Speakers

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.

Neal Ford

Director / Software Architect / Meme Wrangler

Neal is Director, Software Architect, and Meme Wrangler at ThoughtWorks, a global IT consultancy with an exclusive focus on end-to-end software development and delivery.
Before joining ThoughtWorks, Neal was the Chief Technology Officer at The DSW Group, Ltd., a nationally recognized training and development firm. Neal has a degree in Computer Science from Georgia State University specializing in languages and compilers and a minor in mathematics specializing in statistical analysis.
He is also the designer and developer of applications, instructional materials, magazine articles, video presentations, and author of 6 books, including the most recent The Productive Programmer. His language proficiencies include Java, C#/.NET, Ruby, Groovy, functional languages, Scheme, Object Pascal, C++, and C. His primary consulting focus is the design and construction of large-scale enterprise applications. Neal has taught on-site classes nationally and internationally to all phases of the military and to many Fortune 500 companies. He is also an internationally acclaimed speaker, having spoken at over 100 developer conferences worldwide, delivering more than 600 talks. If you have an insatiable curiosity about Neal, visit his web site at http://www.nealford.com. He welcomes feedback and can be reached at nford@thoughtworks.com.

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.

Kirk Knoernschild

Software Developer & Mentor

Kirk is software developer with a passion for building great software. He takes a keen interest in design, architecture, application development platforms, agile development, and the IT industry in general, especially as it relates to software development. His recent book, Java Application Architecture was published in 2012, and presents 18 patterns that help you design modular software.

Kenneth Kousen

President, Kousen IT, Inc.

Ken Kousen is a Java Champion, several time JavaOne Rock Star, and a Grails Rock Star. He is the author of the Pragmatic Library books “Mockito Made Clear” and “Help Your Boss Help You,” the O'Reilly books “Kotlin Cookbook”, “Modern Java Recipes”, and “Gradle Recipes for Android”, and the Manning book “Making Java Groovy”. He also has recorded over a dozen video courses for the O'Reilly Learning Platform, covering topics related to Android, Spring, Java, Groovy, Grails, and Gradle.

His academic background include BS degrees in Mechanical Engineering and Mathematics from M.I.T., an MA and Ph.D. in Aerospace Engineering from Princeton, and an MS in Computer Science from R.P.I. He is currently President of Kousen IT, Inc., based in Connecticut.

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.

Prasanna Pendse

Technical Principal at ThoughtWorks

Prasanna has been programming since 1994. He was involved in such adventures as creating India's first search engine and an on-line music and video store before getting a real job.

Prasanna's development skillz went up a notch when he learned about TDD in the early 2000s. In fact, TDD (along with pair programming, CI and other XP practices) is a major reason why he still writes code. In 2006, he joined ThoughtWorks.

His coding adventures took him around the US to places such as Chicago (IL), Atlanta (GA), Albany (NY), Warren (NJ), Malvern (PA), San Francisco (CA) as well as around the world to Krakow (Poland), Bangalore (India), Tokyo (Japan), Beijing (China), Pune (India), Hong Kong (China) and Johannesburg (South Africa)!

Prasanna plays any of many roles including developer, tech lead, software architect, agile coach, QA, project lead, enterprise architect, technical principal, infrastructure automation and build monkey. He has programmed professionally in JavaScript, Ruby, C#, Java, Perl, PHP, Tcl/Tk, C, C++, Bash and PowerShell.

Besides coding, he enjoys eating different types of food and photography.

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.

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.

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.

Matt Stine

I Enable Early-Career Enterprise Software Engineers to Continuously Improve

My passion is taking a metaphysical approach to software engineering: what is the nature of the collaborative game that we continuously play, and are there better, more contextually-aware ways to play that game?

By day I lead a team tasked with taking a first-principles-centric approach to intentionally enabling programming language usage at the largest bank in the United States.

By night I write and teach my way through a masterclass in software engineering and architecture targeting early-career software engineers working in large-scale enterprise technology organizations.

What is the primary goal?

To win the game. More seriously: to get 1% better every day at providing business value through software.

Who am I?

I'm a 22-year veteran of the enterprise software industry. I've played almost every role I can imagine:

• Software Engineer
• Software Architect
• Technical Lead
• Engineering Manager
• Consultant
• Product Manager
• Field CTO
• Developer Advocate
• Conference Speaker
• Author
• Technical Trainer
• Technical Marketer
• Site Reliability Engineer
• Desktop Support Specialist

I've worked at Fortune 500 companies, a tenacious teal cloud startup, and a not-for-profit children's hospital. I've written a book, and I've hosted a podcast. I've learned a lot along the way, including many things I wish I'd known when I first got started. And so now I want to pass those learnings on to you, especially if you've only just begun your career.

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.

Craig Walls

Author of 'Spring in Action' and 'Building Talking Apps'

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