JavaScript experts, mentors, speakers

Stephanie is a Senior Frontend Engineer at Beamery, and a seasoned full-stack engineer with considerable experience in the financial and public sectors. She's a passionate advocate for tech-for-good, diversity, and developer education. As a speaker, she's known for her entertaining talks and irreverent sense of humour. She is currently developing Beamery's AI-powered talent lifecycle management platform.

Leandro Fernandez is an Engineering Manager at Meta, London, with 16 years of experience as an engineer/manager in big tech, like Meta, Uber and Dell Technologies. He has a successful track record of supporting high performing teams of software and machine learning engineers. Some of the cool projects that he launched in the past include Uber's Audio Recording and Record My Ride, and Meta's automated data removal infrastructure.

Alex is Partner Program Manager on the Microsoft Edge team and Blink API OWNER. Before joining Edge in 2021, he worked on Chrome’s Web Platform team for a dozen years where he helped design many new features. He served as overall Tech Lead for Chromium’s Project Fugu, lead Chrome’s Standards work, and acted as a platform strategist for the web. He also served as a member of ECMA TC39 for more than a decade and was elected to three terms on the W3C’s Technical Architecture Group. His technical projects have included Fugu, Progressive Web Apps, Service Workers, and Web Components, along with ES6 features like Classes and Promises. Previously he helped build Google Chrome Frame and led the Dojo Toolkit project. Alex plays for Team Web.

James Swinton-Bland is DevRel Lead at AG Grid. He started out his career as a software engineer, before moving into Developer Advocacy. With a background in Android and Java, James now works primarily with React, helping developers get the most out of AG Grid and AG Charts.

Engineering Manager at Capital on Tap (UK fintech), leading Internal & Core Systems and the Engineering department’s AI adoption. Focused on moving AI from prototype to production with stage-gates, data-protection controls, and measurable impact. Integrating an AI function inside Engineering to ship customer-facing features.

Gokul is a software engineer and former startup cofounder with 10 years of experience building products across fintech, martech, consumer research, telecom, and logistics. He’s passionate about solving complex problems with simple, elegant solutions and mentoring aspiring engineers through programs at General Assembly and AcademyXI.

Hey, I am Joban, and I am currently working as a software engineer at Microsoft Azure. I have been developing planet-scale backend services for the past 2 years and would like to share my experience with Microsoft Orleans Framework, we have been using at Microsoft Teams.

Miguel Henriques is a Cloud Application Architect at AWS with over 4 years of experience building cloud-based, serverless-first applications for large customers in the automotive industry.

Mike Ryan is the co-founder of Polaris, an AI-powered site reliability platform. Mike is a Google Developer Expert specializing in software architecture. Mike has a strong background in working with IoT in industrial manufacturing and designing sophisticated and elegant user experiences. When not in front of his MBP you can find Mike hiking the backcountry in the Pacific Northwest.

I'm Emanuel - Sr. Cloud Application Architect at AWS and I am helping customers to build modern, secure and scalable application on AWS. I evangelize the user of serverless technologies to allow customers to focus on their business.

Distinguished Game Developer and Backend Engineer with a solid track record of 8+ years in constructing sophisticated APIs, microservices, and libraries, and a specialized focus on game design and development. As a Senior Software Engineer at Booking.com, a premier global travel accommodation provider, I am leading the way for tech stack modernisation, shaping the architectural vision and technical strategy, and building recommendation & ranking systems that support 10 million users per day. Furthermore, I am mentoring engineers and fostering a thriving technical environment. My experience extends to developing compelling games and interactive experiences, having designed intricate game worlds using procedural generation and artificial intelligence. My expertise in JavaScript and Python game libraries, combined with my knowledge of AI and ML models, equips me to leverage the power of generative AI in creating immersive gaming environments. This unique blend of skills ensures I am at the forefront of innovative game development, thereby enhancing the gaming experience for players across the globe. My foray into game development commenced at Lazy8Games as a Software Engineer, where I designed and prototyped scalable, reliable game interfaces using Unity Engine and Photon Networking. I have a history of creating award-winning, visually compelling and technically challenging games such as: "Dystopian Skies" - recognised as the #1 Mobile Game at an inter-collegiate game-dev competition. It is a multiplayer 3D game set in a post-apocalyptic scenario, using a variation of the ROAM algorithm for earth simulation. In the game, players combat space drones to reclaim infested land on earth. "Arcane Aero" - A side-scrolling action arcade game for Android, developed as part of an entrepreneurial project Blooming Pixel, and live on the Google Play Store. In my subsequent role as a Software Engineer, I designed and developed intricate engineering applications using multiple programming languages and frameworks, including Java, C++, OpenSceneGraph, OpenGL, Qt, and C# across Windows, Linux, and Android platforms. Here, I particularly worked on GIS Applications, where I developed modules in the digital graphics domain, leveraging my understanding of performance graphics, a crucial component in game development. I also designed a GPS-based tracking application on Android with map caching, besides maintaining a software SDK stack on Linux. My technical prowess extends to Service reliability, System design, Kubernetes, Java, Kafka, Protobuf, BigData platforms (Apache Hadoop/Hive/Oozie/Spark), C#, Python, Perl, MVC Frameworks, JavaScript Frameworks, and Android app development, backed by an engineering degree from IIT Bombay (Mumbai), a leading engineering university in Asia. As a thought leader, I enjoy exploring and speaking about the intersection of AI, game development, and backend engineering, and frequently share these insights through technical speaking engagements. My other passions include chess and alpine skiing. Continually pushing the envelope in the gaming industry, I relish the challenge of crafting unique gaming experiences through the power of generative AI.

I’m Harsh Maheshwari, a Principal Engineer at Optum, UnitedHealth Group. I hold a Master’s in Computer Science and specialize in applied search technology, focusing on Full Stack AI/ML application. I’ve filed patents in this area and have previously created similar solutions for the fintech industry. My work revolves around advancing search methodologies and pioneering innovative frontend development.

Tim Makin is a Software Engineering Manager at CDL with over 20 years of experience in driving innovation and delivering high-impact digital products. They currently lead 14 teams, guiding projects from conception to completion while fostering a culture of excellence. Before their current role, Tim spent six of those years as the founder of a digital agency, developing solutions for world-renowned organisations including the BBC, Tesco, IKEA, and Sage.

Haris is a Software Engineer at Grafana Labs, where he makes contributions to open-source Grafana. Currently, he’s on the Explore squad, focused on improving data troubleshooting and discovery experience.

As CTO and Co-Founder, Connell oversees Zapworks (Zappar’s AR, VR & WebXR platform) as well as being responsible for all cloud infrastructure. Connell founded Zappar in 2011, alongside Dr. Simon Taylor, Caspar Thykier and Kirk Ewing and is one of the world's leading XR Platforms and creative studios. More recently, Connell and the team launched Zapvision, an app and SDK that's helping people who are blind or have low vision to access product information on packaging through a single Accessible QR code.

Cynthia Akiotu is a Cybersecurity Architect and Identity Specialist with expertise in IAM, data governance, and Zero Trust. She has led projects on securing AI-driven environments, identity risk, and insider threats. A certified Microsoft Identity & Access Administrator and Microsoft Certified: Information Security Administrator, Cynthia speaks at global events and writes on AI governance and security. She also leads community initiatives as Cyberhero Coach Cynthia, promoting digital safety.

Senior Frontend Developer & Freelancer

Trish Ta is a Staff Developer Shopify with over 9 years of experience working on web applications. She started her career in creating software for data visualization. She is currently working on front-end libraries that empower developers to build cool things on top of Shopify’s platform.

The scripted part: Experienced and results-driven Customer Success Manager with a proven track record of driving customer satisfaction, retention, and revenue growth. I am passionate about building strong relationships with customers and helping them achieve their goals based on outcomes-based thinking and maximizing the value they derive from products or services. Unscripted: I am an empath, product nerd, people nerd, and a consultant/coach. My background in business, marketing, tech, and SaaS, allows me to bring a lot of great ideas and discussion to the CSM table. One can often find me learning AI, metrics, psychology, and trying to continually answer the question, "what can CSMs do to help customers solve real problems while also seeing future value in a product or service?"

I build product marketing and sales enablement organizations at technical start-ups and scale ups. I have experience in cybersecurity, DevSecOps, computer networking and MarTech.

Vijay has been building software professionally for 20 years, focusing mostly on full-stack and backend development for the first half of his career before transitioning into data engineering and applied data science roles, and eventually into engineering leadership. Today at Demandbase he heads up two of the main application groups - supporting Account Based Experience and Advertising - as well as leading the Core and Shared Services platform team.

Experienced Customer Success professional with a history of working in developer tooling and startups. Extensive background as a support professional.

Rodrigo is a focused developer who produces digital projects for agencies around the world. He has 20 years of experience using various methodologies and tech in most web and mobile projects. He has a strong knowledge base of the WordPress world and is very engaged with the community: building custom themes, plugins, and core customizations. He specializes in WordPress, developing for the front-end back-end and in managing digital projects.

Sam is the cofounder/CTO at Oso working on making security more accessible for developers. Sam previously got a PhD in Cryptography and was a contributor to TLS 1.3