Claire Novotny is a Program Manager on the .NET team at Microsoft and a former Executive Director of the .NET Foundation. She is passionate about reducing friction in the development process and creating modern software solutions to solve complex business challenges. Prior to joining Microsoft, Claire was a Regional Director and MVP, with a major focus on the open source .NET ecosystem. She has been writing code on the Microsoft platform since the days a 2400 baud modem was considered cutting-edge.

Her prior experience ranges from building identity solutions for global organizations, developing real-time trading systems dealing with massive amounts of data to the complex data models of equity derivatives and the regulatory needs of Medicaid claims processing. She believes that technology is meaningless in a vacuum and strives to show how the bleeding-edge delivers superior value to the bottom line.