WeAreDevelopers World Congress is honored to host a top-notch lineup of speakers who are at the forefront of technology and innovation.
Each year, we are privileged to bring together visionary thinkers, industry leaders, and innovative developers who are not just shaping the future of technology, but redefining it.
Please welcome the first batch of confirmed speakers, and stay tuned as we continue to unveil more exceptional talents joining our lineup.
As Chief Decision Scientist at Google Cloud, Cassie Kozyrkov advises leadership teams on decision process, AI strategy, and building data-driven organizations. She is the innovator behind bringing the practice of Decision Intelligence to Google, personally training over 20,000 Googlers. Prior to joining Google, Cassie worked as a data scientist and consultant. She holds degrees in mathematical statistics, economics, psychology, and neuroscience.
Joel Spolsky is cofounder of HASH, a startup working on the Block Protocol, an open standard for data-driven, structured blocks, so that web applications are both human and machine readable.
He was the CEO and co-founder of Stack Overflow, a network of Q&A sites visited by over 100 million people every month. He is a globally-recognized expert on the software development process. His website Joel on Software (joelonsoftware.com) is popular with software developers around the world and has been translated into over thirty languages. As the founder of Fog Creek Software (now Glitch) in New York City, he created FogBugz, a popular project management system for software teams, and Trello, a popular online project management application. Joel has worked at Microsoft, where he designed VBA as a member of the Excel team, and at Juno Online Services, developing an Internet client used by millions. He has written four books: User Interface Design for Programmers (Apress, 2001), Joel on Software (Apress, 2004), More Joel on Software (Apress, 2008), and Smart and Gets Things Done: Joel Spolsky’s Concise Guide to Finding the Best Technical Talent (Apress, 2007). Joel holds a BS from Yale in Computer Science. Before college he served in the Israeli Defense Forces as a paratrooper, and he was one of the founders of Kibbutz Hanaton. Today he serves as the co-founder of HASH.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
Rajeev Rajan is the Chief Technology Officer (CTO) at Atlassian. Rajeev joined the company in May 2022 and is responsible for Atlassian Engineering, IT, Security and Trust, and the Engineering Operations teams. His focus areas include the company's continued transformation to Cloud, Developer Platform, and Product lines. Additionally, he is passionate about continuing to develop Atlassian’s world-class engineering organization and making it a top choice for aspiring engineering talent worldwide. A long-time resident of Washington state, Rajeev previously acted as the Vice President and Head of Engineering for Facebook and Head of Office for Meta in the Pacific Northwest Region. Prior to Meta, Rajeev spent more than two decades with Microsoft, first joining as an intern in 1994. During his time there, he worked on many products, culminating in Office 365 where he built and led the team responsible for all of the Cloud Infrastructure for Office 365. Rajeev is married with two children and a spunky yellow lab named Rayna. He and his wife are very involved in and passionate about a number of efforts that uplift the local community, ranging from the arts to STEM programs.
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.
Martin Wezowski is the Chief Futurist, and Head of NVT Future Hub, for SAP’s Technology & Innovation. With a drive to "lead from the future" and a mission to to unfold what is next for the future of human work, our global ecosystems, and SAP. Martin crafts future outlooks, concepts, defines and runs long term innovation frameworks.
He is lecturing as a faculty member of Futur/IO, a European future institute and other education programs. He moved across a range of disciplines from UX, to systems, to define innovation visions and strategies. 2017 he was named 1 of 100 most innovative minds in Germany as the “Software visionary” (“Handelsblatt”).
"I want to innovate what we call "work" out-of our lives. We are shaping SAP's innovation vision; the empathic symbiosis between humans and machines, investigating how we learn technology, and most of all, how technology learns us, especially when tech moves forward faster than how we, leaders, developers, humans seem to manage the implications"
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".
Sue Quackenbush is Chief People Officer at Dynatrace, passionate about talent strategies, employee experience, and cultivating a workplace culture that fosters an ecosystem where people can thrive and drive innovation. Sue recognizes the importance of genuinely keeping the 'human in human resources'.
She brings a wealth of knowledge in organizational and cultural transformation from her previous roles as CHRO in the tech industry. When not working, Sue enjoys spending time with her family and friends, trying new recipes, and exploring the local farmer’s market on weekends.
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A leader with long experience in global hi-tech business. Marco has been COOof Apple Computer in Cupertino responsible for Global Operations, Marketingand Sales after a successful turnaround of Apple EMEA activities as President ofApple Europe. Previously he spent over 20 years at Texas Instruments managingall business units in EMEA based in Brussels and ASIA based in Hong Kong. Duringhis 3 years tenure, TI Asia increased its revenues from $1B to over $4B.
In Brussels he won the prestigious European Quality Award and was appointedChairman of the American-European Electronics Association representing over300 thousands workers at the European Commission in Brussels.
Marco holds a degree in telecom engineering from the prestigious University ofBologna and attended an executive MBA program at INSEAD Institute. He issitting in several boards across the world and invests in innovative newtechnologies.
He has published four books;
- Da Chianciano a Cupertino - Business Humanum Est
- Guida all’IA per umani
And in 2024 : We humans & Artificial Intelligence : what synergies ?
Currently he is involved in several activities around Artificial Intelligence :
- he has created the Institut EuropIA;
- contributed to the creation of the Maison de l’Intelligence Artificielle in SophiaAntipolis;
- started the WAICF in Cannes in 2022
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Daniel is Head of Decentralized Identity for Block. Prior to Block, he founded the Decentralized Identity program at Microsoft after spending his early career at Mozilla leading the Developer Ecosystem product group and various W3C Web standards efforts. He represents Block in the Decentralized Identity Foundation and is working with members of DIF and W3C to make decentralized identity a reality.
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.
Jan is a quantum physicist and co-founding co-CEO of IQM, building next-generation quantum computers. IQM has assembled an exceptional team of international professionals to build quantum computers for high-performance centers, academia, and industry. IQM has raised €128 million in Series A2 funding (in 2022), largest ever funding round raised by a European quantum computing company. Jandid his doctorate on superconducting quantum circuits at TU Munich and worked as a Marie-Curie Fellow in Helsinki at Aalto University, where he holds the title of docent. In 2023, he was selected as Founder of the Year by Handelsblatt. In 2020, Capital magazine selected him as one of 40 under 40 in Germany and he received an entrepreneurship award from the KAUTE Foundation. Jan was in the Board of the European Innovation Council EIC and holds a Board seat in the European Quantum Industry Consortium QuIC. He is also and member of the German Federal Economic Senate, an EIC Scaling Club Council member, member of the Hall of Future, as well as a Digital Leader and Global Innovator at the WEF.
Scott Chacon is the former cofounder of GitHub; now cofounder of GitButler, a next generation version control client, based in Berlin. Scott helped grow GitHub from 4 cofounders to 450 employees over 8 years, eventually being acquired by Microsoft for $7.5 billion. Scott is also the author of Pro Git, published by Apress and found online at git-scm.com. In unrelated news, he holds a WSET Level 3 certification in Wines and Spirits and owns a dog rescue outside of Berlin.
Kris Rasmussen is the Chief Technology Officer at Figma, where he leads the engineering, security and data science teams. Prior to joining Figma in 2017, Kris served as engineering lead and a technical advisor at Asana, where he co-authored many aspects of the framework and infrastructure that powers the company's realtime collaborative features. Before Asana, Kris co-founded RivalSoft Inc., a web-based application that gives companies an internal hub for market information, and served as Chief Architect at Aptana.
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David Simas is the Managing Director of Research and Impact at Emerson Collective, where he works to develop in-depth research projects and distributes findings and analysis in service of Emerson's priorities including democracy, immigration, education, and climate. A native of Taunton, Massachusetts, David was appointed Deputy Chief of Staff to Massachusetts Governor Deval Patrick in 2007.
He then joined President Obama’s administration in 2009 as a Deputy Assistant to the President, working with senior advisors David Axelrod and David Plouffe. In 2012, he served as Director of Opinion Research for President Obama's reelection campaign.
Following the reelection, Mr. Simas returned to the White House as Assistant to the President and Director of the Office of Political Strategy and Outreach. In 2016, President Obama selected Mr. Simas to serve as Chief Executive Officer of the Obama Foundation.
Mr. Simas holds a B.A. in political science from Stonehill College and a J.D. from Boston College Law School. He is the son of two Portuguese immigrants and lives in Los Angeles with his wife, Shauna, and their two daughters.
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John Woods joined the Algorand Foundation as CTO in 2022. Prior to joining the leadership team he worked as Chief Architect of Cardano at IOHK. John has held roles leading software architecture and applied cryptography at a number of firms including Informatica and ConsenSys.
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.
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.
Ankit Patel is a senior director at NVIDIA, leading developer engagement for NVIDIA’s many SDKs, APIs and developer tools. Ankit joined NVIDIA in 2011 as a GPU product manager and later transitioned to software product management for products in virtualization, ray tracing and AI. Prior to joining the company, he worked on products for video editing and live production, holding management positions at Matrox Video and Blackmagic Design. Ankit holds a bachelor's degree in computer science from Concordia University in Montreal, Canada, and an MBA from Cornell University.
As Group Chief Operating Officer, Rosanne Kincaid-Smith, is a key player in the company’s rise as a leading provider of High Performance Computing solutions. With experience in technology, data analytics, and commercial business strategy, she leads global teams and manages significant operational transformations, driving the business strategy. Rosanne’s expertise spans executing restructuring initiatives, spearheading market expansion efforts, navigating intricate mergers and acquisitions and championing innovation.
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.
Asrar leads targeted developer engagement within Google Cloud, driven by a deep passion for fostering vibrant connections within the global developer community. His primary objectives include driving key initiatives to boost developer engagement, amplifying advocacy efforts, forging strategic in-kind partnerships with developer communities, and fostering sustained global engagement among developers. Additionally, Asrar is dedicated to advancing developer learning and upskilling initiatives to empower developers to achieve excellence in their careers.
Katrin Lehmann has been the Chief Information Officer (CIO) of Mercedes-Benz Group AG and Mercedes-Benz AG since April 2024, with a global responsibility for IT across all divisions, brands and markets.
Previously, she was Vice President IT Sales/Marketing & Home of Tech at Mercedes-Benz AG. The focus of her work was on the digitalization of all sales processes, including IT-based marketing, sales and after-sales activities.
She started her professional career in the SAP sphere in 2001. Since 2004, she has held various management positions in consulting as well as in solution and business development within the SAP Group. In 2015, she took on the role of Program Lead in Strategic Program Management and became the Global Chief Data Officer in 2017. Afterward, she was appointed as Senior VP of S/4 HANA Cloud Data Development. In her last position as Senior VP of Customer Innovation & Maintenance at the Product Engineering Group at SAP SE, she oversaw customer and industry-specific software development, software maintenance and innovation from 2020 to 2023.
Katrin Lehmann holds a Master of Business Administration (MBA) from Mannheim Business School. She is married with four children and enjoys competitive swimming and triathlons.
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Passionate about driving change, Silke has 25 years of leadership experience in large-scale transformation and technology integration programmes, customer service delivery, strategic partner management and marketing in the ICT industry. She has been building up the Lean Portfolio Management & Transformation function for the global Digital & IT organisation to connect Vodafone’s Tech2025 strategy with team level execution. Silke holds a Master Degree in Applied Linguistics with additional executive certificates from INSEAD and Imperial College London and has been a Winner of the 2017 Team Leader FDM everywoman in Technology Award.
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Abdel Sghiouar is a senior Cloud Developer Advocate @Google Cloud. A co-host of the Kubernetes Podcast by Google and a CNCF Ambassador. His focused areas are GKE/Kubernetes, Service Mesh, and Serverless. Abdel started his career in data centers and infrastructure in Morocco, where he is originally from, before moving to Google's largest EU data center in Belgium. Then in Sweden, he joined Google Cloud Professional Services and spent five years working with Google Cloud customers on architecting and designing large-scale distributed systems before turning to advocacy and community work.
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.
Ray Eitel-Porter is a Senior Adviser for Responsible AI. He was previously Accenture’s Global Lead for Responsible AI developing solutions for data and AI ethics, advising clients and building Accenture’s own AI compliance program. He remains engaged as an Accenture Luminary. He has held leadership roles in data and AI for the past 15 years working across many industries. Ray led the formation of Accenture’s Strategic Partnership with The Alan Turing Institute and co-chairs the UK government’s Data Skills Taskforce. He initiated the UK’s first national data science prize for schools, in association with TeenTech. Ray holds an MA from Oxford and an MBA from INSEAD. He is fluent in German, having lived in Munich for many years.
Mike leads TBD, Block's newest business unit that is focused on making the decentralized financial world accessible for everyone. Mike sits on Block’s executive team and has held a number of leadership positions at Cash App. He was part of the core team that brought bitcoin to Cash App, and was responsible for setting up Square Crypto, now Spiral, an open source, independent initiative focused on making bitcoin the world’s preferred currency. Prior to Block, he was a principal software engineer and project lead at Red Hat where he enabled developers and enterprises to build more simply, openly, and cost-effectively than on proprietary SOA platforms.
Alex Soto is a Director of Developer Experience at Red Hat. He is passionate about the Java world, software automation and he believes in the open-source software model. Alex is the co-author of Testing Java Microservice, Quarkus cookbook, Kubernetes Secrets Management, and GitOps cookbook books and contributor to several open-source projects. A Java Champion since 2017, he is also an international speaker 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.
His responsibilities include the positioning of Intel products and solutions in the AI environment. Together with his cross-site and inter-organizational team, Stephan Gillich plans and implements strategies for AI technologies worldwide and with a specific focus on the EMEA region.
Within Intel, Stephan has held various management positions with responsibility for technology and the positioning and marketing of relevant products for businesses and end-users.
He holds a degree (Dipl. Inform. Univ.) in Computer Science from the Technical University of Munich.
As Co-Founder & CEO of Nylas, Gleb Polyakov is focused on empowering developers and their organizations to think big, innovate, and build a better future through APIs. With an emphasis on accelerating corporate growth and nurturing company culture, Gleb has been recognized by Comparably as one of the Top 50 CEOs in North America and led Nylas to its ranking on the Inc. 5000 list of fastest-growing private companies, Forbes' America's Best Startup Employers, and its listing on the Deloitte Technology Fast 500.
Nina holds a prominent position as the EMEA CSS Cluster Lead at Google and she is the co-founder of Impact Force, a pioneering top 3 Ukrainian women-led non-profit organization that focuses on social behavioral change and fosters economic opportunities. She has been recognized as a Top Innovator by the World Economic Forum, highlighting her contributions to solving social challenges. Her dedication to driving positive change has earned her membership in prestigious organizations such as the Schwab Foundation Alliance for Social Entrepreneurship. She is a Globsec Young Leader, BMW Foundation Responsible Leader, Top100 Most Influential Women'24 by Ukrainian Pravda, Women in Tech Advocate, and Angel Investor. Since 2023, Nina has also obtained a position as part of the pro-bono advisory board for innovation and technology at UN Women in Ukraine.
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With over 8 years of experience in data analytics and AI, Laura specializes in leveraging technology to drive business transformation and innovation. As a Tech Manager at Globant's Data & AI Studio, she empowers clients to harness the power of AI to create sustainable value. Her mission is to enhance human capabilities by integrating AI, enabling professionals to focus on high-value, rewarding work, thus boosting productivity, operational efficiency, and revenue growth.
Beyond her role at Globant, Laura mentors startups, guiding them to bridge the gap between research and market application. She focuses on understanding market needs, validating innovative solutions, and building scalable business models to address future societal challenges. She also volunteers with Global Women TechLeaders, an international network for female leaders in the tech industry.
Daniel Tao is the Head of Engineering for DevOps Products at Atlassian, leading the engineering organization responsible for developer-focused experiences including Bitbucket Cloud and the Open DevOps solution in Jira Software. He has overseen initiatives at Atlassian including Bitbucket's migration from the data center to AWS, a strategic shift to supporting enterprises in the cloud, and launching a new beta product (Compass), among many others. Dan's professional experience includes time at Google, ThoughtWorks, and several startups.
As CEO for Europe, the Middle East and Africa (EMEA) and Latin America (LATAM), Helmut is responsible for all go-to-market functions across EMEA and LATAM. Prior to joining Palo Alto Networks in 2022, Helmut was CEO of Orange Business Services (OBS), leading its global organization of 28,000 employees and supporting the digital transformation of enterprise customers around the world. Prior to OBS, Helmut held leadership positions across Europe at Avaya Inc., NextiraOne Germany and Alcatel Austria.Helmut holds a Ph.D. from Vienna University for Economics and Business (WU), and speaks English, French, German and Spanish.
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.
Christian Wiebus is Senior Director for New Business and Innovation in the CTO organization of NXP Semiconductors. In this role, Christian leads the System Innovation Team for the Automotive, Industrial and Medical verticals. Christian drives innovation projects to create proof of concepts with customers and partners in these areas. Since 2022, Christian is also responsible for contributing with R&D on the creation of ion trap based quantum computers in close cooperation with partner companies and the German DLR.
Sandra worked at some Axel Springer Companies where she learned a lot about coding and DevOps in large companies. That knowledge helped her a lot in setting up the automated infrastructure and DevOps pipeline plus the agile momentum in the StartUp she worked afterwards. In her first year at Microsoft, she helped several companies with their container, Kubernetes, DevOps, agile processes before moving 5 years ago to the cloud advocacy team where she keeps focusing on open-source technologies and heavily in Java.
As Director of Developer Relations at Nylas, Ash Arnwine is passionate about empowering and inspiring developers to create innovative solutions and build the next generation of software through rich communications APIs. Ash and his team connect, inform, and gather feedback from the Nylas developer community in order to better understand their needs and facilitate product development that helps developers maximize their value with Nylas. Ash previously built the Developer Experience team at Adobe for their Creative Cloud Platform and Ecosystem.
Angie Jones is the Global Vice President of Developer Relations for TBD, Block’s newest business unit focused on open and decentralized technologies. She is an award-winning teacher and international keynote speaker who shares her wealth of knowledge at software companies and conferences all over the world.
As a Master Inventor, Angie is known for her innovative and out-of-the-box thinking style which has resulted in 27 patented inventions in the areas of collaboration software, social networking, smarter planet, virtual reality, and software development processes.
Wei Hu is the Senior Vice President of Research and Development at Oracle. He leads the development of mission-critical database capabilities as well Blockchain, Kubernetes, Microservices, and Globally Distributed Databases.Mr. Hu has B.S. and M.S. degrees from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). He has been with Oracle since 1998, holds more than 40 patents, and is the author and co-author of several books and papers.
Gift Egwuenu is a Developer Advocate at Cloudflare. She has over 6 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.
Carlos Sanchez is a Principal Scientist at Adobe Experience Manager, specializing in software automation, from build tools to Continuous Delivery and Progressive Delivery. Involved in Open Source for over 15 years, he is the author of the Jenkins Kubernetes plugin and a member of the Apache Software Foundation amongst other open source groups, contributing to several projects, such as Jenkins or Apache Maven.
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.
Michael Hunger has been passionate about software development for more than 30 years.
For the last 14 years, he has been working on the open source Neo4j graph database filling many roles, most recently leading Product Innovation.
As a developer Michael enjoys participating in exciting and ambitious open source projects and contributing and writing software related books and articles. Michael spoke at numerous conferences and helped organized several of them.
Michael helps kids to learn to program by running weekly girls-only coding classes at local schools.
Arno is responsible for the development of all think-cell software products. He oversees our R&D team, quality assurance and customer care. Before founding think-cell, Arno worked at Microsoft Research and McKinsey. Arno studied computer science and management and holds a Ph.D. from Georgia Tech with a specialization in computer graphics.
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.
Alan Southall is Senior Vice President of Software Transformation at Infineon Technologies and leads the Internet of Things Service team, which launched its first AI-supported product at OktoberTech 2023. Alan is driven by a passion for building products that deliver customer value and business success. He joined Infineon from Amazon Web Services, where he led the AWS Digital Production Platform and collaborated with the Volkswagen Group to enhance production efficiency and reduce logistic costs. Previously, he served as Senior Vice President of Engineering at SAP SE, overseeing the development of SAP Predictive Maintenance.
Hendrik Ebbers (@hendrikEbbers) is a Java Champion, JSR expert group member and JavaOne Rockstar. He works as a contractor for Swirlds Labs on the public Hashgraph of Hedera. Hendrik is the founder and leader of the Java User Group Dortmund and gives talks and presentations in user groups and conferences around the world. His JavaFX book “Mastering JavaFX 8 Controls” was released in 2014 by Oracle press. He contributes to several open source projects including JakartaEE and Eclipse Adoptium. Hendrik is a member of the AdoptOpenJDK TSC and of the Eclipse Adoptium WG.
Hannes Preishuber is well known in tech community, for his extensive experience and contributions. He is the CEO of ppedv AG and served as the editor-in-chief of the German ASP.NET professional magazine.His involvement in the tech community extends to being a speaker at numerous major conferences such as TechEd, ADC, VSone, Basta, TechDays, and SDN. His role in these events highlights his commitment to sharing knowledge and insights in the tech world.His expertise in ASP.NET was recognized through his receipt of the MVP (Most Valuable Professional) award from Microsoft.
Mabrouk stands out as a Microsoft MVP and a leading figure in the realm of mobile and web development. As a Senior Technical Consultant for eBiz Consultant GmbH in Frankfurt, Germany, Mabrouk boasts over a decade of robust hands-on experience in application and system design, development, testing, and integration. His prowess goes beyond just coding; he's a proven analyst and problem-solver dedicated to delivering optimal solutions to intricate business technology challenges.
As Director for Workplace Design and Consulting, Elena de Kan is leading Steelcase’s EMEA Workplace Design and Consulting teams distributed in Munich, London and Cluj as they create impactful workplace strategies and design concepts for global organizations and institutions.
She and her teams focus on analyzing and translating the needs and behaviors of organizations, teams and individuals into holistic spatial solutions – balancing human and strategic requirements.
Educated both as industrial designer and design theorist, Elena de Kan holds Degrees from the University of Applied Sciences Schwäbisch Gmünd and the VU University Amsterdam and is specialized in Design Thinking. Throughout her career, she has worked in various positions in design and consulting at IDEO, Atelier 522, KMS and Blackspace, before joining Steelcase in 2019.
Elena strongly believes in both the potential and the responsibility of design to make people’s lives better, in the power of stories, communities and diversity. She recognizes the value of neurodiversity and approaches design from an inclusive perspective. Outside of her work, you can find Elena playing the drums or biking along the Isar.
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Alex Birke – Managing Director / Head of Business Agility DACH – Accenture GmbH
For over 20 years, Alex has co-created and advised on many change initiatives with up to 6000 people in dozens of large companies. He is passionate about designing organizations that enable and engage people to create fulfilling job environments allowing organizations to grow beyond their former limits. Alex studied computer science, was a developer and architect, and is now a certified Coach and organizational Consultant for mindful and people-centric change.
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Markus Hacker joined NVIDIA in 2019 as Regional Director Enterprise for D-A-CH. He oversees NVIDIAs Enterprise go to market activities in Central Europe – an important and technologically advanced market – inspiring his team to help customers achieve their goals in AI, Visualization and Virtualization.
After an apprenticeship in electrical engineering, Markus built a successful career within the IT industry. Initially working as a PC repair technician, he then spent several years in technical procurement in Microsoft’s Central European Data Centre in Munich during the 1990s. He found his home in Sales & Business Management in the early 2000s, where he has since enjoyed over 20+ years of his career. Prior to joining NVIDIA, he held various leadership positions with Akamai, Lionbridge, T-Systems and Colt Technology Services.
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Dr. Christian Ertler is the Co-Head of Technology Partnerships at ParityQC Germany and manages large-scale quantum computing projects with international partners. He is a theoretical physicist by training and conducted fundamental research in the field of dynamics of open quantum system and quantum computing at the University of Regensburg and University of Graz. His profound expertise in research management was acquired as a research coordinator at the German Aerospace Center DLR.
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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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Karin Schweizer is a visionary leader with more than two decades of experience in IT, most of them in the developer space. She works with cloud technologies since their early beginnings and has a passion for bridging the gap between business and IT to help companies build solution with more impact. Currently, Karin leads a team of specialists who are working with German Enterprise customers on cutting-edge cloud solutions and on improving their developer experience through platform engineering. Karin is committed to diversity and inclusion in tech and engages to mentor and support early in career professionals to launch their careers in tech. She also regularly takes part in career discussions on how to balance family and career as this is a second topic close to her heart.
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Kai Müller is founder and CEO of the digital transformation and innovation company Experience One. For more than 20 years it has been his passion to help large corporations become innovation leaders in their industry, starting with his work for Mercedes-Benz in 2002. Throughout his career, the qualified computer scientist has worked with numerous brands and enterprises, including Mercedes-Benz, Volkswagen, General Motors, Postbank, Bosch, and Porsche. With his focus on connected cars, applied AI, and disruptive business models, he actively drives digital innovation in Germany and has the goal to decisively shape a qualified “AI made in Germany”.
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As Chief Technology Officer at Experience One, Sebastian Luxem is responsible for the strategic and visionary use of new technologies for innovative solutions in international customer projects. For more than 20 years, he has been advising international corporations such as Mercedes-Benz, Audi, Bosch, Postbank, KfW and Baufritz, using the latest technologies to develop web applications, product configurators and virtual assistants for outstanding customer experiences. In this context, the computer science graduate has been working for many years on the possible applications of AI technologies in conversational design and, in collaboration with the Fraunhofer Institute for Intelligent Analysis and Information Systems, developed the first adaptive and multi-award-winning recommendation engine for Mercedes-Benz in 2015, which understands customer needs and suggests suitable vehicle recommendations.
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Dmitry is a product lead at Google working on Firebase, with a focus on serverless products and AI frameworks. He's a 25+ year veteran of the tech industry, with experience as a software engineer, technical trainer and mentor, and in various product roles. Based in South Florida, Dmitry balances his passion for building developer products with a healthy dose of gym time, computer games, and quality time with his wonderful family.
I’m a Senior PHP Developer with over 12 years of experience in delivering exceptional software solutions. I am passionate about clean code, design patterns, and performance. With a strong background in software architecture, optimization, refactoring, microservices, and message systems, I am proficient in Laravel, Symfony, Git, MySQL, AWS, Docker, and Unit Tests. I have since worked with prominent companies such as Ubisoft, MindGeek, and Three Ireland, making significant contributions to high-scale and high-availability systems. Currently based in Dublin, Ireland
Peter is a Staff Developer Advocate on the Firebase at Google, helping developers build amazing experiences and high quality apps using Firebase and AI.Peter is also the author of the book "Asynchronous Programming with SwiftUI and Combine" and host of the YouTube show "Firebase After Hours", in which he and his colleagues explore Firebase in a light-hearted and fun setting.He has written code in BASIC, C, ObjectPascal, Java, Kotlin, Xtext, JavaScript, TypeScript, Objective-C, and a number of home-grown DSLs - but his all-time favourite is Swift.
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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Alexandra Waldherr holds a degree in chemical engineering and currently completes her studies in molecular medicine and drug development. Her passion for quantum computing started to grow from experiments back in 2018. Since then, she has been part of various projects, and together with Somya Rathee and Nico Einsidler founded the Quantum Society Austria in 2021. Alexandra has worked at BASF, the European Synchrotron Radiation Facility, CERN and the European Space Agency. She is Fellow at the Stanford Center for Responsible Quantum Technology.
Maxim Romain is french, based in Amsterdam and the co-founder & COO of Tier-Dott. He is passionate about about build responsible companies from a social and environmental standpoint. Before he was GM for Wayfair Europe, based in Berlin, & before worked for Decathlon in Asia.
Alayshia Knighten has many years of experience in the DevOps realm. Alayshia specializes in enhancing technical and team-related experiences while educating customers on their journey with and beyond IaC. Previously, she spent time at Honeycomb.io, educating people on Observability. In her words, “Getting ish done while identifying how to accelerate at the person beyond the tooling is the real meat and potatoes.” She enjoys solving the “so, how do we solve that?” problems and meeting people from all walks of life.
Linda Stauffenberg is a strategic advisor specializing in driving people centric change and transformation initiatives within complex organizations. She is co-founder and managing director at Experience One, a digital transformation and innovation partner for companies like Mercedes-Benz, BOSCH, AOK, ZEISS, Sparkassen Group. Her expertise lies in changemaker positioning and coaching as well as delivering change programs to help companies to become customer centric and to establish innovation culture.
Evan Lezar is a Senior Systems Software Engineer on the Cloud Native team at NVIDIA. His focus is making GPUs and other NVIDIA devices easily accessible from containerized environments. This includes driving development and adoption of the Container Device Interface (CDI).
Adam Larter is the CTO of Affinidi, where he oversees the progress and development of decentralised technology that will pave the way for the next generation of digital identity. He spearheaded the development of the Affinidi Trust Network (ATN), the company’s technology stack. Previously, Adam spent 8 years as the Head of Developer Acceleration at AWS, and previously held the position of CTO at Dubsat where he was chief architect for all media and metadata-related systems globally. He graduated from Monash University with a Master’s in Information Technology, Computer Software Engineering.
Christian is a leader in Accenture Strategy’s Software & Platforms practice in the Pacific region. Christian and his team help clients shape their growth agenda, build capabilities that enable that growth and incubate new businesses.
Christian is currently helping clients define what products and services to create, how to make better product development decisions and develop next-generation R&D practices for complex hardware-software-services combinations. In addition, Christian is helping clients define their future operating blueprint to enable sustainable growth.
Christian is passionate about new connected products and services made possible by the combination of cloud services, emerging hardware components, ubiquitous networking, new user interfaces and artificial intelligence. Christian is equally passionate about leadership and how to create sustained competitive advantage through better leadership.
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Kathrin Schwan is a executive leader in Data and AI, spearheading Accenture’s Data & AI business in Germany, Austria, and Switzerland. With extensive experience in the retail, industrial and consumer goods sectors, she excels in leveraging data to drive business transformation and tangible business value. Kathrin is passionate about enhancing developer experience, ensuring that cutting-edge AI and data solutions are accessible and impactful for developers in an ever-evolving digital landscape.
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.
I started developing Internet applications in 1995. Since then, I have remained connected to the subject. For 4 years now, I have been developing and leading the One Developer Journey with the aim of letting developers do what they enjoy doing again in an enterprise environment. Let developers develop again.
Du’An is an Air Force veteran and Sr. Developer Advocate at AWS. He has 10+ years of designing, implementing, and supporting enterprise infrastructures. At AWS he uses his experience and knowledge to help customers learn and build on AWS.
Zaid Zaim is a passionate technologist - As a Spatial Computing Expert at Ignore Gravity (IG), Zaid's responsibilities span a spectrum of exciting and innovative areas. His advocacy work involves building and nurturing communities in the AR/VR space, fostering an environment of collaborative growth and learning. Zaid is instrumental in establishing a solid foundation for IG and potential partners to make their mark in the Metaverse, a testament to his forward-thinking and visionary approach.
Zaid adds a dose of fun to technological innovation. Projects he is leading ranges from Cultural Heritage to Healthcare using MR for Dentistry.
Zaid's unwavering commitment to technology has made him a global multiplyer for MR - His efforts in sharing knowledge on MR technologies and engaging with tech and dev communities worldwide have earned him the coveted Microsoft MVP award.
By "Ignoring Gravity" – the marriage of the tangible world and the digital sphere – paints the picture of an immersive, boundless future he is helping shape.
Today, he is continuing his learning journey at CODE University of Applied Sciences in Berlin.
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Maxim has spent the last 20 years building massively distributed systems for Amazon, Microsoft, Google, and Uber. Among other things, he led the design and development of the AWS SQS backend, and AWS Simple Workflow Service. At Uber, Maxim led the effort on open source projects Cherami and Cadence Workflow. Since October 2019, Maxim has been the CEO/Cofounder of Temporal Technologies. Its flagship open source project temporal.io is redefining the way large-scale reliable applications are developed and operated.
Amira Gutmann-Trieb is responsible for Berlin Partner's ICT, Media and Creative Industries Cluster. The cluster is made up of 50,000 players from science, business and administration. The focus is on knowledge and technology transfer, networking and innovation management. The aim is to promote the use of AI, blockchain, IT Security, Blockchain, 5G/6G, Immersiv Technologies und UX-Design in the economy and to strengthen ecosystems.Amira studied at the Vienna University of Economics and Business and at the London Business School (LBS) and has a wealth of experience in managing strategic partnerships as an interface to industry, science and administration thanks to her professional stations in Vienna, London, New York and Boston. She focussed on innovation management and technology transfer from science to industry.
Born in England, she grew up in Vienna, now lives in Berlin and has two children.
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