Allison Pollard helps people discover their agile instincts and develop their coaching abilities. As an agile coach with Improving in Dallas, Allison enjoys mentoring others to become great Scrum Masters and fostering communities that provide sustainability for agile transformations. In her experience, applying agile methods improves delivery, strengthens relationships, and builds trust between business and IT. Allison is also a Certified Professional Co-Active Coach, a foodie, and proud glasses wearer.

Angel started his career as an US Air Force Space Systems Operations specialist in Cape Canaveral AF Station where he realized his passion for technology and software development. He has extensive experience in the private, public and military sectors and his technical experience includes military/space lift operations, technical writing, software development, SRE/DevOPs engineering. He also has a wealth of experience in defense and federal sectors such as contracting, information systems security and management. You can usual find him speaking at or organizing local tech meetups and hackathons where he enjoys engaging with developers. Angel’s passions are positive disruption, learning, teaching, mentoring but most of all inspiring all forms of technologists & building awesome tech communities.

Chad Green is a manager, software developer, architect, community leader, and most importantly a father and husband. Chad woks as the Director of Software Development for ScholarRx developing an affordable, lifelong digital-learning platform for medical students and physicians everywhere. Over his career, Chad has managed groups from 3 to 63 people and worked on projects in a wide range of markets including healthcare, military, government, workforce management, financial services, chemical research, and electronic commerce. Being a big believer in giving back and wanting to ensure that there are cool events for others, Chad founded and chairs the annual Code PaLOUsa conference, organizes the Louisville .NET Meetup user group and the Monthly Tech Leader Coffee and Discussion, and has helped with other groups like the Louisville Tech Ladies and events like Cincy Day of Agile.

A client engagement manager turned developer, I want to deliver more than just software. My drive is rooted in helping others and I bring commitment and compassion to every relationship. A long time coach, volunteer and organizer, I am dedicated to doing my best in my work and also to help others tap into their highest potential as well.

Jeff is a technical architect, an executive consultant, and an attorney. As a member of the Chief Digital Advisor team at World Wide Technology—and with his unique experiences that combine tech and the law—he maintains a passion for solving problems with inspired solutions, improving life and business through technology. A dedicated member of the developer community, Jeff travels internationally to speak on both technical and business-oriented topics. He is a Microsoft MVP and serves on the board of directors for the Kansas City Developer Conference.

Jeremy Clark makes developers better. By drawing on over 15 years of experience in application development, he helps developers take a step up in their skill set with a focus on making complex topics approachable regardless of skill level. He is a Microsoft MVP for .NET, and he has authored seven courses for Pluralsight, including "C# Interfaces", a course aimed at giving developers a clear understanding of abstraction. He loves speaking and has delivered over 300 technical presentations in the last 9 years in the United States and Europe. Jeremy lives in northern Washington with his lovely wife, 2 cats, 2 dogs, and a banjo.

After almost two decades writing software professionally (and a few years unprofessionally before that), Lee Brandt still continues to learn every day. He has led teams in small and large companies and always manages to keep the business needs at the forefront of software development efforts. He speaks internationally about software development, from both a technical and business perspective, and loves to teach others what he learns. Lee writes software in Objective-C, JavaScript, and C#… mostly. He is a Microsoft Most Valuable Professional in Visual Studio and Development Technologies and one of the directors of the Kansas City Developer Conference (KCDC). Lee is also a decorated Gulf War veteran and loves to play the drums whenever he gets any spare time.

Micah Silverman is a Principal Technical Platform Instructor for Okta. With 24 years of Java Experience (yup, that's from the beginning), he's authored numerous articles, co-authored a Java EE book and spoken at many conferences. He's a maker, who's built full size MAME arcade cabinets and repaired [old electronic games](http://afitnerd.com/2011/10/16/weekend-project-fix-dark-tower/). He brings his love of all things Java to a conference near you!

A husband, father of four, and currently the Founding Software Craftsman of Greater Sum, Mike Clement believes we work best when we are working together and that there are no best practices—only better and worse ones depending on the context. Passionate about raising the bar of technical excellence in the software development community, Mike is a founder and organizer of Software Craftsmanship Atlanta, a founding member of the Utah Software Craftsmanship group and a former organizer of the Agile Roots conference. He has worked at several companies including Pluralsight, Ancestry.com, Microsoft, and Caselle. Find out more about Mike on his blog (http://blog.softwareontheside.com/) and on Twitter at @mdclement.

Scott Hunter is responsible for the Microsoft’s .NET platform, which includes the .NET Framework, .NET Core, ASP.NET, Entity Framework, .NET Tools, Web Tools and the managed languages (C#, F# and VB). Prior to leading the .NET Platform, Hunter helped the Azure Developer Experience team build the Azure SDK’s, App Service Tooling, Azure Redis Cache, Azure API Management, ASP.NET, Entity Framework and the Web Tooling. In his spare time he loves hiking mountains around the world. Scott grew up in Little Rock, AR and went to college in Fayetteville before heading to the West Coast for a startup and Microsoft.

Taylor graduated from the Darla Moore School of Business at the University of South Carolina in 2011 and immediately jumped into the world of recruiting. He started his career at Vaco in 2011 where he has recruited for clients such as Disney, Pacific Gas & Electric, Yahoo!, and Sony. After achieving top producer for 2013 out of a team of six, Taylor was recognized by Vaco and was brought to Raleigh to be instrumental in the building of the Technology division. During his time in Raleigh Taylor helped to scale the team from three to seven and focused on recruiting in all things technology, where he ultimately found his niche within development and TriNug (Raleigh .NET User Group). In June 2014 Taylor was asked to return to the Nashville office to help build out the technology team. Since his return, Taylor has been elected VP of the .NET User Group in Nashville for the last two years. He focuses 100% of his time within the development vertical in technology. As of 2017 Taylor is the Recruiting Manager of Vaco’s Nashville Technology division that is responsible for grossing $4.5 million a year in revenue and ranking in the top of over 30+ Vaco Technology offices. From his time at Vaco he has seen the team double in size from seven to seventeen and has spoken at multiple conferences ranging from Nashville's very own Music City Code, the Raleigh Code Conference, to Vaco’s National Engage the World Conference and continues to be heavily involved within both the local and national tech community.

Aaron is a Sr. Applications Architect with Accruent focusing on migrating applications to the cloud. Aaron is also the President of the Fort Smith Tech Users Group since April 2018. Aaron started as a developer and later served as a Manager of Developers, Business Analysts, Test Analysts, Vendor Managers. During his twenty plus years, Aaron has worked in banking, electric utilities, health care, transportation. Aaron is an analytical and solution-oriented professional with expertise in guiding teams to improve efficiency by identifying the core issues. In his free time, Aaron enjoys music and food festivals, video games, the occasional workout, and spending time with his family.

I've been a QA for 7 years now and I try to use my varied job skills to help improve not only software quality but the quality of interactions with my team. I have a background in customer service and music and feel that these skills help me to think outside the box when it comes to quality. I am currently pursuing my degree in Cyber Security at Norwich University and feel that the additional skills I’m learning there will help me take QA even further.

Anita Walden is a faculty member in the Department of Biomedical Informatics at the University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences, her research interests are in international data standards, EHR data integration for clinical research, and implementation mobile technologies for underserved and rural communities to improve healthcare access and health outcomes. She is also an industry educator and trainer in data management, clinical research informatics and mobile health technologies with the Society of Clinical Data Management (SCDM).

Expert Talend SE with many years experience in enterprise and database projects.

Ben Kennedy is a passionate scrum master with a decade of software development to lean on. Ben uses his technical background and coaching skills to help scrum teams reflect about how they work.

Bill is a Solutions Architect with VML working on delivering digital solutions to our clients. Over the last 15 years Bill has worked in enterprise IT starting in the trenches on the help desk. After that, Bill spent almost a decade working in infrastructure support focusing in the Microsoft stack. Over the last 5 years Bill has been developing, architecting and leading teams of software developers with VML. During that time Bill has done everything from troubleshoot dial up connections in rural Nebraska to building the digital experiences for some of America's most well known brands. When not working, Bill will probably be found on his bike exploring gravel roads in his hometown of Lincoln, Nebraska.

Bobby is a full-stack developer, advocate, and evangelist at Auth0. He is a passionate engineer with an interest in learning and teaching new technologies, using open source software, and engaging the greater software development community. His experience ranges from building line-of-business applications for financial professionals with Russell Investments and Milliman to distributed social content apps with Cheezeburger and Steller.

Instructor for video game design and project management classes.

Chris is a native of Central Arkansas and a graduate of the University of Arkansas. He holds degrees in Computer Engineering and Management Information Systems as well as CISSP and CEH certifications. He is a 12 year veteran of the US Air Force and has also worked for The MITRE Corporation and FIS. Currently, Chris operates a consulting firm focused on making cybersecurity reasonable and affordable for small businesses in the region.

I've spent over 25 years building software solutions. I currently freelance in the data engineering space and spend my free time tinkering with crazy ideas.

Daniel is a Master Software Engineer at J.B. Hunt Transportation. He has been in the industry since 2005, graduating from UALR with a degree in Computer Science. Daniel has a passion for diving into new emerging technologies and integrating them into revenue systems.

Dave has about three and a half decades of experience in a wide variety of languages, techniques, etc. He is the T. Rex (yes, really) of Codosaurus, LLC (his one-man consulting firm, which explains how he can get such a cool title, at http://www.Codosaur.us/) in Fairfax, Virginia, USA. His latest passion project is to perfect and spread the ACRUMEN Software Quality Framework, which he created. On lighter notes, he is married, is owned by two cats, and enjoys dark beers, smokey whiskies, playing guitar, and shooting targets.

Dave Stokes is a MySQL Community Manager for Oracle. He has worked for organizations ranging alphabetically from the American Heart Association to Xerox in areas ranging from anti-submarine warfare to webmaster. He lives in a small Texas town with the required hound dog and pickup truck.

I have been working on developing computational pipelines for analysis of genomic data for more than 20 years. I enjoy teaching students, and have successfully supervised more than two-dozen Ph.D. students. As well as publishing one of the first textbooks in the field (in 2006), I’ve also published more than a hundred papers that'd been cited at least 10 times – most of those papers have Ph.D. students as first authors, and I am a senior author. I have been leading a group on Comparative Genomics since 1998. My research includes several projects focused on the high-throughput analysis of hundreds and now thousands of genome sequences for bacterial pathogens, such as Escherichia coli, Salmonella and Vibrio cholera. We are currently building a database with more than two million viral genome sequences, and developing tools for rapid classification and analysis of viral genomes from metagenomic sequences. I am interested in developing ‘realtime’ methods for detecting microbial pathogens (e.g., C. difficile, or Zika virus) from clinical metagenomic samples, using third-generation sequencing technologies, such as Oxford Nanopore flow cells. Using this technology, we can sequence RNA transcripts directly, and we have recently deposited the first RNA sequence to the SRA (Sequence Read Archive – before this, the ‘RNA sequences’ were cDNA copies). We are working on sequencing microbiomes and viromes – both RNA and DNA. Preliminary results indicate that it is possible to identify bacterial pathogens and obtain full-length viral genome sequences from urine samples within less than 30 minutes, allowing for rapid clinical diagnostics. I have several collaborative projects with groups in Denmark, Norway, the UK, Germany, Belgium, and Thailand. I am also mentoring several faculty in the Department of Biomedical Informatics at UAMS.

As a member of BKD’s IT Risk Services division, Dwayne brings 25 years of experience helping companies with information technology and security issues. He primarily focuses on cybersecurity with an emphasis in computer forensics and ethical hacking. Since 1993, he has worked for public and private companies on various issues such as managing and performing vulnerability management programs, conducting penetration tests, forensics and leading cybersecurity exercises and training. He has experience with compliance activities concerning HIPAA, PCI, NIST, FISMA and a variety of compliance audits. Dwayne is a Certified Information Systems Security Professional (CISSP) and a member of ISACA®. He is a 1987 graduate of University of Arkansas at Little Rock with a B.S. degree in computer science.

Efoe find excitement in new beginnings: projects, team leadership, innovation challenges. An 11 year old veteran in the software industry, he has seen many companies try and succeed to reinvent themselves through process and technology transformation: Agility, Digitization, and now Cloud migration. He has worked in the A.I space, the Aerospace industry and more recently within IBM Big Data Division before moving to Little Rock to work for Liveramp leading a team of talented engineers, testers and DEvOps that deals with some of the hardest challenges in the Data Space

Erin is the VP of Identity Engineering at LiveRamp. With over 10 years of identity resolution experience she leads a team of creative and innovative engineers working to provide industry leading identity products that span both the online and offline channels.

📖 Felicia | name meaning "happy" 📖 pow·er·house | a person or thing of great energy, strength, or power. ​ Felicia Miller Johnson happily operates her successful business Sevenfold Coaching. She is a powerhouse presenter, coach, and author of the book, “Do you feel like a fraud? A certified life coach’s guide to help you recognize and overcome impostor syndrome”. She believes “investing in yourself leads to success”. Felicia has a Masters in Business Administration and several practitioner certifications. She combines her education and 20+ year leadership experience in the fields of higher education, military government, and non-profits into workshops and transformation coaching that inspires people to live and work happily and successfully. Felicia enjoys her sevenfold life with her husband of 20 years, their two kids, additional family, and friends.

Fred Prior, PhD, is the inaugural chair of the Department of Biomedical Informatics at UAMS. Dr. Prior served as the Electronic Radiology Laboratory director in the Mallinckrodt Institute of Radiology at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis. He is also director of the Center for High Performance Computing, which he created and supported with funding from the National Institutes of Health (NIH), as well as associate director of the Center for Biomedical Informatics and a research professor of radiology.

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James is a developer, speaker, and teacher with a passion for Web Development, Tooling, and Design. He speaks at community events, participates in Hackathons, and runs a YouTube channel called “Learn. Build. Teach.” James spent three years at Microsoft as a Technical Evangelist in New York City and Miami and is currently working at FedEx Services in Memphis as a Full-Stack Web Developer and Architect. He considers himself to be a "Social Developer" because of his love for working with people. In his spare time, he plays in weekly lunch basketball games, runs half marathons, and solves a Rubik's cube in under two minutes.

James is a visiting associate professor at Southern Arkansas University, where he teaches computer science. He has also taught at and developed curriculum for Santa Rosa Junior College in Santa Rosa, California as well as the Digital Media Institute in Shreveport, Louisiana. James also makes games. He has developed titles for LucasArts (The Force Unleashed II, Lucidity) and 2K Games (NBA 2K9, The Bureau, Mafia III). He currently consults on games and related projects under the aegis of Programming Consultants Group. James’s writing has appeared on Gamasutra.com and in AI Game Programming Wisdom, an anthology of articles relating to artificial intelligence for games. He has also written fiction and tabletop role-playing material for White Wolf and Games Workshop. James received his Master of Computer Science degree from the State University of New York at New Paltz, and a master’s degree in Interactive Technology from the Guildhall at Southern Methodist University.

Jeff Blankenburg spent the early part of his career in digital advertising, building websites for Victoria’s Secret, Abercrombie & Fitch, and Ford Motor Company, among others. He also spent 8 years at Microsoft, primarily as an evangelist for any new technology he could get his hands on. Today, he works on the Amazon Alexa team helping developers make Alexa even smarter. Jeff has also spoken at conferences all over the world, including London, Munich, Sydney, Tokyo, and New York, covering topics ranging from software development technologies to soft skill techniques. He also serves as an organizer for the Stir Trek conference.

As research faculty instructor at the UAMS Center for Health Literacy (CHL), Jennifer is actively engaged in writing grants, establishing research collaborations, and managing clinical research projects. Before joining CHL, she worked as deputy director of clinical research for a clinic in California specializing in the treatment of neuropsychiatric disorders. She has managed multiple clinical research projects, a surgical resident educational program, and an international robot-assisted laparoscopic surgical training program at the University of California Irvine (UCI). She also managed the statewide NSF-funded Louis Stokes California Alliance for Minority Participation, promoting undergraduate research for underrepresented minorities across all UC campuses. As a member of the UAMS Digital Health Working Group, she is working with a team to provide clinicians and researchers guidance in the development and use of digital health technologies, such as mobile apps, wearable biomonitors, and predictive analytics. Jennifer has an undergraduate degree in sociology and a master’s degree from the Health Care Executive MBA program at UCI’s Paul Merage School of Business.

Jeremy Dorn is Lead Architect at Education.com and author of several open source projects with millions of downloads. Jeremy first started programming on a TI-83. A few years later he discovered Geocities and has been building websites ever since. In his day job, Jeremy builds scalable systems and focuses on creating a great developer experience for the rest of the engineering team at Education.com. He lives in Austin, TX with his wife and their lazy old dog.

I have been writing software in the .Net world professionally since 2011. I have worked on a wide range of products and applications ranging from eCommerce websites to phone system call routing trees to cross-platform mobile apps for real estate agents. I love C# and learn new things about it every day. Currently I am a Application Development Team Lead at Veterans United Home Loans, the nations leading lender of VA Home Loans. In my current role I work on a wide range of products, internal and external facing, using a vast array of different technologies and platforms. I love playing sports (golf lately), working out, playing video games, and hanging out with my awesome wife and two kids.

Kevin W. Sexton, MD, is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Surgery, the Department of Biomedical Informatics, and the Department of Health Policy and Management at the University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences (UAMS). He also serves as Associate Chief Medical Informatics Officer for Innovation, Research, and Entrepreneurship at UAMS and co-directs the Division of Healthcare Analytics in the UAMS Institute for Digital Health and Innovation. Dr. Sexton’s clinical focus is general surgery and his administrative focus is on developing technologies for market. He spends 80% of his time on evaluating healthcare technologies for implementation, co-development opportunities, and novel market potential for UAMS. Dr. Sexton has received research honors from the Association of Academic Surgery, the Society of University Surgeons, and the Association of Veteran Administration Surgeons, and has a history of extramural funding from the Department of Defense, Venturewell, and other organizations. As an entrepreneur, Dr. Sexton helped create the technology for CredenceHealth Inc which was sold to ACS (a Xerox Company) and is now being marketed as Midas + Live. Following this endeavor, he founded Medvisory, a private healthcare consulting company focused on algorithm and application creation.

Kurt Coppersmith is an Assistant Professor of Art and Design at Southern Arkansas University. He teaches courses in art foundations, game design, digital cinema and web design. Kurt previously taught at the University of Utah for over 5 years within their Entertainment Arts and Engineering program (Game Production). He has also worked in the technology industry for over 20 years, where he managed both creative and development teams for entities as large as Bosch and Dell to mid-size eCommerce companies and tech startups. Always working on multiple projects, he most recently implemented new technology and software for the newly renovated Vivint Smart Home Arena, home of the Utah Jazz.

Kurt Haas is currently Director of Business Development at Kitestring Technical Services, connecting top talent to top companies. His presentations borrow from 18 years of retail and technology insight, as Mobile/Cloud/Enterprise Architecture at both QuikTrip and Walmart, and in previous roles as public school teacher, application developer, product manager, board member, and non-profit co-founder. After two decades in technology, Kurt is still driven by his initial passion: connecting and sharing with people.​

Kylie Schleicher spends her days at VMLY&R in relentless pursuit of evolving quality assurance practices to bring maximum delivery confidence. She is responsible for the strategies and standards used to verify digital experiences, and is passionate about continuous improvement. She believes it possible to dynamically adjust and never face the exact same problem twice.

I was part of the Stack Overflow core development team for four years. I worked for more than twenty years in all kinds of cool places. I started my career at a web agency at the height of the IPO craze in 2000, doing the coolest websites ever for the world's top brands. I have been mingling with hackers at a famous security company and building trading software that powers 80% of Europe's electrical energy in the UK. I've been seen building the future of work at Toptal. In another life, I have also been a signed pro musician, a game audio engineer, and a music producer. Lately, I help companies build better development teams as a consultant for Intelligent Hack.

Developer, writer, speaker, musician, and Community Advocate, PJ is the founder of DevRelate.IO. He is known to travel the world speaking about programming and the way people think and interact. He is also known for wearing hats.

Rhaelene Lowther is an Associate Professor of Art: Game, Animation and Simulation Design. She worked as an environment artist for Microsoft for five years, working on one of the original XBox launch titles, Amped Snowboarding. She also worked at Sensory Sweep Software working on Nintendo DS games for about 5 years. She earned a BFA in painting from Brigham Young University and an MFA from Utah State University. She taught at the Art Institute of Salt Lake City and Utah State University before moving to Arkansas to start the Game Development program at Southern Arkansas University. She has lived in Magnolia, AR for 6 years.

I work with some of Octopus Deploy's largest customers to help them be successful in their continuous delivery efforts. I'm also active in the broader Octopus community answering questions in Slack, recording videos for our Ask Octopus series, and visiting conferences and user groups to speak about CI/CD and Octopus Deploy. Before joining the Customer Success team at Octopus, I was a developer and happy Octopus Deploy user. I've always taken an interest in improving processes and automating tasks where possible. This naturally led me to CI/CD and a several phase project to improve my team's build and deploy pipeline. By the end, we had a fully automated build and deploy process that integrated with our other tools through APIs. We even had recurring scheduled deployments to keep our test and demo environments up to date. Outside of developing and advocating, I perform comedy around Dallas, belong to two needy cats, and like to travel to new places and sample their vegan food.

I have been a software developer for 19 years now.  I have worked in various industries from advertising to voice recognition.  I love troubleshooting and problem solving.  As a team lead and senior programmer at Infinity Interactive, Inc., I do primarily C# development for web and mobile.  My passion for mobile development has driven me to found the DFW Mobile .NET User Group, found the Dev Fest Weekend conference and helped me achieve my Xamarin MVP and Microsoft MVP awards.

Sean has been the President of Tulsa .NET User Group since 2009. He's also a Cloud Architect with TokenEx. He's been programming and playing with electronics for over 20 years. He also teaches self-defense classes to kids and adults.

For over 25 years, Todd Williams has helped clients achieve business results through the accelerated delivery of business insight provided by data. Whether a legacy company with decades of mainframe/mid-range based applications and data-sets...or a newer company wholly built on the cloud, Todd has helped clients efficiently navigate the means to business value through data/API integration. Companies pay a price by hand-coding application/data integrations. Todd will explain the ROI available in the modern approach to these challenges.

Enterprise architect for J.B. Hunt with over 10 years of frontend, backend and mobile development experience. Tyler has a passion for testing, tinkering and making great software. He graduated from the University of Arkansas with a bachelors degree in Computer Science. https://www.linkedin.com/in/tylermurry/

I am a sports nerd who is trying to figure out how I can use to the power of data to win my fantasy football league.

William Autrey is an experienced software architect and engineer, with a focus on developing resilient and responsive enterprise applications. He is currently employed as a consultant at Lightbend, Inc., helping developers create stateful microservice applications using Scala, Akka, Lagom, and Play.

Since writing his first line of code at age 9, Zac has been completely fascinated with computers. Now Zac builds and scales software for one of the leading web based educational companies in the world. With experience in multiple areas of product development and delivery, Zac brings his years of learning and growing to multiple venues and events across the globe.