William Kennedy is a managing partner at Ardan Studio in Miami, Florida, a mobile, web, and systems development company. He is also a co-author of the book Go in Action, the author of the blog GoingGo.Net, and a founding member of GoBridge which is working to increase Go adoption through diversity. https://github.com/ardanlabs/gotraining#william-kennedy-goinggodotnet

Blog: GoingGo.Net

Kevin is a Distinguished Engineer with Critical Stack, a secure container scheduling platform for the enterprise. He has been building software for the past 30 years, and is the author of "Programming WebAssembly with Rust" as well as 18 other technical books and 2 fantasy novels. He eats, sleeps, and breathes distributed systems and cloud native application development.

Carmen leads the Open Source Strategy team for Go at Google. She spends lots of time thinking about sociotechnical systems, the evolution of programming languages, and conceptual frameworks of just about anything. Prior to joining Google, She worked as an Infrastructure Engineer for Travis CI, wrangling vms and containers to many clouds in Go, Ruby, Bash, and a whole lot of YAML. She has worked in Ops in various other companies, but started her tech career at a nearby SUNY as a systems integration programmer and windows sysadmin. Ask her about her previous career lives (including a stint at a heavy metal radio station!) and Teach for America. If you really want to get her attention, ask her about her masters coursework in Autism Spectrum Disorders, and the Notre Dame Fighting Irish.

Jedidiah Stewart is a Senior Consultant/Architecture at Troy Web Consulting. An accomplished software developer who has been designing, authoring and implementing modern technological solutions in and out of the cloud for nearly two decades. Extensive experience in the full life cycle of software (requirements definition, prototyping, proof of concept, design, interface implementation, testing and maintenance) in an enterprise environment.

Joe Iaquinto is a .NET Developer at Troy Web Consulting. Joe is a software developer and RPI alumnus. He has several years experience in desktop and web application development and design, primarily with WPF and ASP.NET. He is passionate about designing and developing Robotic Process Automation solutions that not only save businesses time and money, but also free employees from the work that they dread.

Megan O'Keefe is a Developer Programs Engineer at Google Cloud, where she works on building end-user experiences for Kubernetes, Istio, and all things containers. A graduate of Wellesley College, her past experience includes building edge computing platforms at Cisco. She is passionate about hybrid cloud, open source, and inclusion in technology.

Scott is a co-founder of several programs within the Flutter Community organization, owner of the Flutter Community public Slack and creator of the weekly, remote office hours for Flutter, #HumpDayQandA.

He’s spoken at groups and events throughout the United States, as well as in the United Kingdom, and is available to speak both nationally and internationally.

He’s also the organizer of GDG Cleveland, the real mastermind behind Brain’s Ultimate Plan for World Domination, and a consumer of entirely too much overpriced airport pizza. In his spare time, he enjoys making (or trying to make) his own VR apps for Google Daydream and finding new ways to make nummy things and thoroughly trash the kitchen.

Benjamin is a Software developer at CACI in Rome, NY. He’s a web developer that has contributed to open source projects maintained by Microsoft, Gatsby, GitHub, Netlify and others. He helps both in his local community with developer meetup groups in Central New York as well as across the globe through online mentoring and part of the live coding community on Twitch.

Kirk Bater is a Dev/Ops professional with over 14 years of personal and professional experience in the field. When Kirk isn't developing software, you can find him writing or talking about software, making big pieces of wood into little pieces of wood in his garage shop, or training for his next triathlon.

Jonathan is the Lead DevOps Engineer at Jahnel Group for a team that serves multiple apps to 20+ states. In his free time he likes golfing with the guys, snowboarding, and keeping it country.

Linda is a software architect at Nuvalence. She specializes in helping large organizations architect, build, and implement digital products and platforms using cloud technologies. Her experience revolves around large scale distributed platforms, software quality, and massive data ingestion.

Victor Dibia is a Research Engineer with Cloudera’s Fast Forward Labs where his work focuses on prototyping state of the art machine learning algorithms and advising clients. He currently serves as a Google Developer Expert for Machine Learning. Prior to this, he was a Research Staff Member at the IBM TJ Watson Research Center, New York. His research interests are at the intersection of human computer interaction, computational social science, and applied AI. He holds an M.S. from Carnegie Mellon University and a Ph.D. from City University of Hong Kong.

Yulia Ovchinnikova, President and Founder of Open Hub, is a Russian-born American who holds a Master’s degree in Computer Science and Applied Mathematics, as well as a PhD in Economics. She is an educator, entrepreneur, and community leader for the Hudson Valley tech community. As a connector and entrepreneur, Dr. Ovchinnikova knows technology can help solve problems and transform business. As a passionate advocate of collaboration and coworking, she engages people to promote partnership and coordinates projects to foster business growth. She founded Open Hub as a community development initiative, introducing a Technology-Driven Economic Development approach.

Yulia was the first women at the Top Level Country Internet Domain .RU Council and the first women elected to be the Russian Foundation of Open Source Softwarepresident. Started as a web-developer in 1995, she was leading development teams across all her following jobs, including publishing platform (IKS-Media), consulting (KPMG), few startups (Rosa Lab and iTrend), As a team lead, she won a Google Hackathon’s audience award in 2015.

Walt received his Bachelor’s degree in Electrical Engineering from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and his Master’s degree in Computer Science from Union College.

He served for several years in the US Navy and Navy Reserve before being honorably discharged as a Lieutenant Commander.

For the last 18 years, he has been involved in submarine propulsion development; originally working at Bechtel Plant Machinery, Inc. and then at the Naval Nuclear Laboratory, where he is currently an engineering manager.

Walt is a huge advocate of science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) education. As a result, he founded and is the President of the 501(c)(3) non-profit organization, Schoharie Mohawk Initiative for Science and Technology. The organization’s mission is to encourage students to pursue opportunities in STEM by identifying, developing, delivering and supporting STEM initiatives for communities in the Schoharie and Mohawk regions.

Pilot, Musician, Full Stack Developer, Tennis Player:

Will Guisbond is a High School senior at Jamesville-Dewitt, and currently live in Syracuse, NY. At Hack Upstate, he is an Operations Intern who helps to manage, organize and plan multiple hackathons. He also assists in the execution of Careers in Code, a 24-week coding bootcamp aimed at women and minority groups coming from poverty within Syracuse. In addition, he is an Assistant Teacher at Tech4Kidz, an avid tennis player, and a licensed student pilot.

His day to day usually consists of too much homework. Otherwise, in his free time, he loves to help build a thriving tech community and to empower young developers.

Annmarie holds a Bachelor of Science in Electronic Art Media and Communication and a Master of Fine Arts in Integrated Electronic Arts from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute.

In 2008, Annmarie co-founded Greane Tree Technology, a New York State Certified Women Owned Business Enterprise (WBE).

In 2016, Annmarie founded AlbanyCanCode, an organization dedicated to helping talented local people from all backgrounds find pathways to employment in the regional technology sector. She serves on the boards of AlbanyCanCode, WMHT and the Capitol Region Chamber.

In 2012, Annmarie was selected by Albany Business Review as one of the 40 Under Forty and as one of the six Women Who Mean Business. In 2015, the Capital District Women’s Employment and Resource Center honored Annmarie with the Harriet Rifkin Award for “her work in creating opportunities for women to achieve personal and financial independence.” Annmarie was named a New York State Woman of Distinction by Senator Neil Breslin in 2016. In 2018, Annmarie was honored as a Technology Disrupter by the Albany Business Review and as Entrepreneur of the Year by NYS Empire State Development.

Linda was born in Romania. She started programming in Basic when she was in elementary school and make her way up to Computer Science College with other programming languages. In High School, she started to work as a journalist in Radio and TV for 6 years. After 2 years of Computer Science College, she moved in Italy where she lived for 13 years, working as Translator, Web Developer, Web and Graphic Designer over the years and as Journalist for a monthly magazine for 6 years. Her teenager dream to move to the USA finally came true in 2013, shortly after she started to volunteer as an IT and translator for Refugee Center and worked as Web Developer, Web, and Graphic Designer for a Corporation. She became US citizen in 2018 and started her career as Remote Freelancer Full Stack Developer. In 2017 she joined the GDG of Capital Region where she falls in love with Flutter, Google’s mobile app SDK for building iOS and Android apps from a single codebase. In 2019 she was nominated Women Techmakers Ambassador, #IamRemarkable Ambassador and Google Developer Lead for Capital Region and started to involve more women in GDG coding events and meetups. She started to lead a monthly GDG Meetup on Flutter with hands-on Codelab, IWD celebration event, #IamRemarkable Workshops and DevFest. In 2019 she received the Full Stack Developer Honorary Diploma from Careers in Code Bootcamp - Hack Upstate.