Speakers

Chris Wanstrath co-founded GitHub in 2008 to make it easier to build software. Prior to GitHub, Chris briefly attended the University of Cincinnati before moving to San Francisco to work as a software developer at CNET Networks on GameSpot, TV.com, and Chow. He left CNET in 2007 to start his own business, which eventually led to GitHub. A self-taught programmer, Chris has contributed to and published dozen of open source projects, written extensively about technical topics, and given talks at conferences all around the world. When he's not thinking about code or octocats he's probably making music or reading.

A respected software engineer and executive with an impressive history of building widely used and loved products, Bret Taylor is the co-founder and CEO of Quip a productivity platform for teams which was acquired by Salesforce in August 2016. Quip combines docs, spreadsheets, and communication all in one to help teams get work done faster and smarter. Prior to founding Quip, Bret served as the first CTO of Facebook and saw the company through its successful IPO in 2012. Credited with the invention of the original "Like" button, Bret joined Facebook in 2009 after it acquired his social networking company, FriendFeed, for $50 million. Bret's product acumen extends to his time at Google, where he co-created Google Maps, Google Local, Google Maps API and Google’s first developer conference, Google I/O.

Bret has served on Taser International's board for the past two years, and was recently appointed to Twitter's board of directors. Bret graduated from Stanford University in 2003 with a B.S. and M.S. in Computer Science and now lives in the Bay Area.

Nicole Sanchez is GitHub's VP of Social Impact. She is an organizational culture and management expert with over 20 years of experience. Prior to joining GitHub, she was CEO of Vaya Consulting, a firm focused on supporting tech companies on diversity and inclusion efforts . Nicole holds an undergraduate degree from Stanford University and an MBA from UC Berkeley’s Haas School of Business. A self-described “people and culture geek,” Nicole has worked in both the public and private sectors on issues of engaging communities in education access, technology, and civic participation.

When ex-Army Captain David Molina couldn't use his education benefits, the New GI Bill, to pay for code school, he taught himself to code. In 2014 he launched Operation Code. When he's not coordinating and cultivating military veterans in the Operation Code Slack channel, or learning vim, he's busy co-raising three young daughters with his better half in Portland, Oregon.

Kimberly Bryant is the Founder and Executive Director of Black Girls CODE. Bryant has enjoyed a very successful 20+ year professional career in the pharmaceutical and biotech industries as an Engineering Manager in a series of technical leadership roles for various Fortune 100 companies such as Genentech, Merck, and Pfizer. Since 2011, Ms. Bryant has helped Black Girl CODE grow from a local organization serving only the Bay Area, to an international non-profit organization with chapters in seven U.S. cities and Johannesburg, South Africa serving over 3,000 African/African-American, Latina, and Native American girls.

Bryant serves on the National Champions Board for the National Girls Collaborative Project, and the National Board of the NCWIT K-12 Alliance. In August 2012, Bryant was also given the honor of receiving the prestigious Jefferson Award for Community Service for her work to support communities in the Bay Area. In 2013 Black Girls Code and was selected by Business Insider in 2013 on its list of BusinessInsider.com’s list of “The 25 Most Influential African-Americans in Technology” and was named to The Root 100 list, and the Ebony Power 100 list in 2013. Bryant was honored in 2013 as a Champion of Change by the White House for her work in tech inclusion and for her focus on bridging the digital divide for girls. She has been identified as a thought leader in the area of tech inclusion and has spoken on the topic at events such as Personal Democracy Forum, TedX Kansas City, Platform Summit, Big Ideas Festival, SXSW, and others.

Roman Mars is the host and creator of 99% Invisible, a short radio show about design and architecture. With over 120 million downloads, the 99% Invisible podcast is one of the most popular podcasts in the world. Fast Company named him one of the 100 Most Creative People in 2013. He was a TED main stage speaker in 2015. It is currently the most popular Ted Talk about design with over 3.5 million views. His crowd funding campaigns have raised over $1.16 million, making him the highest-funded journalist in Kickstarter history. He is also a co-founder of Radiotopia, a collective of ground-breaking story-driven podcasts.

Ian is a Computer Engineer at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. He leads several efforts aimed at building an open source mindset to facilitate open development across the laboratory and with the outside world. These include being the driving force behind the development of the laboratory's open source presence on GitHub, as well as leading development efforts to create open and re-usable packages for interfacing with High Performance Computing (HPC) data centers.

Matt is a technical documentation nerd turned trainer with experience in laboratory information systems, IT security certifications, payment authentication platforms, and GitHub. He ❤️s helping people work smarter. When he logs off for the day, he enjoys spending time with his wife and brewing 🍺.

Eric is a trainer at GitHub and currently travels the country to teach customers how to best adopt and utilize the GitHub platform and Flow for best practices in their company environments. Utilizing his MA and background in teaching Math and Science in New York, Eric's primary focus is on keeping customers invested, engaged, and excited while learning. He spends most of his down time working to be better at table tennis, catching Pokemon, reading books on Git, or watching Netflix. He currently lives in San Diego, CA.

Rocio Delgado is a Platform Engineering Manager at GitHub. Previously, she was an engineer at GE and founding engineer at WorkMarket. Rocio has been a backend engineer for 12+ years, with an affinity for Java and Ruby. She's interested in performance, scalability, resilience, distributed systems, databases, and diversity and inclusion in tech. Her hobbies are yoga, dancing, and being a junior karaoke performer. Rocio lives in Brooklyn via México.

Shlomi Noach is an engineer and a database geek. He is an active MySQL community member, authors gh-ost, orchestrator, common_schema, openark-kit (and others) open source tools, and blogs at http://openark.org. Shlomi is a recipient of Oracle ACE, Oracle Technologist of the Year, and MySQL Community Member of the Year awards.

When a career as a full-time rapper didn't pan out, Ayman became an engineer. She's built and shipped several products at GitHub, Khan Academy, Dropbox, Microsoft and various start-ups while spitting the illest rhymes.

Katrina accidentally became a developer while pursuing a degree in molecular biology. When programming, her focus is on automation, workflow optimization, and refactoring. She works primarily in Go and Ruby, contributes to several open source projects, and is the creator of exercism.io, a platform for leveling up your programming skills.

Lynn Langit is an independent Cloud & Big Data Architect. She is currently most often found mob programming in San Diego with an enterprise team on an IoT project. Lynn is also the Director of the 501c3 ‘Teaching Kids Programming.’

Unsatisfied with the status quo of how we build apps, Gregor dreamed up a world were we can stop thinking about backends – and has been building it ever since with his friends at Hoodie. Along the way they created a diverse & inclusive community, started Offline First and are really into automating all the JavaScript things with semantic-release and Greenkeeper.

Enrique has been passionate about writing code since high school. His experience as software engineer ranges from backend and web applications to integrations and open source projects. He is a big fan of pair programming and believes that collaborative environments are the key to promote quality code and improve software design. Enrique was born and raised in San Miguel de Allende, Mexico, he received his Master’s degree from the University of Valencia, Spain. He enjoys traveling and reading.

Jason Chen is the author and maintainer of Quill, a powerful open source rich text editor. He was previously the founder and CEO of Stypi—a collaborate coding platform backed by YCombinator and acquired by Salesforce in 2012. Jason continues to be passionate about knowledge and collaboration and hopes to continue innovating in the space. When he is not thinking about bits or startups, he might be wandering around the Californian landscape or trying to stay alive in a small airplane.

Quinn Murphy loves building scalable, highly available infrastructure anywhere he can and with the best open source tools he can find. He currently works at Netsuite as a Sr Systems Engineer, where he does just that. When not designing infrastructure, he designs tabletop storytelling games.

Kakul Srivastava is VP of Product Management at GitHub. She is a tech entrepreneur focused on building companies that empower people and create community. Kakul has helped build some of the best loved consumer tech products -- Adobe's Photoshop line of software, Flickr, Yahoo! Messenger, and Yahoo! Mail. She was the founder and CEO of Tomfoolery, Inc., a start-up dedicated to making beautiful social apps for work. Tomfoolery was bought by Yahoo in 2014. Kakul is a graduate of MIT with a BSc in Mechanical Engineering, and also holds an MBA from the University of California, Berkeley Haas School of Business. She serves as Co-Chair on the Board of Cure Violence, a non-profit dedicated to stopping violence in some of the world’s most high-risk communities, and is an active volunteer, advising in official and unofficial roles, to a number of start-ups and non-profits. She lives in SF with her husband and two children.

Anjuan Simmons is a technologist with a successful track record of delivering technology solutions from the user interface to the database. He is an energetic and informative speaker who presents at conferences, seminars, schools, and community centers around the world on topics including Agile software development, diversity, and leadership. Anjuan has an undergraduate degree in electrical engineering from the University of Texas at Austin and an MBA from Texas A&M University.

Keavy is a software engineer at GitHub. Previously, she was a senior engineer at LivingSocial, and as an independent consultant, she has paired up with development shops across Europe and the U.S.. Like many of her fellow Irishmen, Keavy enjoys telling a good story. Unlike many, she trains for Ironman triathlons and is not a fan of whiskey. Cosmo, anyone?

Kyle Daigle is an engineering manager at GitHub and helps build and improve its platform. Before GitHub, he built and integrated APIs for banks, credit unions, realtors, and small businesses. Kyle is passionate about using APIs to enable teams to collaborate more effectively. Kyle lives in Connecticut with his wife and son and enjoys a crisp New England apple on a fall day.

Todd has been in the Software Configuration Management (SCM) field for 29 years in multiple capacities. From writing custom version management tools for the DoD to working at some of the largest and most well known companies in Silicon Valley. He has worked with many of the best known tools in the industry. Today Todd lives in Utah where he enjoys the close proximity to ski resorts and the multitude of outdoor activities and National Parks.

Danielle Leong is an engineer on GitHub's Community & Safety team who loves building tools to help make open source a more welcome and inclusive environment. She is also the founder of Feerless, an app that provides trigger warnings for Netflix users with PTSD. She's passionate about inclusivity in tech, mental health awareness, and improving online good citizenship. In her spare time she climbs rocks, rides motorcycles, and dresses up as a T-rex - occasionally all at the same time.

Ross Goodwin is a creative technologist, artist, hacker, data scientist, and former White House ghostwriter. He employs machine learning, natural language processing, and other computational tools to realize new forms and interfaces for written language.

His work has been discussed in the New York Times, the Chicago Tribune, CBS News, the Financial Times, the Guardian, the Globe and Mail, Ars Technica, VICE Motherboard, Gizmoto, Engadget, TechCrunch, CNET, Forbes, Slate, Fast Company, Huffington Post, Mashable, Fusion, Quartz, PetaPixel, and other publications. He has exhibited or spoken at the International Documentary Film Festival DocLab, the TriBeCa Film Festival Interactive Showcase, the International Center of Photography, Phi Centre in Montreal, Gray Area in San Francisco, the MIT Media Lab, Maker Faire, Molasses Books in Bushwick, and other venues.

Ross earned his undergraduate degree in Economics from MIT in 2009, and his graduate degree from NYU ITP in May 2016. He posts essays about his recent work on Medium: https://medium.com/@rossgoodwin/

Oscar Sharp is a BAFTA-nominated British filmmaker, described by The New Yorker as "A huge talent, masterly with tone and style". He came to the US as a Fulbright scholar to study at NYU Grad FIlm under Todd Solondz, Spike Lee and Darren Aronofsky. His short films have won 30 prizes, from the likes of Joss Whedon and Guillermo del Toro. In 2015, after his BAFTA nomination for T​he Kármán Line, he signed a one-picture blind deal with Tobey Maguire's Material Pictures to write and direct "&", a near-future sci-fi set in San Francisco.

In spring 2016, he and his technologist collaborator Ross Goodwin created Benjamin, the world's first A.I. screenwriter, and shot Sunspring - Benjamin's first screenplay - starring Silicon Valley's Thomas Middleditch. In summer 2016, 20th Century Fox attached Oscar to adapt and a direct upcoming book WOOLLY, an account of the true-life Harvard project to resurrect Woolly Mammoths, from author Ben Mezrich (Accidental Billionaires / The Social Network). ​Oscar is also developing a feature film imagining the creation of AGI in 1981. He is represented in the USA by United Talent Agency.

James Stewart is Chief Architect at the Government Digital Service where he leads a team of architects, developers and operations engineers who are at the heart of transforming government services. He works across government, helping establish a user-centric and platform-based architecture for government services.

He was responsible for the technical architecture of the award winning GOV.UK, building the acclaimed team behind it, and transforming the UK Government's relationship with open source by "coding in the open." He’s been instrumental in the UK government’s move to use of public cloud and coordinates the network of senior technology leaders across government.

Prior to joining the civil service James ran an agency providing websites, business tools and product development to a range of small businesses, charities and entertainment industry clients. He's a regular conference speaker covering topics from technical architecture and modern development techniques to digital transformation.

Jess Frazelle is a Software Engineer at Google. She was previously a Software Engineer at Docker. Jess Frazelle has served as a Maintainer of Docker, Contributor to Runc and Golang as well as other projects. Jess Frazelle is working on making containers more secure. She loves all things involving Linux namespaces and cgroups and is typecasted as the person who runs everything in containers.

Zeke is a developer on GitHub's Electron team. He's spent the last five years at Heroku, npm, and now GitHub, working to empower others to build, package, and deploy great things. When he's not hacking, he spends his time on the beaches of Southern California with his wife and two young boys.

Colin Dean is a software engineer at IBM Watson. He is an organizer of Code & Supply, Pittsburgh's largest developer group, and president of Meta Mesh Wireless Communities. He recently organized Abstractions software conference and lives in Pittsburgh his girlfriend and a pack of show dogs.

Hui Ding manages the infrastructure team at Instagram. He earned his PhD from Northwestern University, IL, after which he joined SAP Labs as a senior research scientist. Prior to growing the infrastructure team at Instagram, he worked on Facebook's core data infrastructure.

CJ Johnson is a Solutions Engineer at GitHub with a decade of experience in people management. She is responsible for helping GitHub Enterprise customers onboard and implement workflows and tools that let them ship better software. She loves coaching customers through the social changes that make their development teams more transparent and productive. If you're into fermentation, deadlifting, or original Nintendo games, y'all should talk.

Lee has been in information technology for over 20 years. He has been a teacher, mentor, and consultant focused on information technology value through enterprise application integration and application modernization. His experiences span verticals including transportation, healthcare, financial services, telecommunications and insurance. Information technology should be an enabler to simplify business processes by automating tasks and enhancing decision support.

Machisté is a Software Engineer at Slack, where he works on the cross-platform Slack desktop app, combining web and native in unholy matrimony. Prior to Slack, he worked at Yale University on something totally unrelated. He also helps maintain Atom, the hackable text editor, and Electron, the framework for building cross-platform apps with web technologies. When not computering, he plays guitar, writes songs, and gets down at karaoke.

Jim has 33 years of experience delivery solutions across a wide range of industry domains (Banking, Insurance, Aircraft, Point of Sale, CAD/CAM). He is an avid promoter of technologies to help developers become better software engineers and collaborators. Recently transitioned into DevOps as a great way to help do this.

Pamela is an Engineering Manager at MailChimp in Atlanta, Georgia and an organizer of Rails Girls Atlanta. She likes bicycles, coffee, soccer, and gifs.

Jamie is an engineer on GitHub's Professional Services team, where she enables companies to wield the power of GitHub Enterprise responsibly. She has a background in art history, and has worked at Microsoft, Google, and Nintendo of America. She likes Linux, open source, and documenting all the things. When not Hubbing, she lives and travels in a Westfalia Vanagon with her partner, Maxwell, and corgi, Yorick.

Brent has used Git and GitHub for over 5 years through university classes, contributions to open source projects, and professionally as a web developer. While working as a trainer for GitHub, he also became a published author for O'Reilly and now works as a solutions engineer for GitHub in Amsterdam to help bring Git and GitHub to developers across the world.

Arfon Smith, Program Manager for Open Source Data at GitHub, and co-founder of the Zooniverse, is a lapsed academic with a passion for new models of open scientific collaboration. He gained his PhD in astrochemistry from the University of Nottingham in 2006 and then went on to build DNA sequencing pipelines at the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute – the site responsible for sequencing more than a third of the original human genome. In 2008 he moved to the University of Oxford and co-founded the Zooniverse – a web based collaboration that has engaged millions of people in online citizen science. In October 2013 he joined GitHub Inc. to work on supporting researchers who are using the GitHub platform for capturing the process of scientific discovery.

Christine Abernathy is a Developer Advocate on the Open Source team at Facebook, with previous Developer Advocacy roles on Parse and Facebook Platform. Prior to Facebook, Christine headed up engineering at MShift, a mobile banking software provider, delivering iOS apps and mobile browser-based products. Prior experiences include co-founding Clickmarks, a mobile and enterprise middleware provider.

Laura Dabbish is an associate professor in the Human-Computer Interaction Institute at Carnegie Mellon University. She studies open collaboration, sociality and new forms of work. She's interested in the social life of software repositories and what large scale software analysis can learn from small scale qualitative research. Her research spans the fields of Human-Computer Interaction, Computer-Supported Cooperative Work, Information Systems and Organizational Behavior. She received her B.Sc. in Computer Science from the University of Southern California, and her M.S. and PhD from Carnegie Mellon in Human-Computer Interaction. Laura has spent time at Microsoft Research, Motorola, Inc., and is currently a visiting researcher at Dropbox. She directs the Connected Experience Lab within the HCI Institute at CMU (coexlab.com).

In 2011 Felipe Hoffa moved from Chile to San Francisco to join Google as a Software Engineer. Since 2013 he's been a Developer Advocate on big data - to inspire developers around the world to leverage the Google Cloud Platform tools to analyze and understand their data in ways they could never before. You can find him in several YouTube videos, blog posts, and conferences around the world.

Jeff McAffer is the Director of the Microsoft Open Source Programs Office, where he and the team help drive the company’s transition to an “open source engagement first” mindset. Enabling collaboration, simplifying and automating processes, tooling GitHub, and democratizing data, all loom large in his daily activities. Jeff was one of the founders of the Eclipse open source community where was also on the Foundation Board of Directors and led several projects and project management committees. He is an active community leader, book author, and frequent conference speaker.

Aditya is an engineer at Stripe on the Risk team, based in New York City. He studied statistics at Columbia and computer science at Cornell, and has been writing Go professionally for the past four years. When not defending users against online fraudsters, he spends his free time playing German-style board games and listening to embarrassing music.

Mathias Meyer used to be an engineer and is now the CEO at Travis CI, where he focuses on the intersection of distributed systems, teams, company culture and resilience engineering.

Patrick Reynolds leads the team at GitHub that runs Git as a service. He has been building tools to monitor and troubleshoot distributed applications for more than ten years: first as an academic research project, then as a product at BlueStripe Software, and most recently for internal use at GitHub.