Alex Allain has been writing about C++ since 1998, when he started Cprogramming.com. In 2012, he published Jumping into C++ to teach new programmers how to think like a professional C++ programmer. At Dropbox, Alex leads the Platforms and Libraries team, helping make the dream of cross-platform C++11 a reality. Prior to Dropbox, Alex led a team at Liquid Machines focused on injecting code into applications to perform binary hooking.

Ben Alpert is a software engineer at Khan Academy, where he builds tools that help millions of students learn. Ben is a core contributor to React, trying to help other developers change the world too. He also likes to eat, sing, and sleep, though usually not simultaneously.

Justin Becker is a senior software engineer working for the Edge Engineering team at Netflix. Justin Becker has experience building distributed systems for machine learning applications.

Tamar Bercovici is a senior engineering Manager at Box where she leads the distributed data systems team in scaling Box’s database and cache architecture. Prior to Box, Tamar was an early-stage employee at XMPie (now a Xerox company). Tamar holds a Ph.D. in computer science from the Technion – Israel Institute of Technology.

Kurt leads the data platform team at Netflix. His group architects and manages the technical infrastructure underpinning the company's analytics.

Avik Chaudhuri works on programming languages and tools at Facebook. Previously, he was at Adobe, where he led the design of ActionScript 4, a major initiative to revise the language and VM underlying Flash, and served as a member of ECMA TC39, the de facto design committee for future versions of JavaScript. He has a Ph.D. in computer science and has published several research papers in the areas of program analysis and computer security.

Harrison Fisk manages the data performance team at Facebook. This team is involved in the performance, efficiency, and reliability around production and permanent data stores, including MySQL, Hbase, and Hadoop. Prior to working for Facebook, Harrison filled many roles as an early employee of MySQL AB. He graduated with a B.S. in computer science from the University at Buffalo. In addition, he has co-authored a book, MySQL Clustering.

Pamela Fox loves to learn, teach, create, and every combination of those. During the day, she creates the programming curriculum for Khan Academy, to teach the next generation of programmers. On the side, she teaches web development classes for the GirlDevelopIt San Francisco chapter. Before that, she was a frontend engineer at Coursera, a developer advocate at Google, and a graduate from USC's computer science department.

Our web products–and the people designing and building them–are under pressure to adapt to ever-changing conditions. The ability to move quickly and predictably is a major competitive advantage. I'll provide an overview of why I think UI components are an important part of designing adaptable systems.

Worked at Apple for a long time, now at Uber. Lover of cats.

Basil Hosmer works in the languages and tools group at Facebook. Prior to Facebook, Basil developed languages and runtimes at Adobe, where he created Mesh, a research language focused on type systems and concurrency, co-created the Halfmoon VM, collaborated on the design of ActionScript 4, and created the Fiber data modeling language.

Jafar Husain is Netflix's cross-UI team technical lead. He specializes in building application servers and user interfaces using functional reactive programming. He's also an active member of TC39, the standards body responsible for evolving the JavaScript language.

A highly-rated speaker, he has delivered talks about reactive programming at HTML Dev Conf, QCon, Code Mesh, YOW! and has given multiple Channel 9 interviews on the subject. He has also authored interactive training software to help developers learn about functional reactive programming.

Anshul Jaiswal manages the realtime data team at Facebook. The realtime data team develops and operates the platform for stream processing at Facebook. Prior to that, he worked with the team that developed the async processing infrastructure. Before Facebook, he led various teams in developing infrastructure software at Sun Microsystems and other startups.

Tyler Kieft has spent the last two years as an engineer working on Instagram for Android, building key features and focusing on usability and performance. Before joining Facebook, he was one of the co-founders of SpeakerText, which leveraged crowdsourcing and machine learning to produce fast, accurate transcriptions of video and audio content.

Xun Liu is a software engineer on the infrastructure team at Pinterest. He has worked in many areas and is currently focusing on storage and caching solutions at Pinterest. Before Pinterest, Xun was a staff software engineer at Google and worked on display ads and search quality.

Ori Livneh is a senior performance engineer at the Wikimedia Foundation, the 501(c)3 non-profit that supports Wikipedia and other open knowledge projects. At Wikimedia, Ori works to scale MediaWiki, an open source wiki engine, to deliver a free encyclopedia for everyone.

Chris Marra is a product manager at Facebook focused on adapting products and development practices to the growth of low-end Android phones. In past lives at Facebook, he worked on Graph Search, ad creation tools, and helped kick off Instagram's first business management suite. Prior to joining Facebook in 2012, he built autonomous off-road vehicles at Olin College of Engineering.

Rajesh Nishtala has been a software engineer at Facebook since 2010. He spent three years working on many pieces of caching infrastructure. Rajesh was one of the main early developers of McRouter and integrating it into both memcache and Tao infrastructure. He was also involved integrating McRouter into Instagram's infrastructure. Rajesh is currently working on understanding and identifying the site’s performance and capacity bottlenecks. Prior to coming to Facebook, Rajesh finished his Ph.D. from UC Berkeley in parallel and distributed systems working under Katherine Yelick and James Demmel.

Raghavendra Prabhu is engineering manager for the infrastructure team at Pinterest, which is responsible for core backend infrastructure including storage systems, caching, service framework and core business logic. The team is also responsible for the scalability and long term direction of Pinterest's overall software architecture and building backend services that enable product teams to move fast and ship awesome features. Prior to Pinterest, Raghavendra worked for many years on storage and search infrastructure at Twitter, Google, and Microsoft.

Ricky Ramirez is currently one of the systems administrators at Reddit, the frontpage of the internet. Before that, he helped run Rackspace Cloud Sites. He has extensive experience in managing websites with billions of monthly pageviews.

Andrew Rogers is an engineering manager at Facebook’s Seattle office. Since joining two years ago has worked on several Android-related projects, most recently on performance and efficiency. Before joining Facebook, he spent 12 years at Microsoft as an engineer and manager on multiple embedded and mobile projects.

Itamar Rosenn is an engineering manager at Facebook, where he leads the Data Science Infrastructure team. Itamar and his team build datasets and tools that streamline and automate the data science work that product teams do throughout the company. Itamar joined Facebook as the company's first Data Scientist in 2007, spent five years doing Data Science work, and founded the DSI team in early 2012.

Weizhe Shi has been working on building and improving Facebook's analytics engine to serve mobile development for more than two years. He joined Facebook after he graduated with a M.S degree in computer science from UCLA.

Sugu Sougoumarane has been working on Vitess since its inception in 2010. He's responsible for the overall design of the product, and is actively implementing many of those features.

Prior to Vitess, he worked on various site scalability projects for the YouTube infrastructure & storage team. Before coming to YouTube, Sugu was part of the architecture team at PayPal where he built some of its core features. Sugu has also done work in development environments, compilers, and computer graphics.

Andrew Twyman has been developing products and libraries in C++ for almost 10 years. He loves building robust systems and solving tricky low-level problems. Starting in 2012, Andrew helped spearhead Dropbox’s new approach to cross-platform mobile development. Now on the platforms and libraries team, Andrew is helping bring cross-platform goodness to Dropbox’s new generation of mobile and desktop apps. Prior to Dropbox, Andrew was an architect at Liquid Machines, where shared libraries supported parallel development of more products than there were developers.

Will Wirth is a product analyst on mobile at Facebook, where he focuses on informing and influencing mobile product management and business strategy with data. He has spent the past two and a half years working primarily on the reliability, performance, design and navigational schemes of the Facebook for Android application as Facebook has shifted to be a mobile-first company. Prior to joining Facebook in 2010, Will worked as a Financial Analyst and graduated with a B.S. in managerial economics from the University of California, Davis.

Igor Zaika is the development manager for the Office core experience team at Microsoft, responsible for shared UX components and application framework used by Office applications. Before that, Igor worked in various areas related to Office client applications, ranging from building Word Object Model and integrating VBA (Visual Basic for Applications) with Office, to shipping the first version of OneNote for the WinRT platform. Before joining Microsoft, Igor worked on 3D CAD application and contributed to the Kronos project.