Developer Advocates

Bob Brindley

San Francisco, CA

Expertise: Spring, Kubernetes

Bob Brindley travels the world spreading the good word according to Tanzu and Spring to any and all that will hear.

He has been a developer advocate for five years and still smells terrific.

Cora Iberkleid

New York, NY

Expertise: Spring, Kubernetes

Cora Iberkleid is part developer advocate, part advisory solutions engineer at VMware, helping developers and enterprises navigate and adopt modern practices and technologies including Spring, Cloud Foundry, Kubernetes, Tanzu, and modern CI/CD.

Jakub Pilimon

Poland

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

Jakub is a developer advocate at VMware, blogger, programmer, and trainer. He loves to tackle complex enterprises with domain-driven design, test-driven development, and Spring. Architecture is a main area of interest, too. When he doesn’t program, he rides motorbikes, skis, or practices kitesurfing.

He writes a DZone MVB-awarded blog and his 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.

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.

Mark Heckler

St. Louis, MO

Expertise: Spring, RabbitMQ, Kafka, Reactive programming, Kotlin, Kubernetes

Mark Heckler is a software developer and Spring developer advocate at VMware, conference speaker, published author, and Java Champion focusing upon developing innovative production-ready software at velocity for the cloud. His latest book, Spring Boot: Up & Running! (O’Reilly Media, 2021), is available for early access now and is scheduled for publication February 2021.

As an engineer and an MBA, Mark has worked with key players in the manufacturing, retail, medical, scientific, telecom, and financial industries as well as various public sector organizations to develop and deliver critical capabilities on time and on budget. He is a committed open source contributor and author/curator of a developer-focused blog and an occasionally interesting Twitter account.

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.

Paul Czarkowski

Austin, TX

Expertise: Spring, Kubernetes

Paul Czarkowski is a long-time practitioner of the dark arts of DevOps. Hailing from Australia, he moved to Austin,Texas to help build and run one of the largest and most successful online games. Now at VMware, Paul works to improve the operator experience by taking cloud native software development concepts and applying them to operations to create platforms that reduce toil and improve software delivery.

Tasha Isenberg

Pittsburgh, PA

Tasha runs the Advocacy team like a well-oiled machine. Contact her to talk about having an advocate work with you.

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.