Christina Aldan (@luckygirliegirl)
Christina Aldan is a TEDx speaker, trainer, and digital advertising consultant whose boutique agency, LG Designs, offers businesses brand consulting and creative content for everyday media. With over a decade of experience in the digital advertising realm, Christina is highly regarded for her approach to business, partnering with clients to find unique strategies that ensure their advertising goals are met. Christina builds connections through her keynote addresses, workshops, and technological education. She uses these tools to help individuals and businesses cultivate value in everyday media. She also served as Chief Marketing Officer for PrayerSpark and currently serves as Marketing Coordinator for Starmark1. Christina uses her charisma and expertise to inspire others by mentoring women in business like herself. She also has sat on state and local boards supporting women in tech, entrepreneurship, and children with learning disabilities.
She is the recipient of the Las Vegas Women in Tech Community Service Award, the Distinguished Woman of the Year Award in STEM, the Stevie Award for the category of Women Helping Women, and nominated as one of the Top 100 Women in Las Vegas 2017. Learn more at: ChristinaAldan.com.
Steve Andrews (@SteveAndrews)
Steve is the Founder & CEO of Platinum Bay Technologies. He is a successful software engineer with over seventeen years of experience and a four-time Microsoft MVP Award recipient. Steve is a frequent speaker at over 130 events across North America and engages diverse audiences including families and individuals, educators, software professionals, and business professionals. After discovering his own Autism in 2012 at the age of 33, Steve dedicated his life to creating Understanding, Acceptance, Inclusion, and Opportunity for Autistic individuals everywhere.
Matt Darby (@mattdarby)
I’ve developed on the web for 20 years. I am currently a Senior Developer at Rackspace. I was also recently a Professor at Franklin University. I hold a Master’s in Computer Science and I lead 500 members of the Columbus Ruby Brigade. I’ve launched projects for folks from Rackspace, AT&T, Sprint, LivingSocial and SeoMoz to local engineering and consulting firms.
Brandy Foster (@bcwf)
Afrodroid Samurai, aka Brandy Foster, is an Android application developer at Detroit Labs. And because she’s always “doing the most” she is also known as the Detroit Labs’ Diversity and Inclusion Coach, Co-creator and Instructor of D-Code where she teaches front-end web development at a local high school, the mother of two epic boy humans who constantly force her to re-think what is life, a facebook poet, and pessimistic optimist society critic
Jay Harris (@jayharris)
Jay is a code wrangler, software consultant, and co-owner of Arana Software. He has been developing on the web since 1995, when the Blink tag lured him away from Visual Basic 3. Recognizing that the greatest application performance bottleneck is a developer’s time, Jay’s continuing quest is for frameworks, modules, tools, and practices that make developers stronger, fitter, happier, and more productive.
Originally from Rochester, New York, he has lived in Michigan since 2003. He likes Michigan, and considers it his permanent home, but will always remain a New Yorker at heart.
Jim Holmes (@aJimHolmes)
Single Dad. Widower. Geek. Veteran. Around 25 years IT experience. Author of The Leadership Journey. Coffee Roaster. MVP for C#. Past President of CodeMash Conference. Diabetic. Runner. Liked 5th grade so much he did it twice. One-time setter, middle blocker, and weakside hitter. Blogger (http://FrazzledDad.com). Big fan of naps.
Hilary Weaver-Robb (@g33klady)
Hilary Weaver-Robb is a Software Quality Architect at Quicken Loans, where she recently won an award for “Getting Sh!t Done”, makes friends with developers & mentors testers, and helps teams to improve their quality processes. She runs the Motor City Software Testers user group, scarcely maintains a blog at g33klady.com, tweets a lot as @g33klady, and spends a ton of time building stuff on Minecraft.
Heather Wilde (@heathriel)
Heather Wilde is CTO of ROCeteer, and is also known as the “Unicorn Whisperer” due to her special focus on entrepreneurs. She is a personal and professional growth expert, executive coach, author, and speaker.
As a founding employee of Evernote, she oversaw the company’s growth from thousands to 100,000,000 customers. She is one of the only women to have wholly programmed, designed, produced and published a game at the company THQ. Additionally, she has worked with the U.S. Navy, NASA and state and local governments around the world. She has led development, scalability, and reliability engineering of web sites with 60+ million unique monthly visitors, 1.7+ billion monthly page views, and 99.99% uptime SLA requirements.
Among her other awards, Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid selected her for a commendation in 2016 for her work in increasing STEM education in schools.
Wilde’s writing and speaking spans social media, entrepreneurialism, startups, leadership, cybersecurity, customer experience, fundraising, and diversity issues. She writes for Forbes and hosts the “Entrepreneurial Revolution” column for Inc Magazine.
She currently lives in Las Vegas, NV.