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. You can reach him by email at [email protected] or on twitter at @venkat_s.

34 Years Industry Experience Started Career in Application-Development Architecture (Application & Infrastructure) Leveraged App-Dev Skills For Automation-of-Many-Things Last 12 years in Cloud/Infrastructure/Platform Automation

Anish Patel is a Staff SE at VMware, focusing on organization modernization. His past experiences include running operations for a major EdTech company, as well as an ITSP. He also helped design the original firmware for Uber bikes. When he is not busy working on customer problems, you'll find him on the mats at you local BJJ school.

Ajai Peddapanga is a Principal Cloud Solution Architect at Microsoft and a Technical Leader in the App Innovation space. Since 2014, he has been helping large enterprise customers build their cloud strategy, adopt Azure, and migrate data centers to Azure. A prestigious Microsoft Gold club award winner, he works closely with customer decision makers, c-suite through architect and developer on strategies for application modernization and increasing developer velocity. Prior to Microsoft, he spent 10 years as a product owner, building multi-tenent SaaS solutions for the supply chain industry. Ajai started his career as a Java Developer in 1999 and he is passionate about building large scale enterprise solutions using Java and Spring. LinkedIn — https://www.linkedin.com/in/ajaipeddapanga/

Manoj Singh is a Java Champion and Senior Cloud Solution Architect at Microsoft. In his current role he helps customers design and implement innovative cloud-based solutions that drive digital transformation and business growth. His role also involves collaborating with cross-functional teams to identify opportunities for application optimization, automation, and scalability, while ensuring seamless integration with existing systems and compliance with industry best practices. Thus, enabling organizations to rapidly prototype, develop, and deploy applications that enhance user experience, streamline operations, and foster a culture of innovation. Prior to joining Microsoft, he was an Application Architect/Technical Lead/Software Engineer at Amazon, Johnson & Johnson and other companies.

John LaFata is Staff Solution Engineer at VMware. John's focus is helping customers in their journey to the cloud using modern technologies through the lens of the VMware Tanzu portfolio of products in the public and private cloud. John has rich experience from years of developing high performing enterprise applications in a variety of business verticals.

Danica began her career as a software engineer in data visualization and warehousing with a business intelligence team where she served as a point-person for standards and best practices in data visualization across her company. In 2018, Danica moved to San Francisco and pivoted to backend engineering with a derivatives data team which was responsible for building and maintaining the infrastructure that processes millions of financial market data per second in near real-time. Her first project on this team involved Kafka Streams – she never looked back. Danica now works as a Developer Advocate with Confluent where she helps others get the most out of their event-driven pipelines. Outside of work, Danica is passionate about sustainability, increasing diversity in the technical community, and keeping her many houseplants alive. She can be found on Twitter, tweeting about tech, plants, and baking @TheDanicaFine.

Amanda Gilbert is a Senior Solutions Engineer for Confluent and a Confluent Cloud subject matter expert. She has been working in the data engineering space since graduating college in 2014. She is passionate about building event driven architectures that utilize existing technologies, limit technical debt and create performant applications. Amanda lives in Charlotte, NC where she enjoys playing poker, hiking, traveling and reading in her free time.

Jonatan Ivanov is an enthusiastic Software Engineer, member of the Spring Engineering Team, maintainer of Micrometer, one of the leaders of the Seattle Java User Group, speaker, author, certified dragon trainer. He has hands-on experience in developing and shipping innovative, production-ready software for industry-leader companies. He likes Distributed Systems, Production, Open Source, Math, Linux, Cloud environments; he is passionate about the Java Ecosystem and the Java Community. He is an Open Source contributor, writes a "develotters"-focused blog (https://develotters.com), sometimes can be found on Twitter(@jonatan_ivanov) and in the Seattle area.

Phil Webb is the co-creator of the Spring Boot open source project and has been serving as the project lead since its inception in 2013. Phil is employed by VMware where he is fortunate enough to be able to work full-time on open source software.

Rich Hagarty is a software developer and Developer Advocate at IBM, currently focusing on Java and Open Source related technologies. Based in Austin, TX, Rich has been active in the developer community for the past 6 years, working on cloud computing and AI technologies. He has created numerous learning paths, code patterns, articles, and videos - all to help developers understand and utilize IBM services, such as Watson Discovery and Assistant, IBM Cloud Pak for Data, as well as Red Hat OpenShift container security and deployment. Previous to IBM, Rich worked at HP, where he was a contributor to the OpenStack open source project, focusing on UI dashboards and storage device configuration. Rich's passion is to engage and share new and exciting technologies with developers.

Emily Jiang is a Java Champion. She is Liberty Cloud Native Architect and Chief Advocate, Senior Technical Staff Member (STSM) in IBM, based at Hursley Lab in the UK. Emily is a MicroProfile guru and has been working on MicroProfile since 2016 and leads a number of specifications including MicroProfile Config and Fault Tolerance. She interacts with most of the other MicroProfile specifications. She is also active in Jakarta EE specifications. She is a co-lead in Jakarta Config and also a Jakarta Context and Dependency Injection (CDI) committer. At IBM, she leads the effort of implementing all of MicroProfile specifications on Open Liberty. She is passionate about MicroProfile and Jakarta EE. She regularly speaks at conferences, such as QCon, Code One, DevNexus, JAX London, Voxxed, Devoxx, EclipseCon, GeeCon, JFokus, etc. Connect with Emily on Twitter @emilyfhjiang LinkedIn (https://www.linkedin.com/in/emilyfhjiang).

Cindy has worked over 20 years with application servers, Java EE and now Jakarta EE as a developer, technical lead, and architect. She is the WebSphere Application Server migration tools architect at IBM and currently works on app mod tools that help with operational and runtime modernization as well as Java SE and EE upgrades.

Harry is a Software Engineer working as the team lead on the Open Liberty Kernel team and is based at IBM's RTP Laboratory in Durham, NC.  He has 25 plus years of experience working in various IBM divisions such as Global Business Services, and the IBM Cloud and Cognitive group.  Harry holds a B.S. degree in Computer Science from North Carolina State University.  Check out this blog post to learn more about Harry's activities in open source: https://openliberty.io/blog/2021/10/07/HarryHoots_MeetTheTeam.html