JavaScript experts, mentors, speakers

I co-founded Semble after witnessing the challenges of a fragmented healthcare system first-hand. Driven by a desire to create meaningful change, I joined forces with my fellow tech entrepreneur and friend, Christoph Lippuner, who had also seen the impact of disconnected care. Leveraging our experience as tech entrepreneurs who had successfully exited their first start-up, we collaborated closely with doctors and healthcare staff to design an interoperable, all-in-one clinical system that truly meets their needs and enables them to amplify their impact. Today, Semble supports thousands of healthcare professionals across more than 77 specialities, helping to improve care for over 8 million patients.

Max is the technical co-founder of Monadical, a software development consultancy focused on emerging technologies and AI solutions, and Developer Capital, an early stage AI investment corp.

Bogdana is an Engineering Manager at Zoopla, where she leads teams in building scalable, high-impact technology solutions. Over the past nine years, she has grown from an eager engineering intern into a thoughtful leader passionate about people, process, and continuous improvement. Her career spans both fast-paced startups and large organizations, giving her a broad perspective on how teams thrive in different environments. Beyond her day-to-day work, Bogdana is dedicated to supporting the next generation of technologists. She has taught at coding bootcamps and apprenticeships, guided students in launching their careers, and was an instructor for Code First Girls. Driven by curiosity and a focus on growth, Bogdana helps engineers find opportunities for learning and innovation in the fast-moving world of tech.

Sofia leads end-to-end product teams building services and customer experiences in a distributed architecture. She cares deeply about creating environments where engineers can do their best work. Outside of work, she co-hosts Developers!, one of Sweden’s most popular software podcasts.

Daniel is a software engineer with a background in first, local, and then international and VC-backed startups. He's now the lead engineer at Reckon Digital, where he directs and coordinates several projects with clients such as the UN's World Food Programme.

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.

Mofei started programming when she realized it can help her cheat in video games. She focused on operating systems in undergrad / grad school, but now finds herself happily tinkering on React. Outside of work, she enjoys debugging bouldering problems and planning her next backpacking trip(s).

Todd has a passion for promoting a healthy product and engineering culture, collaboratively exploring ways to solve both organizational and engineering needs, as well as holding regular discussions around how to evolve the software engineering craft. Todd believes in a human centered approach to engineering, where the experience of those creating and evolving the product is just as important as those that use the product. A native to California's bay area, Todd’s journey into programming started over two decades ago and he has been privileged to work with many technologies as well as leadership roles over the years. With his experience as a Principal of Software Engineering Practices, in the Technology Center of Excellence at Pluralsight, Todd supported both individual software engineers and the technical leadership team in helping to continually improve and work together in a way that enables everyone to do their best work. Todd loves to play the guitar, and is always open to jamming out and frequently enjoys paired programming with strangers.

Alex Shershebnev is a seasoned Computer Vision and MLOps Engineer with over nine years of experience shaping the future of AI-driven software development. Currently, Alex leads the ML/DevOps team at Zencoder, where he leverages his extensive background in Software Engineering, ML and DevOps to deliver high-quality machine learning solutions. His work spans complex data pipelines, cloud infrastructure management (GCP, Kubernetes), and advanced ML/DevOps pipelines, ensuring scalability and efficiency.

Heena is an open-source enthusiast since her college days. She completed her Bachelor of Technology from Delhi Technological University, 2011-2015 in computer engineering. She contributed to KDE organization during Google Summer of Code. Later, she mentored open-source contributors as a Google Code In, 2013 mentor and made the KDE community even more stronger by her diligent demonstration of mentorship skills. She was also one of the co-administrator and mentor for Search of KDE, 2014 and Google Code In, 2014. She has represented KDE organization in various Google Summer of Code knowledge sharing sessions held in DTU. She also presented KDE plasma projects in FOSSASIA 2015, Singapore. She also organized a Google Summer of Code meetup in Delhi which was featured in Google open-source blog. Apart from her open-source contributions, she has over 8 years of work experience as a software developer. She is currently working at Expedia as a Software Development Engineer III for Flights. She is one of the service owner for flights progressive web application. She has done several pipeline improvements for an efficient release process and is responsible for ensuring timely releases using the release pipeline for the same. She is a part of flights performance project where she shares a crucial role in making the flights progressive web application performance efficient. She has presented on “Portfolio Management through storytelling using narrative visualizations with advanced filtering” in Hong Kong Open Source Conference, 2017. She also presented a poster on “Optimal financial planning through storytelling using narrative visualizations with advanced filtering“ in Grace Hopper Conference India, 2017. She was also a mentor in “Learn IT, Girl” 2015 in which she mentored female developers.

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.

My degree is in Graphic Design, but when I started coding by accident, I fell in love with the beauty of good code. I've never looked back. I've worked for tiny sole proprietorships and giant multinationals, startups and mature companies. I've found something interesting and worth doing at all of them.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Joel is a CTO Coach who supports start-up and scale-up CTOs to successfully and confidently navigate the changes in their roles as their businesses evolve. He has over 20 years experience building, scaling and leading software development teams, mainly in start-ups, where he held both CTO and COO roles.

Samhitha is a full-stack software engineer at BlackRock, currently spearheading the UI architecture for the second generation of a high-scale, data-intensive investment management application. She is a University of Southern California alumna with a Master’s degree in CS, where she was also a Graduate Teaching Assistant and a Webmaster. Passionate about youth education and empowering women in STEM, Samhitha advocates for these causes through panel discussions, coding workshops and teaching. She serves as a mentor and judge at various hackathons, helping young developers refine their skills, and is also a contributor to freeCodeCamp. Outside of work, she loves to paint and has been doing it for over 20 years now.

Aikerim Belispayeva is a Senior Analyst at Memorial Healthcare System, where she leads data-driven initiatives to improve hospital billing accuracy, detect improper payments, and modernize revenue cycle management. With a Master’s in Data Analytics and a strong background in SQL, Python, and EHR systems like EPIC, she works at the intersection of data science, healthcare finance, and regulatory compliance. Aikerim brings a unique perspective to the tech world — blending deep industry expertise with hands-on analytics to advocate for smarter, more user-centric data tools. She is also a recognized speaker and award-winning advocate for using data to drive impact in public health systems.

I am a Frontend Developer at Shopify and a certified Web Accessibility Specialist. My expertise lies in creating complex user interfaces that are both user-friendly and compliant. At Shopify, I develop No Code tools, enabling all users to effortlessly customize their Online Store.

Phil is Head of Developer Relations at Deno. With a passion for browser technologies, and the empowering properties of the web, he loves seeking out ingenuity and simplicity, especially in places where over-engineering is common. After 25 years of building web applications for companies such as Google, Apple, Nike, R/GA, and The London Stock Exchange, Phil has worked to challenge traditional technical architectures in favour of simplicity and effectiveness. Phil is co-author of “Modern Web Development on the Jamstack” (O’Reilly, 2019).

Karina Ionkina works as a senior software engineer on the Data Visualization team at Bloomberg, which builds and maintains multiple full-stack tools used by the company’s reporters and data visualization developers (see examples of these visuals at https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics). Outside of work, Karina likes to play tennis, paint, and sew. Karina earned her bachelor’s degree in computer science from Hunter College (CUNY).

Gil is a Performance Architect at Wix Viewer. For the past eight years, he has been helping build the application that powers Wix websites. As part of the Viewer team, Gil works on making it easy for anyone to create their dream website and for developers to extend the functionality of their Wix websites. With over 10 years of experience in software development, Gil started his career in networking and Linux but always had a passion for web development. For the past four years, he’s been leading the Viewer performance team, working on Wix websites performance and ensuring they load as fast as possible. In his free time, Gil likes working out at the park, playing basketball, and working on his personal projects—many of them built with AI ;)

Grigorij is an author of Clean Coder (https://github.com/GregorD1A1/Clean-Coder-AI) - a multi-agent framework for autonomous code writing by AI. He used Clean Coder to write most of the code in his startup takzyli.pl, where Grigorij is CTO and co-founder. He is also interested in open-source LLMs and their application in different fields, including robotics. Grigorij built a robot capable of thinking and making coplicated decisions using a local LLM on a Raspberry Pi on his deck. He works with the fine-tuning of open-source models. Grigorij creates educational content on YouTube about AI development and open-source LLMs.