Coffee and Open Source

Shaun Walker has 25+ years professional experience in architecting and implementing enterprise software solutions for private and public organizations. Shaun is the original creator of Oqtane and DotNetNuke, web application frameworks which have cultivated the largest and most successful Open Source community projects native to the Microsoft platform. He was one of the original founders of DNN Corp, a commercial software company providing products, services, and technical support for DotNetNuke, which raised 3 rounds of venture capital from top tier Silicon Valley investors. Based on his significant community contributions he has been recognized as a Microsoft Most Valuable Professional (MVP) as well as an ASPInsider for over 10 consecutive years. He was recognized by Business In Vancouver as a leading entrepreneur in their Forty Under 40 business awards, was a founding member of the Board of Directors of the Outercurve Foundation, and is currently the Chair of the Project Committee for Microsoft's .NET Foundation. Shaun is currently a Technical Director and Enterprise Guildmaster at Cognizant Softvision.

Hayden Barnes is a Senior Mgr. for Windows, Docs & Internal DevOps at Rancher Labs. He is a Microsoft MVP and former Engineering Manager for Ubuntu on WSL & founder Pengwin Linux.  

Ian Lance Taylor has been writing free software since 1990. He is the main author of Taylor UUCP, the gold linker, and the Go frontend to GCC. He is a member of the GCC steering committee. He joined Google in 2006, and since 2008 has been working on the Go programming language.

Mordechai Zuber is a software developer based in Israel.

Jerome Hardaway is a Senior Software Engineer at Microsoft and The Executive Developer of Vets Who Code. Having served in the Air Force as Security Forces then transitioned into software engineering, he is focused on helping underrepresented members in the veteran community learn and break into tech. He has received numerous awards and honors due to his work but the most rewarding part to him is easing the point of entry so that others have easier paths into tech than he did.

Noelle has been speaking professionally for 20+ years now and have given over 800 keynote presentations to audiences as large as 10,000. As an experienced speaker, Noelle and her team want to provide two key things for your next event… A great experience on stage — Noelle has presented to audiences both large and small in a variety of different settings and contexts. As a presenter, Noelle will use stories, empathy and humor to not only make a point but to keep your audience engaged and listening. They will leave with practical, actionable next steps to take with them beyond that session. A great experience off stage —We know as a conference planner, there are a lot of details you have to manage and juggle. The speaker should be the last of your concerns. We’ve worked with hundreds of event planners and are regularly told we make their lives easier and how grateful they are for our experience with the process.

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.