Speakers

We hand pick our speakers to bring you the best possible lineup with the most diverse range of expertise.

  1. Abdurrahman Qadan

    Abdurrahman Qadan

    Coaxis

    Abdurrahman Qadan is a senior iOS application developer at Coaxis who has developed more than a dozen iOS and Android apps. While at ACTV8, he worked on apps for television shos such as The New Girl, Celebrity Apprentice, and So You Think You Can Dance! He is the co-author of a forthcoming book on iOS7 development through O'Reilly.

  2. Adam DuVander

    Adam DuVander

    SendGrid

    Adam DuVander is Developer Communications Director for SendGrid. He has written for Wired and Webmonkey, and is the author of Map Scripting 101. He speaks fluent developer.

  3. Adam Roben

    Adam Roben

    GitHub

    Adam Roben is a developer at GitHub. He helped ship the first version of GitHub for Windows and now focuses on improving the tools the company uses to communicate internally. Before coming to GitHub, Adam worked at Apple on the Safari/WebKit team, touching everything from the Web Inspector and WebKit2's multiprocess architecture to Safari's Top Sites page and Safari Extensions.

  4. Albert Lee

    Albert Lee

    OTG Management

    Albert is Chief Technology Officer and Partner with OTG Management, the 2nd largest privately-held airport food and beverage in the US. He brings 20 years of technology and management experience to OTG, and is currently deploying over 7000 self-service iPads into several airports throughout North America -- the largest installation of customer-facing iPads outside of Apple's retail stores. Albert has provided executive technology leadership for large brands such as New York Magazine, SPIN Magazine and Chronicle Books. He has also served in advisory roles for early-stage companies such as Savored.com, taking companies such as this from idea to series A venture financing. In addition, Albert consults for industry publications such as CIO Magazine, NetworkWorld and Microsoft CIO Network as a subject matter expert.

  5. Ana Nelson

    Ana Nelson

    Dexy

    Ana is the creator of Dexy, a Python-based tool for powerful document and data automation. Ana is a programmer with a Ph.D. in Computational Economics who loves the Computational part more than the Economics part. She combines her programming and research interests by working with and documenting open source software. Ana's talks are creative and interdisciplinary, bringing together diverse ideas.

  6. Andy Sterland

    modern.IE

    Andy Sterland is a Program Manager in the Windows & IE Developer Tools group where he works on tooling for web developers. Currently Andy is the program manager for the inspection and debugging tools in F12 for IE11 and the inspection tool for Windows Store Apps for JavaScript in Visual Studio. Before working on a browser tools Andy worked on incubation projects like Popfly a web based mashup and game creator. In another lifetime Andy also took part in the Imagine Cup competing in the world finals in Spain ('03) and India ('06).

  7. Antony Falco

    Antony Falco

    Orchestrate.io

    Antony Falco co-founded and currently heads Orchestrate.io, a new multi-database service startup. Prior to Orchestrate, Antony founded Basho Technologies, a Cambridge NoSQL startup. He joined Akamai in early 1999 where we was VP of Product Management. He currently lives in Portland, Oregon.

  8. Caleb Thompson

    Caleb Thompson

    thoughtbot

    Caleb has been a software engineer since 2008, and has experience in x86 Assembly, Java, C++, C#, and Ruby on Rails. Since 2012, Caleb has been a Developer at thoughtbot, makers of web & mobile apps. He enjoys fine wines, craft beers, and punching comets.

  9. Cali Lewis and John P.

    Cali Lewis and John P.

    GeekBeat.TV

    The dynamic duo behind one of the world's most popular technology shows probably have more gadgets in their bags than most people will ever own! They travel the world in search of the latest tech to share with millions of followers on social media, iTunes, YouTube, and TV. You've seen them on TV channels like BBC, CNN, MSNBC, NBC, ABC, FOX and G4 Canada. They serve up millions of monthly video downloads through Discovery Chanel's Revision3 network. And they routinely light things on fire. Well at least John P. does, while Cali tries to stop him!

  10. Chad Pytel

    Chad Pytel

    thoughtbot

    Chad Pytel is founder and CEO of thoughtbot, a leading Ruby on Rails development firm and the creators of popular plugins like paperclip, factory_girl, shoulda, and well as their own products Airbrake, Trajectory, Copycopter and Radish Chad is the author of Rails AntiPatterns and Pro Active Record, and is currently at work on Backbone.js on Rails He has spoken at numerous conferences around the world. He lives in Newton, MA with his wife and two children.

  11. Chris Kelly

    Chris Kelly

    New Relic

    Chris Kelly is an amateur human and professional Rubyist. He believes that flourishing is the key to happiness, servers are an anachronism, and the person that will create SkyNet has already been born. At New Relic he is a Happiness Engineer, where they let him work on things that makes someone’s day better. His stuff lives in San Francisco where he visits it from time to time. Chris tweets occasionally, speaks often, and drinks coffee in between.

  12. Chris Lea

    Chris Lea

    Chris Lea has over a decade of experience working with programming, system administration, and performance engineering issues at large scale. He's been using Linux as his primary desktop operating system since 1997, and actually knows what all that mess in the /proc filesystem is there for. 

  13. Chris Toomey

    Chris Toomey

    thoughtbot

    Chris Toomey is a web developer at thoughtbot in Boston. He is a big fan of Vim and the general Unix philosophy of sharp focused tools. A former mechanical engineer, he recently made the switch to web dev full time. All signs point to this being a very good idea.

  14. Christian Floerkemeier

    Christian Floerkemeier

    Scandit

    Christian Floerkemeier is the CTO and co‐founder of Scandit and is responsible for Scandit's image recognition technology,software development and research road map. Before founding Scandit, Christian was the associate director of the Auto‐ID Lab at MIT and a member of the MIT research team that developed the RFID technology which is today in use in major supply chains.He also co‐founded of Fosstrak, the leading open‐source RFID software platform that implements the EPC Network specification and is used in RFID projects at Orange/France Telecom, SAP, TCS and many others. Christian has published his research in leading conferences and journals and was the technical program chair of the Internet of Things Conference in 2008 and IEEE RFID 2009 and general chair of IEEE RFID 2011. Christian received a PhD in Computer Science from ETH Zurich and a Bachelor and MEng degree in Electrical Engineering from the University of Cambridge.

  15. Delyn Simons

    Delyn Simons

    Mashery

    Delyn Simons heads up developer platform at Mashery, where she and her merry band of evangelists engage directly with Mashery’s growing network of 216,000 API key-wielding developers. Mashery’s API ecosystem also includes 175+ businesses looking to partner with developers inside and outside the walls of their companies, including Klout, ESPN, Coca-Cola, USA TODAY, Expedia, and The New York Times. Mashery offers API management, services and strategy for companies that are transforming their products into platforms. Prior to Mashery, Delyn worked at eBay, CMP Media, Insero and Well Engaged/The Well.

  16. Drew Willams

    Drew Willams

    nuRevenue

    Drew is a serial marketing entrepreneur who sold one of his creations, an internet software company, to a Boston firm for eight figures. For over 30 years, he has successfully marketed everything from television to high-tech to financial services to chocolate, as head of marketing for a $10 billion company, a $100 million company, a $10 million company, and a bunch of $1 million companies. He has also been an award-winning advertising copywriter, working for and with some of the largest advertising agencies in the world.

  17. Elliott Garcea and Emir Hasanbegovic

    Elliott Garcea and Emir Hasanbegovic

    Xtreme Labs

    As a Lead Engineer at Xtreme Labs, Elliott oversees the mobile development for some of the world’s most important brands. Because of the scope of projects he is exposed to, Elliott is an expert in many programming languages. He specializes, however, writing in Objective-C and building for the iOS platform. Other programming languages Elliott is fluent in include C/C++, Java, and Python. Aside from his work on the iOS platform, Elliott has also worked on several Android projects that have help diversify his programming knowledge in just a short time thanks to pair programming at Xtreme Labs. In the past, Elliott has had the chance to work as an engineer for major corporations like Apple Inc. and Toyota Motor Manufacturing of Canada. Elliott has a degree in Computer Engineering from the University of Waterloo. Emir is an Agile Engineer for Xtreme Labs who is a key player in designing the core infrastructure that lines most of Xtreme Labs’ Android and Google TV applications. Emir was the lead of the team that launched the Aljazeera news application for Google TV, making him one of our resident Google TV development expert. He shines when working with Xtreme’s clients by helping them leverage Mobile Technology to its full potential in an effective and innovative way. Emir has a bachelor degree in computer science from the University of Toronto.

  18. Emil Anticevic

    Emil Anticevic

    Imaginary Feet

    Emil Anticevic is Co-Founder of Imaginary Feet, a web and mobile app company. Emil leads the coding and product design of the company’s several apps and services. Before founding Imaginary Feet, Emil worked as a Technology Manager at WHITTMANHART Interactive, an independent digital advertising agency and was the Lead Web Developer for Estco Medical. Emil is a graduate of American University with a degree in Computer Information Systems.

  19. Garrett Wilkin

    Garrett Wilkin

    Hacktivate

    Garrett loves bringing nerds together. Last year he founded the Maine Hacker Club, a growing group of tight knit specialists. In June he orchestrated the first ever hackathon in Bangor, Maine as part of the National Day of Civic Hacking. Since June he's been working to launch two new efforts: Hacktivate, an organization to foster hacker culture in high schools; Open Vehicle Tracker, an open source approach to fleet management initially geared toward public safety. He sees a great potential for meaningful work in finding solutions to tangible problems in our communities. He is a programmer by trade, hacker by choice.

  20. Gary Whitehill

    Gary Whitehill

    Gary is a relentless entrepreneur and driven philanthropist with a footprint on four continents; broad experience spanning entrepreneurship, M&A;, business turnarounds, and Fortune 50 board directorships. Seasoned in structuring the macro-level dynamics of entrepreneurial ecosystems, Gary has been featured in industry-leading publications such as the Harvard Business Review, Inc. and the New York Times, and delivered over 50 presentations to audiences around the World on many topical facets of entrepreneurship.

  21. Gregg Pollack

    Gregg Pollack

    Code School

    Gregg is the founder of Envy Labs, a consultancy that builds big web applications, and Code School, an online learning platform that teaches software developers new skills. Gregg also helps run Orlando's BarCamp, the Orlando Ruby Users Group, the EdTech Orlando Meetup, and the Orlando Tech Events newsletter. His newest project is Starter Studio, Orlando's first business accelerator.

  22. Herve Mischler

    Herve Mischler

    SAP

    Based in France, Hervé Mischler is Senior Visual Designer dedicated to mobile user interfaces at SAP. He was previously Creative Director at Dailymotion, were he sharpened his design and coding skills in the context of fast-growing video platform start-up. Hervé is also co-organiser of the Paris UX Book Club.

  23. Ian Murphy

    Ian Murphy

    Future Insights

    Ian is a Future Insights Product Director. He is a writer, gamer, sports enthusiast, classicist, geek and loudmouth. He somehow combines those things into usefulness as the content wonk for Future Insights.

  24. Jamie Turner

    Jamie Turner

    60secondmarketer

    Jamie Turner is an author, speaker and marketing consultant. He is also the Founder of the 60 Second Marketer, an online magazine that provides tools, tips and tutorials for marketers around the globe. Jamie is a regular guest on CNN and HLN on the topics of social media, mobile marketing and digital marketing. He consults and has worked with brands such as AT&T;, CNN, Motorola, Cartoon Network and The Coca-Cola Company. In addition to the 60 Second Marketer blog, Jamie writes for Mashable, HubSpot and Social Media Examiner. He has been profiled in the world’s best-selling marketing textbook and is the author of "How to Make Money with Social Media" and "Go Mobile" which are available online and at fine bookstores everywhere. "Go Mobile" is the #1 best-selling mobile marketing book in the United States and has been translated into Chinese, Spanish and other languages. Jamie is an in-demand keynote speaker and speaks at trade shows, events and corporations around the globe. He is known for his ability to provide relevant marketing insights in a light-hearted style that keeps audiences engaged and entertained. You can follow Jamie on Twitter @AskJamieTurner and via his blog at 60SecondMarketer.com/blog.

  25. Jason Lengstorf

    Jason Lengstorf

    Copter Labs

    Jason Lengstorf a turbogeek hailing from Portland, Oregon. He designs and develops websites using PHP, MySQL, JavaScript (jQuery), CSS, and HTML. He's written two books (PHP for Absolute Beginners [2009 Apress] and Pro PHP and jQuery [2010 Apress]), and he's written articles on development and design for Nettuts, CSS Tricks, and Smashing Magazine, among others.

  26. Jeffrey Burlin

    Jeffrey Burlin

    PwC

    Jeff Burlin is an electrical engineer by education, and technology consultant by occupation. He is currently part of the core team at PwC's Emerging Technology Lab, where he focuses his time on exploring new web technologies and understanding how they can be applied to solve enterprise-level business problems. He is also a strong advocate of agile and lean-startup principles, and believes they can be just as valuable to large companies as they are to start-ups and entrepreneurs.

  27. Jen Kramer

    Jen Kramer

    Jen Kramer

    Jen Kramer has been educating clients, colleagues, friends and graduate students about the meaning of a "quality website" for more than 12 years. She is a lynda.com author with fourteen published titles, including the popular "Up & Running with Foundation", "Up and Running with Bootstrap", and "Responsive Design with Joomla." She is currently writing her third book, "Sams Teach Yourself Bootstrap in 24 Hours", to be published by Pearson. She has written two books published by Wrox Press (a division of Wiley), "Joomla! Start to Finish: How to Plan, Execute, and Maintain Your Web Site" and "Joomla 24-Hour Trainer." She teaches in-person and online courses through the Harvard Extension School, the Community College of Vermont, the Center for Digital Imaging Arts at Boston University, and National University.

  28. Jessey White-Cinis

    Jessey White-Cinis

    Betaworks

    Jessey White-Cinis is a web developer based in New York. He is the co-founder of numerous startups such as Nubook.com and Ptagr.com, he co-founded the digital agency Stolen.la in 2003 and was a partner at Polychrome until 2012. Jessey has been active in the web design and development scene for over a decade, has written extensively on the topic of website development, and has helped to build and nurture numerous web communities over the years. When he's not working on commercial ventures, he keeps active in web-based social activism and practices Ashtanga yoga. Jessey can currently be found as a Hacker-In-Residence at Betaworks in New York City. You can tweet him at @jcinis.

  29. Joe McCann

    Joe McCann

    Mother NY

    Joe McCann is the Director of Creative Technology at Mother, an award-winning creative agency in New York City.   Joe is also a Managing Director and Partner at The Node Firm, a global collective of Node.js experts. Prior to joining Mother, Joe was the Mobile and Platform Architect for all of Product at Bazaarvoice (Nasdaq:BV), an Austin, Texas-based SaaS company enabling authentic conversations between brands and consumers through various channels, clocking in over 30 billion impressions/month. Joe also ran his own digital consultancy serving Fortune 500 companies in areas such as technical architecture to mobile application development and design. Joe is also a frog design alumnus. Joe's experience in various industries is widespread: from music and live events, to fashion, to Wall Street and even real estate, the perspective he brings to the mobile, design and software engineering industries is extremely rare and unique. Joe advises a number of technology startups and has spoken at conferences all over the world including SXSW, Dutch Mobile Conference (Amsterdam), Android Only (Stockholm),  PulsoConf (Bogota, Colombia), Morningstar Financial Developers Conference (Chicago) and many many more.

  30. John Sheehan

    John Sheehan

    Runscope

    John is a Co-founder and CEO of Runscope and API fanatic. As an early employee at Twilio, John lead the developer evangelism program and worked as a Product Manager for Developer Experience. After Twilio, John was Platform Lead at IFTTT working with API providers to create new channels. John is also the creator of RestSharp, API Changelog, API Digest, API Jobs and co-host of Traffic and Weather, an API and cloud podcast.

  31. Jonathan LeBlanc

    Jonathan LeBlanc

    PayPal

    Jonathan LeBlanc is a technology evangelist, Emmy award winning software engineer, and author of the O’Reilly book "Programming Social Applications". Specializing in user identity concepts and data mining techniques, as well as open source initiatives around social engagement, Jonathan works on the development of emerging initiatives towards building a more user-centric web.

  32. Josh Holmes

    modern.IE

    Josh Holmes is a passionate soul who gets his kicks solving problems with deep fried awesomeness. He is currently employed by Microsoft as a program manager on the Internet Explorer team. Josh is a frequent speaker and lead panelist at national and international software development conferences focusing on web technologies on the Microsoft stack such as ASP.NET, PHP, IronRuby, JavaScript and more.

  33. Josh Wagner

    Josh Wagner

    Josh is a Windows Phone Software Engineer at Microsoft.

  34. Julia Ferraioli

    Julia Ferraioli

    Google

    Julia is the Developer Advocate for the Google Cloud Platform.

  35. Junior Barrett

    Junior Barrett

    General Motors

    Junior Barrett is responsible for identifying and collaborating with key partners to develop vehicle- centric applications for GM’s recently announced flexible app framework. With a background in vehicle technology trends and user experience, Barrett recently showcased iHeart, TuneIn, Slacker and Weather Channel as examples of third-party apps embedded into GM vehicles at the 2013 Consumer Electronics Show. Barrett joined General Motors in 2000, and spent the first 10 years in various roles within the OnStar division. Most recently, he was responsible for launching the SiriusXM Travel Link service for GM vehicles in 2012. Barrett holds a Bachelor’s degree in Economics from York University in Toronto and currently lives in southeast Michigan with his wife and 2 children. In addition to his interest in technology, he is an avid golfer and car enthusiast.

  36. Kirsten Jones

    Kirsten Jones

    Kirsten Jones is an unapologetic hacker and passionate advocate for the development community. Her technical interests range from graph databases to cloud services, and her experience supporting and evangelizing REST APIs has given her a unique perspective on developer success. In her copious free time she's a gamer, fantasy reader, and all around rabble-rouser. Code samples, recipes, and philosophical musings can be found on her blog, Princess Polymath.

  37. Mark Otto

    Mark Otto

    GitHub

    Mark Otto is the creator of the popular front-end framework, Bootstrap. He currently works at GitHub as a designer on the Enterprise team. Previously he worked at Twitter on the Revenue and Web teams where he designed the first interfaces for Promoted Tweets and rewrote Twitter.com’s HTML and CSS for #NewNewTwitter. He’s been writing HTML and CSS for over 12 years, ever since learning to write code with GeoCities and Notepad, and has a penchant for open sourcing things. When he’s not busy with GitHub or Bootstrap, he spends his time playing ridiculous amounts of Halo 4.

  38. Nigel Jacob

    Nigel Jacob

    Boston's Office of New Urban Mechanics

    With an extensive background in collaborative, citizen-facing technology projects, Nigel Jacob co-founded the Office of New Urban Mechanics - a civic innovation incubator and R&D; Lab within Boston’s City Hall. Nigel also serves as Mayor Menino's advisor on emerging technologies. In both of these roles, Nigel works to develop new models of innovation for cities in the 21st century. Prior to joining the City of Boston in 2006, Nigel worked for and launched a series of technology start-ups in the Boston area. Nigel is a board member at Code For America as well as a fellow at the Center for the Advancement Public Action at Bennington College.

  39. Panel of Speakers

    Panel of Speakers

    A panel of FOWD Speakers and Partners - watch this space for announcements!

  40. Robin Christopherson

    Robin Christopherson

    AbilityNet

    After a degree in Engineering at Cambridge and working as an IT instructor for the Royal National Institute for the Blind (RNIB), Robin was a founding member of AbilityNet in 1998. Robin now manages AbilityNet’s Web Consultancy services – heading a team that is globally acclaimed as experts in accessibility auditing, disabled user testing and designing attractive websites that are both accessible and easy to use by all. Despite being blind, Robin uses a computer very effectively by relying on speech output to access the full range of mainstream software including email and the internet. He has a first-hand appreciation of the importance of good web design practice to accessibility.

  41. Russ Reeder

    Russ Reeder

    Media Temple

    Russ Reeder is president and COO of Media Temple, where he oversees the creation of the company's most innovative consumer products. With 19 years of experience in IT, including stints at Oracle and Mobil Oil, Russ is well equipped to lead Media Temple's growth in cloud solutions. Most recently, he spearheaded the acquisition of DIY site builder Virb. Russ was previously CEO of LibreDigital, a cutting edge digital platform for creating and distributing books, magazines, and newspapers to any device.

  42. Ryan Carson

    Ryan Carson

    Treehouse

    Ryan loves web tech, coffee and movies. (Is it wrong to see The Matrix seven times at the cinema?) He's got a degree in Computer Science and is passionate about connecting and encouraging people - which is why he's passionate about running events for the web community. He loves his wife and can't believe he's a dad. I'm a Father, entrepreneur and lover of movies. Founder of @carsonified and @treehouse

  43. Steve Marx

    Steve Marx

    Dropbox

    Steve Marx is a Developer Advocate for Dropbox, helping developers make better applications with the power of Dropbox’s platform. Prior to joining Dropbox, Steve founded Webscript.io and Site44, which uses Dropbox’s API to turn Dropbox folders into websites. Previously, Steve spent 10 years at Microsoft working on developer platforms and Microsoft’s cloud platform, Windows Azure.

  44. Todd Garland

    Todd Garland

    BuySellAds

    Todd Garland created and bootstrapped BuySellAds from a nights & weekends project to the Inc500 and beyond. He and the BuySellAds team are working hard to bring transparency and efficiency to the ad industry like never seen before.

  45. Tom McLeod

    Tom McLeod

    Imaginary Feet

    "Tom McLeod is Co-Founder of Imaginary Feet, a web and mobile app company. At Imaginary Feet, Tom oversees general direction of the company and its numerous successful applications and services for work and play. Under the Imaginary Feet umbrella, Tom has helped bring to market the multi million-user Frametastic, and its sister app Collagetastic. Tom graduated with a Bachelor of Science degree in Audio Technology and a minor in Computer Science from American University. Tom is also heavily involved with philanthropy, and sits on the board of the non-profits F*ck Cancer and Mama Hope."

  46. Trevor Stricker

    Trevor Stricker

    Disco Pixel

    Trevor Stricker has made games professionally for 15 years, and as a bedroom coder for 15 years before that. His console titles include NBA 2K and Panzer Dragoon Orta and have been on every console since the Dreamcast. His last game was online sports destination Quickhit NFL Football. Currently he runs indie developer Disco Pixel making mobile rhythm game Jungle Rumble.

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