Meet Our Shift Miami Speakers

John Romero is an award-winning programmer, game designer and level designer whose work spans over 130 games, 108 of which have been published commercially. Romero is considered to be the "father of first person shooters" having led the design and contributed to the programming and audio design of the iconic and genre-defining games Wolfenstein 3D, DOOM, Quake, Heretic and Hexen. Romero is also was also one of the earliest supporters of eSports and a professional-level DOOM and Quake player. To date, Romero has co-founded eight successful game companies including the likes of id Software, Gazillion Entertainment and most recently Romero Games in Galway, Ireland. He is considered to be among the world's top game designers, and his products have won well over 100 awards. One of the earliest indie developers, Romero began working in the game space in 1979 on mainframes before moving to the Apple II in 1981. He is a completely self-taught programmer, designer and artist. His memoir DOOM Guy will be released in July 2022.

Brandon is the Founder and CEO of Flightcontrol and the Creator of Blitz.js. He's deeply passionate about helping people reach their dreams and about making development and entrepreneurship more accessible. Outside of work he loves flying airplanes and helicopters, rock climbing, and traveling.

Joyce is the head of developer relations at Postman, an API platform used by 20M+ people to access bazillions of APIs every month. She is a culinary magician who specializes in tacos and boba.

David Astor is a Solutions Architect Manager with GitLab. He's worked with numerous organizations of all sizes to assist them in simplifying their DevOps workflows. He has a great passion for learning new things and loves getting to the “wow!” moment with the folks he helps. He's a listener, a story teller, an agilist, a part time runner, an avid college football fan and loyal husband and friend. He's a father to an incredible daughter and general purveyor of all manner of useless trivia. He's a huge proponent of breaking down walls and getting people to work together. Oh, and dad jokes!

Erik Rasmussen is an expat American JavaScript hacker living in Spain. He's best known as the author of two of the most popular form libraries in React, Redux Form and Final Form. He's currently trying to promote mindful Flow at Centered.

Paige Cruz is a Senior Developer Advocate at Chronosphere passionate about cultivating sustainable on-call practices and bringing folks their aha moment with observability. She started as a software engineer at New Relic before switching to Site Reliability Engineering holding the pager for InVision, Lightstep, and Weedmaps. Off-the-clock you can find her spinning yarn, swooning over alpacas, or watching trash TV on Bravo.

A web developer with over 10 years of experience. Working with and for names such as Nike, OMM, NearForm, Uber, Eurostar, Barclaycard, ATG, O2, and M&C Saatchi. Comfortable with a variety of tools. Typically digging in with React, architecting CSS in and out of JavaScript, or orchestrating slick animations with Greensock. Whatever the tools used, thrives on bringing ideas to life. Takes pride in crafting innovative solutions with polished user experiences. This whilst possessing a keen eye for design, accessibility, and well-structured code. A CodePen advocate and shares attention-catching demos over on Twitter. Many of which feature in various newsletters/publications. He'll often stream the creation process over on Twitch. He enjoys writing and has written for various publications. He's an author for CSS Tricks. Jhey is also an Egghead instructor.

Alexandra Spalato is a Developer Relations engineer at Storyblok and a specialist in JAMstack and headless architecture. With a background in freelance development and entrepreneurship, Alexandra has a unique perspective on what it takes to build successful web projects. As a member of the team at Storyblok, a company that champions the power of headless architecture, she helps developers around the world bring their visions to life. Whether she's speaking at a conference or collaborating with a team, Alexandra is always seeking out new ways to innovate and drive progress in the tech industry.

Nic is a developer advocate and polyglot programmer working for HashiCorp, and the author of “Building Microservices in Go” and "Service Mesh Patterns." In his spare time, Nic coaches and mentors at Coder Dojo teaches at Women Who Go and GoBridge, speaks and evangelizes good coding practice, process, and technique, and works to raise money for a charity he runs with his wife.

Toma is 22 years old and works as a Full Stack Software Developer at Codeanywhere and is also a computer science student. Even though he's young, he has been active as a developer for 6 years and loves to share his knowledge with the community.

Gift Egwuenu is a Developer Advocate at Cloudflare. She has over 5 years of experience in web development and building tools to help businesses grow. In her previous role, she worked as a front-end developer. She is now working in developer relations.

Sean Falconer is Head of Developer Relations at Skyflow. Sean spends his time building, writing, speaking, and connecting with communities about engineering and data privacy. He has a wide range of interests and expertise, including full stack development, developer experience, and API design. Prior to Skyflow, Sean led developer relations for Google's Business Communications product suite and was CTO and founder of a startup focused on mobile hiring tools. You can connect with Sean on Twitter @seanfalconer

Ekene is a Developer Experience Engineer and Technical Writer. He is currently working with the Developer Experience team at Netlify where they build tools, create content, open-source repos, and demos to teach and also help developers build a better web with Netlify's products and services.

He's a great teacher and instructor. At his spare time, he likes to write blog posts and create courses for different platforms to educate more learners.

Mike has been causing chaos on the internet for more than a decade, he's been around to see a lot happen (and sometimes help it along). He loves building and learning in the open and sharing what he gains along the way via streams and other means.

Milin Desai is CEO of Sentry, the leading developer-first application monitoring platform used by 4 million software developers worldwide. Before joining Sentry, Milin was GM of Cloud Services at VMware, where he led the cloud strategy for the company, including the transition to SaaS and expansion of its public cloud solutions.Prior to this, Milin launched VMware's NSX network virtualization product line, which he grew into a billion-dollar business. Earlier in his career, he held engineering roles at Veritas and was an early employee at Riverbed, bringing multiple new products to market.

My experience and studies in Information Technology started as a child with my first certificate in the field. Since then I have never stopped learning! During my career, I worked in a variety of roles, including project management, solutions architecture and developer relations. Leading and managing from projects to communities. Today I am the voice of Elastic for the Americas, interacting with our users, understanding their needs and planning and managing content and programs that generate a better experience and increase user engagement.

I'm a technology veteran with over 30 years of experience in the industry. Throughout my career, I have been an enthusiastic advocate for emerging technologies and their potential to transform lives. In addition to my extensive technical knowledge, I am also skilled in project management, product development, and organizational leadership. My passion for tech has led me down many paths - from software engineering to business management - all with the aim of leveraging technology to create meaningful solutions that make a positive impact on society. Most recently, I founded a non-profit organization dedicated to promoting women in tech by providing them with resources and opportunities for professional advancement.

Ivan founded the largest developer conference in SE Europe called Shift, which was acquired by Infobip - a global communications cloud provider in 2021. Ivan now serves as the Chief Developer Experience Officer at Infobip, running all global developer facing operations. Alongside this, Ivan co-founded Codeanywhere, the first cross platform Cloud IDE, which now has over a two million developers worldwide.

Sead Ahmetovic is the CEO and Co-founder of WeAreDevelopers, an organization dedicated to empowering tech talents and accelerating their careers. With his team, he runs Europe's leading career platform for software developers, providing them with valuable tech content, perfectly matching job opportunities, and outstanding events.

I'm passionate about expanding the intersection of entrepreneurship, innovation, and impact. My brand of leadership revolves around collaboration. By bringing people together, connecting the dots and building bridges stakeholders, business leaders, academics, politicians, and organizations come to the table in ways they wouldn't have thought about otherwise. I enjoy jumping into complicated messes, building and rebuilding, creating teams, nurturing startups and nonprofits.