Write / Speak / Code
2018 Conference

Amy is a programmer and designer who cares about STEM and STEAM education and making the world better through human-centric design and technology. She is the founder of Bubblesort Zines—zines that explain computer science concepts via drawings and stories. Previously, she was a web dev at Airbnb, did machine learning research at Honda Research Institute in Japan, and HCI research at the University of Tokyo.

Kortney Ziegler is ZaMLabs’ Director of Research & Design, bringing to this role a passion for social-justice-based work in the tech space. He is the creator of Trans*H4CK (2013) and the first person to receive the PhD of African-American studies from Northwestern University (2011). An award-winning writer, filmmaker and social entrepreneur -- Ziegler was named one of the most influential African Americans by TheRoot100.

Lara Callender Hogan is an engineering leader, coach, and consultant at Wherewithall. Lara is also the author of Designing for Performance, Building a Device Lab, and Demystifying Public Speaking. She champions engineering management as a practice, helps people get comfortable public speaking, and believes it's important to celebrate career achievements with donuts.

Mina Markham is a front-end architect, conference speaker and organizer and lover of design systems. She writes code for a living, currently as a Senior Engineer at Slack. Previously a senior engineer at Hillary for America, her work on the Pantsuit pattern library has been spotlighted in WIRED, Fast Company, and Communication Arts. A prolific public speaker, Mina has appeared at events worldwide, including CSS Dev Conf, Fluent, and Future of Web Design. In addition, she’s the co-organizer of Front Porch, a front-end conference which prides itself on showcasing and fostering new speakers. Mina likes ampersands, Oreos, traveling, cupcakes, and the color pink. When she's not crafting sites or teaching others, she is probably in her kitchen baking something chocolatey. Mina graduated from Syracuse University with a dual major in Graphic Arts from the S.I. Newhouse School of Public Communications and Women’s Studies. She lives in Oakland, California.

Cate has spent her career working on mobile and documenting everything she learns using WordPress. Now she combines the two as Automattic's mobile lead.

Christina Warren is a Senior Cloud Developer Advocate at Microsoft, where she helps shape the overall video and broader content strategy for Channel 9, Docs.Microsoft.com, and the greater CDA team. In this role, she hosts shows on Channel 9, Microsoft’s video channel for developer content, speaks at events, and interviews people within the developer community. Prior to joining Microsoft, Christina spent a decade in digital media as an editor, senior reporter, and commentator, with a focus on technology, business, and, entertainment. As a journalist, she appeared as an expert or commentator on ABC, NBC, CBS, CNN, CNBC, Fox News, Fox Business, Bloomberg, the BBC, Marketplace Radio, The Today Show, Good Morning America, and many more outlets. She also co-hosts Rocket, a popular tech news podcast, which has the distinction of being one of the only tech podcasts with an all-female hosting team.

Sara Wachter-Boettcher is the principal of Rare Union, a digital product and content strategy consultancy, and the author of Technically Wrong: Sexist Apps, Biased Algorithms, and Other Threats of Toxic Tech (W.W. Norton, 2017), which was named one of the best tech books of the year by Wired. Her other books include Design for Real Life (with Eric Meyer) from A Book Apart, and Content Everywhere from Rosenfeld Media. Sara and Katel are also two-thirds of the badass team behind No, You Go, a weekly podcast with their friend Jenn Lukas about being ambitious, living your best feminist life at work, and giving—and getting—support along the way.

Catt is a product designer, game maker, and front-end web developer. She makes awesome things at Etsy. She has done design work for companies of all sizes including SoundCloud, Bedrocket, and Nasdaq. She started coding around the age of 10 and designing at the age of 15. In 2011, she graduated from SVA with a BFA in Graphic Design and later received an MS in Integrated Digital Media from NYU in 2016. Catt also makes video games with Brooklyn Gamery and helps make STEAM industries more inclusive with Good for PoC. You can follow her @cattsmall on Twitter and view her work at www.cattsmall.com.

Jenn Schiffer is an engineer, artist and tech humorist. Most people know her for her incredible strength and also for being the Community Engineer of Glitch.com at Fog Creek. She organizes JerseyScript, a monthly web developer social in Jersey City where she's based, and built everyone's favorite free online pixel art editor, Make8BitArt.com.

Chiu-Ki Chan is an Android developer with a passion in speaking and teaching. She has spoken at numerous conferences all over the world, and has been recognized as a Google Developer Expert for her extensive knowledge in Android. She hopes to make the tech industry a better place by encouraging more underrepresented minorities to write, speak, code, and be visible.

Liz is a Staff Site Reliability Engineer at Google and works on the Google Cloud Customer Reliability Engineering team in New York. She lives with her wife, metamour, and a Samoyed in Brooklyn. In her spare time, she plays classical piano, leads an EVE Online alliance, and advocates for transgender rights.

Jamie Chung (@jamieshark_) is currently an engineer with Trello, working remotely from Chicago. Previously, they worked on maintaining Foundation (an open-source frontend framework), built health apps with Northwestern University’s Medical School, then worked on Dropbox's monetization and brand design team. When it comes to programming, they focus on a user-centric experience with smart and sustainable code. Jamie's current phone lock screen is a picture of Mt. Tam Brie Cheese from Cowgirl Creamery which probably covers the rest of the bio.

Angie Jones is a Senior Automation Engineer at Twitter who has developed automation strategies and frameworks for countless software products. As a Master Inventor, she is known for her innovative and out-of-the-box thinking style which has resulted in more than 25 patented inventions in the US and China. Angie shares her wealth of knowledge by speaking and teaching at software conferences all over the world and leading tech workshops for young girls through Black Girls Code.

Hilary Stohs-Krause is a full-stack software developer at Ten Forward Consulting in Madison, WI. She came to tech by way of childhood website-building (a "Buffy the Vampire Slayer" fansite, to be exact). Before joining Ten Forward, she spent several years as a professional journalist. Hilary volunteers regularly with several tech and community organizations, and co-runs Madison Women in Tech, a local group with more than 1,200 members. She loves board games, garlic-stuffed olives and bourbon barrel-aged stouts. She’ll read any fantasy or sci-fi she can get her hands on. She tweets puns and intersectional feminism at @hilarysk.

Crystal is a Salesforce Development consultant at Slalom, a co-organizer of Strange Loop Conference, and diversity in tech and business advocate. As a Detroit Public Schools graduate, Crystal is passionate about equal access to education at all levels. She came to St. Louis as a 2010 Teach For America Corps Member and taught middle school math in St. Louis Public Schools for four years. After her time in the classroom, she wanted to explore a career that would allow her to bring together her love for creativity, science, and community and technology was just that! Crystal likes to call herself a “developing developer”, she’s a lifetime learner and is currently digging into JavaScript and Salesforce and fighting the patriarchy and imposter syndrome one key stroke at a time. She holds a B.S. in Nutritional Sciences from Michigan State University and an M.Ed. in Secondary Education from the University of Missouri-St. Louis, which goes to show, college degrees matter, but they really don’t.

Jess is a co-founder of dev.to, a place for programmers to connect and share knowledge. She leads day-to-day operations and commits to the dev.to codebase (ideally from the rock climbing gym.) In her spare time, Jess attempts to replicate Taiwanese street food in her kitchen and entertain her past life as a musician.

Jessica is an urban designer turned web developer who is writing Go and JavaScript these days. She loves open source and tries to build tools to make the web more approachable.

Jiaqi is a Software Engineer at Button building out their data platform. Prior to this, she was a Principal Data Scientist at Capital One Labs, where she worked on a variety of prototypes leveraging data science, design thinking and software engineering to improve financial wellness for consumers. She is passionate about challenges in bridging the gap between the science and engineering part of data-driven work. Outside of work, she is a Director at Women Who Code NYC and active in the NYC Python Community.

Jo Balme is a software engineer specializing in robotics and embedded programming. She builds life-saving drones by day and terrifying battlebots by night.

Katel LeDû is the CEO of A Book Apart, where she helps passionate tech community members become successful authors. Previously, she worked with _National Geographic_ as their digital director of photography, and has been in publishing since the early aughts. She’s seen a lot. She enjoys running (no, really) and learning the secrets of life from her snaggle-toothed mutt, Hugo. Sara and Katel are also two-thirds of the badass team behind No, You Go, a weekly podcast with their friend Jenn Lukas about being ambitious, living your best feminist life at work, and giving—and getting—support along the way.

Kathy Simpson is Senior Director of Product Management at GitHub, where she leads Developer Experience in navigating code collaboration, workflow and efficiency. Kathy has an engineering background and has always been a maker at heart with a passion for technology. She’s played a critical role in the creation of new products such as Heroku’s developer dashboard and enterprise workflow management systems, and works to make every product successful well beyond launch. Her curiosity for building is fueled by exploring new tools, prototyping potential solutions and investigating different processes. Prior to GitHub, Kathy worked as Senior Product Manager on the Human Interface Team at Heroku. Before Heroku, Kathy was a Senior Product Manager for Disqus, where she ran the core commenting platform. She studied Philosophy and Physical Anthropology at Pacific Lutheran University.

Katrina is a software engineer at GitHub, where she works on integrating Git and GitHub into Atom. She loves nerding out about Git, and empowering others to use it with more confidence and ease.

Kelsey Rose is a Software Engineer at Squarespace, where she works on business products that empower small businesses. She loves cycling, fancy coffee, and the intersection of design and technology.

Lateesha is a conference organizer and speaker, occasional developer and workplace diversity & inclusion advocate. She's currently managing partnerships for Google's Women Techmakers initiative. Before that she was the Director of​ ​Strategic Partnerships, Business Development and Corporate Training at Dev Bootcamp, where she​ created programs and curriculum aimed at fostering a transparent, inclusive, equitable and empathetic culture in technology. She serves on the board of Write/Speak/Code (and is this year's conference lead), as well as an advisory board member for Lesbians Who Tech.

LeeAnn is Director of Programs at Girl Develop It, a national non-profit that exists to provide affordable and judgment-free opportunities for women interested in learning web and software development. LeeAnn is also co-founder of Ela Conf, a safe, inclusive tech leadership conference and community for adult (18+) women (cis and trans), trans men, and genderqueer people to gain the confidence to become leaders, speakers, and teachers in tech. In her free time, she loves spending as much time possible outdoors, hiking, biking and camping.

Lilia Kai is a cyber wizard who uses javascript and magic to build stuff for the web and desktop. In her spare time she fashions enchanted talismans from discarded hard drives.

As a controls engineers at Zipline, I am responsible for the flight controls for our fleet of vehicles. I am building new flight controls architectures, developing cutting edge technologies, such as reverse thrust, and improving flight performance of our vehicles. In my free time, I love flying planes, building planes and outdoor sports.

Mariann Micsinai is a Senior Data Scientist at Pivotal. With a background in math, financial services, economics, and computational biology, she has worked on some of the most interesting data science projects in the company and solved real-world business problems in the areas of churn prediction, text analytics, financial compliance, and more. After 6 years on Wall Street doing street litigation, Mariann decided to pivot her career toward data science. She earned a PhD in Computational Biology, pushing herself to finish early for an opportunity at Pivotal.

Neha Batra is an engineering manager at GitHub who, 6 years ago, was an energy consultant and quit to teach herself programming because “it was time.” She holds a bachelor’s in Mechanical Engineering from MIT and enjoys foodie adventures, planning trips (and has docs for most of her trip plans), and collecting national park magnets. If you want to hear her ramble on a topic, ask her about pair programming, how she likes managing, or how much she loves Miami.

Nishat Anjum is a New York City based software engineer. You can usually find her in the back of a cafe tinkering with her projects or typing furiously at a hackathon.

Ope Bukola is a Product Manager at Google, where she works on Google Classroom and G Suite for Education. Previously, she was a product manager at Amplify Education, founded an edtech company that provided a web-based interactive Algebra course, and managed partnerships at CK-12 Foundation, a provider open-source digital textbooks. She is passionate about building technology that improves teaching and learning, and helps people thrive. She loves funding strong founders and ideas: she is a member of Pipeline Angels, Executive Board chair of Black Art Futures Fund, and a crowdfunding junkie. Ope holds a joint degree in Economics & Mathematics from New York University. She enjoys book clubs, dinner parties, and yoga.

Rebecca is a senior software engineer at New Relic, developing potential new products and technologies. Her tech cred is from a full time coding bootcamp; before she was in tech she studied History and French. When she's not thinking up new ways to monitor software, she's reading, eating, or learning to do cool things with computers.

Rowan is an SRE, an activist, a writer, and a tabletop games designer. She came to engineering after a life of many and varied careers, which she feels gives her a different perspective on the responsibilities of engineers to create ethical and user friendly technology. When she's not arguing about dress colors with her coworkers at BuzzFeed (#TeamBlackAndBlue) she's writing software to improve the world, one user at a time.

Amelia Downs is an engineering anchor on the Container Networking team at Pivotal Cloud Foundry. She cares deeply about process and actually likes doing CI work.

Shemika Lamare is a Biologist turned Data Enthusiast. She is on a non-traditional path into Data Science and is passionate about the ways that data can be used to improve our society. She wants to ensure everyone is aware of how their data is being utilized and that society is held accountable when using data. When she is not playing with data she is attending conferences, and writing talks to help empower newbies in the tech field.

Sravanti Tekumalla is a software engineer investigating how technology intersects with fields like art, music, and urbanism. She currently works as a full-stack software engineer at Uber on the Safety team in San Francisco and has previously worked at Newsela, Goldman Sachs, and HubSpot. In her spare time, Sravanti enjoys baking, weight lifting, and classical music.

Tanya Reilly is a principal engineer at Squarespace working on infrastructure and site reliability. Before Squarespace she spent 12 years in Site Reliability Engineering at Google. She likes raspberry pi, go, and making systems that are hard to break. She has broken many, many things.

Tiffany Mikell, Managing Director of ZaMLabs, is a software engineer with over 10 years of professional experiences in business, technology and entrepreneurship. In 2010, she founded a successful consulting firm developing SaaS platforms for non-profits and social enterprises. In 2013, she was on the founding team of Dev Bootcamp -- which was acquired in less than 2 years. ZaMLabs, Inc is an Idea to Seed Tech Incubator for Mad Scientists & Social Engineers. Our core area of focus is solving problems for the world's most marginalized communities. Our portfolio to-date includes Trans*H4CK, BlackStarLaunch (Sunset), AerialSpaces & Appolition.

Tilde Ann Thurium is an artist, engiqueer, and activist. Currently, they are an engineer building Atom editor at GitHub. In previous lives, they have done stints as a florist, a security guard, and a Human Resources wench. In their spare time, they illustrate data structures and algorithms with acrylic paint.

Vanessa is a Software Engineer working on Electron at GitHub. Having grown up in Hong Kong, and lived in Toronto, Canada for over a decade, she is a recent transplant in Berlin, Germany. She is passionate about the intersection of art and technology, as well as creating top-notch developer experiences. When not in front of a computer, she can be found impatiently tending to her plants, or paddling on some bodies of water.

Ann is currently a software engineer at athenahealth, working to create a more connected healthcare experience. She loves finding new technologies and new ideas and boiling them down to be more simple to understand for beginners. In her spare time, she hangs out with her dog and drinks too much fancy coffee.

Anna Neyzberg is a San Francisco native who has done a lot of work in the ruby community in SF and currently sits on the board of RailsBridge. She has taken this community organizing experience and 2 years ago co-founded ElixirBridge in SF- an organization that offers free weekend long workshops, with the goal of creating an inclusive welcoming space for under-represented populations in tech to learn elixir. By day she works as a Developer at Carbon Five. When not in front of a keyboard, she is trying to get better at climbing rocks.

Anna Barto is a European video producer currently contracted by Google Developer Studio. She is responsible for end to end producing of one-off video projects as well as serial video formats for developer and designer audiences on Google media channels, especially YouTube. Previously, she worked in Content & Talent Development division at YouTube, specializing in areas such as content strategy, audience development, YouTube-friendly production, and digital rights management. She believes the combination of art and science is when it gets interesting, and she also believes in the power of digital media.

Anne is the Lead Product Manager at OpenLaw, a spoke of ConsenSys. She is passionate about the intersection of ethics and AI, as well as practical applications of blockchain. She recently worked as an Emerging Tech Correspondent for Tech 2025, a platform and community for learning about, and discussing emerging technologies. Her most recent piece, Holding Algorithms Accountable To Those They Should Be Serving, focused on the New York City Algorithm Accountability law and how it should serve the people it is meant to protect. Much of her writing explores both the potential benefits and dangers of emerging technologies.

Ashi's first program printed `I LOVE YOU MOM` in a colorful infinite loop; she was six at the time, and she was hooked. Her first written story emerged around the same time, and featured sentient sea slugs. Her career has been a story of finding balance in these dual modes of expression. She studied computer science and creative writing. Fresh out of school, she worked as a coder for NOAA, and then Google. Exhausted by the many emotional challenges of working in tech, she went into teaching—first at Dev Bootcamp, and then at Fullstack Academy in New York, where she taught at the Grace Hopper program for women and non-binary people. This summer, lured by new and interesting problems and exhausted by the many emotional challenges of teaching at a bootcamp, she joined GitHub as a senior engineer. She hopes this will mark an evolution, not an end, to her teaching career, as she continues to pursue her passions of speaking, traveling, and writing. She is working on a book. It is about the sea, and about the future, and about you.

Ashley is a Director of Engineering at Datadog where she runs the web platform, dashboard, and data viz teams. Before that she focused on building fast, scalable data infrastructure at BuzzFeed. Ashley has helped build (and rebuild) core systems at many startups in NYC. Prior to working as a software engineer she worked in policy and politics and continues to follow campaigns the way other people follow basketball.

Bonnie Pan is a Staff Applications Engineer at Medidata currently working on the next generation clinical cloud platform. She started her career in startups working on green-field projects and then was intrigued by the challenges working with legacy code. She has been working with in-production legacy code for the past 7 years, and becomes passionate about refactoring, readability and testing. As a new immigrant to this country, she enjoys reading about USA and teaching her two little kids classical Chinese poem the same time.

Carolyn is a software developer based in the wilds of suburban Chicago, working remotely on the Microsoft Azure Containers team. She is a maintainer for the Go dependency manager (dep), a Kubernetes contributor, and Service Catalog SIG chair. As an organizer for Women Who Go, she regularly hauls her cookies across the world to share her love of Go, Kubernetes, and excessive emoji ✨ with her peers.

Chrys Wu, a product and business culture consultant, has worked at the intersection of technology and media for most of her career. Highlights include leading the Data Visualization practice at the open source consultancy, Bocoup; creating engineering-focused initiatives for The New York Times; working on a Pulitzer Prize-winning series for The Los Angeles Times; and fulfilling her initial career aspirations as a staff and freelance journalist and editor. She has been an invited emcee, speaker and panelist at events around the world, including the Grace Hopper Celebration and the Girls in Tech Catalyst Conference. She is also a co-founder of Write/Speak/Code.

Claire Slattery is the Director of Performance at Speechless. In this role, she combines her decades of experience as a seasoned performer, arts management leader, and veteran teacher to deliver Speechless public speaking training and produce Speechless Live around the globe. Claire delivers trainings to groups and coaching to top executives and is particularly passionate about training female and non-binary leaders to free their voice, tell their story, and transform their impact. Speechless Live has been selling out shows at comedy clubs and conferences since 2013 and is hailed by The Wall Street Journal as “comedic gold”. In producing the show, Claire spreads the power (and comedy) of their signature format by growing diversity on stage and in the audience. Claire has trained, performed, and produced her own original work at top theaters and comedy centers including the Upright Citizens Brigade, iO West, The Groundlings, American Conservatory Theater, and We Players. She is a proud graduate of Stanford University and lover of karaoke, farmers markets, and poodle mixes.

Cynthia Rich is an instructional designer and passionate GitHub advocate. She possesses an enthusiasm for non-technical users and software developers alike and the advantages the GitHub Flow provides for content collaboration.

Dana leads the Chrome Desktop UI team in Seattle, after a three-year stint in supply chain feeding Google's hungry data centers. Previously, she was Technical Lead at Phoenix Integration, where she architected software that helped NASA design missions to the moons of Jupiter. She was also responsible for much of the enemy AI in Volition, Inc.'s 2009 console title, Red Faction: Guerrilla. In her spare time, Dana is a mom, a dedicated partner, and a competitive roller derby player.

Denise is a Software Engineer (who occasionally wears a Product Management hat) at Pivotal Cloud Foundry. In her former life, she was a competitive university debater, classical musician, and student of public policy and law. She believes strongly in using technology as a means towards social impact, and she enjoys organising and facilitating events for tech communities, particularly those with a focus on enabling women, NB folk, and people of color.

Elisa Miller-Out is an experienced tech entrepreneur, investor, board director and community builder. Elisa is Managing Partner at Chloe Capital, a seed stage venture capital firm investing in women-led innovation companies. She’s co-founder of PollQ, a chatbot startup, a board member at Women 2.0, a media brand with a global reach of over 1 million women in tech, and CFO and chair of the board at Singlebrook. Singlebrook is a custom software services firm Elisa co-founded and led as CEO for over 10 years. Singlebrook has Fortune 500, higher education and nonprofit clients from around the world, including: Cornell, Yale, Henry Schein, Hitachi, the Sierra Club, and the Environmental Defense Fund. Elisa has been featured in the New York Times, the Washington Post, USA Today, Forbes and other publications, and she speaks about technology and entrepreneurship at events across the country. Elisa graduated Summa Cum Laude from Barnard College of Columbia University.

Emma's background is in satellite operations. She was a satellite flight operations engineer at Lockheed Martin before moving to Skybox Imaging, where she built the flight operations system for a constellation of high resolution imaging satellites. Emma started working at Google in 2014 when they acquired Skybox, and moved to Zipline in 2017. At Zipline, Emma is working on building a world-class flight and fulfillment operations system to deliver blood and medical supplies to remote hospitals.

Erica Stanley is a software engineer, entrepreneur and tech diversity & inclusion advocate. She is an engineering manager for the integrations and data analytics teams at SalesLoft – where she’s helping grow the product engineering team for the 4th fastest growing software company in North America. She’s worked with Fortune 500 companies, including Boeing, FOX Interactive Media, Turner Broadcasting, and Oracle, as well as early-stage and pre-acquisition startups. Erica is active in the Atlanta technology community. She founded the Atlanta network of Women Who Code, where she organizes conferences, hackathons, developer workshops, monthly tech talks and networking events for women technologists. She also helps develop and teach youth coding programs, speaks at local hackathons, conferences, and user groups and mentors entrepreneurs for various incubators and accelerators.

Evelyn Masso is a person (all the time), a developer/designer (on weekdays), and a poet (on weekends). She co-organizes the LA chapter of Write/Speak/Code.

From emergency and shelter veterinarian to event planning business owner to software developer, Heather has had quite the career path. She was a member of Cohort 6 at Ada Developer's Academy in Seattle, but calls Pittsburgh home. She's childfree by choice and has filled her house with an amazing husband, a snuggly pit bull, and three cats who live on the heat vents. In her free time, she enjoys baking, sewing, traveling, and cardio boxing.

I am a Software Development Manager at Amazon, where I have worked for 9 years. Before Amazon, I was a Computational Biology engineer at several research institutions. I grew up in Mexico before I moved to Seattle to study Computer Engineering at the University Of Washington. I first used a computer with internet when I was 18, and I built the first computer I owned in college (after burning many motherboards). I am passionate about building diverse teams and helping people believe that they are "invencibles."

Jasmin Rubinovitz is a cross-disciplinary researcher, designer, and engineer. She holds a Masters in Media Arts and Science from the MIT Media Lab, where she built innovative user interfaces with machine learning and data visualizations. Jasmin is a lead creative technologist at Fake Love - a design driven Experiential Agency that creates unconventional immersive & artistic projects.

Rebecca Miller-Webster is a software engineer, conference organizer, and educator. She is the founder of Write/Speak/Code and Director of Engineering at DevMynd. Rebecca has been developing software professionally for over a dozen years, previously organized GORUCO, and was the founding teacher at Dev Bootcamp NYC. Rebecca's hobbies include drinking Cherry Coke Zero, wearing trousers, telling computers what to do, cuddling pugs, & wearing all the colors.

Write/Speak/Code has been developing and delivering curriculum to the tech community on writing, speaking, coding, leadership, and personal growth for 5 years. We have helped launch thousands of conference speakers, open source contributors, meetup organizers, tech leads and more.