Katrina Owen

Katrina sampled careers in ballet, trapeze, and ship-building before finding a home in software development. Today she is working in Go and Ruby for GitHub when she’s not busy writing books like 99 Bottles of OOP, teaching software courses, and growing Exercism.io.

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Keavy McMinn

Keavy McMinn utilized an education in studio art to win a cash prize enabling her to buy her first computer, learn HTML, and kick off a long career in software development. Whether it’s helping build GitHub or training for a triathlon, she works to find performance and efficiency while delivering top results.

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Vaidehi Joshi

Vaidehi leverages her curiosity to dive deep into highly technical topics, then enjoys sharing them with the broader community through her work on BaseCS. As a developer at Tilde working on Skylight, she has a front-row seat to watching how great projects struggle and helps customers find their next big breakthrough.

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Aaron Patterson

Legendary curer of meats and occasional programmer, Aaron is notorious for his scientific approach to solving the problems that developers didn't realize they had. The only person on earth who understands both the Matz Ruby Interpreter and ActiveRecord, Aaron also manages a team of cats and attempts to speak Japanese.

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Marty Haught

Software wrangler/entrepreneur that runs Haught Codeworks building both great software and teams. Marty is actively involved in the software community, most notably as an organizer of RailsConf and RubyConf. Beyond his love for the outdoors, food and music, Marty is busy raising his two children with his lovely wife and enjoying life.

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Nadia Odunayo

Nadia is the CEO at The StoryGraph, a company exploring the intersection beteween storytelling and software. Before that, she co-directed Ignition Works, a software consultancy that helped firms manage their cloud platforms, and she worked at Pivotal as a software engineer. She originally learnt to code at Makers Academy in London and she maintains speakerline.io in her spare time.

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Nickolas Means

Nickolas Means loves nothing more than a story of engineering triumph (except maybe a story of engineering disaster). When he’s not stuck in a Wikipedia loop reading about plane crashes, he spends his days as a Senior Engineering Manager at GitHub. He works remotely from Austin, TX, and spends most of his spare time hanging out with his wife and kids, going for a run, or trying to brew the perfect cup of coffee.

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Stefania Druga

Stefania Druga is the creator of the Cognimates platform for AI education and recent graduate from Personal Robots Group at MIT Media Lab. Currently, she is an AI Creative Learning Researcher at NYU ITP and RISD, teaching graduate students how to hack smart toys for AI education. She is also leading Hackidemia, Afrimakers and MakerCamp.

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Louisa Barrett

Louisa is the Director of the Front-End Engineering program at the Turing School of Software and Design. She is the former director of Colorado for Women Who Code and past chapter leader for Girl Develop It Denver/Boulder. She began her career as an illustrator/graphic designer, and a passion for understanding people led her to programming. She has a soft spot for UX, typography, and correcting students when they refer to an assignment operator as an "equals sign".

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Jen Pahlka

Jen is the founder and Executive Director of Code for America. Over the last decade she has worked to help government use technology to better serve and empower its citizens. After years in the Obama White House working to found the United States Digital Service, Jen has returned to Code for America to push forward the modernization of local governments.

Adam Cuppy

Adam is a co-founder and COO of ZEAL a principle-driven development agency. Adam is a professional stage actor, who moved into marketing (to make a living) and became the VP of Creative and Online Media for Dutch Bros., a large national coffee chain. Eventually, he found his way into software engineering and entrepreneurship. Other than computering, he's training to finish a 140-mile Ironman Triathlon, which is a big deal for him, because he has only one lung.

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Madison Kerndt

Madison is on a mission to help developers build secure software and to make the digital world a safer place for everyone. She is a Software Engineer and Developer Evangelist at IronCore Labs (https://ironcorelabs.com/), makers of turnkey data security solutions for developers and empowers Enterprises to control their data wherever it lives. Madison has deep roots in the startup community and has worked with multiple startups as a front-end developer, designer, and marketer. She enjoys building, creating, teaching, and contemplating the interplays between technology, community, privacy, and digital security.

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