Speakers_24

Melissa Houghton is a Principal Software Engineer, a Microsoft MVP in Developer Technologies, an international conference speaker, and a technical community event organiser. She is a Women in Tech WA 2023 Tech [+] Award Winner and an Octopus Insider. She is a driven software engineer and excellent leader with extensive experience in end-to-end application development and delivery. She enjoys solving complex problems and is always open to learning new things, with current work focused on .NET and Azure. Outside of the tech world, Melissa lives in Australia’s South West, raising her twin baby girls. In her free time, she loves to travel and has a boutique wine business with her winemaker husband.

Anne-Marie Charrett is a renowned leader in engineering, with key roles at Culture Amp and Tyro Payments, alongside her consultancy work. With over two decades of experience, she’s a sought-after speaker, acclaimed author, and expert trainer in engineering leadership.

Michelle “MishManners” Duke, is a multi-talented personality in the tech and gaming communities. As a developer advocate, she has made significant contributions to GitHub, and is known for her expertise in sharing technical knowledge. Mish is a successful entrepreneur and founder, having co-founded several companies. She has been a driving force in Melbourne’s entrepreneurial culture and sits at the forefront of the city’s science, tech, esports, and startup scenes. She has been instrumental in pioneering esports to become mainstream and has been recognised as an influential woman in the industry. Throughout her career, Mish has been a dedicated advocate for diversity, inclusion, and community building, inspiring others to pursue their passions in tech, gaming, and entrepreneurship.

Aaron is a a Cloud Advocate for Microsoft based in Sydney. His area of specialty is .NET web development, focusing on the intersection of .NET and JavaScript applications.
Find out more about Aaron.

Brendan is a Product Coach at Organa, a boutique consulting agency, where he coaches product leaders and serves as a Fractional CPO for scale-ups in Australia. Previously, he was the Product Manager for Spotify’s Desktop product, responsible for one-third of their monthly active users, along with coaching teams at Spotify to utilise Product Discovery and Lean Startup methods to test innovative ideas. He’s passionate about mental health and brings his experience as a CPO for a mental health non-profit and his advocacy for wellbeing in the workplace to his coaching. Brendan is currently pursuing a Master in Psychotherapy, further deepening his commitment to mental well-being.

Beck is the General Manager and a principal consultant for Alpha Echo, a Newcastle born cyber start-up. After serving over 13 years as a full-time intelligence analyst and officer in the military, Beck started her cyber career with Alpha Echo as a Cyberworthiness consultant before becoming the General Manager of the company.  She also continues to consult on some of Alpha Echo’s major contracts within the DoD with her particular area of specialty in intelligence, operations and cyber awareness and education. She maintains an active reservist status as a military intelligence officer – and likes to think she gets the best of both worlds!

Lars is a Principal Magician with Arkahna in Australia, an author, trainer, Microsoft Azure MVP, community leader, aspiring YouTube host and part time classic car collector. He is heavily involved in the space of cloud computing services, especially Azure, and is a published author, solution architect and writer for numerous publications. He has been a part of the software development community for the past 20 years and co-organises the DDD Melbourne community conference, organises developer events with Microsoft, and also runs a part time car restoration business. He has spoken at numerous technical events around the world and is an expert in Australian Outback Internet.

Ben Dechrai is a software developer with a wealth of experience ranging from small MVP projects to large scale enterprise deployments. Passionate about working closely with developer and open source communities, he has been coding since the age of 7 and enjoys helping developers find the joy of experimentation.
Learn more about Ben

Senior Developer from Germany with over 15 years of experience building web apps and leading frontend teams, currently living and working down under in Australia. Pragmatic perfectionist, always looking for opportunities to learn and grow.
Find out more about Julian.

Hayley is an Insights & Analytics Business Partner working for Federal Government. Her early career spans the Not-for-Profit sector, consultancy & the higher Education sector before making a move into tech & data. She is a PM by trade (aka professional cat herder) so enjoys being the jack of all trades in risk, governance, strategy, operations, finance, tech & data. Hayley has worked on digital transformation projects, product implementations & large-scale business & cultural events such as Newcastle China Week. She’s also spent time on National Advisory Panels & board appointments for the City of Newcastle Business Improvement Association. Hayley holds a BA in International Relations & Linguistics & an MBA from the University of Newcastle.

Matt is an elite SSW Solution Architect who runs the Newcastle office. Matt stands out in the tech landscape as a certified Scrum Master, an Octopus Insider, and is GitHub accredited. From the early days when .NET 2 was still in beta, Matt has been capitalizing on the full potential of the Microsoft stack, coding his way to ingenious solutions that deliver significant business value.

Phil is a developer advocate for DataStax and Google Developer Expert living in Melbourne, Australia. He loves working with JavaScript, TypeScript or Ruby to build web applications and tools to help developers. He once helped build a website that captured the world’s favourite sandwich fillings. He has too many GitHub repositories.
Away from the keyboard, Phil listens to ska punk, hangs out with his miniature dachshund (also called Ruby), and is on a mission to discover the world’s best beers.
Phil tweets at @philnash and you can find him elsewhere online at https://philna.sh.

Chris is a software consultant with more years at places like Readify and SixPivot than he cares to admit. In that time he’s become extremely passionate about how different projects run, how different people tick, and how there’s always six different ways to solve any technical problem.

As a speaker, Chris has presented at user groups and conferences across Australia on a range of technical and non-technical topics. He loves sharing war stories and giving people something tangible to take home from every session.

Chris is the Consulting Director at SixPivot. In his spare time he co-organises DDD Brisbane, a not-for-profit community event run by developers for developers.

Aiden Price is the CTO of Arrowtail Precision, a local company building an application to manage operational data for blasting companies. Not considering digital transformation at a single company to be a big enough challenge, Aiden with his business partners and team mates are transforming an entire industry in one big uplift. He was/sort of still is/slightly one of the organisers of the Hunter Analytics meetup, now sort of fading into the background like Obiwan Kenobi. All this on top of a few decades knocking around the mining, energy and data industries.

Elena Scifleet is a Cyber Education Lead at Alpha Echo, a cybersecurity company in Newcastle. Her role involves creating engaging cyber training to upskill the workforce and make a positive cyberculture change for her clients.

Elena has been a part of the IT professional industry and educator for the last 20 years and has been securing environments even before cybersecurity was a hot topic. With various technical and non-technical roles under her belt, Elena has been a key contributor to the curriculum of CyberCX Academy, an industry-led initiative that has achieved major success in growing over 160+ new cybersecurity professionals.

Elena is very passionate about cyber security and works hard to demystify the concepts and make them accessible to all. Through her work and volunteering, she is striving to increase diversity in the cybersecurity field. Elena is also a firm believer in lifelong learning, a critical skill in a fast-paced industry like cybersecurity and has just graduated from Charles Sturt University with a Master’s in Cyber Security with a postgraduate medal.

Bryden is a Solution Architect with over 25 years professional experience. He has a wealth of knowledge from a diverse range of areas but with particular focus on database, web services, Microsoft Azure and SaaS based solutions. He has an enormous amount of experience working with developers on database performance. He’s had dealings with customers ranging from the world’s largest companies right through to small business. He has a strong understanding of how software will deliver business value to his customers.

Born in Dubrovnik, Croatia, I hold a degree in theoretical nuclear physics from the University of Zagreb, Croatia. My journey in software development began at a young age, during high school, when I actively participated in significant digital transformation projects within Croatian Telecom.

My career in the Telecom industry included roles in software development, senior software engineer, solution architect, and head of OSS (Operation Support Systems) engineering. I specialised in technical order management, network inventory, and network discovery.

Transitioning from OSS, my focus shifted to BSS (Business Support Systems), specifically Salesforce CRM. While still involved in the telecom industry, my emphasis broadened to the media industry. I built an integration platform linking Salesforce with external systems. This platform enabled integration with ad servers in the media industry and served as the foundation for a headless e-commerce API-based B2C service seamlessly integrated with Salesforce. Six years ago, I relocated to Australia, extending my mission to establish an R&D office in Newcastle.

Another transition happened about two years ago when I became a part of Skript, a fintech startup, as the lead software engineer. My primary responsibility involves building a scalable API-based platform providing Open Banking data.

My main areas of expertise lie in designing and building robust APIs, designing effective software architectures, managing enterprise-level integrations, and leading technical teams.

Hi, I’m Sam and I’m a Software Engineer in Test on a mobile app team in Sydney. I speak at tech conferences, play board games and live code on twitch. I’m a developer evangelist for YOW! Conference, an Associate in the Equal Experts network, and active in the tech community. I’m building a wearable app to track your poo, it’s called BogLogger. You can also check out my YouTube channel. I’m also studying a graduate diploma in financial advice.

Matthew is a Senior Data Analyst at nib working within the Data and AI business unit.
He has been working on conversational analytics for the past 18 months, however prior to this has been a seasoned data whisperer drawing insights across financial, education, healthcare and commercial domains after making a switch from health research into industry.

Sheena Peeters is passionate about helping organisations achieve transformative technology change.  She has spent couple decades as a senior leader and consultant in iconic Australian brands and sectors.  She’s learnt a thing or two about strategy, execution and how to realise those bold outcomes that helps organisations achieve their competitive advantage. Her success in leading digital and technology modernisation change is attributed to her hands on approach to solving problems and leading change. Sheena is part of the Equal Experts Network.

Libby is a transformative CIO with over 25 years’ experience leading organisations through strategic and operational technology transformations in financial and consumer service organisations, both domestic and international.
As Managing Director of Global Consumer Technology for Citi bank, Libby led the modernisation of Citi’s global consumer business in 17 markets across Europe, Africa, the Middle East and the Asia-Pacific. More recently Libby was based in London steering a digital modernisation agenda in the insurance industry, before returning home to Australia.
Libby is now applying her depth of experience as the CIO of NGM Group, one of Australia’s largest customer-owned financial institutions, where she leads digital innovation for the regional banking powerhouse.

I’m a Principal Software Delivery Consultant with a passion for creative problem solving and building things in the best way possible. I pride myself on accelerating time-to-market, making software services more reliable—both for teams building them and people using them—and building learning cultures in large scale organisations.
I often achieve these goals using the You Build It You Run It operating model, which I enjoy writing and speaking about. I’ve also co-authored a detailed playbook on the subject.
When I’m not working on any of the above, you’ll find me enjoying the beaches in New South Wales with my dog, Doddie.

A proud Maori man, Damian Hamilton has spent most of his career working in senior roles in global technology companies like HP, Dimension Data and VMware. With a strong belief in the power of culture and the ability for a good story to change lives, Damian gravitated towards alliances, sales and channel partner roles, driving dramatic growth in cloud services and channel revenue year on year for over two decades.
Combining his career and passion for coffee, his newly founded Pirate Coffee business and roastery at Port Stephens blends tech, food manufacturing and workflow systems with his passion for storytelling and conversation. With a goal to positively impact mens wellbeing, Pirate Coffee helps create moments for men of all ages to deeply connect through conversations that matter – one micro-roasted coffee at a time.