Developer Advocates
The Technical Advocacy team serves as a public face for VMware Tanzu. We are respected experts in the IT community, speak frequently, create relevant content, and offer feedback for our customers, developers, ops people, etc. on the topics of: developers, operators, open source, and digital transformation.
We are many things, among them:
- Experts in our field (DevSecOps, TAS, TKG, Spring, domain driven development, test driven development, Kubernetes, architecture, microservices, containers, Java, digital transformation, software supply chains, cloud native data)
- Dedicated open source maintainers and contributors
- Respected inside and outside of VMware
- Experienced conference keynote speakers and presenters
- Kind of a big deal (just ask us), popular on social media and the tech scene in general
- Published authors (books, blogs, podcasts)
- Perfect guests to round out your webinar, fireside chat, or round table
- Not salespeople
We can do a whole range of things, including:
- Conduct deep-dive, technical workshops for technical staff (devs, ops, product managers, testers, security, and all of the intersections of these disciplines)
- Lead or support executive briefings, meetings, executive dinners, etc.
- Explain VMware Tanzu and provide related use case stories to audiences
- Provide input to vision, campaigns, and content both inside and outside of VMware
- Participate in casual conversational meetings, such as over lunch or dinner
- Host or speak at meetups (CF, CN, Spring, JUG, DevOps, management/executives)
- Provide a conduit for you to have an impact on VMware Tanzu products
- Help you tell a story across many mediums
Virtually or in person, VMware Tanzu specific or Open source ecosystem.
Contact us
Interested? Please email Tasha Isenberg with your event date, location, topic, and type of interaction (workshop, exec briefing, internal customer event, etc.).
Our Advocates
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
Cora Iberkleid
New York, NY
Expertise: Spring, Kubernetes, Architecture, Microservices
Cora Iberkleid is a Developer Advocate for Modern Applications at VMware Tanzu, helping developers and enterprises navigate modern practices and technologies, focusing on cloud native architecture, modern CI/CD, Spring, and Kubernetes.
Prior to joining VMware, Cora was an Advisory Solutions Engineer at Pivotal. She also spent nearly a decade at Sun Microsystems and Oracle, helping customers design and build enterprise integration applications. Through this experience, she developed an understanding and empathy for complex organizational challenges, and she strives to incorporate this empathy into her everyday work.
Dan Vega
Cleveland, OH USA
Expertise: Spring, Java, Architecture, Cloud, Microservices, Full Stack
Dan Vega is a Spring Developer Advocate at VMware Tanzu. He has been developing software for the web for over 20 years and his superpower is problem-solving. Dan is a blogger, YouTuber, course creator, and speaker. He is a lifelong learner and his passion is sharing his knowledge with the developer community. Dan lives near Cleveland Ohio with his beautiful wife and 2 daughters. When he isn’t writing code or teaching he enjoys spending time with his family, lifting weights, running, or reading a good book.
DaShaun Carter
Kansas City, MO USA
Expertise: Spring, Kubernetes, Azure, Redis, Terraform
DaShaun is a husband, father of four, volunteer, struggling athlete and Spring Developer Advocate at VMware Tanzu. Deliberately practicing to build, manage, and run, 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, Spring, Java, Architecture, Cloud, Full Stack
Josh (@starbuxman) became the first Spring Developer Advocate in 2010 and hasn’t looked back! He contributes (bugs, mostly..) to numerous open source projects, including Spring Boot and Spring Cloud.
Layla Porter
Milton Keynes, UK
Expertise: .NET, Microservices, Solution Architecture, TDD, JavaScript, Unity3D, Azure Functions
Layla (@LaylaCodesIt) is a Developer Advocate at VMware serving the .NET community.
She is a Live Coder on Twitch, a Microsoft MVP, A GitHub Star, former director of the board - The .NET Foundation, and the founder of the #WomenOfDotNet Initiative.
Layla loves sharing knowledge whilst having fun. No question is stupid and beginners are always welcome.
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 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 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 really likes to travel and dabble in photography. You can find her on Twitter @tiffanyfayj.
Whitney Lee
Austin
Expertise: Kubernetes
Whitney is a full stack developer who enjoys understanding and using tools in the cloud native landscape. Creative and driven, Whitney recently pivoted from an art-related career to one in tech. She is active in the open source community, especially around CNCF projects focused on developer productivity. You can catch her lightboard streaming show ϟ Enlightning on Tanzu.TV. And not only does she rock at tech - she literally has toured playing in the band Mutual Benefit on keyboards and vocals.