Simon Ritter is the Deputy CTO of Azul Systems. Simon has been in the IT business since 1984 and holds a Bachelor of Science degree in Physics from Brunel University in the U.K. Simon joined Sun Microsystems in 1996 and started working with Java technology from JDK 1.0; he has spent time working in both Java development and consultancy. Having moved to Oracle as part of the Sun acquisition, he managed the Java Evangelism team for the core Java platform, Java for client applications and embedded Java. Now at Azul, he continues to help people understand Java as well as Azul’s JVM technologies and products. Simon has twice been awarded Java Rockstar status at JavaOne and is a Java Champion. He currently represents Azul on the JCP Executive Committee and on the Java SE Expert Group (JSR 379, 383 and 384).

Margarita is a big Kotlin fan and Kotlin GDE. Knows both conference sides: speaking and organizing. Organized a KUG in her native city Kyiv because she believes in Knowledge Sharing and Collective Intelligence. For her everyday job, she's building Static Code Analysis tools for Java/Kotlin/Scala and other languages.

Evgeny is a contributor to various open source projects, including OpenJDK, and a speaker at international conferences and JUGs. He is also one of the project leads of widely adopted code coverage library for Java and Kotlin - JaCoCo, and the award-winning EclEmma project at the Eclipse Foundation that integrates JaCoCo into Eclipse. In his day job at Sonar he develops SonarQube’s static source code analysis for languages such as Java, Kotlin, C, and C++.

Scott helps Java developers to get their unruly code under control so they can work on fun and rewarding projects.

Exploring new languages, frameworks, and technologies, and then sharing what he’s learned, has always come naturally to Ryan. Even when it wasn't his day job, Ryan has always been driven by his passion, spending his time and energy educating his friends, colleagues, or anyone else that would listen. Currently, Ryan is working as a software engineer as part of the Spring Cloud team. Ryan has a passion for sharing what he learns via social media, including Twitter and his blog (http://ryanjbaxter.com), as well as in person at conferences. When he’s not coding, Ryan likes spending time with his daughter, ice fishing, running obstacle course races, and watching the Red Sox.

Phil Webb is the co-creator of the Spring Boot open source project and has been serving as the project lead since its inception in 2013. Phil is employed by Broadcom where he is fortunate enough to be able to work full-time on open source software.

Jonatan Ivanov is an enthusiastic Software Engineer, member of the Spring Engineering Team, maintainer of Micrometer, one of the leaders of the Seattle Java User Group, speaker, author, certified dragon trainer. He has hands-on experience in developing and shipping innovative, production-ready software for industry-leader companies. He likes Distributed Systems, Production, Open Source, Math, Linux, Cloud environments; he is passionate about the Java Ecosystem and the Java Community. He is an Open Source contributor, writes a “develotters”-focused blog (https://develotters.com), sometimes can be found on Twitter(@jonatan_ivanov) and in the Seattle area.

Dr. Venkat Subramaniam is an award-winning author, founder of Agile Developer, Inc., and an instructional professor at the University of Houston. He has trained and mentored thousands of software developers in the US, Canada, Europe, and Asia, and is a regularly-invited speaker at several international conferences. Venkat helps his clients effectively apply and succeed with sustainable agile practices on their software projects. Venkat is a (co)author of multiple technical books, including the 2007 Jolt Productivity award winning book Practices of an Agile Developer. You can find a list of his books at agiledeveloper.com. You can reach him by email at venkats@agiledeveloper.com or on twitter at @venkat_s.

Tobi is a Java Runtime developer for the J9 VM team in Ottawa, Canada. In the past, he has worked on Interpreter optimizations, JVMTI enhancements, JSR 335, and more. Currently, his main focus is on investigating checkpoint/restore technology at the JVM level.

Andres is a Java/Groovy developer and a Java Champion Alumni, Developer Advocate for the Database Group At Oracle, with more than 2 decades of experience in software design and development. He has been involved in web and desktop application development since the early days of Java. Andres is a true believer in open source and has participated on popular projects like Groovy, Griffon, and DbUnit, as well as starting his own projects. Founding member of the Griffon framework and Hackergarten community event. Author of JReleaser. You can find him on twitter too as @aalmiray. He likes to spend time with his beloved wife, Ixchel, when not hacking around.

Billy is a Java Developer Advocate with the Java Platform Group at Oracle. With over a decade of experience in Java, Billy brings a passion for helping developers find ways to reduce tedious work, such as project initiation, deployment, testing, and validation, through automation and adopting the latest features and tools in the Java ecosystem. Outside of work, Billy enjoys traveling, playing kickball, and cheering on the Kansas City Chiefs. Billy also co-organizes the Kansas City Java users group.