Meet Our Shift 2023 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.

Nader Dabit is a web and mobile developer, author, open source enthusiast, and Senior Developer Advocate at Edge i Node.

Eddie is an Open Source fullstack and DevRel expert, with experience in Javascript, Typescript, SQL, NoSQL, automation testing and DevOps. The foundation of Eddie's tech ethos is Open Source, as there is something in it for everyone. Eddie founded the EddieHub community to foster collaboration, communication and career development. Eddie received the GitHub Star of the Year 2020 Award, GitHub Community Growth Award 2021 and GitHub Teacher of the Year Award 2022.

James is a JavaScript Developer, Speaker, and Teacher with a passion for teaching developers through various mediums of content. He is a firm believer in work-life balance, the on-going pursuit of personal happiness, and empowering others to take control of their career. His personal philosophy of “Learn Build Teach” has blossomed into a growing community of aspiring and established developers focused on helping each succeed. His professional experience includes Software Development at Fedex and Developer Advocacy at Microsoft, Auth0, and PlanetScale. He is currently working as a full-time Technical Content Creator focused on growing his YouTube audience of over 150k subscribers, a weekly Web Development podcast called Compressed.fm, and an array of online courses. James has partnered with notable companies like Cloudflare, Microsoft, Fauna, Cloudinary, and more along his content creation journey. In his spare time, James plays co-ed soccer with his wife, spends time with his dogs, and can solve a Rubik's cube in under a minute.

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

Known for his open source and JavaScript security initiatives, Liran Tal is an award-winning software developer, security researcher, and open source champion in the JavaScript community. He's an internationally recognized GitHub Star, acknowledged for his open source advocacy, and has received the OpenJS Foundation's Pathfinder for Security for his work on Node.js security. His contributions to developer security education include leading OWASP projects, building supply chain security tools, participation in CNCF and OpenSSF initiatives, and authoring books such as O'Reilly's Serverless Security. He leads the developer advocacy team at Snyk.io and is on a mission to empower developers with better application security skills.

Michael Cote studies how large organizations get better at building software to run better and grow their business. His books Changing Mindsets, Monolithic Transformation, and The Business Bottleneck cover these topics. He’s been an industry analyst at RedMonk and 451 Research, done corporate strategy and M&A, and was a programmer. He also co-hosts several podcasts, including Software Defined Talk. Cf. cote.io, and is @cote in Twitter. Texas Forever!

Misko Hevery is the CTO at Builder.io, where he is helping to empower anyone to create blazing fast sites. Previously he has worked at Google, where he created Angular, AngualarJS and was co-creator of Karma. Before focusing on making the web better, he brought testing culture to Google and the world through his blog. Miško started his career by designing digital circuits and moved to databases, full-stack development, and finally, front-end frameworks, giving him a unique perspective. He understands all of the layers from the web down to a transistor.

Sven Peters, former developer advocate at Atlassian and MongoDB - now at Manfred, has been studying trends in software development for the last 15 years uncovering the cultural and technical attributes to help development teams work effectively and drive innovation. He has 20 years experience in writing code, leading teams, and sharing his experience with thousands of developers at uncountable conferences in 25+ countries.

Adrienne Tacke is a Filipina software engineer, keynote speaker, published author of the book Coding for Kids: Python, and a LinkedIn Learning instructor who specializes in Cloud Development courses. Perhaps most important, however, is that she spends way too much money on desserts and ungodly amounts of time playing Age of Empires II.

Keren is a full-stack developer at Torii, who has been working as a software engineer for more than a decade. She has a M.Sc. in Computer Science and loves React and learning new technologies. Keren volunteers as a program manager at Baot, a community that helps women in tech in their professional growth. She is also a dev community leader and co-organizes meetups. And in her not-so-spare time, she studies psychology. Her hobbies include drawing, photography, and singing.

Software developer and technology passionate- I enjoy building and delivering quality, all the while trying to have fun as much as possible. I am a perceptive and innovative individual that's not afraid to exploit its best version and go the extra mile outside the comfort zone of conventional. This exact desire, of getting out of the comfort zone, led me in the last years to changing the context from full-stack, frontend, API design to technical leadership and architecture.

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.

Eric is Chronosphere's Director Evangelism. He's renowned in the development community as a speaker, lecturer, author and baseball expert. His current role allows him to help the world understand the challenges they are facing with cloud native observability. He brings a unique perspective to the stage with a professional life dedicated to sharing his deep expertise of open source technologies and organizations. Follow on https://www.schabell.org.