JavaScript experts, mentors, speakers

Andrew Murphy started his career as a Software Engineer but, after a decade in technology leadership, he decided to focus on teaching the skills that he learnt the hard way. When he moved into leadership there was no support, so he had to make all the mistakes (a lot of them!) and learn from them. His goal is now to make sure that tech leaders don’t have to do things the hard way by providing them with the mindsets and skillsets that can make them happy, confident and effective leaders. His company, Tech Leaders Launchpad, currently focuses specifically on the new and emerging leader space, as that's the place we can have the biggest impact on the students, and the industry.

Hello, my name is Shivakant Shukla, and I am a MERN stack developer with four years of experience in creating dynamic and user-friendly web applications. My passion for technology, coupled with a strong foundation in front-end development, has been the driving force behind my career. In the realm of Front-end development, I excel in crafting interactive and responsive user interfaces using technologies such as React, Redux, JavaScript, HTML5, and CSS3. I take pride in my ability to transform design concepts into functional, pixel-perfect websites that provide exceptional user experiences. Whether it's optimising performance, ensuring cross-browser compatibility, or enhancing accessibility, I am committed to delivering high-quality front-end solutions. While my primary expertise lies in front-end development, I have had the opportunity to work with back-end technologies like Node.js, Express.js, Nest.js, and MongoDB.

Hadar is the co-founder and CTO of Myop, a developer-first platform transforming how UI and UX are built, controlled and optimized in production. Hadar brings over 15 years of hands-on development experience and a deep focus on frontend infrastructure. Over the past decade, he’s led engineering teams at some of Israel’s top tech companies. At Wix, Hadar served as an architect and then head of the frontend guild, managing over 700 developers and helping shape the company’s core frontend systems. Prior to that, he held senior R&D leadership roles at Jive Software and Rafael, driving large-scale frontend development across complex products. A Unit 8200 alum, Hadar brings not only technical depth but also a strong understanding of organizational scale, cross-team architecture, and how to evolve legacy systems. His experience spans both building systems from scratch and leading long-term frontend transformations in high-growth environments.

Roy Tal is a cloud and DevOps enthusiast who loves to build tool that will make infrastructure operations better for everyone. Today he is a team leader and founding team member at Firefly who are helping solve infrastructure drift in large-scale cloud operations. Before that he served as a backend developer at Dome9, building better security practices into cloud operations, that has been acquired by Check Point.

Nica Mellifera (She/Her) was a developer for seven years before moving into developer relations. She specializes in containerized workloads, serverless, and public cloud engineering. Nica has long been an advocate for open standards, and has given talks and workshops on OpenTelemetry and Kubernetes architecture.

Software Engineer @Sentry

Co-Founder, CTO & Security Researcher at NeuraLegion. Developer and security researcher, I love playing with Neural networks and other ML tools. I'm interested in new programming languages and the potential they bring.

Full Stack Web Developer with expertise in all aspects of the web development life cycle, including requirements analysis, design, development and production support. Primary strengths are Node & Javascript (ES6, React, Vue), React Native, Ruby on Rails, Amazon Web Services/Heroku, and SQL + NoSQL Database Management.

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.

Paul is the PyCharm/WebStorm Developer Advocate at JetBrains. Before that, Paul was a co-founder of Zope Corporation, taking the first open-source applications.

Senior Front End Developer @Shopify

Luke is the co-founder of Gazelle, an all-in-one business automation solution for piano technicians. He founded and bootstrapped the company in 2015, helping piano technicians around the world grow their businesses. Gazelle has customers in over 30 countries and is translated into 11 languages.

Juliette MacPhail is a Product Manager at mabl, where she spends her time working on a low-code platform for simplifying test automation and helping teams ship high-quality software. She’s passionate about understanding core challenges in the test automation space and enabling the transition to quality engineering. As an active member of mabl’s DEI committee, she spends her spare time on initiatives related to accessibility, inclusivity, and mental health in the workplace.

Jenn Creighton is a senior software engineer at Netflix. She hosts Single Threaded Podcast. Organizer of Women of React 2020 conference & useReact.NYC meetup. Jenn lives in New York with her two cats and maintains a Home for Abandoned Succulents, Mismanaged Plants and Otherwise Ailing Flora. You can find her online - [@gurlcode](https://twitter.com/gurlcode).

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.