Developer Advocates

Cora Iberkleid

New York, NY

Expertise: Spring, Kubernetes, Architecture, Microservices

Cora Iberkleid is a Developer Advocate for Modern Applications at VMware, helping developers and enterprises navigate modern practices and technologies including Spring, Kubernetes, Cloud Foundry, Tanzu, and modern CI/CD. Prior to that she was an Advisory Cloud Application and Platform Architect at Pivotal. She also spent nearly a decade at Sun Microsystems and Oracle, helping customers design and build enterprise integration applications.

DaShaun Carter

Kansas City, MO USA

Expertise: Spring

DaShaun is a husband, father of four, volunteer, struggling athlete and Spring Developer Advocate at VMware Tanzu. Deliberately practicing to build better software, faster.

Jakub Pilimon

Poland

Expertise: Architecture, Domain-Driven Design, Unit testing, Refactoring, Spring

Jakub Pilimon is a Staff Technologist at VMware, blogger, programmer, and trainer. His main duty is to tackle complex enterprises with Domain-Driven Design and to propose a model and architecture that solves a problem. Sometimes he is involved in refactoring projects. When he isn’t coding, you can find him riding his bike, reading, or practicing kitesurfing.

Jakub’s pet projects can be found at https://github.com/ddd-by-examples.

Josh Long

San Francisco, CA

Expertise: Spring, Microservices, Kubernetes, CloudFoundry, EAI, Cloud Computing, YAML

Josh (@starbuxman) has (officially) been a Spring developer advocate since 2010. Josh is a Java Champion, author of six books (including Cloud Native Java: Designing Resilient Systems with Spring Boot, Spring Cloud, and Cloud Foundry (O’Reilly Media, 2017) and the upcoming (self-published) Reactive Spring, as well as the creator of numerous best-selling training videos, including Building Microservices with Spring Boot Livelessons with Spring Boot co-founder Phil Webb. He is also an open source contributor (Spring Boot, Spring Integration, Spring Cloud, Activiti, and Vaadin), a podcaster (A Bootiful Podcast), and a screencaster.

Layla Porter

Milton Keynes, UK

Expertise: .NET, Microservices, Solution Architecture, TDD

Layla is a Developer Advocate at VMware serving the .NET community. She is a Live Coder on Twitch, a Microsoft MVP, A GitHub Star, and founder of the #WomenOfDotNet Initiative. Layla loves sharing knowledge whilst having fun. No question is stupid and beginners are always welcome.

Leigh Capili

Denver, CO USA

Expertise: Kubernetes, GitOps, Continous Delivery, Developer Experience

Leigh is an empathetic speaker and developer with niches in cloud-native systems and security. Leigh comes from a background of building software to manage infrastructure. He contributes to Kubernetes and Flux and is frequently working on his next software demo

Mario Gray

Santa Monica, CA

Expertise: Spring, kotlin, TDD, Security, Services, functional, Kubernetes

Mario is a principal technologist at VMware with more than 20 years of experience in software development and software architecture. He is co-author of Pro Spring Integration (Apress, 2011). He’s helped organizations large and small build service-based architectures in a number of different runtimes and platforms over the decades, but adopting Spring in 2004, and using it whenever possible since, was a no-brainer that culminated in joining the Spring team in 2017. As a Spring developer advocate, Mario loves to engage and inspire developers and businesses in the Pivotal ecosystem.

Michael Coté

Austin, TX

Expertise: Digital Transformation, DevOps

Michael Coté studies how large organizations get better at building software to run more efficiently and grow their business. He covers this topic in his books, Monolithic Transformation (O’Reilly Media, 2009) and The Business Bottleneck (O’Reilly Media, 2020). 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 on Twitter. Texas forever!

Nate Schutta

Minnesota

Expertise: Architecture, Domain-Driven Design, Microservices, Usability, Refactoring, Spring, Kubernetes, Cloud Native Computing, Architect as a Service

Nathaniel T. Schutta is a software architect focused on cloud computing and building usable applications. A proponent of polyglot programming, Nate has written multiple books and appeared in various videos. He is a seasoned speaker, regularly presenting at conferences worldwide, No Fluff Just Stuff symposia, meetups, universities, and user groups. In addition to his day job, Nate is an adjunct professor at the University of Minnesota where he teaches students to embrace (and evaluate) technical change. Driven to rid the world of bad presentations, Nate co-authored the book Presentation Patterns (O’Reilly Media, 2016) with Neal Ford and Matthew McCullough. He also recently published Thinking Architecturally (O’Reilly Media, 2018), available as a free download from VMware.

Nate’s presentations cover a variety of topics, ranging from architecture fundamentals to mobile design, usability, cloud computing, JavaScript, and everything in between. His current slate of talks can be found in Talk Abstracts, however additional presentations can also be found at his NFJS Speaker Page. If you are interested in having Nate speak at your event, please reach out.

Tasha Isenberg

Pittsburgh, PA

Tasha leads a global group of Technical Advocates at VMware Tanzu where she inputs her vision and strategy for advocacy and empowers her team to deliver on them. She is a fearless advocate for her team, and for the various technical communities they support. Tasha resides in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania with her amazing husband and wonderful 2 girls.

Tiffany Jernigan

Seattle, WA

Expertise: Kubernetes

Tiffany is a senior developer advocate at VMware and is focused on Kubernetes. She previously worked as a software developer and developer advocate (nerd whisperer) for containers at Amazon. She also formerly worked at Docker and Intel. Prior to that, she graduated from Georgia Tech with a degree in electrical engineering. In her free time she likes to spend time with her fiancé, family, and friends, as well as dabble in photography. You can find her on Twitter @tiffanyfayj.

Whitney Lee

Austin

Expertise: Kubernetes

Whitney traveled the scenic route but is absolutely chuffed to have found her way to Kubernetes and cloud technologies. She began her professional career as a fine artist before owning her own photography business for over a decade. Then, after a year-long tour playing keys and singing harmonies in the band Mutual Benefit, Whitney went back to school to learn full-stack web development. Shortly after graduation Whitney was employed by IBM as a cloud developer, using none of the skills she had just learned at school. However Whitney quickly developed an insatiable appetite for all things cloud, and a passion for teaching others as she acquired knowledge herself. She has made many light board videos for IBM Cloud, from topics ranging from creating a Pod in Kubernetes, to event-driven architecture, to cloud-native API solutions. At VMware Whitney’s contagious excitement drives her to continue to explore, collaborate, teach, and play!