Mary is a Java Champion and a passionate Senior Developer Advocate at DataStax, a leading data management company that champions Open Source software and specializes in Big Data, DB-as-a-service, Streaming, and Cloud-Native systems. She spent 3.5 years as a very effective advocate at IBM, focusing on Java, Jakarta EE, OpenJ9, Open Source, Cloud, and Distributed Systems. She transitioned from Unix/C to Java around 2000 and has never looked back since then. She considers herself a polyglot and loves to continue learning new and better ways to solve real-life problems. She is an active tech community builder outside of her day job, and currently the President of the Chicago Java Users Group (CJUG), as well as a co-organizer for several IBM-sponsored meetup groups in the Greater Chicago area.
