Coffee and Open Source

Mat Velloso is the Chief Product Officer at Docker and an advisor and board member. He previously served as a vice president at Meta, Google DeepMind, and Microsoft.

You can find Mat on the following sites:

Sam Basu is a developer advocate for Uno Platform, a 13-time Microsoft MVP, speaker, author, and streamer. He writes Modern Developer Ramblings about cross-platform development, AI, and developer productivity.You can find Sam on the following sites:

A Developer Advocate for Deepgram with over ten years of experience in advocacy, Ed Charbeneau focuses on fostering engagement with the developer community while supporting the development of innovative AI-Native applications. With a diverse technical skill set, Ed contributes to building impactful solutions using a wide range of technologies including: C#, Asp.Net, HTML/CSS, JavaScript, Microsoft Extensions AI, RAG, and ML.NET technologies.

Ed leverages his role as a developer advocate to find new and innovative ways to expand the boundaries of product through customer feedback, research and hands-on development. Ed has built proof of concept frameworks, components, and SDKs that have gone on to production. These initiatives have future-proofed the Progress portfolio, empowered customers, and enabled product integration.

Ed is passionate about empowering developers to explore opportunities in full-stack development, AI, machine learning, and prompt engineering. Ed facilitates discussions on emerging technology trends, fostering collaboration and knowledge-sharing within the tech community.

You can find Ed on the following sites:

Based near Seattle, Brady Gaster aspires to make it easy for .NET developers to party in the cloud as the product manager behind Visual Studio’s Azure right-click publish and Connected Services features. He also helps with Aspire tooling support in Visual Studio and Visual Studio Code. When not designing new tooling features or building demos with teammates, he’s trail running 5Ks, parenting two teens, mixing new 174 BPM drum’n’bass sets, or producing his own electronic music.You can find Brady on the following sites:

Kevin W. Griffin is an independent software consultant and 16-time Microsoft MVP specializing in ASP.NET Core, Microsoft Azure cloud architecture, SignalR real-time applications, and .NET modernization.

You can find Kevin on the following sites:

Michael Washington is an ASP.NET and C# programmer with experience in process improvement, billing systems, and student information systems. He is the founder of AiHelpWebsite.com and BlazorHelpWebsite.com.You can find Michael on the following sites:

Jimmy Bogard is a software architect and consultant who created the OSS libraries AutoMapper, MediatR, and Respawn. He helps teams build systems faster, better, and more maintainable.

You can find Jimmy on the following sites:

Pavlo Baron is co-founder and CEO of Platform Engineering Labs, creators of formae - Infrastructure-as-code made for humans in the AI era. Pavlo is looking back at a long career, having spent plenty of time on all sides of the table - in startups, enterprises and consulting. He was co-founder and CTO of Instana, that got acquired by IBM in 2020. Pavlo has spoken at many conferences and wrote 4 books.

You can find Pavlo on the following sites:

Speaker, author, and software developer recognized with a Microsoft MVP Award for Developer Technologies. Stacy has been developing solutions since the mid-1990s across various industries. She authored Beginning Azure Static Web Apps and is passionate about Azure, DevOps, and empowering developers.

You can find Stacy on the following sites:

Martin builds cross-platform multimedia infrastructure and developer tools. Since 2017, he has maintained major LibVLC ecosystem projects including LibVLCSharp and VLC for Unity, used by developers worldwide to build media applications. He is also the founder of pkgstore.io and regularly shares his expertise through consulting, speaking, and technical writing.You can find Martin on the following sites:

Rizel Scarlett is a Principal Developer Advocate at Entire and a software engineer and community builder. She previously worked in developer advocacy roles at Block and GitHub and shares content about open source and AI agents.You can find Rizel on the following sites:

Paige Bailey is the AI Developer Relations Engineering Lead at Google DeepMind. Prior to returning to Google DeepMind, Paige spent just over a year at Microsoft as a director of machine learning and MLOps at GitHub, working on projects like GitHub Codespaces, VS Code, and Copilot. As a former applied ML engineer (in Azure Research, Chevron, and on NASA projects), Paige can’t imagine a more exciting charter than accelerating developer productivity and creativity with machine learning.You can find Paige on the following sites:

Here is Debbie in her own words.

With over 15 years experience in Frontend development I have worked as a Tech Lead and consultant for many important clients with various technologies and often with a strong focus on performance. I have lead teams both in house and remotely as well as giving workshops and training. I have many years of experience as a mentor for online learning platforms, Treehouse and OpenClassrooms and am a teacher at Vue School as well as Jamstack Explorers, and I am a writer for Ultimate Courses.

I am a Platform Engineer – Applied AI at Zephyr Cloud, Google Developer Expert in web technologies, Nuxt Ambassador, and am a former Microsoft Most Valuable Professional in developer technologies, Media Developer Expert and GitHub Star Alumni.

I have a special love for JavaScript frameworks especially Vue.js and Nuxt.js and am now focused on testing especially end to end testing with Playwright. I have a Frontend and FullStack Tech Degree and am Microsoft certified. I am an international speaker, and have spoken at many meet-ups and conferences worldwide on many continents including Antarctica.

I am Irish but live in Mallorca, Spain and when I am not writing code and studying new technologies you can find me doing all sorts of sports from running, cycling and skiing, body combat and of course Taekwondo as I am a 4th degree black belt.

You can find Debbie on the following sites:

Brittany is a Staff Software Engineer at GitHub, helping build the platform millions of developers rely on every day. She hosts the Overcommitted podcast, writes The Balanced Engineer newsletter, and speaks at conferences about AI, accessibility, developer productivity, and building a software engineering career.

You can find Brittany on the following sites:

Joe Finney is a Product Owner and MVP by day and builds productivity apps for Windows at night. When he is not programming he is birding, running, and enjoying tasty coffee and beer in Milwaukee.You can find Joe on the following sites:

Pierce leads the VS Code product team. He has a long history in developer tools and joined via Microsoft's acquisition of Xamarin in 2016. He lives in Park City, UT and enjoys skiing and biking with his wife and two kids.You can find Pierce on the following sites:

Gerald Versluis is a software engineer at Microsoft, who wields the power of .NET to conquer any project that comes his way. With a career spanning over a decade, he's tackled it all, from frontend to backend and everything in between, using .NET MAUI, Azure, ASP.NET, and all the other .NET goodies. And these days of course; AI and Copilot.

But it wasn't until he discovered the magic of Xamarin that he truly fell in love with mobile and cross-platform development, becoming an active community member and sharing his knowledge through writing, tweeting, and presentations.You can find Gerald on the following sites:

Courtney Yatteau is a Developer Advocate on Esri's Developer Experience Team, where she helps developers build better web applications with modern JavaScript tools, libraries, and mapping technology. Before Esri, she taught computer science and mathematics, which shaped her approach to making technical concepts clear, approachable, and visual.You can find Courtney on the following sites:

William Morgan is the co-founder and CEO of Buoyant, creators of Linkerd. Prior to Buoyant, he was an infrastructure engineer at Twitter, where he helped move Twitter from monolith to microservices. He was a software engineer at Powerset, Microsoft, and Adap.tv, and a research scientist at MITRE.You can find William on the following sites:

Brian Alvey is CTO at WordPress VIP, the enterprise platform trusted by brands such as CNN, Salesforce, Bloomberg, and NBCUniversal (and built on WordPress Open Source, which powers nearly 45% of the internet). Brian is also one of the internet’s original builders and leaders in online publishing - from founding Engadget to creating software used by global brands like AOL, Gucci, BusinessWeek, Netscape, Huffington Post, and more.

You can find Brian on the following sites:

Nir is an experienced information security leader, executive, expert and a public speaker at leading conferences globally, including Black Hat, Defcon, BSides, and RSA.

Before founding Arnica, Nir lead the product and data security across Finastra, established security at Kabbage (acquired by Amex) as CISO, and headed application security across NCR.

Innovation is a key driver for Nir, as reflected by his contribution to open source projects and invention of 7 patents in software security.You can find Nir on the following sites:

Helen Hou-Sandí is a Staff Software Engineering Manager for Accessibility at GitHub and a WordPress Lead Developer. As a technologist, she is a leader in open source software and management, and caree deeply about building great user experiences. She am also a classically-trained pianist who’s performed extensively worldwide.You can find Helen on the following sites:

Jeffrey Snover is retired and spending his time as a Philosopher-Errant, attending Science & Technology conferences and giving public talks. Prior to retiring in 2026, he was a Distinguished Engineer at Google and a Technical Fellow at Microsoft where he was an AI Architect in Office, the Chief Architect for Windows Server Azure Stack. Snover is the inventor of Windows PowerShell, an object-based distributed automation engine, scripting language, and command line shell.

Snover joined Microsoft in 1999 as divisional architect for the Management and Services Division, providing technical direction across Microsoft’s management technologies and products.

Snover held 8 patents prior to joining Microsoft, and has registered over 30 patents since. He is a frequent speaker at industry and research conferences on a variety of management and language topics.

You can find Jeffrey on the following sites:

Ardalis (Steve Smith) is an entrepreneur and software developer with a passion for building quality software as effectively as possible. Ardalis has published DOZENS of courses on Pluralsight and Dometrain, covering DDD, SOLID, design patterns, and software architecture. He's a Microsoft ASP.NET MVP, a frequent speaker at developer conferences, an author, and a trainer.

Ardalis works with companies through NimblePros, the boutique consulting company he runs with his wife, Michelle. They help teams who want to avoid the trap of technical debt to deliver better software, faster. Ardalis and his team have been described by clients as a 'force multiplier', amplifying the value of existing development teams.You can find Steve on the following sites:

Tim is a program manager at Microsoft, working on .NET and developer tools (formerly UI frameworks including WPF, Silverlight, UWP, and WinUI). In the past Tim worked as software developer for various healthcare and consulting companies building client and web applications. Personally Tim is an avid cyclist.

You can find Tim on the following sites:

Known globally as DThompsonDev, Danny Thompson is a software engineer driven by a single mission: helping developers grow. He is the founder of the Commit Your Code Conference and community, leader of the Dallas Software Developers Meetup, the largest and most active dev group in North Texas, and co-host of The Programming Podcast. An expert in public speaking and AI, Danny is the author of The Developer’s Guide to AI. When he isn't on stage or coding, you can find him on the pickleball court or helping the next generation of speakers through his 'Commit Your Talk' initiative.You can find Danny on the following sites:

Michael Stahnke is a seasoned technology leader and open-source advocate, currently serving as the VP of Engineering Flox. With experience in leading operations and engineering departments, Michael has played a pivotal role in shaping DevOps practices and automation in software development. Prior to joining Flox he held senior leadership positions at CircleCI and Puppet, where he built and led engineering teams solving problems for developers and operations. He is a regular speaker at technology conferences, sharing insights on DevOps transformations, scalability challenges, and the future of automated workflows. He’s obsessed with measurements of engineering performance and finding a great night of karaoke.

You can find Michael on the following sites:

Keith Townsend is an independent CTO advisor and infrastructure practitioner focused on how enterprises actually adopt AI, cloud, and open-source platforms at scale. He’s the founder of The Advisor Bench and the voice behind The CTO Advisor, where he helps CIOs and CTOs navigate hard infrastructure decisions around hybrid cloud, AI systems, and platform architecture.

Keith has spent his career inside large enterprises and alongside vendors—working as an enterprise architect, consultant, and analyst—bridging the gap between engineering reality and executive decision-making. He’s known for translating complex systems into plain English and for challenging hype with operational truth.

Today, Keith advises enterprise IT leaders, moderates closed-door executive forums, and builds real AI systems himself—using open source not as ideology, but as a practical tool for control, portability, and long-term leverage.You can find Keith on the following sites:

Kat is the Head of Developer Advocacy at Minimus, focused on the growth and nurturing of open source through authentic contribution. In particular, her specialties are approachable 101-level content and deep dives on the history of technology, with a focus on DevOps and cloud native. She was the Kubernetes Release Lead for 1.30 Uwubernetes, and currently serves as a member of the Kubernetes Steering Committee, the Release Team Subproject Lead, and a SIG Docs Tech Lead.

When she’s not at a conference, she spends her time playing video games, watching horror movies, or reading science fiction, but her current hyperfixation is film photography. She lives in Colorado with her cat, Espresso, who is the real brains behind the operation and actually ghostwriting all of her posts.You can find Kat on the following sites:

Once described on Reddit as “technically challenged”, Sarah is a Principal Security Advocate working at Microsoft. She has lived all over the place but currently calls Melbourne home.

Sarah has been working in cyber security since before it was cool, has previously spoken at many security conferences including Black Hat and has co-authored a few Microsoft Press technical books. She is an active supporter of security communities across the globe and a co-host of the Microsoft Azure Security Podcast.

Sarah spends most of her spare time gaming, taking part in Melbourne's official sport of brunching, taking high tea and spending a disproportionate amount of her income on her dogs.You can find Sarah on the following sites:

Jeff Williams is the Co-Founder and CTO of Contrast Security, where he leads innovation in runtime-based application security. A pioneer in modern AppSec and co-founder of OWASP, Jeff has spent more than two decades helping organizations understand and manage software risk through instrumentation, context, and continuous learning.

You can find Jeff on the following sites:

Sydnee leads AI product initiatives at Cribl, the data engine for IT & Security. Prior to joining Cribl, Sydnee was leading hyperscale inference within the CoreAI group at Microsoft. Sydnee is passionate about helping individuals learn and adopt AI safely and responsibly.You can find Sydnee on the following sites:

Adriana is a CNCF Ambassador, blogger, host of the Geeking Out Podcast, and a maintainer of the OpenTelemetry End User SIG. By day, she's a Principal Developer Advocate at Dynatrace, focusing on Observability and OpenTelemetry. By night, she climbs walls. She also loves capybaras, because they make her happy.

You can find Adriana on the following sites:

Phil Nash is a developer relations engineer for Langflow at IBM. Sometimes he writes code on stage in front of a crowd, hoping everything just works. Sometimes he writes open source code, which is much less stressful because if it is wrong someone else can correct it. He writes code in tweets or toots sometimes, but not much fits.

You can find Phil on the following sites:

Mark Techson, an award-winning university instructor and senior software engineer, has two decades of experience developing tech solutions. Passionate about creating meaningful learning experiences and demystifying coding, he currently works as DevRel Lead on the Angular Team at Google.

You can find Mark on the following sites:

Brian Pontarelli is a technology entrepreneur currently solving login, registration, and user management challenges with FusionAuth. Brian started programming at the age of 8 and studied Computer Engineering at CU Boulder. During his early career, Brian worked as a software engineer at companies such as BEA and Orbitz. He started working on his own products nights and weekends and quit his day job after selling to a few large companies. He bootstrapped the company for 16 years before selling a majority share to Updata Partners. Brian still codes, but spends most of his time focusing on growing FusionAuth and helping customers solve their auth problems.

You can find Brian on the following sites:

Don is the CTO and Co-Founder at Searchcraft, a developer-centric platform focused on re-imagining content search for applications. Don has spent nearly 30 years in software engineering, building applications for both startups and enterprise-scale companies.

You can find Don on the following sites:

Dan Wahlin is a Principal Cloud Developer Advocate at Microsoft working with developers to leverage the capabilities available in Azure, Microsoft 365, and Power Platform. In addition to his work at Microsoft, Dan creates training courses for Pluralsight, speaks at conferences and meetups around the world, and offers webinars on a variety of technical topics. Prior to joining Microsoft, Dan was CEO of a consulting, architecture, and training company for 20 years helping enterprises build great software.You can find Dan on the following sites:

Alvin is a technical writer and software developer specializing in Microsoft technologies, specifically .NET, C#, and XAML. He has over 30 years of experience developing applications for Windows, mobile, and the web. He has authored two books for Packt Publishing and is a full-time content developer on the Windows developer docs on Microsoft Learn. His published books are 'Learn WinUI 3' and 'Parallel Programming and Concurrency with C# 10 and .NET 6'.You can find Alvin on the following sites:

Noelle Russell is a multi-award-winning speaker, author, and AI Executive who specializes in transforming businesses through strategic AI adoption. She is a revenue growth + cost optimization expert, 4x Microsoft Responsible AI MVP, and named the #1 Agentic AI Leader in 2025. She has led teams at NPR, Microsoft, IBM, AWS and Amazon Alexa, and is a consistent champion for Data and AI literacy and is the founder of the 'I ❤️ AI' Community teaching responsible AI for everyone.

She is the founder of the AI Leadership Institute and empowers business owners to grow and scale with AI. In the last year, she has been named an awardee of the AI and Cyber Leadership Award from DCALive, the #1 Thought Leader in Agentic AI and a Top 10 Global Thought Leader in Generative AI by Thinkers360.You can find Noelle on the following sites:

Patrik is a programmer from Sweden with over 20 years of experience, starting his journey at the age of 7 on an ABC-800 and later exploring platforms like the Commodore 64, Amiga, and PC. He has been active in the open source community since 2010 and is the creator of tools such as Cake and Spectre.Console, along with several other open source projects.

He has a strong interest in developer tooling and devops, and enjoys working with languages like C#, Rust, and Swift. His contributions have somehow been recognized with three GitHub Star awards and seven Microsoft MVP awards (suggesting a possible clerical error or that bribes actually work).

Outside of tech, he enjoys spending time with his family, playing guitar, and working on home improvement projects.You can find Patrik on the following sites:

Kohsuke Kawaguchi is a prominent software engineer, best known as the creator of Jenkins, an open-source automation server that is widely used for continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD). He is currently the Co-Head of AI at leading DevOps provider, CloudBees and the former Co-CEO of Launchable, an AI platform that speeds up testing to help teams expedite their continuous integration (CI) and delivery pipelines, which was acquired by CloudBees in 2024.Kawaguchi developed Jenkins as a side project when working at Sun Microsystems in 2011. Since then, it has become an essential tool for developers and DevOps professionals around the world helping teams automate parts of software development, testing, and deployment.In addition to his work on Jenkins, Kawaguchi has contributed to the broader open-source community and has worked with various technologies related to software development, automation, and cloud computing. He is also known for his contributions to the world of Java and DevOps.You can find Kohsuke on the following sites:

Spriha Tucker is the Field CTO at Buildkite, where she plays a pivotal role in bridging the gap between Buildkite's engineering teams and its clients. A two-time Y-Combinator founder, Spriha previously co-founded Aviator, a developer productivity platform, which served customers like Slack, Figma, Doordash, Bosch, and others. Her prior experience includes Product Management at Google on developer tools, data, infrastructure and search ads, and at Microsoft, on platform tooling. Spriha also taught as an instructor at General Assembly and spent time as a Quantitative Trader at Morgan Stanley, focusing on developing trading models and trade execution algorithms for equities. She holds a Bachelor's degree in Econometrics and a Master's in Computer Science from the University of Pennsylvania.You can find Spriha on the following sites:

Shawn Wildermuth has been tinkering with computers and software since he got a Vic-20 back in the early '80s. He has been a Microsoft MVP since 2003. You may have taken one of his more than twenty-five courses on Pluralsight. He's authored eight books and innumerable articles on software development. You can also see him at one of the local and international conferences he's spoken at including Techorama, KCDC, Stir Trek, TechBash, DevSum, and DevConnections. You can find Shawn on the following sites:

Chris Woodruff has been at the forefront of software development since before the first.COM boom, building a career that spans enterprise web development, cloud solutions, software analytics, and developer relations. As an Architect at Real Time Technologies, he applies his deep technical expertise to tackle complex challenges, with a particular focus on API design and scalable architectures. He is recognized as a Microsoft MVP specializing in .NET and Web Development.

You can find Chris on the following sites:

Maddy Montaquila (formerly Leger) is a Senior Product Manager at Microsoft and the product lead for Aspire. She’s been building dev tools at Microsoft since 2018, working across the .NET mobile stack and helping bring .NET MAUI to life. Maddy has been obsessed with making developers’ lives easier ever since her first dev tools internship, where she realized it perfectly combined her tech background with her passion for product development.

These days, she’s focused on making modern distributed app development suck a whole lot less. Maddy’s an experienced speaker who’s presented everywhere from local user groups to major keynotes, known for bringing great energy and a genuine love for dev tools to every talk.You can find Maddy on the following sites:

Aravind is Director of Developer GTM at CodeRabbit, a lifelong learner and passionate technologist who transforms complex challenges into clear, engaging narratives.

As a mentor, speaker, and open-source advocate, he champions community-driven innovation and hands-on experimentation.You can find Aravind on the following sites:

Paul Stack is an infrastructure coder and has spoken at various events throughout the world about his passion for continuous integration, continuous delivery and good operational procedures and why they should be part of what developers and system administrators do on a day to day basis. He believes that reliably delivering software is more important as its development. Paul’s passions are the DevOps and Continuous Delivery movements and how they help the entire business and its customers.You can find Paul on the following sites:

Ralph is Microsoft's representative on the board of the Bytecode Alliance Foundation and is responsible for WebAssembly outside of the browser at the company. Ralph has worked with Linux for several decades and had worked on many Azure services through the years. His team is also responsible for the ContainerD project Runwasi, part of the SpinKube project.

You can find Ralph on the following sites: