Prof. Dr. Maja Göpel is a political economist, transformation researcher, and sustainability scientist. As the founder of Mission Wertvoll and Managing Director of Global Eco Transition gGmbH, she works at the intersection of economy, politics, and society to drive socio-ecological transformation. She previously served as the Secretary-General of the German Advisory Council on Global Change (WBGU) and was a founding member of the Scientists for Future network.

A bestselling author of works such as "Rethinking Our World," Maja is a sought-after speaker known for translating complex scientific insights into actionable societal dialogue. Her work focuses on systemic innovation, future skills, and new prosperity models, emphasizing the need for a paradigm shift to create a sustainable and equitable future.

Randy Shoup is a Silicon Valley veteran with over 30 years of experience building distributed systems and high-performing engineering organizations. Currently the SVP Engineering at Thrive Market, he focuses on scaling technology infrastructures and increasing engineering productivity through DevOps and evolutionary architecture.

Throughout his career, Randy has held executive roles at eBay, Google, and Stitch Fix. He is a frequent keynote speaker and advisor to CTOs, particularly interested in the intersection of people, culture, and technology. Randy is known for sharing practical insights on large-scale systems and the power of simplicity in architecture.

Gregor Hohpe is a globally recognized expert in IT strategy and enterprise architecture. Having served as a Technical Director in Google Cloud’s Office of the CTO and a Director of Enterprise Strategy at AWS, he now advises technology leaders on connecting corporate strategy with technical implementation.

Gregor is the co-author of the seminal book "Enterprise Integration Patterns" and author of "The Software Architect Elevator." He is famous for his "Architect Elevator" concept, which encourages architects to move seamlessly between the "engine room" of IT and the executive "penthouse" to drive meaningful digital transformation.

Neal is an independent software consultant, best-selling author, and international speaker. He is an internationally recognized expert on software development and delivery, especially in the intersection of agile engineering techniques and software architecture. Neal has authored magazine articles, nine books (and counting), dozens of video presentations, and spoken at hundreds of developers conferences worldwide. His topics include software architecture, continuous delivery, functional programming, cutting edge software engineering, and includes a business-focused book and video on improving technical presentations. He is an innovator in building concrete verification mechanisms for software architecture, for humans or agents. Check out his web site at nealford.com.

Cat Swetel is a technology leader and engineering manager with a profound interest in how digital transformation can foster generative and equitable institutions. Currently serving as Director of Engineering at Nubank, she oversees foundational infrastructure and tooling, ranging from CI/CD and runtime environments to mobile application platforms.

Cat is a frequent speaker at global conferences, known for her expertise in Lean-Agile principles, Wardley Mapping, and socio-technical systems. Beyond her corporate role, she is pursuing a master’s degree in Science and Technology Policy and is dedicated to increasing diversity in STEAM to create a more resilient and inclusive human future.

Diana Montalion is a software engineer, systems architect, author, and speaker working at the intersection of technology architecture and organizational intelligence. For over 20 years, she has designed complex systems for organizations including The Economist, Wikimedia Foundation, Stanford, and startups. She is the author of Learning Systems Thinking (O’Reilly) and the creator of Knowledge Flow, a body of work focused on how systems learn — or fail to — through the flow of knowledge across people and technology. She currently leads architectural strategy at The Athletic, shaping a platform designed to turn sports data, content, and fan interaction into real-time intelligence.

Vlad Khononov is a software architect with extensive industry experience, working for companies large and small in roles ranging from webmaster to chief architect. In 2021, Vlad authored Learning Domain-Driven Design, followed by the publication of his second book, Balancing Coupling in Software Design, in 2024. Currently, Vlad helps companies to make sense of their business domains, untangle monoliths, and tackle complex architectural challenges. He is also a public speaker, presenting on topics such as domain-driven design, distributed systems, software architecture, and how these disciplines evolve in the brave new world of AI-assisted software engineering.

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.

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.

Gertrud is the CTO of Scout24 and a member of the Executive Leadership Team. She is responsible for the company’s technology strategy and leads its AI transformation, helping to build innovative, data-driven products and a strong engineering culture. Before joining Scout24, she served as CTO at eyeo, where she led the development of products including Adblock Plus, one of the world’s most widely used browser extensions. Earlier in her career, she held several leadership positions at Axel Springer, including CTO of BILD and Welt, and was part of the team that established Axel Springer National Media & Tech. Gertrud started her career in retail software development, working as a software developer and project manager for national and international clients.

Kevlin Henney is a independent consultant, trainer, technologist, writer and renowned keynote speaker known for his work helping organisations, teams and individuals with their software development practices, processes, architectures and the human side of development. With a career spanning decades, he has become one of the most respected voices in the global developer community, known for his deep insights into code quality and agile processes. A frequent keynote speaker at major international conferences, Kevlin is celebrated for his ability to challenge industry dogmas and his advocacy for 'lean code'. He is a contributor to the Modern Software Engineering YouTube channel, co-author of two volumes in the Pattern-Oriented Software Architecture series, editor of 97 Things Every Programmer Should Know, co-editor of 97 Things Every Java Programmer Should Know, and has written for many other publications, including O'Reilly Radar and The Register.

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).

Daniel Terhorst-North invented [Behaviour-Driven Development](/introducing-bdd), co-invented the [build pipeline](https://www.academia.edu/6158670/The_Deployment_Production_Line), and pioneered many of the [Continuous Delivery](https://continuousdelivery.com) practices that software teams now take for granted. These were born out of necessity, on real projects, which is why the ideas stuck. In his thirty-five year career, Daniel has moved from programmer to technical leader to trusted CxO adviser, bridging the worlds of technology and business operations. Since 2012, he has been an independent consultant to organizations from start-ups to household names. A popular keynote speaker at major technology and business conferences worldwide, he has contributed to *The RSpec Book* and *97 Things Every Programmer Should Know*, and blogs at [https://dannorth.net/blog](/blog).

Author of Architecture Modernization (Manning), Curator of legacy-modernization.io and software engineer at PayFit

Emily Bache is an independent consultant, YouTuber and Technical Coach. She works with developers, training and coaching effective agile practices like Refactoring and Test-Driven Development. Emily has written two books about software development and contributed to several others. Emily founded the Samman Technical Coaching Society in order to promote technical excellence and support coaches everywhere.

Russ Miles is on a mission, as an Author, Listener, Speaker and Developer to help people thrive in one of the harshest, and potentially impactful, working environments: software system engineering with AI. As an expert in Platform, Agentic, Chaos & Resilience, and Software Engineering, Russ helps people navigate the complicated and complex to succeed in software through his talks, workshops, consultancy, books, mentorship, open source contributions, his Software Enchiridion blog https://www.softwareenchiridion.com and his daily work. Russ can be reached in email at russ@russmiles.com, at russmiles.com, or on LinkedIn at https://www.linkedin.com/in/russmiles/

Susanne Kaiser ist eine unabhängige Technologieberaterin und ehemalige Startup-CTO mit über 20 Jahren Erfahrung in der Softwareentwicklung und Architektur. Sie ist spezialisiert auf den Aufbau adaptiver soziotechnischer Systeme, die für einen schnellen "Flow of Change" optimiert sind.

Susanne ist eine führende Expertin für die Verknüpfung von Wardley Mapping, Domain-Driven Design (DDD) und Team Topologies. Sie ist die Autorin des Buches "Architecture for Flow" (2025), in dem sie ihren ganzheitlichen Ansatz beschreibt, um Geschäftsstrategie, Softwaredesign und Teamorganisation aufeinander abzustimmen, Komplexität zu reduzieren und die organisatorische Agilität nachhaltig zu steigern.

Dex is currently focused on building AI coding agents that can tackle complex problems in large codebases at HumanLayer. His talk "No Vibes Allowed" from the AIE Code Summit in NYC is in the top-5 most watched AI Engineer videos of all time. He also worked on APIs for agent orchestration and human-in-the-loop systems, and authored the April 2025 essay “12 Factor Agents,” coining the term “Context Engineering.” He has been coding since high school, when he built tools for NASA researchers to navigate the Moon’s south pole, and is an enjoyer of tacos and burpees—though not necessarily in that order.

Tudor Gîrba is the CEO of feenk and a self-styled "software environmentalist" dedicated to making the inside of software systems explainable. With over 20 years of experience, he is the co-inventor of Moldable Development, a paradigm that transforms programming by building custom tools for every development problem.

Tudor leads the team behind the Glamorous Toolkit, an open-source IDE designed to visualize and assess complex systems. A frequent speaker and researcher, he focuses on "humane assessment," helping engineering teams reduce the massive effort typically spent on understanding code so they can make better technical decisions and steer agile architectures.

Daniel Jones (Deejay to his friends!) started his career as a developer, and has since co-founded, grown and sold cloud native businesses. He's keynoted several tech conferences, appeared in Kerrang! magazine, won national martial arts competitions, and was filmed for Grand Designs. He currently works with re:cinq helping organisations with AI Native transformation, specialising in agentic coding and software factories.