are too important (or too interesting!) to leave only in conference rooms.

Jonathan Johnson

Software Architect

Jonathan Johnson is an independent software architect with a concentration on helping others unpack the riches in the cloud native and Kubernetes ecosystems.

For 30 years Jonathan has been designing useful software to move businesses forward. His career began creating laboratory instrument software and throughout the years, his focus has been moving with industry advances benefitting from Moore’s Law. He was enticed by the advent of object-oriented design and applied it to financial software. As banking moved to the internet, enterprise applications took off and Java exploded onto the scene. Since then, he has inhabited that ecosystem. After a few years, he returned to laboratory software and leveraged Java-based state machines and enterprise services to manage the terabytes of data flowing out of DNA sequencing instruments. As a hands-on architect, he applied the advantages of microservices, containers, and Kubernetes with a laboratory management platform.

Today he enjoys sharing his experience with peers. He provides perspective on ways to modernize application architectures while adhering to the fundamentals of modularity - high cohesion and low coupling.microservices, containers, and Kubernetes to their laboratory management platform.

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.