Neal Ford is a director, software architect, and meme wrangler at ThoughtWorks, a software company and a community of passionate, purpose-led individuals who think disruptively to deliver technology to address the toughest challenges, all while seeking to revolutionize the IT industry and create positive social change. He's an internationally recognized expert on software development and delivery, especially in the intersection of Agile engineering techniques and software architecture. Neal has authored seven books (and counting), a number of magazine articles, and dozens of video presentations and spoken at hundreds of developers conferences worldwide. His topics include software architecture, continuous delivery, functional programming, cutting-edge software innovations, and a business-focused book and video on improving technical presentations. Check out his website, Nealford.com. Dr. Rebecca Parsons is ThoughtWorks' Chief Technology Officer. She has more years of application development experience than she cares to admit, in industries ranging from telecommunications to emergent internet services. She has extensive experience leading in the creation of large-scale distributed object applications and the integration of disparate systems. Patrick Kua is a seasoned technology leader with 20+ years of experience. His current mission is accelerating the growth of technical leaders through coaching, mentoring and training. He has had many years of hands-on experience, leading, managing and improving complex organizations and software systems as the CTO and Chief Scientist of N26 (Berlin, Germany) and as a Technical Principal Consultant at ThoughtWorks. He is a frequent keynote and conference speaker, author of three books including The Retrospective Handbook, Talking with Tech Leads and Building Evolutionary Architectures and runs the free popular newsletter for leaders in tech, a Level Upa?A (http: //levelup.patkua.com) and the Tech Lead Academy, offering online training for technical leaders. You can find him online on twitter as @patkua or running his very popular a Shortcut to Tech Leadershipa?A workshop. Pramod Sadalage is Director Data & DevOps at Thoughtworks, where he enjoys the rare role of bridging the divide between database professionals and application developers. He is usually sent in to clients with particularly challenging data needs, which require new technologies and techniques. In the early 2000's he developed techniques to allow relational databases to be designed in an evolutionary manner based on version-controlled schema migrations. He is co-author of Software Architecture: The Hard Parts: Modern Trade-Off Analyses for Distributed Architectures, co-author of Refactoring Databases: Evolutionary Database Design, co-author of Distilled: A Brief Guide to the Emerging World of Polyglot Persistence, author of Recipes for Continuous Database Integration, and continues to speak and write about the insights he and his clients learn.
