As anticipation builds for Craft Conference 2024, we’re thrilled to introduce you to some of the remarkable speakers who will grace our stage this year. Each bringing a wealth of expertise and insight from diverse corners of the tech industry, these individuals represent the forefront of innovation and thought leadership.
And now, let’s read a bit more about a few of our Craft 2024 speakers!
Gergely Orosz
Software Engineer & Author at The Pragmatic Engineer
Gergely writes The Pragmatic Engineer, the #1 technology newsletter on Substack. He was formerly an engineering manager and software engineer at Uber, Skyscanner and Skype/Microsoft. He now researches and writes about software engineering at Big Tech and startups. Gergely is the author of multiple books, including The Software Engineer’s Guidebook and Building Mobile Apps at Scale. He lives in Amsterdam, the Netherlands.
Kelly Shortridge
Senior Principal, CTO Office at Fastly
Kelly Shortridge is a Senior Principal in the Office of the CTO at Fastly. Shortridge is the lead author of Security Chaos Engineering: Sustaining Resilience in Software and Systems (O’Reilly Media) and is best known as an expert work on resilience in complex software systems, applying behavioral economics to cybersecurity, and bringing security out of the dark ages. Shortridge has been a successful enterprise product leader as well as a startup founder (with an exit to CrowdStrike) and investment banker. Shortridge frequently advises Fortune 500s, investors, startups, and federal agencies and has spoken at major technology conferences internationally, including Black Hat USA, O’Reilly Velocity Conference, and SREcon. Shortridge’s research has been featured in ACM, IEEE, and USENIX, spanning behavioral science in cybersecurity, deception strategies, and the ROI of software resilience. Shortridge also serves on the editorial board of ACM Queue.
Richard Wiseman
Professor
Professor Richard Wiseman has published over 100 academic papers examining the psychology of magic, illusion, deception, luck and self-development. He has written popular psychology books (including The Luck Factor and 59 Seconds) that have sold over 3 million copies, and his YouTube videos have attracted over 600 million views.
He regularly gives keynote talks to a wide range of organisations, is one of the most followed psychologists on Twitter, and the Independent On Sunday chose him as one of the top 100 people who make Britain a better place to live. A Member of the Inner Magic Circle, Richard acts as a creative consultant on several stage and television projects, including work with Penn and Teller, and Derren Brown.
Richard has been described by Elizabeth Loftus (Past President, Association for Psychological Science) as ‘one of the world’s most creative psychologists’, and in 2023 the first season of his On Your Mind Podcast reached No.1 in Apple Podcast’s Science charts.
Henrik Kniberg
AI whisperer, Chief Scientist at Crisp, Hups
Henrik Kniberg is a coach and consultant at Crisp. Henrik’s background is a mix of development and management, and his passion is applying Lean and Agile principles to help debug, optimize, and refactor companies. Henrik is the author of Scrum and XP from the Trenches and Kanban & Scrum, making the most of both and a popular keynote speaker at conferences worldwide. Henrik lives in Stockholm with his wife and four kids, and in his “spare time” plays bass and keyboard with two local bands.
Mark Thompson
Sr. Developer Relations Engineer at Google
Mark loves to teach and code.His love for both of these disciplines has led to becoming an award winning university instructor and software engineer. He comes with a passion for creating meaningful learning experiences. With over a decade of developing solutions across the tech stack, Mark likes to use that experience to break down fear of technology and make challenging technical topics more accessible.
Michael Feathers
Founder at R7K Research & Conveyance
Michael Feathers is the Chief Architect of Globant and founder and Director of R7K Research & Conveyance, a company specializing in software and organization design. Over the years, Michael has spent a great deal of time helping teams after design over time in code bases. Michael is also the author of the book Working Effectively with Legacy Code (Prentice Hall, 2004).
John Willis
Founder at Botchagalupe Technologies
John Willis has worked in the IT management for over 40 years. He is researching DevOps, DevSecOps, IT risk, modern governance, and audit compliance. Previously he was an Evangelist at Docker Inc., VP of Solutions for Socketplane (sold to Docker) and Enstratius (sold to Dell), and VP of Training & Services at Opscode, where he formalized the training, evangelism, and professional services functions at the firm. Additionally, Willis founded Gulf Breeze Software, an award-winning IBM business partner specializing in Tivoli technology deployment. As an author, Willis has written six IBM Redbooks on enterprise systems management and four books for IT Revolution, including the DevOps Handbook. He is working on his latest book, The Operational History of Generative AI.
Randy Shoup
SVP Engineering at Thrive Market
Randy has spent more than two decades building distributed systems and high performing teams, and has worked as a senior technology leader at eBay, Google, and Stitch Fix. He coaches CTOs, advises companies, and generally makes a nuisance of himself wherever possible. He talks a lot – sometimes at conferences about software – and is interested in the nexus of culture, technology, and organization. He is currently SVP Engineering at Thrive Market.
Büşra Coşkuner
Founder, Product Management Trainer & Coach at Producteer
Büşra is a product management coach and trainer, and a solopreneur with more than a decade of hands-on product management experience. She helps product teams and product professionals master the craft of product management and transforms them into confident product leaders who get successful products out of the door.
Having worked in both product-led and non-product-led companies herself, from startups and scale-ups to corporations such as Doodle, Deutsche Telekom, home24 and more, she understands the different worlds and helps apply product thinking practices to reality and up-skill product professionals in their craft. With her no-bullshit approach, she helps apply idealistic product theory to real-life product practice.
James Shore
Vice President of Engineering at OpenSesame
James Shore leads organizations in scaling software development, most recently for OpenSesame, where he is Vice President of Engineering. He is the author of the Agile how-to guide, The Art of Agile Development, co-creator of the Agile Fluency® Model, and a recipient of the Agile Alliance’s Gordon Pask Award for Contributions to Agile Practice. His writing and screencasts may be found online at jamesshore.com. He lives in Portland, Oregon with his wife and two children.
Kevlin Henney
Thought Provoker at Curbralan
Kevlin Henney is an independent consultant, speaker, writer, and trainer. His development interests are in programming, practice and people. He has been a columnist for a number of magazines and sites, has contributed to both open- and closed-source software (sometimes unintentionally), and has been on far too many committees (it has been said that “a committee is a cul-de-sac down which ideas are lured and then quietly strangled”). He is co-author of A Pattern Language for Distributed Computing and On Patterns and Pattern Languages, two volumes in the Pattern-Oriented Software Architecture series. He is also editor of 97 Things Every Programmer Should Know and co-editor of 97 Things Every Java Programmer Should Know.
Jessica Kerr
Engineering Manager of Developer Relations at Honeycomb.io
Jessica Kerr (better known as Jessitron) loves software because you can almost design right into it. She believes in Step 1 deploy; Step 2 develop – because coding is about changing how the world works. She speaks about systems thinking because there’s no one like software developers for consciously growing complex systems. Find her at jessitron.com, and at work at Honeycomb.io (because observability means making our systems talk to us).
As we wrap up this introduction to just a few of the incredible speakers gracing the stage at Craft Conference 2024, we’re reminded of the diverse expertise and innovative ideas they bring to the table. With each speaker poised to share their insights, experiences, and visions for the future, Craft Conference promises to be a transformative event for all attendees. Stay tuned for more updates as we countdown to this eagerly anticipated gathering of tech minds!