Ado Kukic

Ado is a full-stack developer, advocate, and technical writer at Auth0. Mixing his passion of programming and education, he creates tutorials, courses, and other educational content focusing on security, authentication, and much more. On the front-end, he prefers Angular, while on the backend he flip-flops between Node.js and Golang.

Aisha Blake

Aisha Blake arrived in Detroit in 2013 to serve as a Jesuit Volunteer and somehow ended up on the leadership team for Girl Develop It Detroit. This inevitably led to a deep love of the tech community in Detroit and a desire to put down roots. She has since become the owner of a cat and a house. She has been an instructor of coding bootcamps, workshops, and online courses while doing client work as a web developer and will go anywhere you ask if there are puppies and/or karaoke involved.

Alex Konrad

Alex Konrad is Technical Director at Joystick Interactive in Los Angeles, CA. Alex is passionate about functional programming, design patterns, and the connections between computers and the sciences. His most prized possession is a signed copy of Linus' Torvalds' book Just For Fun, which he received when he was 12.

Amara Keller

Amara is a Developer Advocate with IBM on the San Francisco City Team. Before her step into developer relations, she was an enterprise web application developer focusing on line of business applications and assisting developers across various teams on implementing proprietary and open source solutions. She’s passionate about UX, technical communities (both online and offline) and excited to see where advances in AI take us. In her spare time she experiments in the kitchen and plays console video games.

Beau Carnes

Beau Carnes is a software developer and instructor. Besides teaching in-person workshops and classes, he has created around 100 software training videos on YouTube and the Algorithms in Motion video course from Manning Publications. He currently works with freeCodeCamp to help advance their mission of helping anyone learn to code.

Bernardo Pacheco

I have been building things for the Web for about 12 years now. Throughout my career I have had the opportunity to work both on the back-end and the front-end with technologies such as XML/XSLT, Java Servlets, ASP.NET Web Forms, Web API and MVC. But it wasn’t until recently, about 3 years ago, that I found my true passion for all things JavaScript. In my current role at Domino’s, I am the technical lead of the A/B Testing team, which is responsible for implementing numerous tests designed to improve the user experience of Domino’s online ordering platform (dominos.com).

Brianna Marshall

Brianna Marshall is a project manager at designvox. She leads and motivates cross-functional teams, providing scope definition, plan development, resourcing, risk management, and team organization through creative process management. She also has expertise in C# .NET, communications, social research, data management and analysis, and a passion for research and technology that advances social equity, diversity, and inclusion. Brianna has a B.S. in Geology from Calvin College, and serves on the boards of Camp Henry and Sisters Who Lead in her spare time.

Bruce Abernethy

Bruce Abernethy is a life-long coder and educator having written code in the last four decades, and made a living at it over the last three, and still loving it. Bruce currently leads the Application Security program at Meijer, Inc. in Grand Rapids, Michigan - working with agile teams across the company on "delivering working secure code daily". He likes to design things, solve problems, delight people, build software, make the world a better place, with teams of awesome people in community.

Charlie Sweet

Charlie Sweet coaches agile teams and manages IT professionals at Baird. He was a software developer for 10 years, and has degrees in fine arts and business. He has been endorsed on LinkedIn for nunchucks and humility, neither of which are skills he possesses.

Chip Kragt

Chip was hired as the Managing Director for 20 Liters in August of 2015. Chip’s background in program implementation, volunteer management, and planning stem from his over 10 years of non-profit experience in Human and Social Service agencies, most recently with the American Red Cross. Chip brings more than 3 years of international experience working in Kenya, Haiti, Alaska, and Northern Ireland. Chip holds a BS in Psychology from Cornerstone University. Chip is passionate about the humanitarian right to basic necessities and breaking the cycle of poverty. He and his wife are raising their first child in Grand Rapids, MI.

Chris DeMars

Chris DeMars is a UI developer first, UX architect always, working out of Detroit, Michigan. Chris is also an instructor, teacher assistant, and volunteer for the Ann Arbor and Detroit chapters of Girl Develop It. Chris loves coming up with solutions for enterprise applications, which include modular CSS architectures, performance, and advocating for Web accessibility. When he is not working on making the Web great and inclusive you can find him writing blog posts, watching horror movies, drinking the finest of beers, or in the woods of northern Michigan.

Daniel Lindeman

Dan is a Software Engineer from Grand Rapids, MI, where he lives with his wife Kayla and his dog Bowie. When not learning a new language, framework, or piece of tech, Dan enjoys playing Nintendo games and spending time with friends. An educator-turned-developer, Dan got his start in the software industry testing embedded automotive infotainment systems. He is currently a part-time Masters student at Grand Valley State University focusing on Web Architectures. A self-described conference junkie, Dan can be found organizing community events and software meetup groups all over West Michigan.

Darren McCleary

I'm a senior software engineer on The New York Times Games Team. I spent most of 2017 migrating the entire Games platform from LAMP to a microservice architecture in GCP with zero downtime for its 300,000+ paying puzzlers, and I now work on new game development. I hold a Bachelor's in Computer Science from Drexel University.

Dave Poortvliet

Dave has been providing technical direction and oversight of university web operations at Grand Valley State University for over 15 years. He ensures design and development of custom web applications align with the strategic goals of the organization. Dave leads, manages, and mentors a talented team of web developers, designers, and student workers to deliver custom web applications that provide value to the faculty, staff, and students of the university.

David Giard

David Giard is a former accountant and a former biochemist, who has been developing solutions using Microsoft technologies for over 2 decades. Currently, David helps people build solutions in his role as a Microsoft Technical Evangelist. David has been very active in the developer community, speaking at numerous major conferences, code camps, and user groups around the world; helping to lead user groups; and helping to organize conferences and other geek events. He is the host and producer of the mildly popular online TV show Technology and Friends. He is the co-author of the Wrox book Real World .NET, C#, and Silverlight. You can read his latest thoughts at www.DavidGiard.com. His hobbies include video, photography, sports, and embarrassing his sons.

Don Schenck

A developer who has seen it all, Don is a Microsoft MVP, author of “Transitioning to .NET Core on Red Hat Enterprise Linux” by O’Reilly Media, and currently a Director of Developer Experience at Red Hat, with a focus on Microservices and Serverless computing. Prior to Red Hat, Don was a Developer Advocate at Rackspace where he was immersed in cloud technology. He enjoys cooking and studying human behavior, and loathes the designated hitter rule. Don's overarching belief is this: "A program is not a communication between a developer and a machine; it's a communication between a developer and the next developer."

Doug Mair

Doug is a Director of Consultanting at Improving Enterprises in Columbus Ohio. He started developing software as a high school freshman on a TRS-80 16K. He loved programming so much that he decided to get a BSCIS from Ohio State University. Since then he has developed software for Graphics Kiosks, Rules Engines, Specialized Hardware and ASP.Net websites. Over the last several years, he has helped grow the Developer Community in Central Ohio. He spends his free time developing Windows applications and Unity games.

Dustin Ewers

Dustin Ewers is a consultant at Centare, where he works to help businesses build better software. Dustin has been building software for over 10 years, specializing in Microsoft technologies. He is an active member of the technical community, speaking at user groups and conferences in and around Wisconsin. While not building the software of the future, Dustin likes a mix of low tech and high tech hobbies, including reading, cooking, hiking, and fishing. He writes about technology at https://www.dustinewers.com/. Follow him on Twitter at @DustinJEwers

Ed Charbeneau

Ed is a Microsoft MVP and an internationally recognized online influencer, speaker, writer, design admirer, a Developer Advocate for Progress, and expert on all things web development. Ed enjoys geeking out to cool new tech, brainstorming about future technology, and admiring great design. Ed has shared his insights, experiences, and advice around collaboration, knowledge management, social computing, and training at many industry events around the United States. Highly ethical and engaging with an uncanny business acumen, he is a creative community builder and outside the box thinker. Focusing on Financial, Healthcare, Manufacturing, Agency and Professional Services. He has defined, architected, implemented line of business solutions with a touch of style and UX best practices.

Frances Coronel

Frances is a developer with a design background who gets a lot of personal satisfaction out of helping the local tech community through her varied skill set. Frances currently works as a Software Engineer at Accenture's Liquid Studio in Silicon Valley, specializing in UI engineering. She has a Master's in Computer Science from Cornell Tech and a Bachelor's in Computer Science from Hampton University. In the long-term, she wants to be able to help engineer and invest in alternative forms of education for computer science and become a leader in that community. Frances is passionate about all aspects of development and regularly contributes to open-source projects while attending conferences, hackathons, and Meetups related to tech.

Guy Royse

Guy works for Nexosis in Columbus, Ohio as a Developer Evangelist. Combining his decades of experience in building software with a passion for sharing what he has learned, Guy goes out into developer communities and helps others build great software. Guy has programmed in numerous languages over the years—many of them semicolon delimited—including C++, C#, and Java. More recently he has worked with dynamic languages like JavaScript and on mobile applications with languages like Swift. Teaching and community have long been a focus for Guy. He is President of the Columbus JavaScript Usergroup and has been part of the session selection committee for CodeMash for the last five years. When given an opportunity, he teaches programming at a prison in central Ohio. In past lives, Guy has worked as a consultant in a broad range of industries including healthcare, retail, and utilities. He spent several years as a consultant in and several more years working for a major insurance provider. This has given him a broad understanding of technology application and business problems. In his personal life, Guy is a hardboiled-geek interested in role-playing games, science fiction, and technology. He also has a slightly less geeky interest in history and linguistics. He lives in central Ohio with his wife and three sons. In his spare time, he helps lead his neighborhood Cub Scout Pack and likes to camp.

Jace Browning

Jace Browning builds, customizes, integrates, and teaches engineering software tools. He has worked on products in the embedded, mobile, and web space, but his expertise is systems programming, specifically in Python. Professionally, he focuses on quality assurance, automation, and process optimization. In his free time, he enjoys contributing to open source and volunteering at local technology events.

Jamie Wright

Jamie Wright is a maker of internet things with a love/hate relationship for Redbull™, standing desks, and paintball guns. He has a love only relationship with teaching, learning, and building bots. Jamie runs Tatsu, a software bot that helps teams save time by performing standup meetings over Slack.

Jeff McGehee

Jeff’s professional career has been focused on applying computation to engineering problems — the majority of which have involved simulation, calibration, system control, and optimization. The more he’s studied machine learning, the more he’s become motivated to understand how it can be applied effectively to complex problems in the real (engineering) world. At Very, he brings his applied mathematics and machine learning knowledge to a wide array of problems and projects involving images, natural language, social graphs, temporal data, and geospacial data. His academic background in control systems and robotics, has allowed him to contribute to IoT hardware projects at Very as well. Before joining Very, Jeff was a research and design engineer at Variable, Inc., where he developed proprietary mathematical models for accurate color measurement; set up a scientific analysis python environment with custom modules for internal company use; and built and deployed internal tools that allow non-technical workers to apply machine learning models.

Jenn Creighton

Jenn Creighton is a senior front end engineer at ClassPass. She is likely to talk your ear off about React, JavaScript, or her hatred of CSS floats. She lives in New York City with her 2 cats, 1 dog, and 1 husband. She probably sewed the outfit she is wearing.

John M. Wright

As a 18-year veteran of the software industry, John has gained development experience ranging from “shrink-wrapped” software to large, distributed networks using multiple platforms and technologies. He has a wide experience base with software development and management across the entire system lifecycle, including requirements gathering and analysis, architecture design, development, testing, and release. He has a pragmatic approach to and a heavy interest in continuous improvement of people, process, and product. He's currently applying that experience as a Full-Stack Web Developer at Stack Overflow on the Internal Development team.

Jordan Whiteley

Jordan is a low key guy with the drive to learn about software architecture, functional programming, and web automation. He’s been into computers since the day his uncle gave him his old commodore 64. He even chose to buy his own computer instead of a car when he turned 16. Currently he enjoys being a Lego robotics coach for middle schoolers, playing Super Nintendo, taking walks in the woods, and snuggling on the couch with his 3 kids and 2 cats.

Justin Majeske

Justin Majeske is currently a Lead Developer at Kunz, Leigh and Associates with 13 years of experience designing, developing, and maintaining web-based and batch systems. As a certified Java developer, he has implemented various critical web-based systems using various back-end and front-end technologies.

Keith Wedinger

Keith Wedinger is a Principal Consultant with Improving. He has over 28 years experience architecting, designing, developing and delivering high quality software solutions for several companies including Abercrombie & Fitch, Diebold, IBM, Lexmark, Limited Brands, Ohio State, and Sterling Commerce. He is very passionate about architecting and developing software solutions that deliver exceptional ROI to his clients. He has presented at CodeMash, Code PaLOUsa, Columbus Code Camp, M3, Path to Agility, StirTrek, and That Conference. When not at work, he enjoys dining, traveling and craft brewery exploration with his beautiful wife Karen and spending time when he can with his twin daughters.

Kelsey Perdue

Kelsey Perdue serves as the Grand Rapids Assistant Campus Director at Grand Circus, where she helps move adult learners from an initial interest in a tech career through an intensive training program to work in a rewarding role. Kelsey believes in building better communities for everyone, and is an avid giver of her “time, treasure, and talent” in the tech community and beyond. She currently serves on the Board of a political advocacy group, a nonprofit that improves children's wellbeing, and organizes communities for social action. She has been recognized with the LINC UP Community Spirit Award for her contributions. Kelsey earned a BS at Howard University and is a proud member of Delta Sigma Theta Sorority, Incorporated.

Kendell Walker Joseph

Hi, I a software developer and educator based in Grand Rapids. I play bass guitar, make things, and connect people.

Kim Arnett 

Kim Arnett is an iOS Developer at Expedia. She enjoys watching her creations work wonders while making a positive impact on the population. She’s interested in technology, feminism, mental health, and Iron Man. Current side project includes learning robotics.

Laura Mosher

Laura is a software engineer with a passion for clean code and oxford commas. She's passionate about creating a better world through code, kindness, and understanding. When she isn't coding, she enjoys rescuing hedgehogs, making things, and playing games.

Lyn Sawyer

I am a Software Engineer with experience in Web API, WCF, C#, MSSQL, MVC, Web Forms, Jquery, JavaScript, CSS and HTML. Yes, I am a nerd. I’m also a wife and a mother. I take Plural Sight courses and listen to podcasts to keep up with new tech. I love learning new things and I love solving problems.

Matt Behrens

Matt has been a software developer and consultant with Atomic Object for three years; during that time and for decades before, he's worked and supported on several full-stack applications on the web, desktop, servers, and in the mobile space, across several different industries.

Matthew D. Groves

Matthew D. Groves is a guy who loves to code. It doesn't matter if it's C#, jQuery, or PHP: he'll submit pull requests for anything. He has been coding professionally ever since he wrote a QuickBASIC point-of-sale app for his parent's pizza shop back in the 90s. He currently works as a Developer Advocate for Couchbase. His free time is spent with his family, watching the Reds, and getting involved in the developer community. He is the author of AOP in .NET (published by Manning), and is also a Microsoft MVP.

Megan Boczar

Megan has been a software developer for less than a year. She graduated with a degree from the University of Michigan in anthropology with minors in museum studies and Polish language, literature, and culture. Since graduation, her passion for data took her around the outskirts of development for several years, before she finally jumped into a bootcamp at Grand Circus in Detroit. She now works as a web developer at DocNetwork in Ann Arbor, and serves as an Event Organizer for the Ann Arbor chapter of Girl Develop It.

Michael Carr

I’m Michael Carr and I am the Founder of UK startup - GoRoadie. I started GoRoadie (https://www.goroadie.com) with the aim of helping driving students in the UK find the right driving instructor for them. Think AirBnB for driving instructors. During the 9 to 5, I’m Software Development Manager at Amazon (Edinburgh, Scotland) where I lead a team of eight on internal HR projects. Previously, I lead a fast-paced development team at FindMyPast (Dundee, Scotland), I even acted as an Agile Consultant for many teams where I helped delivery in several locations. On top of Amazon, I have worked in Sony Entertainment(London), and Realtime Worlds(Dundee), having worked in software for 10 years, I have a passion for lean and agile delivery.

Michael O'Keefe, Chris Dahm and Jason Kusnier

Michael O'Keefe is a currently Full Stack Developer at Kunz, Leigh and Associates with 3 years of experience designing, developing and maintaining web based systems using a variety of front and back end technologies some of which include .NET, Spring, Django, JSTL and Angular. Chris Dahm is a Full Stack Developer at Kunz, Leigh and Associates. Jason Kusnier is currently a System Architect at Kunz, Leigh and Associates.

Michael Stahnke

Michael Stahnke is Director of Engineering at Puppet, Inc. He's had a few roles at Puppet, and been a part of the company growing from 35 to 530+ employees. He's been heavily involved with release engineering and community throughout his tenure. He came to Puppet Inc from Caterpillar, Inc. where he was an infrastructure architect, system administration team lead, and open source evangelist. Michael also helped get the Extra Packages for Enterprise Linux (EPEL) repository off the ground in 2005, is the author of Pro OpenSSH (Apress, 2005), is an organizer of Devopsdays Madison, and rants continuously about technology and computers, while striving to learn more about them. He blogs at medium.com/@stahnma.

Nathan Loding

I'm a nerd, I've always been a geek, dork, or nerd, and probably will always be. I love solving problems and technology is the best way to do that. I work professionally as an Application Development Consultant for OST, in Grand Rapids, MI. Currently, I'm the lead developer and architect on CareCircle, a healthcare focused product to help patients communicate with their friends and family. On the side I'm a husband, father, roboticist, and outdoorsman (hiking, camping, canoeing/kayaking). I enjoy woodworking and build my own canoes and kayaks. I hate chores and cleaning up after myself.

Olivia Liddell

Olivia Liddell is a Cloud Training Specialist at Cloudbakers. Previously, she taught middle school Arabic in Chicago Public schools (as-salaamu 'alaykum!). She now specializes in technology training and change management. She lives in Chicago and is passionate about teaching, cross stitching, and distance running.

Paul and Robin Schroeder

As an independent consultant, Paul Schroeder has multiple decades of experience developing code for many large organizations. He has been delivering talks on code generation since 2003. Certified as a MCSD for Web Applications - Toastmaster's Competent Communicator. Recent talks include:

1. Rapid Delivery of Enterprise Architectures (Chicago .NET Users Group March 2018)
2. Cross Platform Mobile Development - Xamarin
3. RESTful APIs
4. 4. Agile Process

Robin Schroeder is a consultant at MSC Technology Consulting where she specializes in developing cross-platform mobile applications using Xamarin. She is Microsoft certified and has been writing software since 1999. During her rip-roaring

Friday nights, you can find her co-teaching a gaggle of high school girls how to code at the Fox Valley Girls Coding Club. Recent talks include:

1. Rapid Delivery of Enterprise Architectures (Chicago .NET Users Group March 2018)
2. Cross Platform Mobile Development - Xamarin

Paul Harju

Full stack web developer that makes games in his spare time. Loves React and C#, tolerates Angular and Perl.

Phil Kirkham

A developer turned tester A Brit now living in Michigan missing proper bacon sandwiches

PJ Hagerty

Developer, writer, speaker, musician, and founder of DevRelate.io, PJ is known to travel the world speaking about programming and the way people think and interact. He is also known for wearing hats.

Rachael McQuater & Drew Colthorp

Drew Colthorp is a principal consultant and Rachael McQuater is a developer at Atomic Object. Drew has been seeking out better ways to write JavaScript for 20 years, and Rachael is just getting started with the same. We're both really excited about the power and beauty of software that closely models complex real-world problem domains. Together we're working to share what we've learned about building more robust, powerful, easy-to-write code with TypeScript.

Rebecca Long

Rebecca Long is a software engineer with 15 years experience focusing on quality assurance and devops at a cyber-risk assessment company in Spokane, Washington. She holds undergraduate and master's degrees in computer science with her thesis on social engineering and phishing within a financial institution. While having been a leader in the Spokane tech community for most of the last decade, in 2018 she finally launched her dream of a non-profit called [Future Ada](http://www.futureada.org) which supports and advocates for women and non-binaries in STEAM (science, technology, engineering, art, and mathematics). She lives with two cats, who are the true masters of the household.

Ronda Bergman

Ronda has been working as a software developer for 18+ years, primarily in the .NET stack. She has worked for large multi-national organizations and small startups. She is the Co-founder and lead consultant of EllaVatec, a diversity and inclusion consultancy. The Co-founder and Chapter Leader of Girl Develop It Ann Arbor. A Software Artisan at Pillar Technologies, and the Vice President of Ann Arbor .NET Developers. As a female developer and the mother of 2 female developers she is working hard to help level the playing field for everyone in the industry.

Ryan Lanciaux

Ryan Lanciaux is a professional software developer in Ann Arbor, MI. Although he programs in several languages, his current area of focus is front-end development. He helps companies and teams build awesome React and React Native applications through his company Spaceship Studio, LLC. He attempts to contribute to the development community through his (often-neglected) blog.

Sam Bleckley

Sam trained as an artist, and has written software for machine learning labs, computational biochemists, San Fransisco startups, and local Michigan companies. He is a freelance engineer, designer, and consultant; and he operates Vistimo, project management software with an emphasis on accurate estimation.

Stephen Cleary

Stephen Cleary is a Christian, husband, and father who programs software in his spare time. :) He is a Microsoft MVP and the author of "Concurrency in C# Cookbook" (O'Reilly) as well as several MSDN articles. He's also the top answerer for async/await questions on Stack Overflow. His work usually deals with asynchronous and multithreaded programming, but he finds any challenging subject interesting. These days he uses C#/JavaScript, but remains interested in many different languages.

Taylor Krusen

A tech-enthusiast and Japanophile, Taylor Krusen is an Associate Developer Advocate for Smartsheet. He typically spends his time coding, snowboarding, or teaching his little girl the art of mischief. Taylor's passion for travel, collaboration, and learning have instilled in him a significant appreciation for diversity of thought.

Thomas Wodarek

Thomas is an independent consultant working in the DevOps space around Grand Rapids. Working with containers and orchestrators, he keeps websites up and queries flowing. When he’s not building software or giving talks, Thomas is running a soundboard for a random event or singing as a Tenor.

Tommy Truong and Sokwhan Huh

Tommy Truong is currently a User Experience Designer at Kunz, Leigh and Associates with years of experience working in the private and academic sectors. With a background in UX, accessibility, and project management, he brought projects from conception to implementation for small- and large-scale software solutions using web and virtual/augmented reality technologies.

Sokwhan Huh is currently a Full Stack Developer at Kunz, Leigh and Associates with experience designing, developing, and maintaining large-scale systems in the private and government sectors since 2012. Sokwhan's passion lies in bringing the cutting-edge web and virtual reality technologies to people in a user-friendly way.