Andreas Rossberg is an independent researcher and engineer. By a few twists of fate, he became one of the designers of WebAssembly, author of its formalisation and specification, and champion of various proposals for enhancements. For a while, he was a Staff Software Engineer at Google, where he worked on V8, the JavaScript/Wasm virtual machine, and led V8's language feature team. Before his time in industry he was a post-doc researcher at the Max Planck Institute for Software Systems after receiving a Dr from Saarland University. His research interests mainly revolve around programming languages, ranging from foundational theory, over design, to implementation, as long as they aren't ugly.

Gergely is a product engineering leader and coach with deep experience in building and scaling engineering organizations. He is a former VP of Engineering at Bitrise and Ustream, and has worked across engineering leadership, product development, organizational design, culture, change management, and coaching. He focuses on helping teams build better systems, improve collaboration, and create environments where people can grow and do their best work. He combines leadership experience with strong technical depth, including hands-on software engineering, architecture, developer tooling, and building systems used at significant scale.

Gitte Klitgaard is an agile coach, trainer, advisor and mentor solving problems in organisations. She uses strategy, accountability and responsibilty, collaboration, psychological safety, communication, setting good engineering practice, and what ever else is needed. She works with teams, leaders, and individuals on all organisational level. Gitte is authentic, she will cut to the chase, and help people become themselves thereby reaching success.

Gitte knows how combining human skills with good leadership skills is a necessity for an organisation to get stuff done. And getting the right stuff done. Her ability to align the individual well-being and growth together with company objectives is remarkable. One of Gitte’s key strengths is holding people accountable while fostering psychological safety.

Gitte has given talks and keynots at three continents, where she highlights and makes topics like mental health and psychological safety accessible. Other topics include courage, retrospectives, various agile topics, leadership, management, and her personal goal: bringing humanity back in the workplace.

Her community contributions include organizing coach camps for over a decade and actively engaging on social media. She creates safe and respectful environments at work and outside. She listens to and engages the more silent voices and minority groups. Gitte also contributes to the community by writing blogpost and on Bluesky as she shifted away from Twitter. She wrote a section about team safety in "The Art of Agile Development, 2. edition" by James Shore which was published in 2021.

In her spare time, Gitte collects LEGO and Yodas and keeps in touch with friends from all over the globe including some, she considers her second family.

Gitte is owner of Native Wired and has lead change at companies like IBM, LEGO, Spotify, and SVT.

Luca is the founder of Refactoring.fm — a newsletter and community about running better engineering teams, that goes out weekly to more than 170,000 engineers and managers. He has written 300+ articles, and the Refactoring community includes some of the brightest minds in the industry. Before Refactoring, Luca has been Head of Engineering at Translated.com, and co-founder and CTO of Wanderio, where he grew the product from 0 to 25M customers.

Prof. Dr. Maja Göpel is a political economist and an influential voice for the sustainable transformation of society, working at the intersection of economy, politics, and society. The policy advisor, bestselling author, and sought-after speaker is a professor for sustainability transformation at Leuphana University Lüneburg and founder of “Mission Wertvoll“. She was Director of Research at The New Institute and Secretary-General of the German Advisory Council on Global Change (WBGU). Before that, she headed the Berlin office of the Wuppertal Institute for Climate, Environment, Energy, after having helped set up the World Future Council for six years as Director Future Justice at the Brussels office and as Campaign Manager Climate Energy in Hamburg. Maja Göpel is a member of the Club of Rome, the World Future Council, the Balaton Group, and a co-initiator of the “Scientists for Future” network. She was a member of the Bioeconomy Council of the German Federal Government. Her work has been recognized with multiple awards in Germany, the most recent ones being the Honorary Award of the German Sustainability Award, the myself Award, and the Science Communication Medal.

Michael Feathers is the founder of Research & Conveyance, where he focuses on software and organizational design. He has advised hundreds of organizations on software architecture, design, process change, and the evolution of long-lived systems. Michael is the author of the influential book Working Effectively with Legacy Code and a frequent speaker at international software conferences.

Prof Dr Wilhelm (Willi) Hasselbring holds the Chair of Software Engineering at Kiel University, Germany. He is interested in various areas of software engineering, distributed systems, software architecture, and software performance. Within the German Association of Computer Science (GI), Prof Hasselbring is spokesperson of the Special Interest Group on Software Engineering since 2007, and deputy spokesperson of the Special Interest Group on Research Software Engineering, which he co-founded in 2023. Prof Hasselbring is also an adjunct professor at the School of Electronics & Computer Science, University of Southampton, UK.

Torsten Grust is a professor of Computer Science at Universität Tübingen, Germany, where he leads the Database Systems research group since 2008. Torsten performs research into the design, compilation, optimization, and evaluation of a variety of database languages. In this work, he often walks the fine line between database query and programming language technology. His group develops techniques that turn relational database systems into scalable processors also for non-relational query and programming languages. Torsten is at his happiest whenever he finds new evidence that database and programming language research can mutually benefit each other.

Sam Newman is an independent consultant who loves solving problems with technology. Focusing primarily in the areas of cloud, microservice architecture and continuous delivery, Sam works with companies big and small all over the world. He is also an experienced conference speaker, and author of the O’Reilly books Monolith To Microservices, Building Microservices, and the forthcoming Building Resilient Distributed Systems.

Prof. Dr. Sebastian Vollmer is Professor of Applied Machine Learning at the RPTU Kaiserslautern-Landau and heads the Data Science and its Applications department at the DFKI (German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence). Previously, he conducted research at the University of Oxford and the Alan Turing Institute. Today, he develops agentic AI systems such as BioDisco, which combines knowledge graphs and large language models (LLMs) to enable autonomous hypothesis generation.

Susanne Kaiser is an independent tech consultant and former startup CTO with over 20 years of experience in software engineering and software architecture. She works with organizations on building adaptive, socio-technical systems by combining Wardley Mapping, Domain-Driven Design, and Team Topologies into a holistic approach. Susanne is the author of the book "Architecture for Flow” (Addison-Wesley Signature Series (Vernon), 2025).

Timo Dufner explores the boundaries of sound, image and computation. Working with real-time audiovisual synthesis, live coding, machine learning and experimental hardware, he develops open systems that generate evolving audiovisual experiences. Glitches, feedback loops and unexpected machine behaviors become creative agents, shaping performances that emerge through the interplay of performer, audience and autonomous digital processes.

Tomasz Maj began his journey in product development over 15 years ago, long before "scaling" became a buzzword. Having spent nearly a decade in strategic consulting, he’s navigated the complexities of organizational change across four continents—seeing the good, the bad, and the truly ugly of digital transformation. Along the way, he’s managed to build a formidable sneaker collection, survive the chaos of raising three kids in the Warsaw suburbs, and likely spent more time with Lego bricks than most professional architects. He currently serves as Head of Vibe Coding at Odevo, where he specializes in bridging the gap between tech and product to build high-performing global PropTech solutions.

Tudor Girba is the CEO of feenk, a company focused on helping organizations leverage their legacy systems. They solve the largest bottleneck, the code reading problem, through Moldable Development, a way of programming through thousands of contextual tools. They build Glamorous Toolkit, a free and open-source moldable development environment to help humans make sense of systems and AI.

Yulia Startsev is a programmer on the SpiderMonkey compiler at Mozilla. She served as a chair for Ecma's TC39, the committee responsible for design and development of the JavaScript language. She initiated and co-facilitates the TC39 research group, which evaluates and applies recent academic research to the development of language features. She is a co-chair of PLSS, a workshop dedicated to exploring scientific research in programming language design and specification. Her work focuses on bringing evidence-based reasoning to technical decision making in language communities.

Aino Corry, author of "Retrospectives Antipatterns", is a teacher, a technical conference editor and retrospectives facilitator. She holds a masters degree and a ph.d. in computer science. She has 12 years of experience with Patterns in Software Development, and 25 years of experience with agile processes in academia and industry (in other words; she is old). She also teaches how to teach Computer Science to teachers, and thus lives up to the name of her company; Metadeveloper. In her spare time, she runs and sings (but not at the same time).

Annette is a professor of Software Technology at the RPTU University Kaiserslautern-Landau. Her research interests include the semantics of concurrent and distributed programming, focusing on replication strategies and synchronization techniques. She is passionate about CRDTs, local-first software, programming languages, verification, and teaching students about all aspects of programming.

Artie Shevchenko is the author of Code Health Guardian. A former Google software engineer and startup founder, he is currently a software engineer at Canva and a lecturer at ITMO University. Artie draws on broad industry experience spanning over 15 years to inform his pragmatic approach to code health. His career includes leadership and technical roles—as a CEO, engineering manager, and software engineer—in tech giants like Google and Canva as well as medium-sized companies and agile startups.

Cat Swetel is a General Manager and Senior Director of Engineering at Nubank. Her scope includes much of Nubank's infrastructure and tooling: cloud and regulatory infrastructure, transactional runtime environment, observability, resilience, storage, databases, incident response, supported programming languages, etc. Cat holds a bachelor’s degree in global management and finance and a master’s degree in science and technology policy. In her spare time, she enjoys cooking, hiking, and yoga.