JavaScript experts, mentors, speakers

Simon Zhong is a Sales Engineer at Sentry with almost 10 years of experience in enterprise software. He attended the University of Edinburgh and is a graduate of University of California, Davis in Computer Science. He is an American born Chinese (ABC) who is a native English speaker with conversational proficiency in Cantonese.

Neil Manvar is an engineer dedicated to helping developers ship quality code quickly. In his free time, you can find him cycling, snowboarding, or cuddling with his dog. He currently works as a Solutions Engineering Manager at Sentry, an Application Monitoring software company that helps software teams discover, triage, and optimize the performance of their code.

Allison McMillan is a fractional VP of Engineering and Leadership Consultant with over 25 years of design and facilitation experience for gatherings, covering everything from meetings and strategy planning sessions to offsites and conferences. She’s previously held leadership roles at QuotaPath, DEV, and GitHub. Allison has worn many hats in multiple industries as a community builder, managing director, and software engineer. Allison started a podcast about being a parent in tech, Parent Driven Development, and is an internationally recognized keynote speaker. She is very involved in the Ruby community as a former board director and President of Ruby Central. You can find more writing, speaking, and consulting information on her website: www.allisonmcmillan.com

Erik van der Voort has been working in Information Technology for over 25 years now. Starting as a developer, he moved to other roles like technical and functional designer and project- and portofolio-management. Quite some years ago, he discovered engineering was what made him really happy so since then he has been working in several Ops- and DevOps-roles within ING. For the past five years Erik is one of the engineers within the Fruitloops-team. This team of engineers mainly focuses on building and deploying front-end applications on a global scale within the company.

Robert is a Ruby developer specializing in APIs, application design, and performance. Besides maintaining GraphQL-Ruby, he enjoys fermenting anything he can get his hands on.

Marco is a Data Scientist at the Samsung R&D Institute UK. Outside of work, he is a maintainer of pandas (data wrangling platform for Python widely adopted in the scientific computing community) and author of nbQA (code quality tool for Jupyter Notebooks). He holds an MSc in Mathematics and Foundations of Computer Science from the University of Oxford.

Matt is a Product Evangelist at Tyk passionate about API management, development, and architecture. Matt has worked as a developer, tech lead, and architect for some of the largest financial institutions and insurers in Canada. He is always dabbling in the latest tech and applying this to his own ventures in technology.

Emily is a lead software engineer based out of Pittsburgh, USA. She's a lifelong learner, adjunct professor, and IoT enthusiast. Emily has a tech background in healthcare, robotics, and more recently, bringing local food to the masses at Harvie. In her spare time, you can find Emily working on her web agency startup, scuba diving, or trying her hand at landscape photography.

Ava Wroten has been building ambitious EmberJS apps for over eight years. She's built health education software at Eyemaginations (now called Rendia), banking and account opening software at Q2, budgeting software for K-12 educators at Allovue, and now she is connecting students to employers at SkillsEngine. With a passion for frontend web apps, Ava is excited for the future of the web as a platform to deliver innovation that betters people's everyday lives.

Nouha is the Developer Experience Manager at Prismic. She currently manages a team of developer experience engineers, and spending a lot of time on recruiting and growing her team. This year she'll recruit over 15 people to join her team. She'll share some advice for those of you preparing for technical interviews, and will be able to describe what is a Developer Experience Engineer, a Developer Relations Engineer, a Dev Blogger, a Dev Streamer.

As a developer advocate and technical writer at Buddy, Tom takes his love for communication and passion for technology and uses them to break down complex ideas into bites that everyone can swallow. Having worked directly on open-source projects, he is equally passionate about the front and the back-end - be it React, Go, or Kubernetes. In his spare time, he's a guitar-wielding amateur musician who dreams of recording a platinum album.

Shubham Gautam is a Senior Software Engineer at Headout, where he builds large-scale, performance-sensitive frontend systems powering global travel experiences. His work spans AI-assisted media pipelines, browser-based multi-track audio engines, and TypeScript-first architectures designed for reliability and scale. He has led initiatives across frontend infrastructure, design systems, real-time synchronization layers, and conversion-focused product engineering, balancing architectural rigor with measurable business impact. Shubham enjoys exploring the intersection of deterministic systems, browser performance, and modern React tooling.

Software engineer with 10+ years of Java and Golang development experience. Working with large-scale test infrastructure during last 7 years. Maintaining a big Selenium cluster with 5000+ parallel browsers.

I encourage others to see different perspectives and constructively break the rules. Observe - Optimize - Learn - Repeat is my work and life motto. Next to it, I found my joy in building and optimizing end-to-end Machine Learning Systems. Principal Data Solutions Engineer @ LINKIT Organizer (volunteer) @ PyLadies Amsterdam WaiACCELERATE Tech Mentor (volunteer) @ Women in AI

Yama is a data scientist at MyPart, an Israeli startup in the music industry, developing algorithms and researching lyrical and musical song features. In her spare time, she gives tech talks at conferences and meetups (Geektime Code, PyData Tel Aviv, IsraelClouds); and mentors a group of developers through their first steps in the data science world as a part of Baot - Israel’s largest community of senior female engineers and computer scientists. Yama has a B.Sc in mathematics and physics from Tel Aviv University where she also expresses her passion for music by playing the saxophone in the TAU Wind Band.

By day, Maarten supports front-end teams at Essent with their Accessibility and Design System challenges. By night, he tinkers with the Web Platform.

I currently work at ByteDance as an Engineering Lead for E-Commerce payments system software driving the business of TikTokShop product in the US. I graduated from Carnegie Mellon University with a Masters degree and Vellore Institute of Technology with a Bachelor's degree. I’m a seasoned Silicon Valley professional in the Payments domain with proven engineering expertise for 10+ years. I pioneered the Software Engineering marvel resulting in the increase of user count of products by about 800 times in less than 6 months, generating kick-start revenue of $120k per week during 0 to 1 product growth, tripling the revenue from $5 billion to $14 billion in less than 5 years by getting over the plateau growth, for some of the prominent products in the world like iPhone, Apple Watch, iPad, AWS Amplify, Amazon Alexa mobile app, TikTok shop and Oracle backend server supercluster. The by-products of these business results are multifold improvement in Engineering productivity and grooming myriad software professionals for world class companies like Apple, Amazon, Oracle, SanDisk.

m4dz is a curious animal. Former Frontend Dev, Devtools enthusiast, he has made the Developer eXperience (DX) his cherished topic. All the technologies are under his radar to get things ever simpler. His moto: "Developers are users just like you." As a life-long dreamer his favorite book will ever remains "Alice's Adventures in Wonderland".

Javier Alcaide is a mathematician and software developer focused on data science and machine learning. His professional career is based on the use of advanced analytics and big data techniques within the financial sector. His current role is the design and construction of AI models and the analysis of data using ETL processing with Big Data technologies.

Dr. Nikita Golovko is a seasoned Solution Architect with over 16 years of experience in designing scalable, secure, and cost-effective software architectures for industrial and business-critical systems. With a strong academic background and research in machine learning, he bridges the gap between advanced AI technologies and real-world applications on the shop floor. Nikita has led full project lifecycles—from requirements and architecture design to deployment—ensuring compliance with security and industry standards. He is known for translating business needs into robust architectures and aligning cross-functional teams. Passionate about innovation and sustainability, he focuses on applying AI, IoT, and edge computing to drive continuous improvement in industrial environments.

Gil Friedman is Field CTO at Backslash Security, where he focuses on securing modern software development in the age of AI-driven coding. Prior to Backslash, he spent years leading engineering teams at Meta and SAP/Concur, building and scaling large, distributed systems and developer platforms used by millions. That hands-on experience shaped his perspective on AI-driven development—ensuring that innovation moves fast without compromising security, enterprise data, or developer environments.

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.

After working as a science teacher for a few years, Sylvana transitioned into software engineering as a means to provide a quality education to all learners. She began her career as an apprentice at Codecademy and is now a software engineer at the company. During her time at Codecademy, she has gained experience with React, Next.js, and Typescript and has led initiatives like the tech reading club and dev workshops.

Samuel Pinto is a Frontend Engineer since 2013, he has been working with large using facing applications in companies like Microsoft, Bumble, and OLX. He worked from 5 different countries and loves to be involved and learn new cultures.