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Holly Cummins
Holly Cummins is a Senior Technical Staff Member on the IBM Quarkus team and a Java Champion. Over her career, Holly has been a full-stack javascript developer, a build architect, a client-facing consultant, a JVM performance engineer, and an innovation leader. Holly has led projects to understand climate risks, count fish, help a blind athlete run ultra-marathons in the desert solo, and invent stories (although not at all the same time). She gets worked up about sustainability, technical empathy, extreme programming, the importance of proper testing, and automating all the things. You can find her at https://hollycummins.com, or follow her on socials at @holly_cummins.
Jennifer Looper
Jen Looper is a creative technologist and educator with over 25 years' experience as a web and mobile developer and Developer Advocate. She is the Director of Developer Relations at Cloudinary and has worked as a software engineer and Developer Advocate at companies including Progress/Telerik and Microsoft, where she wrote viral curricula, and AWS, where she founded AWS Cloud Clubs for students globally. A published author, Jen has written Computer Science for Kids, a textbook aligned to CSTA standards for grades 6-8, as well as The Illustrated AWS Cloud, both published by Wiley. She's a multilingual multiculturalist with a passion for web technologies, applied machine learning and AI, and discovering new things every day. With a PhD in medieval French literature, Jen's area of focus is curriculum development and the application of sound pedagogy to technical topics. Visit Jen's personal site at https://www.jenlooper.com.
Jules May
Jules May is a software architect, consultant, and project leader known for designing systems that simply don’t fail. His work spans from safety-critical aviation and automotive software to enterprise cloud platforms, from DSLs and compiler design to algorithmic toolchains.Starting his career in flight-control systems, Jules learned early that reliability isn’t a feature — it’s a necessity. That ethos has shaped a career focused on clarity, precision, and delivering technology that genuinely works.He’s the author of Extreme Reliability: Programming Like Your Life Depends on It and the originator of Problem Space Analysis, a practical framework for understanding and solving complex technical problems.Over the years, Jules has led engineering teams, advised global clients, and spoken at conferences across Europe on reliability, development culture, non-traditional computing and post-quantum security. He’s worked with organisations from start-ups to household names, building solutions that range from embedded systems to high-availability SaaS platforms. Currently, he’s leading the post-quantum cryptography transformation at a UK bank.A mathematician by training, a programmer by instinct, and a teacher by inclination, Jules brings a rare combination of theoretical depth and hands-on experience. Whether mentoring developers or shaping strategy as a fractional CTO, he focuses on one thing above all: making software that does what it’s meant to — every time.
Mary Grygleski
Mary Grygleski is the Sr. VP of AI Evangelism at LuMay AI focusing on Enterprise AI architecture and market expansion. She is also a Technical Advocate and Global VP of the Western Hemisphere at the AI Collective, a nonprofit AI community and think tank.With 25+ years in software engineering and architecture, Mary has worked with organizations including IBM, Bank of America, and the Chicago Mercantile Exchange across Java, generative AI, cloud, and distributed systems. She is a frequent international speaker and an active community leader with the Chicago Java Users Group. Mary is also a Java Champion and Oracle ACE Associate.
Sander Hoogendoorn
Sander Hoogendoorn is an independent dad, avid traveler, and lifelong software developer. With over 40 years of hands-on coding experience under his belt, he still ships code every day — because once a developer, always a developer.Currently the CTO at iBOOD, Sander has led technology at several companies over the past decade and was once Capgemini’s global agile thought leader. But don’t expect corporate buzzwords — Sander’s known for cutting through the fluff with a post-agile mindset and a healthy disregard for outdated best practices.He helps teams and organizations break rules that need breaking — replacing heavyweight processes with lightweight thinking, and agile dogma with actual flow. If something’s slowing your team down, chances are he’s already ranted about it in a keynote.Onstage, Sander brings code, stories, and sharp insights — whether he’s talking about disruption, continuous delivery, practical AI, microservices, monads (yes, really), software architecture, or the lost art of writing beautiful code. His talks are fast-paced, thought-provoking, and never just theory.Sander believes in small steps, critical thinking, and building stuff that works. No silver bullets. Just better software, made by better teams.
Sven Peters
Sven Peters, AI evangelist at Atlassian, has been studying trends in software development for the last 20 years, uncovering the cultural and technical attributes that help development teams work effectively and drive innovation. He has 25 years of experience writing code, leading teams, and sharing his experience with thousands of developers at countless conferences in 30+ countries.
Venkat Subramaniam
Dr. Venkat Subramaniam is an award-winning author, founder of Agile Developer, Inc., an instructional professor at the University of Houston, and creator of the dev2next and Arc of AI conferences.He has trained and mentored thousands of software developers in the US, Canada, Europe, Asia, and Africa, 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 https://www.agiledeveloper.com.