Industry Visionaries & Thought Leaders at GIDS

Daniel is the author of more than a dozen books including the best selling books A Swift Kickstart and Dear Elena.

He has written apps for the iPhone and the iPad since the SDKs first appeared and has written programs for the Mac all the way back to System 7.

Daniel presents iPhone, Cocoa, and Swift training and consults through his company Dim Sum Thinking. When he's not coding or talking about coding for the Mac, the iPhone, and the iPad he's probably cooking, baking bread, or hanging out with friends.

Information on his books is available on the Editors Cut website. Details on his training, and speaking is on the Dim Sum Thinking website.

With almost a decade of experience in software development and information security, Laura Bell specializes in bringing security survival skills, practices, and culture into fast paced organisations of every shape and size. An experienced conference speaker, trainer, and regular panel member, Laura has spoken at a range of events such as BlackHat USA, Velocity, OSCON, Kiwicon, Linux Conf AU, and Microsoft TechEd on the subjects of privacy, covert communications, agile security, and security mindset. She is also the co-author of Agile Application Security, published by O'Reilly media and a regular writer for a range of blogs and magazines on security issues.

Laura is the founder of SafeStack, a specialist security training, development, and consultancy firm. She lives in Auckland, New Zealand with her daughter.

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 several books on Microservices (O'Reilly), the Software Architecture Fundamentals video series (O'Reilly), Enterprise Messaging video series (O'Reilly), Java Message Service, 2nd Edition (O'Reilly), and a contributing author to 97 Things Every Software Architect Should Know (O'Reilly).

Mark has a master's degree in computer science and numerous architect and developer certifications from IBM, Sun, The Open Group, and Oracle. He is a regular conference speaker at the No Fluff Just Stuff (NFJS) Symposium Series and has spoken at hundreds of conferences and user groups around the world on a variety of enterprise-related technical topics.

Scott Davis is a Principal Engineer with ThoughtWorks, where he focuses on leading-edge / innovative / emerging / non-traditional aspects of web development. This includes serverless web apps, mobile web apps (Responsive PWAs), HTML5-based SmartTV apps, Conversational UIs (like Siri and Alexa), and using web technologies to build IoT solutions.

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. Find him on twitter at @venkat_s.

Arty is author of Idea Flow, a data-driven approach to measuring the "friction" in developer experience, and making improvement decisions with science rather than gut feel. After a 17-year career as a developer, consultant, and CTO specialized in statistical process control, data supply chain, and the art of mentorship, she is now a full-time entrepreneur, building the meta tooling platform of her dreams.

Arun Gupta is a Senior Engineering Manager at Apple. He is responsible for the open source strategy at Apple, and participates at CNCF Board and technical meetings actively. He has extensive experience in building, growing, and engaging with communities using collaboration and passion. He has extensive speaking experience in 45+ countries on myriad topics. Gupta also founded the Devoxx4Kids chapter in the US and continues to promote technology education among children. A prolific writer, author of several books, an avid runner, a globe trotter, a Docker Captain, a Java Champion, a JUG leader, he is easily accessible at @arungupta on twitter.

Billy is a developer advocate with IBM and has over a decade of experience. Billy is passionate about finding ways to reduce mental capacity waste from tedious work; such as project initation, deployment, testing and validation, and so on through automation and good management practices. Outside of work Billy enjoy traveling, playing kickball, and having his heart broken by cheering on the Kansas City Chiefs.

Brian Sletten is a liberal arts-educated software engineer with a focus on using and evangelizing forward-leaning technologies. He has a background as a system architect, a developer, a security consultant, a mentor, a team lead, an author and a trainer and operates in all of those roles as needed. His experience has spanned the online game, defense, finance, academic, hospitality, retail and commercial domains. He has worked with a wide variety of technologies such as network matrix switch controls, 3D simulation/visualization, Grid Computing, P2P and Semantic Web-based systems. He has a B.S. in Computer Science from the College of William and Mary. He is President of Bosatsu Consulting, Inc. and lives in Los Angeles, CA. He focuses on web architecture, resource-oriented computing, social networking, the Semantic Web, scalable systems, security consulting and other technologies of the late 20th and early 21st Centuries.

Charles is a lead developer and consultant at ThoughtWorks. I spend my time helping our clients solve gnarly technical problems. My particular interests include hardware, DevOps and improving the developer experience (developers are users too!).When I'm not at work, you'll find me travelling, taking photos, eating chocolate and playing with Lego. (Usually not all at once.)

David is a Developer Advocate in the Java Platform Group at Oracle. Prior to that, he was involved in Oracle's Serverless initiatives. David has also been heavily involved in Java EE 8 and its transition to the Eclipse Foundation as part of the Jakarta EE initiative.

Over the years, David has championed Java extensively throughout the world, by presenting at conferences and user groups, large and small. He blogs at https://delabassee.com and has authored many technical articles for various publications.

David lives in Belgium. In his spare time, he enjoys playing video games with his daughter and tinkering with technologies such as domotics, electronics, and pinballs.

Grace is a developer advocate at IBM, working with Open Liberty and Reactive Platform. She has now been with IBM for two years, after graduating from Exeter University with a Degree in Biology. Moving to software engineering has been a challenging step for Grace, but she enjoys bringing a varied perspective to her projects and using her knowledge of biological systems to simplify complex software patterns and architectures. As a developer advocate, Grace builds POC's, demos and sample applications, and writes guides and tutorials. She is a regular presentor at international technology conferences and has recently authored a book on reactive systems. Grace also has a keen passion for encouraging more women into STEM and especially Technology careers.

Heather VanCura is Chair and Director of the JCP Program at Oracle. She is a leader of the global community driven adoption through the user group programs. Heather drives the efforts to transform the JCP and broaden participation and diversity in the community. Heather is passionate about Java, women in technology and developer communities, serving as an international speaker and community organizer of developer hack days around the world. Heather enjoys speaking at developer, diversity and open source conferences around the world, such as OSCON, Devoxx, FOSDEM, BuzzWords, Wonder Women Tech, and the JavaOne Conferences. She resides in the San Francisco Bay Area, California USA and enjoys trying new sports and fitness activities in her free time.

Jaime is a Developer Advocate at Jack Henry & Associates. He led the iOS development team at OfferUp where he helped make the buying and selling experience simpler, faster, and safer. Jaime was an iOS developer at Simple, where he helped make personal banking delightful. He is also a co-host of the More Than Just Code podcast. Jaime often enjoys a nice cup of coffee and conversation on various topics.

James is a long time open source contributor and Reactive systems expert. He is the creator of Cloudstate, the framework that brings distributed state management to the serverless world. He also created the Lagom Reactive microservices framework and is a core contributor to Play Framework. James' passion is providing developers with the tools to build modern, distributed systems without needing to become a distributed systems guru.

James Weaver is a developer, author, and speaker with a passion for quantum computing. He is a Java Champion, and a JavaOne Rockstar. James has written books including Inside Java, Beginning J2EE, the Pro JavaFX series, and Java with Raspberry Pi. As an IBM Quantum Developer Advocate, James speaks internationally about quantum computing with Qiskit at quantum and classical computing conferences. He tweets as @JavaFXpert, and blogs at http://JavaFXpert.com and http://CulturedEar.com

Jamie is a software developer and Advocate for Open Liberty, MicroProfile and Kabanero based at IBM's R&D Laboratory in Hursley, UK. He is a subject matter expert in containerised solutions and takes a keen interest in emerging technologies with experience in Maven, git, Jenkins and microservice architecture. He fell in love with Java at University and has gone on to talk at many conferences about using Java with microservices. He has worked on a wide variety of projects such as modernising CICS mainframe testing infrastructure, creating and automating the creation of Docker images for IBM's products, contributing to a DevOps pipeline offering and creating web applications for events at the Lab. His recent passion is around raising awareness about energy consumption of technology and discovering ways to help reduce technology's carbon footprint.

Joel Lord is passionate about web and technology in general. He likes to learn new things but most of all, he likes to share his discoveries. He does so by travelling at various conferences all across the globe. He graduated from college in computer programming in the last millennium. Apart for a little break to get his BSc in computational astrophysics, he was always in the industry.

As a developer advocate with Red Hat OpenShift, he meets with developers to help them make the web better by using best practices around Kubernetes. During his free time, he is usually found stargazing in a camping site somewhere or brewing a fresh batch of beer in his garage.

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

Jonathan is halfway into his second score of engineering commercial software, driven by his desire to design helpful software to move us forward. His applications began with laboratory instrument software and managing its data. Jonathan was enticed by the advent of object-oriented design to develop personal banking software. Banking soon turned to the internet, and enterprise applications took off. Java exploded onto the scene, and since then he has inhabited that ecosystem. At 454 Life Sciences and Roche Diagnostics, Jonathan 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. Then as a hands-on architect at Thermo Fisher Scientific, he applied the advantages of microservices, containers, and Kubernetes to their laboratory management platform.

Jonathan enjoys comparing and sharing his adventures with peers. He shares ways to modernize application architectures while adhering to the fundamentals of high modularity and low coupling.

Josh (@starbuxman) is the Spring Developer Advocate at Pivotal. Josh is a Java Champion, author of 5 books (including O'Reilly's upcoming "Cloud Native Java: Designing Resilient Systems with Spring Boot, Spring Cloud, and Cloud Foundry") and 3 best-selling video trainings (including "Building Microservices with Spring Boot Livelessons" w/ Phil Webb), and an open-source contributor (Spring Boot, Spring Integration, Spring Cloud, Activiti and Vaadin)

Justin believes in "Tools before Rules": automating the development toolchain to remove the friction of dealing with manual processes. He works on this goal as part of the IntelliJ Scala plugin team.

Ken Kousen is a Java Champion, Oracle Groundbreaker Ambassador, and a Grails Rock Star. He is the author of the O'Reilly books "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.

In 2013, 2016, and 2017 he won a JavaOne Rockstar award. 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.

Ken is a distributed application engineer at Mesosphere. 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.

Martin Förtsch is an IT-consultant of TNG Technology Consulting GmbH based in Unterföhring near Munich who studied computer sciences. Workwise his focus areas are Agile Development (mainly) in Java, Search Engine Technologies, Information Retrieval and Databases. As an Intel Software Innovator and Intel Black Belt Software Developer he is strongly involved in the development of open-source software for gesture control with 3D-cameras like e.g. Intel RealSense and has built an Augmented Reality wearable prototype device with his team based on this technology.

Furthermore, he gives many talks on national and international conferences about Internet of Things, 3D-camera technologies, Augmented Reality and Test Driven Development as well. He was awarded with the JavaOne Rockstar award and is an author for the technical blogParrotsOnJava.com.

Mary is currently a Java Developer Advocate at IBM, specializing in Reactive Java systems. She started working as a software engineer with C and Unix, then got into Java, Open Source, and web development in the new Millennium, and now she is venturing into Reactive, Mobile, and the DevOps space. In her previous incarnations, she worked for several technology product companies in the Route 128 Boston Technology Corridor as well the San Francisco Bay Area. She now resides in the Greater Chicago area, and is an Executive Board member and the Director of Meetings for the Chicago Java Users Group (CJUG).

Nader is the author of React Native In Action, the host of React Native Radio & works as a Developer Advocate for Amazon Web Services. He has been developing applications with React Native since April 2015. In addition to developing React Native applications, he has also trained companies like American Express, Amazon, Intuit, Visa, Microsoft & ClassPass on how to build production-ready React Native applications.

Nathaniel T. Schutta is a software architect focused on cloud computing and building usable applications. In addition to his day job, he's an adjunct professor at the University of Minnesota, where he teaches students to embrace dynamic languages. A proponent of polyglot programming, Nate has written multiple books, including Presentation Patterns, with Neal Ford and Matthew McCullough, written to rid the world of bad presentations. He's also appeared in various videos and is a seasoned speaker, regularly presenting at conferences worldwide, No Fluff Just Stuff symposia, meetups, universities, and user groups.

I'm a Developer Advocate for Oracle focusing on the Oracle Cloud and Cloud Databases. I have 15 years experience as a full stack developer. I've been working with Java and dynamic JVM languages as well as various JavaScript frameworks for my whole career. I'm obsessed with technology and programming and feel extremely lucky to get paid to do what I love every single day. I've been happily married to my lovely wife Rhonda for the past 17 years. We live in the beautiful Appalachian mountains of North Georgia with our 13-year-old daughter, 12-year-old son, 6 chickens, a potbelly pig, a dog, and a cat.

Dr. Paul King has been contributing to open source projects for nearly 30 years and is an active committer on numerous projects including Groovy, GPars and Gradle. Paul speaks at international conferences, publishes in software magazines and journals, and is a co-author of Manning's best-seller: Groovy in Action, 2nd Edition.

Peter Jausovec is a Consulting Solution Architect at Oracle working on cloud-native solutions. He has more than a decade of experience in the field of software development and tech, in various roles such as QA (test), software engineering and leading tech teams. He's been working in the cloud-native space for the past couple of years, and delivering talks and workshops around the world. He authored and co-authored a couple of books, latest being Cloud Native: Using Containers, Functions, and Data to Build Next-Generation Applications.

Rafal is Cloud software engineer at Hazelcast, author of the book "Continuous Delivery with Docker and Jenkins", trainer and conference speaker. He specializes in Java development, Cloud environments, and Continuous Delivery. Former employee in a number of companies and scientific organizations: Google, CERN, AGH University, and more.

Raju Gandhi is a Java/Ruby/Clojure developer and a programming language geek. He has been writing software for well over a decade in several industries including education, finance, construction, manufacturing and retail sectors. Raju has a graduate degree in Industrial Engineering from Ohio University. In his spare time you will find Raju reading, or watching movies, or playing with yet another programming language. He is affectionately known as looselytyped on Twitter.

Ray is a Developer Advocate for the Google Cloud Platform and a Java Champion. Ray has extensive hands on cross-industry enterprise systems integration delivery and management experiences during his time at Accenture, managed full stack application development, DevOps. Ray specialized in middleware, big data, and PaaS products during his time at Red Hat while contributing to open source projects, such as Infinispan. Aside from technology, Ray enjoys traveling and adventures.

Rhiana is known for speaking and blogging about how to make web sites and applications accessible for people with disabilities. She is currently a software engineer at Blake Education. Where she works to build educational software for students around the world. Drawing from her experience in education and psychology from university and as a high school teacher.

When Rhiana is not at work you'll find her at a local park or zoo with her husband and two children or working on her latest cross stitch pattern. She is currently working on writing her own svg graphing library in ruby.

Riccardo is a passionate and ambitious senior full-stack developer with 9+ years of experience. He likes to work on both the backend and frontend. Worked extensively with Java, Kotlin, and almost all features of the Spring framework on the backend. His frontend skills are considered good while he's familiar with its technologies. But his real knowledge lies on the backend side, where he likes a lot of modern architectural approaches, like Domain-Driven Design, CQRS, and microservices architecture.

He is a perfectionist, who genuinely cares about proper testing and code quality - TDD is the way to go! Riccardo is experienced with testing tools and he's worked with multiple types of databases in his career.

Following courses and learning about new technologies is his hobby. Mastering all aspects of software development, both backend and frontend, is his goal. In his spare time, he likes to play videogames and have a beer with his friends. Of course, he only has time for that, if he's not following an online course.

Ryan is a "developer", someone who teaches other people how to become confident and capable developers. He has done this by running a junior engineering program at Culture Amp for two years, teaching everything from Ruby to JavaScript to AWS.

Ryan has also published books on programming languages, such as Rails 4 in Action and Joy of Elixir. These books have combined sales of over 15,000 copies.

Currently, Ryan works at Coder Academy as a teacher of brand-new-to-programming students. He hopes to grow these people into the next generation of amazing developers.

Sherwood has over 35 years of software engineering experience. He has traveled to six continents and numerous countries helping customers with their enterprise distributed systems. For the past three years he has been working with Kubernetes and service mesh products. He as delivered numerous cloud-native workshops in Latin America, North America, and Europe. He is currently a solution architect for Oracle and is leading the effort to move Oracle's large SaaS applications to a microservices architecture. He leads the team in defining patterns for building resilient services, using distributed tracing, distributed transactions, and multi-tenacy. When Sherwood is not spending his time coding and working with customers he can be found riding his horse Charlie as a member of the Sheriff office's mounted patrol unit.

Developer Advocate, DevOps practitioner (whatever that means) Long time IBM Java developer, leader and evangelist. Steve has been working on IBM Java SDKs and JVMs since Java was less than 1. Also had time to work on other things including representing IBM on various JSRs, being a committer on various open source projects including ones at Apache, Eclipse and OpenJDK. Also member of the Adopt OpenJDK group championing community involvement in OpenJDK. A seasoned speaker and regular presenter at JavaOne and other conferences on technical and software engineering topics.

Thomas Endres is an IT consultant at TNG Technology Consulting in Munich. Besides his normal work for TNG's customers, he creates prototypes with the company's hardware hacking team, such as a see-through augmented reality device and a telepresence robotics system. In his spare time, he is working on gesture control applications, such as those for controlling quadrocopters with bare hands. He's also involved in open source projects written in Java, C#, and all kinds of JavaScript languages.

In addition to all this, he's a lecturer at the University of Applied Sciences in Landshut. Thomas is passionate about software development and all the other aspects of technology. As an Intel Software Innovator and Black Belt, he promotes new technologies like gesture control, AR/VR, and robotics around the world. He recently received a JavaOne Rockstar award. He studied IT at the TU Munich.

Tim is a teacher, author, and technology leader with Confluent, where he serves as the Senior Director of Developer Experience. He can frequently be found at speaking at conferences in the United States and all over the world. He is the co-presenter of various O'Reilly training videos on topics ranging from Git to Distributed Systems, and is the author of Gradle Beyond the Basics. He tweets as @tlberglund, blogs very occasionally at http://timberglund.com, is the co-host of the http://devrelrad.io podcast, and lives in Littleton, CO, USA with the wife of his youth and their youngest child, the other two having mostly grown up.

Todd is a Developer Advocate for Oracle focusing on the Oracle Cloud and Cloud Databases. He has 15 years experience as a full stack developer. Todd has been working with Java and dynamic JVM languages as well as various JavaScript frameworks for his whole career. He's obsessed with technology and programming and feels extremely lucky to get paid to do what he loves every single day. He's been happily married to his lovely wife Rhonda for the past 17 years. They live in the beautiful Appalachian mountains of North Georgia with their 13-year-old daughter, 12-year-old son, 6 chickens, a potbelly pig, a dog and a cat.

Vasco has been developing software for over twenty years. From assembly, through C, C++ and Prolog, to Java, Scala and Kotlin, on big and small computers, from floppy disks to SSDs, on-premises and cloud, he's been there, done that and used it. He loves to learn how things work and then show others what he found: even disassembled his grandfather's watch as a kid. Then grew up to (dis)assemble not only software but also hardware.

His current challenges come from his work as a a Senior Software Developer / Architect at Code Nomads in Amsterdam. He brings teams together to produce well-crafted software. He still enjoys to share knowledge by teaching and learning, and continues to design software and connected devices.

Has been focused in JVM development and languages for the past five years. Was a speaker at recent meetups, the Pixels Camp conference in Lisbon and Devoxx Belgium.