Azul is the largest independent Java vendor and a major contributor to OpenJDK. It builds production-grade Java runtimes - Azul Platform Core (certified OpenJDK builds) and Azul Platform Prime (a high-performance JVM) - plus the analytics-driven Intelligence Cloud. Companies use Azul to escape Oracle Java licensing costs, run lower-latency applications, and cut cloud spend.
Scott Sellers is the co-founder, President, and CEO of Azul, the Sunnyvale-based company that has spent two decades making Java run faster, cheaper, and freer from Oracle's licensing grip. Before Azul, he co-founded 3dfx Interactive, the graphics company that gave PCs real-time 3D before NVIDIA bought it. Eight patents, a Princeton EE degree (magna cum laude, Phi Beta Kappa), and a backup-quarterback origin story round out a quietly relentless career.
Gradle Technologies (Gradle Inc.) is the company behind the open-source Gradle Build Tool - one of the world's most widely used build systems - and Develocity, the commercial Developer Productivity Engineering platform used by Airbnb, LinkedIn, Microsoft, Netflix and many others to accelerate builds, troubleshoot failures, and tame flaky tests at scale.
Ankit Kumar is a software engineer and technical leader at Modern Treasury, the San Francisco-based fintech building payment operations infrastructure for companies moving money at scale. With a Master's in Computer Science from Syracuse University, he built the foundations of Modern Treasury's full-stack Payments product - an integrated payment service provider (PSP) handling fiat and stablecoin payments across ACH, RTP, FedNow, and wire rails. Before payments, his career ranged from AR helmet prototypes for BMW's CES 2016 showcase to Android apps that earned the title 'The Ultimate Camera App' from the tech press.
Hans Dockter is the founder and CEO of Gradle Technologies, the company behind the Gradle build tool - downloaded over 23 million times per month - and Develocity, an enterprise developer toolchain observability platform. A German-born physicist-turned-software-engineer, he co-created Gradle in 2008 out of personal frustration with existing build systems, transforming it into one of the most widely adopted build automation tools in software development. Under his leadership, Gradle Technologies has raised $53.2M in total funding and grown to 170+ employees, serving enterprises including Netflix, Google, LinkedIn, and Airbnb.
Sandeep Panda is the Co-Founder and CTO of Hashnode, a developer-first blogging and community platform that lets software engineers own their content and publish on custom domains. Founded in 2016 alongside Syed Fazle Rahman, Hashnode has grown to serve 3M+ monthly readers and 10M+ monthly views, backed by Sequoia Capital India's Surge, Salesforce Ventures, and angel investors including Naval Ravikant and Guillermo Rauch (Vercel). A graduate of IIIT Bhubaneswar with a background in web development and technical writing, Sandeep has authored books on AngularJS and HTML5, and is now building Bug0, an AI-native end-to-end testing platform.
Alexander Belokrylov is co-founder and CEO of BellSoft, the San Jose company behind Liberica JDK and Alpaquita Linux. After nearly thirteen years inside Sun Microsystems and Oracle - shipping Java ME Embedded, evangelizing Java SE, running pieces of Oracle's IoT Cloud - he left in 2017 with a group of OpenJDK engineers and started building a downstream Java distribution that now runs on millions of servers and ships inside Spring's own quickstart.
Jon Plax is a Vice President of Software Engineering (Customer Centric Engineering) at Salesforce, where he has spent the bulk of a 23+ year career building and leading globally distributed engineering teams. Known internally as a technically deep yet empathy-driven leader, he has tackled some of Salesforce's most complex scaling challenges - JVM tuning, database bottlenecks, and multi-continent team coordination. He spent five years in Salesforce's Dublin office, briefly detoured to Bumble, then returned to Salesforce. A photography hobbyist with a consistent 'spaceman1066' handle across the internet, he is married to Talia Bailey Plax, a product marketing leader at Atlassian.
Kent Beck is the creator of Extreme Programming (XP) and a pioneer of Test-Driven Development, pair programming, and the Agile Manifesto. A programmer with 52+ years of experience, he co-created JUnit with Erich Gamma, co-invented CRC cards and design patterns in software with Ward Cunningham, and spent seven years coaching at Facebook. Today he runs the 'Software Design: Tidy First?' Substack newsletter (123,500+ subscribers in 195 countries), hosts the Still Burning podcast, and explores augmented human-AI coding. In April 2026 he publicly announced a Parkinson's disease diagnosis, continuing his mission to help technologists feel safe in the world.