SpeAkers

Skyler is a Director of Product Design at Postlight, a digital product studio in New York City. As a maker, she defines and creates beautiful, functional, and solution-driven digital products for individuals, startups, and organizations. And as a leader, she mentors and guides talented designers and design teams to engage deeply with the craft and practice of digital product design. Her work is informed by her multidisciplinary background, and she loves to find new ways to bring ideas and people together. Follow @hello_skyler on Twitter.

Spike Brehm is the Engineering Lead for Airbnb’s Emerging Technology R&D group and a recent transplant to New York from San Francisco. Spike has spent most of his career as a frontend software engineer architecting JavaScript and Rails apps. Since joining Airbnb in 2011, Spike has introduced a variety of modern JavaScript technologies to Airbnb, such as Node.js, CommonJS, React, and React Native, and authored Rendr.js, one of the first “isomorphic” JavaScript frameworks. More recently, Spike joined Airbnb’s Emerging Technology R&D group as the founding engineering manager, focusing on building out a team to apply the latest computer vision, virtual reality, and augmented reality technologies to Airbnb’s platform.

You can find him on twitter @spikebrehm

Will Gallego is a systems engineer with 15+ years of experience in the web development field, currently as a Sr Software Engineer at Fastly. Comfortable with several parts of the stack, he focuses now on building scalable distributed backend systems and tools to help engineers grow. He believes in a free and open internet, blame aware retrospectives, and pronouncing gif with a soft “G”. Follow @wcgallego on Twitter.

Dan Mall is a creative director and advisor from Philly. He’s the founder and executive director of SuperFriendly, a design collaborative that helps in-house teams make better products through design systems. Dan is an enthralled husband & dad, author of Pricing Design, and co-founder of SuperBooked, a service that helps you find work with a little help from your friends. He writes about design and other issues on Twitter and on his industry-recognized site, danmall.me.

Nitya Narasimhan is a PhD and Polymath with over two decades of software development and research experience across industry, startups and academia. She is also a long-time community and conference organizer in the Greater New York area. She currently a Senior Program Manager on the Cloud+AI Developer Relations team at Microsoft where she continues to pursue her passion of helping developer communities translate awareness of technology into actionable impact on careers and products. Follow @nitya on Twitter.

Aditya is an engineer, statistician, entrepreneur, and investor based in New York City. He studied statistics at Columbia and computer science at Cornell, and participated in a batch at the Recurse Center.

By day, Aditya works on the Observability team at Stripe, where he write open-source software written in Go. Aditya spends his free time playing German-style board games and listening to embarrassing music. Follow @chimeracoder on Twitter.

Dave Sorin is an office managing partner of McCarter & English and the head of the Venture Capital & Emerging Growth Companies practice. He focuses primarily on privately- and publicly-owned startup, early stage, emerging growth, and middle market technology, tech-enabled and life science enterprises, as well as the investors, executives, and boards of directors who support and lead them. Dave has a long track record of successful representation of growth companies, having been repeatedly recognized by well-known periodicals for a unique combination of legal acumen and sound business judgment. He also brings to bear his broad range of knowledge and experience in counseling enterprises and investors in diverse emerging growth markets, technology industries (including software, information technology, e-commerce, cybersecurity and communications), and life sciences. Many of the companies he represents are well-known names throughout the Mid-Atlantic region.

swyx is an Infinite Builder working on Developer Experience at Netlify. In his free time he helps people Learn in Public at Egghead.io and /r/reactjs. Follow @swyx on Twitter.

Proud Asbury townie, Jenna Gaudio, currently leads the strategy behind roadmap management, agile product development, and cross-team synchronization at Vydia, the Inc 500 tech company that powers the business behind content creators and their teams. Gaudio also serves as a Co-Executive Director for Jersey Shore Women in Tech, an Asbury-based organization that supports, educates, mentors and develops a network for women in business. Previously, Gaudio led the Marketing strategy at video adtech company, Yashi, which was successfully acquired in 2015 for $33M. She has recently been awarded accolades such as NJBIZ 40 Under 40 and American Business Association's Bronze award for "Female Executive of the Year." She has an affinity for the movie "Almost Famous" and running the boardwalk at dusk.

Alex is the Director of User Experience at Macmillan Learning overseeing the digital product design for tools and platform serving students across the country. Alex has made a career of straddling the line between design and development starting off developing games and simulation in the Media & Entertainment industry with clients such as Nike, Disney, and Viacom, and later honing in on education. As a lifelong learner he’s expanded into user research and learning science to guide his product development. Alex is also an adjunct instructor at NYU teaching “Coding of Learning Experience Designers” to the next generation of educational technology innovators.

Carlos is a Software Engineer on the UI Components team at iCIMS, where he is responsible for architecting their design system and helping build out the iCIMS component library. Born in the Dominican Republic but raised on the Jersey Shore, Carlos is a self-taught developer with more than 18 years of experience touching every part of the stack. When he's not at work on his MacBook, he's at home on his MacBook learning about the latest open source technology or hanging out by the water with his two kids.

Parish is a Software Engineer on the UX Framework Engineering team at iCIMS, where he works on the iCIMS front-end platform. An NJ native and developer of 16 years, Parish started programming games in C++ but is now a full stack web engineer who is always looking to learn something new. Outside of work, Parish is an avid gamer who also loves a good karaoke night.