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).

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.

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.

Charles helps teams produce better software for their users and is always exploring new approaches across DDD, architecture, agile, product management, and lean.

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.

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).

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Henning loves programming in high quality. He lives this passion as coder, coach, and consultant at WPS – Workplace Solutions. There he helps teams to structure their monoliths or to build new systems from the beginning with a sustainable architecture. Microservices or self-contained systems are often the result. Henning is author of *Domain Storytelling* (Addison-Wesley, 2022), *Domain-Driven Transformation* (O’Reilly, 2026), and the www.LeasingNinja.io.

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.

Lars is an Evangelist at Giesecke+Devrient, a security technology company. An engineer at heart, they are working to bring modern financial services to people. Lars writes articles and talks about a multitude of topics.

LAURA WINTERLING – Physicist, Helicopter Pilot and Flight Instructor, former Astronaut Instructor

Laura holds a M.Sc. in Physics & an M.Sc. in Behavioural and Organizational Psychology.

Laura is a licensed astronaut instructor on cargo handling, life support systems and emergency procedures on board the ISS. She had been working for almost 10 years for the European Space Agency. She wrote an on-console handbook for ISS Mission Control Center of Europe and trained 80 different international and European astronauts on ESAs spacecraft systems for ISS modules.

During her time at ESA Laura has worked in NASA Johnson Space Center in Houston, and the Gagarin Cosmonaut Center in Moscow. Laura has had the opportunity to be part of 3 Soyuz launch campaigns in Kazakhstan and has undergone Zero-G (Parabolic Flight Experience) and Human Behaviour and Performance Training with ESA.

She founded her company Space Time Concepts in 2016. Laura is a well-known speaker and shares her passion, insights and experiences from training astronauts and human spaceflight with audiences all around the world. She consults various companies in leadership, team performance, communication and decision making processes. Laura has worked with several notable companies in the tech, banking and insurance field all around the globe, e.g. MG, Mastercard, SpaceX, Tesla, SAP, Siemens, Accenture, Deloitte, Generali and more.

Laura is a licensed rescue diver, skydiver and helicopter pilot and helicopter flight instructor. In her free-time she also works as a paramedic assistant. Laura has taken part in the current ESA Astronaut Selection and made it under the top 2% of 23.000 applicants and last 30 Germans.

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.

Michael works as an independent tech consultant with 20+ years of experience specialized in Domain Driven Design, Team Topologies, Software Architecture and Collaborative Modeling. He is a regular speaker at international conferences and an author. Michael is also an INNOQ Fellow and Team Topologies Advocate.

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.

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

Nico Martin is a Machine Learning Engineer with focus on WebML at 🤗 Hugging Face and Google Developer Expert in AI and Web Technologies from Switzerland.

He specializes in making AI accessible through web browsers, developing tools that simplify ML integration for developers. Nico actively shares his expertise through workshops, articles, and conference presentations, bridging the gap between web development and machine learning communities.

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.

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.

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/

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.

With a background in genetics, a love for mathematics, and a deep fascination with economics, Simon brings a unique lens to understanding complex systems from behavioural patterns to tech infrastructure and everything in between.

- Former CEO
- Advisor to multiple startups
- Fellow of Open Europe
- Twice voted one of the Top 50 Most Influential People in tech in the UK

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).

Tim is a long time developer who has also doubled as a coach, consultant, author, speaker, and amateur musician. He is one of the authors of Clean Code, co-author of Agile In A Flash, formulated the FIRST unit testing properties with Brett Schuchert, and has worked as a developer in embedded systems, business systems, and just about anything else you can imagine since 1979. These days he's really into flow and peculiar arms of agentic development.

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.

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.

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.

Adriaan is Co-Founder & CTO at anny and passionate talking about Cloud, DevOps culture and privacy protection.

An Dang is an experienced AI Consultant, Keynote Speaker and Innovation‑Enabler with over five years of expertise in Data and AI. Based in Stuttgart, Germany, he currently works as an Expert AI Engineer at Lufthansa Industry Solutions. In this role he supports customers from initial MVPs to scalable production solutions and drives innovation topics to shape future‑oriented AI capabilities. He ensures a seamless customer experience throughout the journey from ideation through MVP to full deployment. His focus lies in enabling organizations to harness the fullpotential of AI and Generative AI technologies in real‑world use cases. He is also involved with the Social Developers Club, the international network for developers and tech enthusiasts.

My background is particle physics, where I was completely spoiled by access to large amounts of data and the freedom to try out every hot ML algorithm on it. Afterwards I was working as Data Scientist in various fields and recently became “Solution Architect ML/AI and BI” at big enterprise company.

My experience has also been very helpful in guiding data analysts and machine learning engineers as a mentor and contributing to the growth of the next generation of data scientist elite.

András Bocsák is a Product Manager at BSH Hausgeräte GmbH with a focus on conversational AI and production-grade AI systems. Over the past nine years, he has led digital product initiatives across the Home Connect ecosystem. Today, he works on AI Assist, the customer-facing AI assistant in the Home Connect app, where he helps define testing and evaluation strategies for large language model applications. His areas of interest include AI quality assurance, automated evaluations, observability, LLM judges, and continuous improvement of customer-facing AI systems. He is passionate about turning emerging technologies into products that deliver practical value at scale.

Hi, I am Andreas! Fullstack Frontend Backend Webdeveloper (+10 years), SaaS owner and I do workshops and seminars about AI, Automation & Webdevelopment. Passion for AI, Automation & Fullstack (Vue JS, Laravel).

András Bocsák is a Product Manager at BSH Hausgeräte GmbH with a focus on conversational AI and production-grade AI systems. Over the past nine years, he has led digital product initiatives across the Home Connect ecosystem. Today, he works on AI Assist, the customer-facing AI assistant in the Home Connect app, where he helps define testing and evaluation strategies for large language model applications. His areas of interest include AI quality assurance, automated evaluations, observability, LLM judges, and continuous improvement of customer-facing AI systems. He is passionate about turning emerging technologies into products that deliver practical value at scale.

André spent 25 years leading international sales for a large media corporation. When a company takeover made his position redundant three years ago, he briefly considered having a midlife crisis. But then he settled for a more sensible alternative and became a stand-up comedian. He has since performed more than 350 gigs across Germany, in German and English — reciting his own material, but also warming up the room, introducing other acts, and working the crowd as MC. He's not a developer, but after 25 years of asking engineering teams whether it could be done by Friday, he understands your pain better than he should. At code.talks 2026, André hosts the Mainstage for two full days, bringing his unique mix to the job: enough business fluency to make sense of any session, and his energetic stage presence to keep the room engaged. It's the same combination he brings to corporate events, management conferences, and his own keynotes on leadership, teams and change. Worth remembering next time you're planning one of your own.

Anita Schüttler is a computer scientist and expert in digital sustainability and Green Software. As the Head of IT Sustainability of neuland, Bremen, and Co-Chair of the Bundesverband Green Software she works on advancing digital sustainability in her company and the wider IT industry.

Arne Kittler is co-founder of Hey Clarity and Product at Heart, one of Europe’s leading product conferences. Drawing on 15 years leading product organizations as VP Product at XING and CPO at Facelift, he practices Contextual Product Leadership—helping leaders and teams find clarity about their direction, organization, and ways of working.

• Former Technical Product Manager at videro.com • Self-employed for 5 years with Photodesk-app.com, which reached the top 10 in the US App Store multiple times • Developing Hyperdeck.io for the past 2 years — a Markdown-based presentation app for professional pitches • Previously Team Lead Engineering at XING • Build tailoredpod.ai on the side • Currently Director of Engineering at MoonPay

Benjamin Igna runs Stellar Work, a European consulting practice that finds what’s slowing an organization down and fixes it. He’s an industrial engineer who spent a decade in lean and flow, now building AI tools inside client systems at the exact bottleneck. His rule: add AI to a broken process and you get a broken process at scale, now with hallucinations. He hosts the Stellar Work Podcast and writes at substack.com/@stellarwork

15 years of web software engineering across the stack now bringing his experience to customers as a Field Engineer at Vercel.

Christian has over 20 years of int. UX experience and leads the UX CoC at Optimizer in Porto, Portugal. He drives the dev. of award-winning, user-centered products through UX research and Behavior informed design. He contributes to Singularity University, Nomura Research Institute Japan, and more. He is an author on UX Design, AI Product Design and Behavior Design topics. He is teaching UX Leadership, Behavior Design and Human-AI Experiences (HAX) at TheStarter.io. Jury Member UX Nordic Award 26

I’m Christian, backend developer and staff engineer with a focus on functional programming and data pipelines. I’ve worked on e-commerce platform and advertising systems handling terabytes of data with Elixir.

My interest in programming languages and the interaction of natural languages lead me to work with a wide range of database systems and programming languages. From interfacing C libraries as http endpoints in Rust to using AWS services to build data pipelines.

Christian is a freelance data scientist with an M.Sc. in Data Science. Since 2022 he has been building LLM and RAG systems that run air-gapped on open-weight models. His 2025 master's thesis applied GraphRAG to the decommissioning of nuclear facilities. Today he builds knowledge graph and agent systems for clients in regulated industries, currently a public-sector security authority, where every answer and result has to survive an audit.

Raniz is a programmer, architect, speaker and coach at factor10. He is a problem solver who keeps track of the bigger picture. He is prestigeless, likes to get into new domains, and loves sharing knowledge and ideas. Raniz has worked with system- and software architecture at several companies since 2010 and has been with factor10 since 2021. When not working, he's into beer brewing, sourdough bread, 3D printing and triathlons.

Emma A. A. Rünzel is a software developer with a background in linguistics and literature. After a coding bootcamp, she freelanced across industries from fintech to beekeeping software. She now builds tools for the renewable energy sector. Passionate about code, language, and AI, she loves teaching, learning, and connecting unexpected dots between fields.

I help companies make the move to agentic engineering. That means shaping how teams work with agents, building the tooling and workflows that make the change stick, and staying hands-on so the practices hold up in real delivery.

Moin! I'm a Senior Fullstack Developer at OTTO with a focus on Rust. In addition to my day-to-day work, I’m also active in OTTO’s internal cloud cost optimization team, where we systematically identify, evaluate, and ultimately drive cost-saving opportunities across the company. In addition to my work at OTTO, I teach Rust at NORDAKADEMIE and contribute a bit to open source.

Faris Aziz is a Staff Frontend Engineer specializing in React, Next.js, and resilient web architecture. He’s built and led teams across Fintech, SaaS, and Connected TV at companies like Smallpdf, Discovery, and Navro. Faris co-organizes ZurichJS and regularly speaks on frontend performance and developer experience. He’s still investigating why builds only work on his machine.

Frank Grzesiak-Mau ist Mitarbeitender bei der intersoft GmbH, Hamburg. Während seiner über 25 Jährigen Laufbahn hat Frank an der Entwicklung von StarOffice bzw. OpenOffice mitgewirkt und langjährig die OpenSource-Community bei Sun Microsystems und Oracle mit betreut. Zur Zeit agiert er als Product Owner für die Build- und Deployment-Infrastruktur. Sein Motto lautet: Don't stop improving!

Frank Sons is a Senior Software Engineer at Eventim Tech Gmbh in Hamburg. He cares about code quality and the practices around it - reviews, testing, refactoring - and has been talking about them since 2012. He is at home in the software craft and PHP communities. Lately he is building agentic workflows and figuring out where review belongs in them.

Friedrich Wessel is a Senior Software Engineer in the central AI taskforce at InnoGames, with more than 15 years in software development. His goal: build software sustainably and make teams more productive. The basis for that is solid craft, reusable components and knowledge transfer. Today he combines that foundation with AI and builds AI infrastructure and workflows other teams can adopt. His conviction: AI is a paradigm shift, but it does not take the craft of software engineering off our hands. It needs holistic processes and makes clean code and test coverage more important than ever.

currently pursuing a research-oriented Master’s degree in Data Science at the Bielefeld University of Applied Sciences and Arts (HSBI), Germany. Her current work focuses on the evaluation of digital twin simulations through the application of machine learning algorithms. Her research interests include Industry 4.0, data-driven decision-making, and intelligent manufacturing systems.

Technical Coach and Merciless Refactorer from Vienna. All about software craft: baby steps, TDD, refactoring, whole-team programming. I maintain mob.sh (listed in ThoughtWorks Technology Radar). Recently my focus has turned to AI-augmented coding: teaching coding agents a software crafter's approach. Software craft has always been about context and clarity.

Hans Reinl is a software architect and engineering leader with over 15 years of experience building high-scale platform. He has spent his career establishing high-performing technical departments and leading agile transformations. Additionally, he is a co-host of the Working Draft podcast, where he discusses complex technical topics. Currently, he helps organizations move past the AI hype to build robust agentic engineering pipelines and develops his own startup N+One, an AI Cycling Coach.

Ingo Eichhorst is an AI Architect and Tech Trainer with 15+ years of experience in software development, architecture and engineering leadership. He trains engineers at IONOS, lectures on AI and Generative AI at Hochschule Nordhausen, and works with AI native startups.

With more than two decades of experience in distributed systems, Ivan Pedrazas has spent the last year at the forefront of the AI evolution. He is currently building the next generation of developer tooling, integrating AI agents and MCP servers to create seamless workflows between LLMs and non-deterministic production environments.

Joel Burghardt is responsible for the company-wide implementation of AI at Synatix, focusing on AI enablement, automation, and productive agent- and software-driven workflows. As the founder and managing director of Lightweb Media GmbH and a trained software technologist, he combines more than ten years of experience in software development, technical SEO, and automation. Together with his team, he has developed more than 100 AI-powered applications. His focus: how AI can evolve from an individual tool into a reliable, scalable system across the enterprise.

Johannes Behr is a systemic coach, hypnotherapist, stand-up comedian and organizational developer with ~10 years of experience guiding companies through change. He combines comedy stagecraft with coaching practice to create formats that shift mindsets — not just stack methods. As a certified coach trainer, he knows that learning which moves people is learning that sticks. Humor isn't the warm-up. It's the method.

Software developer, IT consultant, and educator with extensive JavaScript experience. Taught thousands of developers online and in person.

Joshua Töpfer is a Senior Consultant at INNOQ. He’s been working exclusively in an ensemble for over four years, focusing on user-centered product development, data-driven decisions, and how collaboration helps teams grow beyond just shipping code.

Since 2017, Dr. Julia Freudenberg has led the Hacker School as CEO, passionately inspiring youth to code. Her focus: future skills, AI literacy, and digital education as a shared societal responsibility. By bridging business, politics, and education, she drives equal opportunities and diversity—empowering girls and disadvantaged youth to become digital creators rather than passive consumers.

Julian's team of data scientists and ML engineers covers everything from reporting to analytics products for Europe's largest footwear retailer, including demand forecasting, pricing, customer analytics and digital analytics across store and e-commerce. That spans brands such as Deichmann, Snipes and Ochsner Sport in more than 30 countries. He came to the field through experimental particle physics and worked as a data scientist in manufacturing at thyssenkrupp before joining Deichmann.

Brazilian security professional based in France, Julio Araujo is currently a Director of Security at Rocket.Chat. With over 6 years of experience in the offensive and application security spaces, his current challenge revolves around securing an open-source project that is used in critical industries.

Karsten has been building digital products across many industries (e.g. gaming, energy, automotive, logistics, ecommerce…) for more than 16 years. As a hybrid web developer and UX unicorn, he is all about collaboration between design & dev and taking accessibility seriously. Since 2026 is working freelance, building pleasant web experiences. He is also co-organizer of UX Roundtable HH and the World Usability Day Hamburg.

Keren is a senior software developer with over a decade of experience in the industry. She holds an M.Sc. in Computer Science and is passionate about React and learning new technologies. Keren volunteers as a program manager at Baot, a community that supports women in R&D in their professional growth. She instructs and inspires people to write blogs in her tech blogging workshops. Keren has experience as a dev community leader and a co-organizer of meetups and events.

Klaus is an experienced B2B SaaS CPTO with a passion for breaking down silos. As a startup founder and business unit lead, he bridges the gap between technical delivery and agile product strategy. Sometimes, he invests or advises, helping leadership teams build interdisciplinary teams themselves. His philosophy: Move Fast And Break Silos.

Konstantin Todte is a Software Consultant at TNG Technology Consulting in Munich. He develops and operates a production multi-agent chatbot built on LangChain, with tools connected via MCP, as part of a larger microservices platform. His current focus is quality control for that system: regression evals, contract tests for agent protocols, and LLM-as-judge monitoring with Langfuse. He holds an M.Sc. from TUM.

Hi, I'm Kristina! I'm doing my Computer Science master's and I'm part of the InnoMaster program at InnoGames. I'm still learning a lot, and that's the fun part. When I'm not coding, I'm usually drawing or gaming, basically anything creative.

Lars Rieche ist CTO bei Vambiant und Co-Founder & AI Advisor bei xmatics in Berlin. Davor hat er als CTO bei SellerX und KW-Commerce über zehn Jahre hinweg Tech-Organisationen im E-Commerce aufgebaut und skaliert – vom ersten IT-Team bis zur Plattform hinter einem schnell wachsenden Portfolio.

Heute arbeitet er an der Schnittstelle von KI und echter Arbeit: KI-gestützte Workflows, Automatisierung und die Frage, wo Agenten sinnvoll sind und wo klassischer Code die bessere Antwort bleibt.

Laura fell in love with the magic that happens when great software solves a customer’s problem over 15 years ago. Over the years she has worked on both in-house and consulting projects, from startups to large corporations, learning what works. At some point became more fascinated with the how than the what and today helps to build organizations where people can thrive and great products are born.

Luan is a Senior Data Engineer at adjoe, building the data infrastructure behind its ML platform. Bridging data science and backend engineering, he turns raw event streams into 600+ features driving ad relevance and recommendations. His work spans batch and real-time pipelines, feature store architecture, and data quality at scale. His stack includes Apache Kafka, Flink, dbt, Airflow, Druid, ClickHouse, and Kubernetes on AWS.

Luc Juggery is a software engineer with experience in corporations, startups, and as a co-founder. He continuously develops his skills through side projects, online courses, and technical events as both speaker and attendee. His expertise spans Docker, Kubernetes, cloud-native technologies, DevOps, infrastructure as code, and CI/CD. Passionate about learning and knowledge sharing, he enjoys teaching and helping others adopt modern cloud-native practices.

Ludovic is passionate about building and operating production systems. Having worked on distributed systems, he developed a strong interest in Observability, helping operations teams adopt telemetry practices. Ludovic has been working for several years as a Solutions Architect, supporting organizations transitioning to cloud-native technologies such as Kubernetes and Istio. Ludovic serves as CTO at Opensend where he is driving the rapid scaling of the company’s technology organization.

Luis Enrique Guerra Naranjo is a Senior Software Engineer at Vorwerk, developing digital products for the Thermomix ecosystem. He is passionate about understanding customer needs and turning complex challenges into practical software solutions. His work combines software engineering, cloud technologies, and AI to build reliable products that make everyday life easier.

Lutz is an independent consultant working at the intersection of software architecture and organizational design, a frequent conference speaker, and a blogger. Until recently, he was Head of Engineering at a FinTech start-up. Previously, he led engineering teams building software for container shipping, online retail, financial institutions, and cruise ship entertainment systems. His current focus is on event-driven architecture for highly available and scalable systems.

Malte Burkert co-founded WAPP in 2012, growing it into a 20-person digital agency in Bielefeld and Dortmund with 100+ projects for clients like Häcker Küchen and German federal authorities. In 2024 he co-founded CAST ME, a casting platform connecting ~20,000 talents and producers. In February 2025 he launched ProduQt, WAPP's first SaaS product. Since Claude Code went public in early 2025, he's been rewiring how his team builds software around agentic workflows.

Mara Saenger is a Psychologist, AI strategist, and organizational change expert at the intersection of psychology, organizations, and technology. She lectures on AI in HR and AI & Diversity at Leibniz University Hannover, is a certified AI Strategist & Trainer, and has led transformation across public institutions, and private sector clients. As Expert Member of the EU-funded WIDCON programme, she contributes policy recommendations to the European Commission on women shaping the AI economy.

Marc Arndt is VP of Engineering and Architecture at Evana AG. With 20+ years in software development and eight years of Go and Kubernetes, he builds production agentic AI for enterprise document processing — and talks about architecture, testing, compliance, and the hard-won lessons of shipping AI with an existing engineering team.

Marc Brehmer has worked as a Software Engineer since 2013. Today, he's a full-stack developer fascinated by software design, Domain-Driven Design, and clean architecture. He sees programming as a tool for great product engineering and enjoys exploring paradigms like functional programming. Marc strongly believes in sharing what he's learned. He speaks at conferences and mentors colleagues, finding helping others grow as rewarding as solving technical problems.

Marc Müller is a principal consultant for DevOps and .NET / Azure solutions at 4tecture GmbH and has been recognized by Microsoft as a Most Valuable Professional (MVP) for Azure DevOps / GitHub and .NET. He has been able to bring his DevOps expertise and know-how for enterprise architectures and component-based distributed systems to many projects over the past few years. As a trainer and speaker, he focuses on the training and coaching of DevOps and .NET project teams.

Marcel is a software architect, author, and trainer who builds bridges between people and technology. He and his team help enterprises build robust systems and modernize legacy architectures using Rust, TypeScript, Flutter, and Java. Believing that software quality is shaped by communication quality, he also coaches development teams in Nonviolent Communication and Transactional Analysis. Marcel is a frequent speaker, podcast guest, and co-author of a Rust book (dpunkt).

Ich beschäftige mich als DevOps-Engineer bei intersoft seit Jahren intensiv mit Kubernetes, Automatisierung und allem, was Entwicklungsprozesse schlanker und stabiler macht. Als Teil des Developer Productivity Engineering Teams ist es mein Ziel, dass Entwicklungsteams effizient arbeiten können. Ich glaube daran, dass gute DevOps-Arbeit dann passiert, wenn sie im Hintergrund wirkt – und einfach alles läuft. Genau das begeistert mich täglich aufs Neue.

Marco Heimeshoff is a Software Developer, Domain-Driven Design Trainer and EventStorming Facilitator

His current focus is agentic AI development: helping developers and teams move beyond vibe coding and build deliberate, sustainable AI-augmented workflows.

He organizes KanDDDinsky and co-founded the German DDD community and VirtualDDD.com.

His development philosophy centers on lifelong learning, focus on language, and empathy.

Marinus is an experienced professional with a strong passion for designing and building data-driven AI solutions. He currently partners with clients across various industries to bring predictive and agentic AI systems into production on Google Cloud.

Markus Winkler is the Co-Founder and CTO of oparco, bringing over 25 years of experience as a high-performance software architect. Since founding oparco in 2012, he has been a leading practitioner in the CIAM market, specializing in robust identity designs, OpenID Connect, OAuth, and SAML. A well-connected IT authority and former JavaEE Expert Group member, Markus guides enterprise clients through complex architectural decisions while taking direct ownership of delivery. As an Auth0 technology partner, he ensures seamless implementation and migration projects across highly regulated DACH industries.

Martin, ein erfahrener Softwareentwickler, Architekt und Tech-Lead für OTTO.de, bringt seine umfangreiche Expertise in die Welt des eCommerce ein. Sein Engagement geht über die Technik hinaus. Als Tech-Lead ist er auch ein versierter People Manager, der die Teamdynamik und die individuelle Entwicklung seiner Teammitglieder fördert. Mit seiner Leidenschaft ist er ein gutes Beispiel dafür, wie Tech Leads und Architekten nicht nur die Technik und Innovationen, sondern auch die Menschen hinter d...

Martin Westphal is a Nerd by heart, loves challenges of any kind and is a firm believer that most people are capable of way more than they believe, if you give them the chance and encourage them. As the co-founder & CTO of the yamuntu GmbH, leader & co-founder of the byteAdventures Community, founder of the Hamburg Dart, Firebase and byteAdventures MeetUps, he is trying to help people achieve more and believe in themselves, to create great things with technology.

Mathias is an experienced consultant for architecture, specializing in Google Cloud and enterprise search. His current focus is primarily on API and AI management using Apigee to deploy AI solutions securely and in a controllable manner.

Matthias Lau is developer and founder of the technology studio Heureka Labs with a passion for software development and innovative digital products. He loves coding, awesome AI concepts, federated learning, Docker, the Apple Multi-Touch Trackpad, Bouldering, Wikipedia and Espresso. As an expert in optimizing AI applications he released tools like airouter.io to help companies to efficiently use LLMs.

Matthias Niehoff works as Head of Data and Data Architect for codecentric AG and supports customers in the design and implementation of data architectures. His focus is on the necessary infrastructure and organization to help data and ML projects succeed.

Rissal Hedna is a Forward Deployed AI Engineer at PHAROS Labs in Hamburg, where he builds agentic AI systems for medical writing and regulated life sciences. He holds an MSc in Intelligent Adaptive Systems from Universität Hamburg and is first author on a paper about LLM calibration at EMNLP 2026.

Mohammed Lachhab is an Offensive Security Engineer at Ostorlab, bug bounty hunter, and CTF player. He works on Android security, reverse engineering, vulnerability research, and agentic security testing. He has published hands-on research and proof-of-concept exploits covering authentication bypass, SSRF, and remote code execution. His work explores how far offensive security can be automated, from discovering vulnerabilities to reversing protections and producing working exploits.

Moritz builds AI systems at 1KOMMA5°, where he leads AI transformation across engineering, product, and design.

Nensi Hakobjanyan is a Solutions Architect at Amazon Web Services, where she supports enterprise Retail & CPG customers in designing and implementing cloud solutions. Alongside her expertise in cloud architecture, she brings extensive experience in Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence, helping organizations unlock the full potential of data-driven innovation. She is passionate about helping customers with digital transformation and building scalable, future-ready solutions in the cloud.

Agentic-Coding-Consultant aus Hamburg. Hilft Teams seit 2025, agentische Softwareentwicklung produktiv zu verankern. Sein Fokus: KI-Agenten steuerbar machen und dabei Herr über das eigene Softwareprodukt bleiben.

Nina Siessegger is an organizational consultant and coach with a background in software development. She helps tech teams and organizations navigate growth, restructuring, and collaboration challenges - with a focus on designing environments that enable team autonomy and sustainable collaboration.

Noemi Klimpel is a Junior Software Developer at InnoGames. During her apprenticeship, she worked on highly maintained traditional platforms before moving into rapid, AI-assisted game development. This contrast has given her a unique view on how AI tools are changing everyday coding practices in different environments. At code.talks, she is eager to share an honest look at the realities, expectations, and open questions career starters face today.

Oliver Steenbuck is a Solutions Architect at Amazon Webservices. He has more than 20 years of experience as software engineer and tech lead working at companies of various sizes ranging from startups to enterprise companies like Lufthansa.Currently he works with Financial Services and Insurance customers of AWS supporting their digital transformation. He loves to enable teams to work with more autonomy and freedom on the cloud.

Patrik Kluge is CTO of the Synatix Group, the “Y-Not-Combinator” from Hamelin, and still closer to the code than to the golf course. He is responsible for everything technical and builds wherever software runs: in the cloud, in data centers, and on their own hardware. To make it all scale, he focuses on shared products, platforms, and processes that provide a solid foundation: standardize the floor, not the ceiling. And AI? It doesn’t replace developers — it’s their turbocharger. Returning to code.talks for the second time.

Per Schulte has been building digital products for over 12 years – as a developer, agile coach, and product owner. He currently leads the Agentic Engineering initiative at his company, building PoCs himself and supporting colleagues with theirs. Since 2023, he’s been working with AI agents daily. He regularly shares what works (and what doesn’t) with audiences in banking – an industry where “well, sometimes it works” isn’t an acceptable answer.

I am Platform Lead at encentive, building software that turns industrial energy flexibility into automated optimization. Before that, I led engineering at RECUP, worked as Head of Engineering and architect at SDA Open Industry Solutions, and spent many years at IBM in frontend architecture and digital experience. I enjoy connecting product, architecture and team reality, including aspects that no diagram shows.

Fullstack developer building and operating distributed systems end-to-end. From application code to Kubernetes and observability, he combines development and DevOps practices to create reliable production systems — increasingly enhanced by AI-driven automation.

Pini Reznik is a seasoned technology leader with extensive experience in the software industry. He is the CEO and Co-Founder of re:cinq, experts in Cloud Native and AI Native engineering. Former software engineer, Co-Founder of two successful consulting businesses and an O’Reilly author.

Ramona is a software engineer with roots in quality assurance. She owns both views of the product - that of a tester and a developer. Ramona primarily uses this to strengthen trust in test automation and support the testers and developers alike, becoming a Google Developer Expert in Web Technologies, Women Techmaker Ambassador, and Cypress ambassador.

Senior Software Engineer working on Debezium. Tamer of beasts (AI). IBM and Red Hat Partner. Previously METRO Markets, codecentric, trivago.

Reyan Korel Erben is an AI Platform Engineer at prokube.ai, where he keeps an MLOps platform running across whatever infrastructure clients throw at it. He came to Kubernetes sideways, with a background in control and automation engineering and several years as a research scientist. Since landing in platform work, he’s spent about two years getting to know Kubernetes one broken assumption at a time.

Richard Gross is an IT archaeologist at MaibornWolff with more than ten years of modernization experience. His focus is on hexagonal architectures, hypermedia APIs, TestDSLs and the expressive and unambiguous modelling of the domain as code. He enjoys mastering TDD, BDD, DDD, decoupled design and even practices that don't include two D's. He also shaped the open source project CodeCharta, which lets even non-developers grasp the quality of their software.

Roland Golla entwickelt bei Eye-Able KI-Lösungen für bessere Accessibility Webdesign. Als Cypress.IO Ambassador optimiert er CI/CD-Prozesse und teilt sein Wissen auf YouTube als Techfluencer. In der Open-Source-Welt organisiert er Meetups mit Fokus auf Softwarequalität und soziale Projekte. Nach eigener Burnout-Erfahrung setzt er sich für mehr Arbeitsschutz in der IT ein. Seine Expertise verbindet technische Qualität mit nachhaltigen, menschenfreundlichen Entwicklungsworkflows.

Rowdy Rabouw is a Google Developer Expert in Web Technologies with 30 years of experience in HTML, CSS and JavaScript. Currently, he works as a Front-End-Focused Senior DevOps Engineer on Vue, Node, and NestJS projects, with a focus on usability and accessibility. Rowdy loves his electronic drum kit and dabbles in creating music on his laptop.

Sam is a Principal Developer Advocate currently working at Auth0. He loves everything related to identity and explaining complex topics clearly and understandably. You can find him on stage at developer events worldwide or simply having great conversations in the hallway.

Shahab is a seasoned software engineer with more than 20 years of experience, specializing in software architecture and event driven systems. He thrives on challenges and enjoys mentoring others. With excellent communication skills, he fosters autonomous teamwork and emphasizes respect within the team. Embracing change is his motto, advocating for collaborative environments where everyone’s contributions are valued.

Sigrid is a Software Engineer on the JavaScript SDK team at Sentry, where she works on making the web more observable. She has contributed SDKs for Nuxt and Hono. If she’s not at her desk, she’s probably exploring a new city via train, reading, or recharging with CrossFit and yoga.

Sohaib Harraoui is a Security Engineer at Ostorlab and a CTF player focused on web and Android security. With a background in software engineering and systems, he approaches security by understanding where software assumptions break and validating findings with working exploits. He has reported multiple vulnerabilities in open-source software, uncovers overlooked infrastructure in complex environments, and reverse engineers Android applications to bypass shielding and RASP controls.

Stefan Erschwendner is Managing Partner at Frontira, where he turns business logic and domain knowledge into reliable agentic systems. He initiated Lobster Lager, a father and son experiment combining an AI coding agent, Gerhard’s brewing expertise, and a Grainfather G30 connected over Bluetooth. Featured in Jensen Huang’s NVIDIA GTC keynote and Peter Steinberger’s TED2026 talk, the project grounds Stefan’s work on moving AI from demos into governed execution.

Stu is a software engineer first and foremost, with a career of 38 years! He has a passion for finding better ways of doing things, a love of technology, and a keen sense of the future of our industry. This drives his love for Rust and his delight in how it is increasingly being used to build stronger, more capable software — software that is fun to create and fun to use! He founded Red Badger in 2010 where he is Chief Scientist.

Tereza Iofciu is a data and AI expert, leadership coach, and PSF Fellow with 15+ years of experience leading data and product teams at neuefische, FREE NOW, and New Work (XING). She helps professionals lead and adapt in the age of AI through her Data Diplomat Framework™, bridging technical depth with human leadership.

Tobias works as a modernization architect at viadee consulting. He supports customers in the modernization of their software architecture and the migration of software systems. His focus sector is insurance and banking. He loves to share his knowledge and experience at international conferences on a regularly basis.

I lead the Artificial Intelligence practice at cronn GmbH, where I turn AI/ML ideas into secure, scalable products for enterprise. My focus spans generative AI, document intelligence, information fusion and data platforms - shipped to production with robust engineering, MLOps, and measurable business impact. In addition, I possess a substantial academic history that spans more than a decade.

IT veteran. Dot connector. Problem solver. Value tracker. AI navigator. Cartographer. Librarian. Translator. Polymath. System design. Resilience. Effectiveness. Simplification. Sustainability. Dislikes long bios. Tries to make IT a (bit) better place.

Verena is Cloud & DevOps Consultant at b’nerd. After many years as HR expert in IT, she transitioned into tech and discovered her passion for building and operating modern cloud infrastructure. Today, she helps teams run and scale their infrastructure, bridging the gap between technical implementation, collaboration, and organizational realities.

I am a Software Engineer @ Phoenics.IT, working mostly with Java & Spring. Currently, we’re exploring how agentic AI can fast-track our development process while meeting strict data privacy and security regulations.

Simultaneously, I am pursuing my M.Sc. in Computer Science. At the moment I am working on my thesis: Susceptibility of Neurosymbolic Security AI Agents to Misleading Signals.

Feel free to reach out & connect.

Yevgen Nebesov is a systems architect based in Bruchsal, Germany. He provides consultancy services to companies across various sectors, including railways, defence, logistics, medical devices, and retail.

Yevgen is the author of two frameworks:

- “Sociotechnical Engineering” — an approach that applies Systems Engineering principles to sociotechnical systems.

- “The Architecture of Power” — a framework for structural change designed for people with or without formal authority.