LATEESHA THOMAS is a conference organizer and speaker, occasional web developer, and workplace diversity & inclusion advocate. She left her role managing global partnerships for Google's Women Techmakers initiative to co-found Onramp, a venture-backed startup that helps companies integrate upskilling into the recruiting process to expand their pipeline of engineering talent. Prior to Google, she was the Director of Strategic Partnerships and Business Development at Dev Bootcamp, where she developed programs and products aimed at fostering a transparent, inclusive, equitable and empathetic culture in technology.

PATRICK EWING is a college dropout with a found his start as a computer programmer while working at (but never attending) Simon’s Rock. His unusual career path was shaped by a lifelong love of learning, a pretty intense learning disability, and a gradual discovery of what learning styles worked for him. At Simon’s Rock, he got his start as an autodidact by learning from some very generous, brilliant and kind people in the IT department, and after a few years coding for tiny startup companies and learning along the way, he somehow managed to get hired as one of the first 20 software engineers at Twitter. He later moved onto coding and designing video games like Firewatch, and then starting his own company to create the game Neo Cab about the last human gig worker in a cyberpunk dystopia. Lately he’s been working as a product designer at Netflix, making interactive television experiences.

SCOTT SHENKER spent his academic youth studying theoretical physics but soon gave up chaos theory for computer science. Continuing to display a remarkably short attention span, his research over the years has wandered from performance modeling and networking to game theory and economics. Unable to focus on any single topic, his current research projects include software-defined networking, network function virtualization, network algorithms and protocols, cluster programming models, and Internet architecture. Unable to hold a steady job, he currently splits his time between the UC Berkeley Computer Science Division and the International Computer Science Institute.

SHANNA GREGORY (she/her) is the Global Leadership Director at Women Who Code, a global non-profit dedicated to inspiring women to excel in technology careers. She enjoys working at the intersection of volunteering, technology, community, and inclusion. Her previous roles include launching the Grace Hopper Program, a deferred tuition web development bootcamp for women+, and product manager (and unofficial recipe tester) at America’s Test Kitchen. After moving across the country three times in ten years, Shanna is currently based in Massachusetts.