Speakers at Voxxed Days Crete 2025
Connect with 29 world-class speakers and industry experts
Alex Shershebnev
Alex Shershebnev is a seasoned Computer Vision and MLOps Engineer with over nine years of experience shaping the future of AI-driven software development. Currently, Alex leads the ML/DevOps team at Zencoder, where he leverages his extensive background in Software Engineering, ML and DevOps to deliver high-quality machine learning solutions. His work spans complex data pipelines, cloud infrastructure management (GCP, Kubernetes), and advanced ML/DevOps pipelines, ensuring scalability and efficiency.
Alexander Chatzizacharias
Alexander, a 34-year-old Software Engineer at JDriven, holds dual Dutch and Greek nationality. He earned his master’s degree in Game Studies from the University of Amsterdam, where he discovered his passion for gamification and software engineering. Alexander aims to bridge the gap between game development and software engineering, believing that both industries have much to learn from each other. He is dedicated to integrating technologies and methodologies from both fields. Additionally, he enjoys experimenting with new technologies and cutting-edge sdk's.
Anja Kunkel
Anja is a Principal Fullstack Engineer based in Berlin. She loves systems thinking - but doesn't love buzzwords all that much. Her aim is to understand and influence human dynamics behind software and organizations.She's equally passionate about hard and soft skills. Over time, she's become more and more convinced that soft skills are the true hard skills.Off stage, she's a sports enthusiast, current local champion in wakeskating, and a fan of pushing limits – whether on the water or in the workplace.
Asim Hussain
Asim is a developer, author and speaker with over 20 years experience working for organisations such as the European Space Agency, Google and now Microsoft, where he is the Green Cloud Advocacy Lead. He's also the Executive Director and Chairperson of the Green Software Foundation, a global industry consortium with a mission to create a trusted ecosystem of people, standards, tooling and best practices for building green software.
Christian Wörz
Christian is a software developer and Microsoft MVP with over a decade of experience in the field. He loves to write code in Java, TypeScript and JavaScript. In his spare time he tries to convince others to also start using these languages by giving engaging live-coding conference talks and trainings. When there‘s time left he records videos trying to explain the most complex concepts of TypeScript in a simple way.
Elias Theodoridis
Elias is a Cloud Engineer specializing in security, cloud infrastructure, and automation. He is currently working on security initiatives at Vodafone, with previous hands-on experience in the telecommunications industry as a Cloud and Software Engineer. He works with both AWS and GCP, with security at the core of his technical focus. His background as a professional basketball player in Greece’s top division and the youth national team has shaped a strong sense of discipline and collaboration, supporting his drive for excellence and continuous learning in technology.
Emmanouil Tavlakis
Experienced tech-agnostic Data Scientist with 14 years in the field, certified as a Generative AI Engineer by Microsoft & IBM, recognized for both academic and athletic achievements. Skilled in implementing end-to-end AI-ML Data Analytics solutions across diverse industries (11), departments (7), and projects (30) in 7 countries. With a strong background in R&D, as well as experience as a Big Data Analytics lecturer, technical presenter, and project manager, he excels in resource management, communication, and business strategy.
Fabian Stäber
Dr. Fabian Stäber is engineering manager and observability enthusiast at Grafana. He is a member of the Prometheus open source project, where he is maintainer of the Prometheus Java client library and the JMX exporter. At Grafana Fabian has his focus on application observability with OpenTelemetry.
Faris Aziz
Faris Aziz is an experienced engineer, international conference speaker, and workshop instructor specializing in React, Next.js, web architecture, and resilient system design. He has a deep passion for startups, having worked in early-stage companies ranging from founding teams to organizations scaling from 1 to 100 people. His expertise spans engineering leadership, building career ladders from scratch, and managing teams of over 10 engineers.As a front-end subject matter expert, Faris has contributed to creating systems used by millions of users worldwide. His work has ranged from building greenfield projects from the ground up to maintaining and scaling decade-old products. His experience covers industries like Connected TV, Fintech, SaaS, and Fitness, working with companies such as Smallpdf, Fiit, Discovery, GCN, Eurosport, and Navro (formerly Paytrix).Faris’s specialization lies in building user-centric, performant, and maintainable applications. He has a particular interest in observability and monitoring, ensuring that systems are not only robust but also easy to troubleshoot and optimize. His passion extends to sharing knowledge, organizing the Zurich.js meetup in Switzerland, and speaking at international conferences about web development, engineering leadership, and creating scalable systems.In his free time, Faris enjoys contributing to web development tools like Raycast and spending time contemplating life’s great questions, like why the build works on his machine but nowhere else.
Foivos Zakkak
Hi! I am Foivos (pronounced [‘fivos]) Zakkak and I am a Software Engineer in Red Hat’s Java platform team working on Mandrel, GraalVM and Quarkus. Prior to joining Red Hat I spent 9.5 years as a post-graduate and post-doctoral researcher. I worked at the Advanced Processor Technologies (APT) group of the University of Manchester where I led the development of the Maxine VM, a metacircular Java-in-Java VM. Before that I worked at the Computer Architecture and VLSI Systems Laboratory (CARV) of FORTH-ICS, where in the context of the GreenVM project, I developed DiSquawk, a Java Virtual Machine (JVM) that targets non-cache-coherent architectures. During my post-graduate studies I also developed SCOOP, a source-to-source compiler that used information from task annotations (memory footprints) to generate optimized code for task-based runtime systems. I was also involved in the development and performance analysis process of the TPC (Tagged Procedure Calls), BDDT (Block-level Dynamic Dependence Analysis for Deterministic Task-Based Parallelism) and PARTEE (PARallel Task Execution Engine) task-based runtime systems.
Fotis Adamakis
Software Engineer at Preply, Author, International Speaker, and Vue.js Athens Meetup Co-Organiser. With 14+ years of experience in frontend development, I’ve led major projects focusing on performance, scalability, and clean architecture. After mastering Vue, recently switched to React and love sharing insights on both through talks and articles.
Frank Lyaruu
Architect and software generalist. Long time Java developer, but recently expanding to Rust and Web Assembly, and advocating for Sustainable Computing,
Hinse ter Schuur
Hinse is a Software Engineer at SDB Professionals. He has been a professional Java coder for over 20 years. He loves to share his experience by doing pair programming, reviews, writing articles and giving talks.
Keren Kenzi
Keren is a senior software developer with over a decade of experience in the industry. She holds an M.Sc. in Computer Science and is passionate about React and learning new technologies. Keren volunteers as a program manager at Baot, a community that supports women in R&D in their professional growth. She instructs and inspires people to write blogs in her tech blogging workshops. Keren has experience as a dev community leader and a co-organizer of meetups and events. And in her not-so-spare time, she studies psychology. Her hobbies include drawing, photography, and singing.
Ko Turk
Ko Turk is a Software Architect, Java Engineer, Green Champion and Community Builder with more than 15+ years of experience in development, architecture, speaking, and building communities.🦊 Voxxed Days Amsterdam conference organiser👥 JUGLeader @CodeLabJUG🫶🏻 Voxxed Amsterdam Program Committee, JFall Program Committee Member, DevoxxBE Community reviewer🧑💻 Working @CodeLab, assignment @Rabobank.🎤 Conference speaker, speaks about everything around Java.➡️ Website: http://koturk.nl/
Mete Atamel
I’m a Software Engineer and a Developer Advocate at Google in London. I build tools, demos, tutorials, and give talks to educate and help developers to be successful on Google Cloud.
Mihaela Gheorghe-Roman
Mihaela is a Software Architect at Systematic, Romania. Ph.D in artificial neural network algorithms, Assistant Professor at the University of Cybernetics and Informatics in Bucharest, she is a dedicated lead developer and architect who enjoys sharing her knowledge.In her professional career, spanning over 13+ years, she worked for telecom and defence domains with a focus on Java, Spring Boot, C, C#, Scala and Angular.Apart from her passion for programming, she loves parrots, she is enthusiastic about traveling the world and doing a lot of sports, from running at marathons, martial arts and to different aerobic trainings.
Nikoleta Tzika
I’ve been in tech for over 10 years — starting as a .NET developer and later moving into Product Ownership. I’ve worked across a range of industries, from banking to grocery delivery, and now gametech, with a focus on casino.At Novibet, I enjoy working on scalable, API-first solutions that support both internal teams and external partners. I love solving in-house challenges with custom tools, and I’m just as excited about building new features that improve the player experience. At Voxxed Days, I’ll share how we moved from custom provider integrations to a unified platform that scales.
Patrycja Wegrzynowicz
Patrycja is a principal consultant and founder of Yon Labs, a startup developing automated tools for detecting and refactoring security vulnerabilities, performance anti-patterns, and cloud misconfigurations. She brings deep expertise in Java, C++, SRE, DevOps, security, performance optimization, and cloud technologies.She is a regular speaker at leading software conferences, including KubeCon, JavaOne, Devoxx, JFokus, and others. Patrycja has been recognized as a Java Champion and holds titles such as Oracle Groundbreaker Ambassador, Oracle ACE Associate, and Oracle ACE Pro. In 2016, she was named one of the Top 10 Women in Tech in Poland.Her interests focus on automated software engineering, particularly static and dynamic analysis techniques to support software verification, optimization, and deployment.
Sander Hoogendoorn
Sander Hoogendoorn is an independent dad, traveler, and lifelong software craftsman. With over four decades of hands-on coding experience, he still writes code daily, proving that real developers never stop learning. Throughout his career, he has navigated the tech world in roles ranging from CTO at companies like iBOOD (currently), ANVA, and Klaverblad to serving as Capgemini's global agile thought leader.Known for his post-agile mindset and fearless approach to challenging the status quo, Sander helps organizations and teams break free from outdated practices and embrace innovation. He’s not just about writing code—he’s about rewriting the rules.As an author and dynamic international speaker, Sander shares his insights at conferences worldwide, covering topics such as disruption, culture, life beyond agile, continuous delivery, microteams, software architecture, monads, microservices, and the art of writing elegant code. He champions critical thinking, strategic design, and mindful development to help teams build better software, faster.Discover Sander—the coding rebel who believes in small steps, big impact, and the mind as the ultimate tool for success.
Stavros Bastakis
Stavros Bastakis is an MSc Software Engineer with a passion for web technologies, specializing in the React ecosystem and TypeScript. With nearly 15 years of experience in tech, he has led frontend and cross-functional teams to deliver high-performance, scalable web applications, always with a focus on clean architecture, best practices, and great user experience.Currently a founding engineer at Fairlo, Stavros has played a key role in building the company’s technical foundations and scaling its development processes. He’s known for mentoring teams, driving results, and solving complex technical challenges, while staying committed to continuous learning and keeping up with the fast-moving frontend ecosystem.Beyond work, he co-organizes Devstaff meetup in Crete, one of the largest tech meetups in Greece, and actively contributes to building collaboration and knowledge-sharing within the developer community.
Theodore Neward
Ted Neward is sometimes referred to as "The Dude of Software", owing to both his remarkable (some say frightening) resemblance to the Jeff Bridges character from "The Big Lebowski", and his ordination as a Dudeist Minister of the Church of the Latter-Day Dude. But, he's also been called the "Dr. Gregory House of Software", owing to his tendency to insult people (who of course deserved it!) and pull no punches when talking about software and how to deliver it successfully. In truth, he's comfortable answering to either name or title, as well as a few others less work-friendly. He knows more programming languages than most people knew existed, and hasn't found one yet that he couldn't turn into a 'mission-critical' application when asked. He currently resides in the Pacific Northwest with his wife, two cats, twelve laptops, seven tablets, nine phones, and a rather large utility bill, and longs for the day when he can hook up panels that convert rain into electricity--like solar, but rain.
Łukasz Nowak
Well, I’m a senior frontend developer with nearly 15 years of professional experience. I love React for its simplicity and high-quality frontend testing for confidence it gives. I love sharing my knowledge, which makes me very often a speaker during internal company meetups. After a few initial attempts I felt like I’d like to spread this activity outside too, that’s why I responded to your CoP.I work for a tech hub of a financial giant of the British market - Hargreaves Lansdown. I’m less and less a developer as recently I focus more on frontend architecture, testing shift left or helping less experienced colleagues to level up their expertise. During an uncountable amount of interviews and inductions I received a lot of feedback that we’ve introduced quality patterns to our ecosystem. That made me think of sharing it, or maybe even challenging by other developers outside.
Vassilis Poursalidis
Vassilis has nearly 20 years of experience working in diverse projects in the technology industry, with a strong record of leadership and technical expertise. He is currently an Engineering Director at Epignosis, dedicated to fostering a collaborative team environment.
Victor Landeau
Machine Learning Engineer for more than 10 years, at Oui.sncf then at Ekinox, I'm trying to make Machine Learning applications valuable and maintainable by bringing the wisdoms of Software Craftmanship, Product and System thinking into the Data Science world.