Josh Knowles is the CEO of Code Climate, the New York software company whose Velocity platform gives engineering leaders at large organizations data on how their teams actually build software. A Ruby developer by training with more than two decades in the field, he spent years at Pivotal Labs and VMware building and running consulting and application-services teams across the US and Europe before joining Code Climate, rising from VP of Strategy and Operations to General Manager to CEO. He took the top job as Code Climate spun out its code-quality product into a separate company, Qlty Software, and refocused entirely on software engineering intelligence for large, complex enterprises.
Allison McMillan is an engineering leader who turned a nonprofit-management career and a Rails Girls workshop into a life spent building teams. She runs Tavlin Consulting as a fractional VP of Engineering and facilitator, was Director of Engineering at GitHub and a leader at DEV/Forem and QuotaPath, served as President and board director of Ruby Central, and is known worldwide for her talk 'Baby Driven Development' and the podcast 'Parent Driven Development' about being a parent in tech.
Matt Pelc is the co-founder and CEO of Plane, the all-in-one people platform (formerly Pilot) that helps fast-growing startups pay and manage employees and contractors in 100+ countries. A Cambridge-trained computer scientist who got his start writing Ruby and building Slack bots, he went through Y Combinator's Winter 2017 batch and has spent the better part of a decade trying to make a worker's location irrelevant to whether a company will hire them.

Corey Haines is a software developer, community catalyst, and author who quit a dead-end job in 2008 with $2,400 in his pocket, hit the road for 9 months pairing with programmers across the US for room and board, and accidentally invented the Coderetreat movement along the way. He co-created Coderetreat (now run in 100+ countries annually), wrote 'Understanding the Four Rules of Simple Design' based on observing thousands of programming pairs, co-founded Hearken (an audience-engagement platform serving 60+ global newsrooms), and has spent two decades championing software fundamentals over hype — all while claiming his only real goal in life is to be happy.

Nate Berkopec is the world's foremost Ruby on Rails performance expert, founder of Speedshop consultancy, co-maintainer of the Puma web server, and author of 'The Complete Guide to Rails Performance.' A self-taught programmer who pivoted from a Shark Tank appearance at 19, he now runs a thriving consulting and education business from Tokyo, helping Rails developers squeeze every last millisecond out of their applications.