WeAreDevelopers World Congress

Scott has been a developer for 30 years and has been blogging at https://hanselman.com for 20 years! He works in Open Source on .NET and the Azure Cloud for Microsoft out of his home office in Portland, Oregon. Scott has been podcasting for over 800 episodes of http://hanselminutes.com over 15 years and 700 episodes of http://www.azurefriday.com. He's written a number of technical books and spoken in person to over one million developers worldwide! He's also on TikTok, which was very likely a huge mistake.

Scott Farquhar is the Co-Founder and Co-CEO of Atlassian, a global software company which builds tools to help teams unleash their potential. More than 300,000 large and small organisations across the world use Atlassian’s collaboration products like Jira, Confluence and Trello to help their teams work better together. Scott is also a Co-Founder of Pledge 1%, a movement that inspires early-stage corporate philanthropy.

Douglas Crockford is at least partly to blame for the incredible success of JavaScript. He also discovered JSON, the world's best loved data interchange format. He was a researcher at Atari, Director of Technology at Lucasfilm, Director of New Media at Paramount, and a Distinguished Architect at Yahoo and PayPal. He is the author of "JavaScript: The Good Parts_ and _How JavaScript Works".

Fascinated by software development since his childhood in Germany, Thomas Dohmke has built a career building tools developers love and accelerating innovations that are changing software development. Currently, Thomas is Chief Executive Officer of GitHub, where he has overseen the launch of the world’s first at-scale AI developer tool, GitHub Copilot. Before his time at GitHub, Thomas previously co-founded HockeyApp and led the company as CEO through its acquisition by Microsoft in 2014, and holds a PhD in mechanical engineering from University of Glasgow, UK.

Prashanth is a proven technology executive with extensive experience leading and scaling high-growth global organizations. Previously, he served as Senior Vice President & General Manager of Rackspace’s Cloud & Infrastructure Services portfolio of businesses, including the Managed Public Clouds, Private Clouds, Colocation and Managed Security businesses.

Before that, Prashanth held a range of senior leadership roles at Rackspace including Senior Vice President & General Manager of Rackspace’s high growth, global business focused on the world’s leading Public Clouds including Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud Platform (GCP) and Alibaba Cloud, which became the fastest growing business in Rackspace’s history.

Prior to joining Rackspace, Prashanth was a Vice President at Barclays Investment Bank, focused on providing Strategic and Mergers & Acquisitions (M&A) advice for clients in the Technology, Media and Telecom (TMT) industries. Prashanth was also a Manager at Capgemini Consulting where he managed Operations transformation engagements and consulting teams across the US. He holds an MBA from Harvard Business School, an M.Eng in Engineering Management from Cornell University and a B.S. in Computer Engineering (summa cum laude) from the University of Maine.

Aleph Alpha Founder & CEO Jonas Andrulis is a serial entrepreneur and former AI R&D manager at Apple’s Special Projects Division (SPG). For several years, Jonas Andrulis has been at the forefront of the development towards transformative AI. His experience ranges from innovative academic experiments to building and operating petabyte machine learning pipelines for computer vision and language processing.

Constantijn van Oranje leads Techleap.nl, the initiative to turn The Netherlands into a European
powerhouse for tech companies. He and his team run programs and connect a community of the
most promising and ambitious startup & scaleup founders in The Netherlands. Techleap also works
with stakeholders like the government to improve the conditions for tech entrepreneurs to scale
their companies.

He is member of the National Growth Fund Investment Committee, Board member of the NATO
Innovation Fund, Fellow at Deloitte Centre for the Edge and Senior Advisor Digital Technology &
Macro Strategy at Macro Advisory Partners in London and New York. Additionally, he is ambassador
of the European Innovation Council.

Constantijn co-founded StartupFest Europe, which is still the biggest start-up event ever organised in
The Netherlands. Previously, he was Chief of Staff to VP Neelie Kroes at the European Commission in
charge of the Digital Agenda and led the Brussels office of the RAND Corporation following jobs at
Booz Allen & Hamilton, IFC and the Cabinet of EC Commissioner Hans van den Broek.
Aside from innovation and technology, Constantijn van Oranje is passionate about art, music,
photography, and nature.

David Simas is the Managing Director of Research and Impact at Emerson Collective, where heworks to develop in-depth research projects and distributes findings and analysis in service ofEmerson's priorities including democracy, immigration, education, and climate.

A native of Taunton, Massachusetts, David was appointed Deputy Chief of Staff toMassachusetts Governor Deval Patrick in 2007. He then joined President Obama’sadministration in 2009 as a Deputy Assistant to the President, working with senior advisorsDavid Axelrod and David Plouffe. In 2012, he served as Director of Opinion Research forPresident Obama's reelection campaign. Following the reelection, Mr. Simas returned to theWhite House as Assistant to the President and Director of the Office of Political Strategy andOutreach. In 2016, President Obama selected Mr. Simas to serve as Chief Executive Officer ofthe Obama Foundation. Mr. Simas holds a B.A. in political science from Stonehill College and aJ.D. from Boston College Law School. He is the son of two Portuguese immigrants and lives inLos Angeles with his wife, Shauna, and their two daughters.

Chris Wysopal is Veracode's CTO and co-founder. He is one of the original vulnerability researchers and an early member of L0pht Heavy Industries, which he joined in 1992. He is the author of netcat for Windows and one of the authors of L0phtCrack. He has testified on Capitol Hill in the US on the subjects of government computer security and how vulnerabilities are discovered in software. He published his first advisory in 1996 on parameter tampering in Lotus Domino and has been trying to help people not repeat this type of mistake for 15 years. He is also the author of "The Art of Software Security Testing" published by Addison-Wesley.

Peter Bosch is Chief Executive Officer (CEO) of CARIAD, the software company of the Volkswagen Group. Prior to his appointment on June 1, 2023, Bosch was Member of the Board of Management for Production at Bentley from 2017 to 2023, where he was largely responsible for the successful realignment and restructuring of the company to become the market leader for sustainable, modern luxury vehicles.

Bosch joined the Volkswagen Group in 2011 and was initially responsible for optimizing the strategy, processes and structures of production for the Volkswagen brand worldwide. Prior to that, he was a senior director at Oliver Wyman, where he held various management positions.

Peter Bosch studied economics at the LMU Munich and mechanical engineering at the TU Munich. He lives near Munich with his family. In addition to his position as CEO of CARIAD, Bosch is a member of the Board of Directors of Scout Motors, where he supports the development of a manufacturer of electric trucks and SUVs for the Volkswagen Group in the USA.

Sitting on GitHub’s Executive Leadership team, Demetris Cheatham is currently the Chief of Staff for the CEO of GitHub, where she acts as the CEO’s trusted partner to move all of software development forward. Demetris is particularly passionate about the evolving nature of open source in the age of AI. Before her time as COS to the CEO, Demetris was Senior Director for Diversity, Inclusion and Belonging Strategy at GitHub, the Global Diversity and Inclusion at Lead at Red Hat, and was formerly the first woman and youngest Executive Director to lead the National Bar Association, the United States’ oldest and largest international network of over 65,000 predominantly African-American attorneys and judges.Demetris earned a B.S. in Computer Science with honors from North Carolina A&T State University and a JD/MBA from the University of Maryland Francis King Carey School of Law and the University of Maryland Robert F. Smith School of Business.

Eric is the co-founder & CEO at Magic.dev, an AGI company building an AI software engineer.

John is an award-winning game designer, level designer, and programmer whose work portfolio includes 130 games, of which 107 have been published commercially. John Romero has co-founded eight widely successful game companies, including id Software, Gazillion Entertainment, and Loot Drop. He co-owns Loot Drop and Romero Games. He is regarded as one of the world’s best game designers and his products have won over a hundred awards to prove it. Furthermore, John Romero is fully a self-taught designer and programmer, drawing inspiration from early Apple II programmers.

Brenda Romero is an award-winning game designer, Fulbright scholar, entrepreneur, artist, writer and creative director who entered the video game industry in 1981.

Maezza Romero is a Community Manager at Romero Games. With 5 years of experience in the industry, she has used her acquired skills to build and manage large community spaces, such as the Romero Games Discord which has recently celebrated 7,000 members.

The Romero Games Twitter, the company’s biggest social media page with nearly 9,000 followers is a fun and nostalgic space for fans of Romero’s legacy titles such as DOOM and Quake, offering discussions on what DOOM weapon one would bring to a desert island, and other lively user polls and QnA. The current social media landscape is challenging, with new platforms overtaking the next.

In 2023, fast-form video content is the meta, so Maezza has had to adapt her social media management to platforms such as TikTok and Instagram Reels. By utilising traditional social media platforms such as Facebook and Twitter, as well as modern platforms, Maezza creates content for diehard Millennial and Gen-X fans.

Former Yahoo, Mozilla, Microsoft. JavaScript and Accessibility expert. Worked on Chromium Developer Tools. Author of the Developer Advocacy Handbook, LinkedIn Learning and Skillshare Trainer. Cinephile.

Ulrich Irnich is Vodafone Germany’s CIO and a member of its Executive Committee. He leads the customer-focused IT strategy, digitalisation, new technologies and the modernisation of IT processes and systems.He has a 32-year track record in the IT and telecom industries, palying an instrumental role in driving Unitymedia’s agile and digital transformation as CIO. At Telefónica he orchestrated the company’s radical simplification and transformation.He has a degree in electrical engineering and in his spare time he enjoys running marathons and cycling. He's married with two adult sons.

Alex Soto is a Director of Developer Experience at Red Hat. He is passionate about the Java world, and software automation and he believes in the open-source software model. Alex is the co-author of Testing Java Microservices, Quarkus Cookbook, Kubernetes Secrets Management, and GitOps Cookbook books, and a contributor to several open-source projects. A Java Champion since 2017, he is also an international speaker, radio collaborator at Onda Cero, and teacher at Salle URL University. You can follow him on Twitter (@alexsotob) to stay tuned to what’s going on in Kubernetes and Java world.

Mike Butcher (M.B.E.) is Editor-at-large of TechCrunch. He has written for UK national newspapers and magazines and been named one of the most influential people in European technology by Wired UK.

He has spoken at the World Economic Forum, Web Summit, and DLD. He has interviewed Tony Blair, Dmitry Medvedev, Kevin Spacey, Lily Cole, Pavel Durov, Jimmy Wales, and many other tech leaders and celebrities. Mike is a regular broadcaster, appearing on BBC News, Sky News, CNBC, Channel 4, Al Jazeera and Bloomberg.

He has also advised UK Prime Ministers and the Mayor of London on tech startup policy, as well as being a judge on The Apprentice UK. GQ magazine named him one of the 100 Most Connected Men in the UK.

He is the co-founder ThePathfounder.com newsletter; TheEuropas.com (the Annual European Tech Startup Conference & Awards for 12 years); and the non-profits Techfugees.com, TechVets.co, and Coadec.com.

He was awarded an MBE in the Queen’s Birthday Honours list in 2016 for services to the UK technology industry and journalism.

Madona S. Wambua is the Founder and CTO of Jibu Labs, an Author, a Keynote Speaker, an Android Expert, and has over a decade in software engineering. She is also a Women Tech Makers Ambassador and AnitaB.org Co-Chair, a host of Tech Talks with Madona, and a developer who enjoys sharing her Android knowledge and teaching others how to make Android applications.

Gift Egwuenu is a Developer Advocate at Cloudflare. She has over 5 years of experience in web development and building tools to help businesses grow. In her previous role, she worked as a front-end developer. She is now working in developer relations.Gift shares her experience in Web Development, Jamstack, and career-related topics, with the goal of helping people level up their skills in the industry.

Being associated with the industry since 2004, I have lent my expertise predominantly in the solution architecture field. I have gained accolades for revolutionising the scalability of frontend architectures with micro-frontends, from increasing the efficiency of workflows, to delivering quality in products. My colleagues know me as an excellent communicator who believes in using an interactive approach for understanding and solving problems of varied scopes.
I helped DAZN becoming a global streaming platform in just 5 years, now as Principal Architect at AWS, I'm helping our customers in the media and entertainment space to deliver cost-effective and scalable cloud solutions.
Moreover, I'm sharing with the community the best practices to develop cloud-native architectures solving technical and organizational challenges.

My core industry knowledge has been instrumental in resolving complex architectural and integration challenges. Working within the scopes of a plethora of technical roles such as tech lead, solutions architect and CTO, I have developed a precise understanding of various technicalities which has helped me in maximizing value of my company and products in my current leadership roles.

Matthias Henze, aka Matze, has been serving as CEO of Jimdo for 18 years, is a curator for the German Founder's Award, and an expert in solo self-employment and micro-enterprises. As a founder, he has steered Jimdo to become a leading provider of software tools and services for these target groups. Additionally, Matze promotes the visibility of self-employed individuals, among other initiatives, through the Jimdo-ifo Business Climate Index. He hails from Göttingen and spent formative years of his childhood in Oman and the USA. He pursued his studies in Business Admin. in Kiel and Gothenburg.

Maxim Salnikov is an Oslo-based cloud and tech community geek. He is a webdev maestro who builds apps since the end of the last century and shares his extensive web platform experience by speaking & training at developer events around the world. Daytime, Maxim is boosting cloud skills at the country scale by leading developer engagement in Microsoft Norway. In the evenings, you'll find him organizing the country's main web & mobile meetups, and two full-scale tech conferences.

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Martina is a Google Developer Expert in Angular and web technologies. As a senior frontend developer, she focuses on implementing highly scalable software solutions with Node.js and Angular. Besides giving workshops as an Angular trainer, she founded RheinNeckarJS, is a core member of the ngGirls Team, co-organizes the local Angular Heidelberg user group and the German Angular conference NG-DE.

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What to say about this exceptional young person? She is a true Wunderkind! Alex developed an interest for science, programming, physics and chemistry since the early age of 12. Today, at the age of only 19, she already holds a Bachelor degree with distinction from the Technological University Dublin and is widely considered as one of the great generational talents. She was part of various programs at the MIT, CERN and IBM. She has received various honors and accolades and besides studying Molecular Medicine she also speaks regularly about Quantum Computing and Machine Learning at international conferences.

Trainer, consultant and programming architect with focus on Angular. Google Developer Expert (GDE) and Trusted Collaborator in the Angular team who writes for O'Reilly, the German Java Magazine, and windows.developer. Regularly speaks at conferences.

Dr. Johanna Pirker is a computer scientist focusing on development, research, and education of games and VR experiences is an active and strong voice of the local indie dev community. She has lengthy experience in designing, developing, and evaluating games and VR experiences and believes in them as tools to support learning, collaboration, and solving real problems. She started in the industry as QA tester at EA and still consults studios in the field of games user research. In 2011/12 she started researching and developing VR experiences at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. At the moment she is Ass.Prof. for game development at TU Graz and researches games with a focus on AI, HCI, data analysis, and VR technologies. Johanna was listed on the Forbes 30 Under 30 list of science professionals.

Senior Web Software Engineer at Bloomberg, Ex Twitter. Passionate about getting more women into technology and teaching. Lover of digital art and chatting about web accessibility and building modular react applications.

Alejandro is the Director of Engineering, Science & Product at Zalando SE, where he leads a cross-functional technology organisation of department heads, managers, principals and ICs. He is responsible for one of Zalando's large-scale central data platforms, a large portfolio of (10+) products, and SOtA machine learning systems powering critical use-cases across the org. Alejandro is also the Chief Scientist at the Institute for Ethical AI, where he contributes to policy and standards on responsible machine learning, and has led EU policy contributions including the AI Act, Data Act, DSA, etc.

Antoine is Principal Product Designer at Yelp and an Indiepreneur currently living and working in Hamburg. He successfully founded, designed, grew, and sold multiple bootstrapped SaaS companies. He is now working on Fernand, the ultimate custom messaging tool for modern SaaS.