JavaScript experts, mentors, speakers

Charly Gomez joined Sentry in 2024 as a Software Engineer. He builds, breaks, fixes and maintains Sentry's JavaScript SDKs out of the city of Vienna, while having also lived several years in Spain and Italy. Charly enjoys salsa dancing, and plays a host of sports, including sailing, padel, cycling, football and is a CrossFit enthusiast.

Lena Reinhard (Website, LinkedIn) is an engineering leadership coach, mentor, and organizational developer supporting technology leaders in growing themselves and succeeding in the complexity of engineering organizations. Previously, Lena served as VP Engineering with CircleCI and Travis CI, and a SaaS startup co-founder & CEO, and has dedicated her career to helping leaders and their organizations excel in times of high change and challenging markets. She has worked with a broad variety of companies at all stages, from startups pre-founding and bootstrapped, scale-ups, to late-stage/pre-IPO and VC-funded ventures, to corporations and NGOs. Find her writing on leadership and more about her work at lenareinhard.com.

Richard is a Sr. Partner Solutions Architect at AWS focusing on Application modernization using Serverless and Containers. During his 3-year tenure at AWS he has played a pivotal role assisting partners & customers in various industries with their cloud adoption and modernization strategies. Richard collaborates with the development teams and engineering leaders to optimize software delivery in the cloud, emphasizing best practices and AWS's capabilities.

Sajal is a Staff Software Engineer at Meta in London and a former Engineering Manager. He has experience in end-to-end product development, technical leadership, and leading engineering teams through complex and ambiguous product development cycles. His work focuses on building customer-focused products and scalable software systems, developing clear technical strategies, and helping teams evolve their engineering practices. He has also led the transition of engineering teams from traditional software development approaches toward AI-driven development.

Senior Software Engineer and consultant in Tektit Consulting. IT trainer at Infoshare Academy. Previously worked on Jira Cloud and Atlassian Forge. He talks and records stuff on Front-end and WebDevelopment related stuff.

Dirk-Willem van Gulik is one of the internet engineers behind the world wide web and of the founding fathers of the apache web server. He was the President of the Apache Software Foundation during its first 10 years. He has worked for the Joint Research Centre of the European Commission, the United Nations, telecommunications firms, several satellite & space agencies and founded several startups. He participated in different international standards bodies, such as the IETF and W3C on metadata, GIS, PKI, Security, Architecture and Internet standard since the early days. He build the initial engineering team at the very first ‘webserver’ startup: Covalent, helped make big-data and the semantic web reality at Asemantics and created the first first instant play P2P viewer at joost.com. He was the Chief Technical Architect at the BBC where he shaped the audience facing development-delivery platform Forge in the time for the 2020 Olympics and where he made information security and compliance a core enabler for business processes. He provides technical due diligence to investors and assists companies with their technology; taking an (interim) CTO role where needed. He currently works on several medical and privacy intensive security projects with a heavy emphasis on Architecture and Governance. During the Corona crisis he assisted the Ministry of Health of the Netherlands, the EU and the UN with the `CoronaMelder'; where opensource, cryptography and security-by-design helped build trust. And, more recently has spend waay to much time in Brussels on the Cyber Resilience Act (CRA) and the Product Liability Directive (PLD) as Europe brings in significant regulation of IT and Open Source. When not at work, he loves to sail or hang out with the lovely people at his local https://makerspaceLeiden.nl.

Simon Ouyang is a Full-Stack + AI Engineer focused on building production-ready React applications and reliable AI workflows. He has worked in early-stage, YC-backed startup environments delivering 0→1 systems across both frontend and backend. His independent research explores agentic workflows, RAG architectures, and evaluation-driven AI development. Simon speaks at React Summit US 2025 and JSNation US 2025, where he shares practical insights at the intersection of modern frontend engineering and trustworthy AI.

Jason Santos is a Senior Solution Architect at Rangle.io, where he is responsible for mentoring teams, understanding problems, finding solutions, and providing technical expertise to different projects. In the few years he has been at Rangle, he was able to contribute to the success of large projects in the Banking, Healthcare and Electronic Payment spaces, helping shape Enterprise architecture, leading teams and implementing full stack solutions using NodeJS microservices and cloud-native technologies, as well as both Angular and React. He brings with him 30 years of experience in building software across multiple languages and environments, from embedded software to IDEs and Debugging tools -- designing and implementing software frameworks and building applications on both back-end and front-end since the late 1990s. Being a certified SAFe Agilist, Jason is a strong advocate of process improvement, DevOps and agile delivery practices; he is also passionate about knowledge sharing and mentoring other developers.

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.

David works as a post-sales Solutions Engineer at Rollbar, with a focus on customer enablement and custom solutions delivery. He is passionate about anything that combines technical learning with customer interaction, and is curious about finding ways to apply technology to improve the UX of everyday life. He has specific knowledge around software observability practices, and worked as a Professional Services Consultant at Sumo Logic before joining Rollbar in August. David earned a BS in Computer Science from Auburn University.

Pramod Shenoy is currently working as a Solutions Architect at Cloudinary. His interests align with his 8 years of experience at Akamai and Catchpoint in web performance and optimization, CDNs and monitoring digital experiences. Outside of work Pramod likes to hike, read blogs on tech, sports and stock markets.

~10y of experience as a full stack engineer with a focus shifted from the backend to the frontend since ~5 years ago. For the past 5 years live in Berlin, Germany. Like strict typing, functional programming, tech in general, traveling, and gaming.

Shivani Poddar is a Machine Learning Tech Lead for the Meeting Assistant team at Workplace, Facebook, leading the development of meeting assistants for making remote collaboration easier for work. Previously, Shivani built and launched the foundational machine learning and AI stack for Facebook Portal, spearheading product and engineering development across social graph technology for ML, deep personalization for a smarter calling experience. She was also the first ever student at Carnegie Mellon to be funded by the Amazon Alexa Prize, where she and her team built a social chatbot, eventually deployed to tens of thousands of users through Alexa. During her time at CMU she also pursued research in the field of Natural Language Generation, Reinforcement Learning for chatbots and multimodal machine learning. Outside of Work, Shivani has emerged as one of the leaders in talking about Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning for Consumers as well as Enterprises. She has been a speaker at numerous conferences over the last 2 years covering topics such as – Diversity and Bias in AI, Future of Work, Immersive Multimodal Assistants. She is also a mentor for young aspirants looking to become the next innovators in the field, and regularly volunteers in resume building workshops, panels for hiring and Q&As on LinkedIn.

Sachin is a Deputy Director at Applied Materials leading efforts in Data Science and Advanced Analytics with a team of data scientists, working to provide innovative solutions with a focus on AI enablement in various products and systems for the semiconductor equipment manufacturing industry. He has over 15 years of diverse experience in the Industry around Software, Data Science and Artificial Intelligence.

Beril Sirmacek is a Dutch AI researcher. She received her PhD degree in Electrical and Electronics Engineering in 2009. Later she has worked with German Aerospace Center and pursued a habilitation degree with University of Osnabrueck. She is an assistant professor at Jonkoping AI Lab and also leading her company create4D. Beril is passionate to use computer vision and AI algorithms for creating useful healthcare and earth care solutions. Beril has taught a MSc course at the University of Augsburg in 2010, only on OpenCV. As a computer vision scientist and developer, she has been using it regularly for many years.

Jaxon has 25 years of experience architecting, designing, and developing enterprise software. He is the founder of three technology startups and has consulted with multiple Fortune 500 companies on IoT and Digital Transformation initiatives. A partially-reformed developer, he understands what it’s like to wrestle with technology instead of benefiting from it, and believes passionately that if the Jetsons never had an episode where a config file error brought down the food-o-matic, it surely should not be a problem now.

Abe is a Developer Advocate at Shopify focused on bringing the next generation of ecommerce to developers. Previously he spent 9 years working at Google on Firebase/Cloud where he focused on JavaScript/Typescript.

Thomas is a software engineer in the GraphQL team at Neo4j where he usually works with Javascript, Typescript, Cypher, and of course GraphQL. Prior to joining the GraphQL team, Thomas was part of the team who builds Neo4j’s graph visualization product, Bloom. Whenever he closes the laptop for the day he makes sure to get out in nature, do all kinds of sports and read a good book.

Jean grew up in France, where he studied computer science and got his master’s degree from the Université de Technology de Compiègne, where he grew fond of web technologies. He moved to Berlin in 2016 and started working with vanilla JavaScript, jQuery, and Angular1 until he discovered React and thought, “Wow, this is how web apps should be built.” Those days he worked mainly with React at Babbel (the best learning language app! 😜)and loves creating enticing user experiences on the web, he has a soft spot for animations and delightful interactivity. In his free time, he loves to cook, make cocktails (ask for advice at your own risk), and play escape/board games.

My name is Zoe Steinkamp and I am a Developer Advocate for influxData. I was a front end software engineer for over 6 years before I moved into a developer advocate role. I have been with InfluxDB for over 3 years and i look forward to sharing my knowledge of the platform and databases. I enjoy learning about awesome new technologies and doing at home tech projects to help make my life as well as other peoples lives easier. My passions besides new technology include traveling and gardening.

Zach is a builder for the web. He created Eleventy (11ty), an award-winning open source site generator now full-time sponsored by Netlify. At one point he became entirely too fixated on web fonts. He has given 62 talks in eight different countries at events like Jamstack Conf, Beyond Tellerrand, Smashing Conference, CSSConf, and The White House. Formerly part of Filament Group, NEJS CONF, and NebraskaJS.

Engineering Manager in UI Engineering at JP Morgan, Steve works with the core engineering teams creating open source developer tooling and an accessible React component library aimed at streamlining the life of development teams across the bank. Steve has working in JavaScript development focused roles since 2001 from ad agencies to fintech and IE6 through to evergreen Chrome, he is the author of several widely used open source libraries and describes his career as having been lucky enough to follow his hobby and his passion every day for over two decades.

Melanie loves being a software engineer. The infinite loop of bugs, puzzles and learning make of everyday a new adventure. Her specialty and the love of her life is Vue.js, but lately she has been adding Nuxt.js and Node.js to the party. When she is not working as a software engineer at Capgemini, she uses her web development skills to remove micro plastic in the waters of the world. Her goal in this life is to work towards a more sustainable way of life, meaning that her hobbies include sailing the world, documenting underwater micro-life, and picking up trash with podcasts blasting. She is always trying on many different hats: trainer, team lead, community builder, talker, organizer. But the hat that fits best is developer.