Dr. Venkat Subramaniam is an award-winning author, founder of Agile Developer, Inc., creator of agilelearner.com, 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.

Mark Heckler is a software developer & Principal Cloud Developer Advocate for Java/JVM Languages at Microsoft, conference speaker, Java Champion, and Kotlin Developer Expert focused on developing innovative production-ready software at velocity for cloud and edge computing platforms. He has worked with key players in numerous industries and public sector organizations to develop and deliver critical capabilities on time and on budget. Mark is an open source contributor and author of Spring Boot: Up and Running (https://bit.ly/springbootbook) and can be found on Twitter @mkheck.

34 Years Industry Experience Started Career in Application-Development Architecture (Application & Infrastructure) Leveraged App-Dev Skills For Automation-of-Many-Things Last 12 years in Cloud/Infrastructure/Platform Automation

Anish Patel is a Staff SE at VMware, focusing on organization modernization. His past experiences include running operations for a major EdTech company, as well as an ITSP. He also helped design the original firmware for Uber bikes. When he is not busy working on customer problems, you'll find him on the mats at you local BJJ school.

Danica began her career as a software engineer in data visualization and warehousing with a business intelligence team where she served as a point-person for standards and best practices in data visualization across her company. In 2018, Danica moved to San Francisco and pivoted to backend engineering with a derivatives data team which was responsible for building and maintaining the infrastructure that processes millions of financial market data per second in near real-time. Her first project on this team involved Kafka Streams – she never looked back. Danica now works as a Developer Advocate with Confluent where she helps others get the most out of their event-driven pipelines. Outside of work, Danica is passionate about sustainability, increasing diversity in the technical community, and keeping her many houseplants alive. She can be found on Twitter, tweeting about tech, plants, and baking @TheDanicaFine.

Amanda Gilbert is a Senior Solutions Engineer for Confluent and a Confluent Cloud subject matter expert. She has been working in the data engineering space since graduating college in 2014. She is passionate about building event driven architectures that utilize existing technologies, limit technical debt and create performant applications. Amanda lives in Charlotte, NC where she enjoys playing poker, hiking, traveling and reading in her free time.

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.

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 VMware where he is fortunate enough to be able to work full-time on open source software.

Rich Hagarty is a software developer and Developer Advocate at IBM, currently focusing on Java and Open Source related technologies. Based in Austin, TX, Rich has been active in the developer community for the past 6 years, working on cloud computing and AI technologies. He has created numerous learning paths, code patterns, articles, and videos - all to help developers understand and utilize IBM services, such as Watson Discovery and Assistant, IBM Cloud Pak for Data, as well as Red Hat OpenShift container security and deployment. Previous to IBM, Rich worked at HP, where he was a contributor to the OpenStack open source project, focusing on UI dashboards and storage device configuration. Rich's passion is to engage and share new and exciting technologies with developers.

Yee-Kang (YK) Chang is an architect and developer advocate on the IBM's Java application platform team. He works on Open Liberty and contributes to various OSS projects like Eclipse LSP4Jakarta and LSP4MP. YK is keen on how we can make life easier and better for developers.