Jim Holmes (@aJimHolmes) – Growing Into Leadership
Jim is the Owner/Principal of Guidepost Systems. He has been in various corners of the IT world since joining the US Air Force in 1982. He’s spent time in LAN/WAN and server management roles in addition to many years helping teams and customers deliver great systems. Jim has worked with organizations ranging from start ups to Fortune 100 companies to improve their delivery processes and ship better value to their customers. Jim’s been in many different environments but greatly prefers those adopting practices from Lean and Agile communities. When not at work you might find Jim in the kitchen with a glass of wine, playing Xbox, hiking with his family, or banished to the garage while trying to practice his guitar.
Elizabeth Naramore (@ElizabethN) – The Beauty of a Beginner’s Mind
Elizabeth is an author, speaker, mentor, and recovering web developer. She currently works as the Patchwork Community Manager at GitHub, and she’s all about looking at new ways to solve old problems. She lives in Cincinnati, Ohio with her fiancee, their 3 children, and a dog named Raisin.
Cori Drew (@coridrew) – Ignition: Geek Parenting’s Lessons Learned…so far
Cori Drew is a consultant with Improving Enterprises in Addison, TX. She started her programming career as a web developer before cutting her OOP teeth (& falling in love with C#) in 2003 in .NET Framework 1.1. Cori was a programmer for 8.5 years before discovering there was a developer community in 2009. Appreciation for growth & learning, enabled by our tech community, has inspired her to try to pay it forward.
Jeff Blankenburg (@jeffblankenburg) – Be A Beginner
Ultra passionate. That’s how Jeff Blankenburg (@jeffblankenburg) describes his relationship with technology. Over the past 10 years, Jeff has enthusiastically applied his technical expertise to build industry-changing websites and marketing efforts for mega brands including Victoria’s Secret, Abercrombie & Fitch, Ford Motor Company, Sony and several pharmaceutical companies. He’s especially proficient in user interface design, web standards and mobile application development. In addition to his developer evangelist role for Microsoft, Jeff contributed to the O’Reilly title Windows Developer Power Tools on the subject of code validation services, and authored a Windows Phone development book out now on Amazon. He also serves as an organizer for the CodeMash and Stir Trek conferences. On the academic front, Jeff holds a Bachelor of Science degree in Psychology from Ohio’s Bowling Green State University.
Alan Stevens (@alanstevens) – Values Driven Development
Alan Stevens is the Winston Wolfe of software development. He solves problems. He is a partner at NerdHive Industries, LLC in Knoxville, TN where he builds kick-ass mobile and web apps. He is also a jerk on Twitter at @alanstevens.
Cory House (@housecor) – Confessions of a Technical Speaker: A Behind-the-Scenes Tour
Cory is founder of Bitnative LLC, an agile software development and training consultancy, and creator of OutlierDeveloper.com, a blog for software developers who aspire to be exceptional. He is a Pluralsight author, Microsoft MVP in C#, ASPInsider, a member of the Telerik Developer Experts, INETA speaker, and independent consultant with 15 years of experience in full-stack software development. As a software architect at AutoTrader, Cory specializes in creating C# .NET and JavaScript based single page applications for the automotive industry. He regularly speaks and coaches teams on clean code, architecture, and software career development at conferences and user groups across the country and internationally. Cory has authored multiple Pluralsight courses including Clean Code, Architecting Applications in .NET, and Becoming an Outlier. Cory blogs at bitnative.com and outlierdeveloper.com and is active on Twitter as @housecor.
Dawn E. Kuczwara (@digitaldawn) – Give Up!
Dawn Kuczwara has been working in tech for over 17 years and in a number of industries, including video games, defense, medical and interactive television (where, incidentally, she was part of a team that won a technical Emmy). Beginning as a developer she migrated, over time to leading diverse teams spanning the full SDLC, security and support. But her true passion lies in mentoring and leading technical teams and in creating highly intuitive and usable applications.
Jay Harris (@jayharris) – Conviction
Jay is a software consultant and president of Arana Software. But he has been coding for the web since long before someone paid him to do it. He didn’t do it to be cool. He didn’t do it to make a statement. He just found that he had a talent for it, and like a moth to a flame, was drawn to the lure of the Blink tag.