Reza Rahman

Reza Rahman is a long time former independent consultant and now officially a Java EE/GlassFish evangelist at Oracle. He is the author of the popular book EJB 3 in Action. Reza is a frequent speaker at Java User Groups and conferences worldwide including JavaOne and NFJS. He is an avid contributor to industry journals like JavaLobby/DZone and TheServerSide. Reza has been a member of the Java EE, EJB and JMS expert groups. He implemented the EJB container for the Resin open source Java EE application server.

Reza has over a decade of experience with technology leadership, enterprise architecture, application development and consulting. He has been working with Java EE technology since its inception, developing on almost every major application platform ranging from Tomcat to JBoss, GlassFish, WebSphere and WebLogic. Reza has developed enterprise systems for well-known companies like eBay, Motorola, Comcast, Nokia, Prudential, Guardian Life, USAA, Independence Blue Cross and AAA using EJB 2, EJB 3, CDI, Spring and Seam.

Arun Gupta

Arun Gupta is Director of Developer Advocacy at Red Hat and focuses on JBoss Middleware. As a founding member of the Java EE team at Sun Microsystems, he spread the love for technology all around the world. At Oracle, he led a cross-functional team to drive the global launch of the Java EE 7 platform through strategy, planning, and execution of content, marketing campaigns, and program. After authoring ~1400 blogs at blogs.oracle.com/arungupta on different Java technologies, he continues to promote Red Hat technologies and products at blog.arungupta.me. Arun has extensive speaking experience in ~40 countries on myriad topics and is a JavaOne Rockstar. He also founded the Devoxx4Kids chapter in the USA and continues to promoting technology education amongst kids. An author of a best-selling book, an avid runner, a globe trotter, a Java Champion, JUG leader, he is easily accessible at @arungupta.

Josh Long

Josh Long loves software. He is the Spring developer advocate at Pivotal, a contributor to many of the Spring projects (including Spring Boot), a contributor to other open-source projects like Vaadin and Activiti, and author of 5 books, and 2 best-selling videos on Spring.

Find him on Twitter (@starbuxman), or on the web (http://spring.io/team/jlong).

John Davies

John is co-founder and CTO of C24, a London based software company created in 2000, C24 was sold to NASDAQ company Iona Technologies in 2007 and re-acquired back in 2011. C24 has the vast majorities of the world’s largest investment banks as customers, specialising in complex messaging and integration, standards like SWIFT, ISO-20022, FpML and FIX as well as the bank’s own internal formats. C24 has recently release a new product that creates binary versions of these messages reducing memory and network usage by over 20 times while significantly increasing performance at the same time.

In the past John has been global chief architect at JP Morgan, BNP Paribas and was the original architect behind Visa’s V.me (now Visa Checkout). John has co-authored several Java books and is a frequent speaker at technical and banking conferences around the world. He is married to a French wife and has 3 boys (11, 13 & 16) who all love travelling (as long as there’s internet).

Mani Sarkar

Mani Sarkar is a passionate Java/JVM developer currently living and working in London, UK, an LJC Associate, and an LJC Advocate to the @adoptopenjdk & @adoptajsr programs, JCP Member, OpenJDK contributor (submitted a number of patches), active member of a number of developer communities, speaker, blogger, and tweets interesting topics. Contributor to the Adopt OpenJDK and sister projects like Betterrev. He sees himself working in the areas of core Java, JVM, JDK, Hotspot, Nashorn and Performance Tuning. In his free time he also works on open-source projects one of them being in relation to RESTful APIs, others can be found on his personal github and bitbucket accounts. He is also an advocate of software craftsmanship principles like BDD and TDD, practices like pair-programming & collaborations – fervent user of SonarQube, analysing code quality on a regular basis. A regular attendee and presenter at many talks, conferences and hands-on-workshops in and around the UK and other parts of Europe.

Andy Gumbrecht

Andy Gumbrecht is an avid Apache TomEE member, developer and evangelist at Tomitribe. He is an active contributor of Apache projects including OpenEJB/TomEE, etc. Andy is a speaker at local Java Users Groups and conferences throughout Europe.

Andy has been fitting in tight code since getting a Sinclair ZX81 with a whopping 1k memory back in 1982. After a rewarding military career gaining many life experiences he eventually turned his long time passion into a professional qualification, and subsequently went on to become a lead developer on several successful and large scale local government and commercial industry projects. As a senior Java developer he has never lost his love for coding, open source and best practices within the industry and has an attention to detail, performance and infrastructure. He has been using in production environments and contributing to Apache OpenEJB/TomEE since 2009. You can find some of Andy’s technical postings at http://www.tomitribe.com/blog.

He still dreams of his early paragliding days when it was ‘really’ dangerous, but these days just loves to traverse the mountains of Bavaria by foot or cycle up the occasional hill – Sometimes he even manages to convince those he loves most to drag along behind.

Ivan St. Ivanov

Ivan St. Ivanov is development architect at SAP Labs Bulgaria. He is now working in the HANA Cloud Platform team, focusing on performance topics. In his free time he likes contributing to open source software, mostly to JBoss Forge. He is active JUG member, co-driving the adoption of OpenJDK in Bulgaria. Ivan is doing his PhD in the area of cloud multi-tenancy in the University of National and World Economy in Sofia. He is teaching Java, Java EE and SOA in three Universities in Sofia.

Branimir Giurov

Branimir is working at BULPROS as a Solution Architect. Branimir has more than 14 years of experience in Software Development. In October 2014 he has been awarded as a Microsoft Most Valuable Professional for a 11th consecutive time in the area of Visual C#. Branimir co-founded one of the first user groups in the area of software development in Bulgaria 10 years ago – the SofiaDev .NET User grou and has been leading it since then.

Branimir has been working with SharePoint for about 10 years, starting with SharePoint 2003 and WSS 2.0. Over the last decade he had participated in large number of SharePoint-based projects and products development on SharePoint 2007/2010/2013.

Roberto Cortez

Freelancer, Speaker, RebelLabs Author, Blogger, Passionate Developer

My name is Roberto Cortez and I was born in Venezuela, but I have spent most of my life in Coimbra – Portugal, where I currently live. I am a professional Java Developer working in the software development industry, with more than 8 years of experience in business areas like Finance, Insurance and Government. I work with many Java based technologies like JavaEE, Spring, Hibernate, GWT, JBoss AS and Maven just to name a few, always relying on my favorite IDE: IntelliJ IDEA.

Most recently, I became a Freelancer / Independent Contractor. My new position is making me travel around the world (an old dream) to customers, but also to attend Java conferences. The direct contact with the Java community made me want to become an active member in the community itself. For that reason, I have created the Coimbra Java User Group, started to contribute to Open Source on Github and launched my own blog (www.radcortez.com), so I can share some of the knowledge that I gained over the years.

Radoslav Veselinov

Radoslav Veselinov is a software developer with 10+ years of experience in big enterprise projects.

He was lately seen leading a team of software engineers which took part in building of Cisco’s social platform. He was most recently working on several innovative, highly confidential projects.

His main interests are in the sphere of Cloud computing and building of bug free and highly scalable software solutions when he is not riding his motorbike.

Rossitsa Borissova

Rossitsa Borissova is a Java developer with more than 13 years experience. She loves to learn new things and experiment with new technologies.
She has been a team leader of several teams and now is a part of the Research and Development (Infrastucture) team at Skrill.
She is the author of the ApiFest project.

Geertjan Wielenga

Geertjan Wielenga is a NetBeans product manager working at Oracle, focused on Java development and HTML5 development with NetBeans IDE and the NetBeans Platform. Geertjan is a Java technology enthusiast, primarily interested in Java desktop technologies, in particular, application development on the NetBeans Platform.

Borislav Mirchev

Borislav Mirchev is a Certified Java Developer with many years experience in the IT industry.
Borislav has been working for Bulgarian government institutions and international private companies.
He obtained MSc in Informatics cum laude from the University of National and World Economy in Sofia, Bulgaria.
During his career growth Borislav used extremely wide technology stack and is familiar with all the aspects of the software development lifecycle.
He specialize in Core Java, Java Web technologies, Java ORM technologies and Java Middle tier technologies.
Currently he is working as a Senior Java Developer in Luxoft where he is expanding his skills and working on new challenges.

Mihail Stoynov

Mihail is a security and software consultant, trainer and author. His resume includes projects in companies like Saudi Aramco, Boeing, HP, Siemens, USAF, several foreign banks and government entities. Mihail is the co-author of 6 books on software, and has 10 years of training experience in local and foreign companies and most of the local universities.

Viktor Hristoskov

Viktor is iOS Developer in MentorMate and has almost 3 years of experience in the mobile development.
He is doing his bachelor degree of Informatics in Sofia University.
Passionate in learning new technics about writing more readable and maintainable code.
Loves the variety of the problems and their solutions that the mobile development provides.

Stephane Epardaud

From deep into the Nice mountains, Stéphane works for Red Hat on the Ceylon project.

Passionate hacker in Java, C, Perl or Scheme. A web standards and database enthusiast, he implemented among other things a WYSIWYG XML editor, a multi-threading library in C, a mobile-agent language in Scheme (compiler and virtual machines), and some Web 2.0 RESTful services and rich web interfaces with JavaScript and HTML 5.

Eager to share, he is a frequent speaker at various conferences such as the Scheme Workshop, Nice University, Devoxx, JavaOne, JavaZone, JAX, many Java User Groups as well as the Riviera Java User Group he founded with Nicolas Leroux. A long-time open-source user and advocate, he is committer on RESTEasy, author of jax-doclets, stamps.js and various Play! Framework modules, and developer on various Ceylon projects for Red Hat.

Tano Dzhinski

Tano Dzhinski is a Solutions Architect in BULPROS, currently working on the integration of Cisco Jabber functionality with the leading social and collaboration platforms: IBM connections, Microsoft SharePoint, and SAP Portal. In the past, he has held senior technical positions: software developer, senior QA, build/release engineer and release manager. This varied experience allows him to view a software product from the perspective of all the different roles engaged in the development process.

Mite Mitreski

Mite Mitreski works on custom enterprise application development and consultancy with primary focus on Java and JVM-based solutions. He has held various titles such as solution architect, team leader, senior engineer and technical consultant but at the end of the day he is software engineer.

Currently he is deeply involved in activities surrounding development groups in Macedonia, where he is the JUG Leader of Java User Group, Macedonia. Mite has a great passion for free and open source software, open data formats, and the open web. Occasionally, he writes at his blog and can be reached on Twitter. Recently he co-author a book titled HTML 5 Data and Services Cookbook.

Dmitry Alexandrov

Dmitry is a passionate Java developer. Through his 8+ years career he has gained a huge experience with different web technologies. His areas of interest include the wide range of Java-related technologies (JSF, Spring Framework, JMX, JAX-RS, JAX-WS), enterprise solutions, cloud computing technologies, as well as non-Java like NodeJs and NoSql. He’s also passionate about Eclipse plug-ins development process. He’s big enthusiast of distributed multinational, multi location software development. At his free time he’s trying to contribute to OpenJDK and supports his own opensource project.

Goran Kopevski

Goran Kopevski is a 4 year experienced Java & mobile developer. Currently he is working for Polar Cape as a consultant and developer for the client Liberty Global. He has worked for multiple clients including Porsche Informatik, Cardiologie Centra Nederland and various telecom companies. He is developer who aim for simplified code and usage of javascript. Open minded for new technologies and solutions in IT. As open minded person he wants to exploit all of the magic that javascript can offer.

Stanislav Zhelyazkov

Stanislav is System Center Consultant at BulPros where his responsibilities are to build Private and Hybrid Clouds for customers to host their applications and services.

Stanislav Zhelyazkov has been working in IT since 2007. Stanislav has started his IT career as a Help Desk Specialist in 2007 while studying Informatics in the University of Ruse. He also worked in HP Enterprise Services, maintaining large corporate IT infrastructures for clients in Holland, Switzerland and Germany and was involved in a Private Cloud project based on MS Hyper-V and System Center. Currently he is a consultant and Microsoft MVP focusing on MS System Center, Virtualization and Cloud Computing. Stanislav is active community member at systemcentercentral.com, one of the world’s most popular sites, a resource site for information and solutions for Microsoft System Center and cloud technologies. His blogposts can be found at cloudadministrator.wordpress.com or systemcentercentral.com.

Boris Hristov

Boris is a SQL Server Consultant and Architect for BULPROS where his responsibilities are to help the company’s customers continue their data journey in a seamless manner.

Boris is a SQL Server Consultant, but also an Author for Pluralsight and a SQL Server MVP. He is frequently speaking at conferences all accross Europe and is heavily involved in training students and organizations in what he calls “The Art of SQL Server”. Boris is frequently blogging and is the host of SQLHangouts.

Yordan Pavlov

Yordan Pavlov is associate developer at SAP Labs Bulgaria. He is doing his bachelor degree of Computer Systems and Technologies in the Technical University of Sofia. With only 2 years of experience in programming, he is not the typical speaker you would expect to see.

But don’t be misled, this freshman has experience both in software and also hardware development. He well knows the concept of In-System development and is one of the drivers of the “Dirigible” project.

Ivan Rangelov

Natural born scientist. Always been fascinated on how things work and making them do something else.
Meanwhile spent 14 years doing professional Java development. Got master’s degree in Electronics from Technical University of Sofia.
Certified as Scrum Master, Product Owner and Agile Software Engineering trainer.

Martin Toshev

Martin is a Java enthusiast. He is a graduate of Computer Science from the University of Sofia. He is also a certified Java professional (SCJP6) and a certified IBM cloud computing solution advisor.
His areas of interest include the wide range of Java-related technologies (such as Servlets, JSP, JAXB, JAXP, JMS, JMX, JAX-RS, JAX-WS, Hibernate, Spring Framework, Liferay Portal and
Eclipse RCP), cloud computing technologies, cloud-based software architectures, enterprise application integration, relational and NoSQL databases. You can reach him for any Java and FOSS-related topics (especially Eclipse and the OpenJDK).

Nikolche Mihajlovski

Nikolche Mihajlovski is a software engineer who always seeks improvements of the commonly established processes, practices and technologies. He has 17+ years of programming experience in various programming languages, paradigms and technologies, diverging from experimental research and pet projects to serious enterprise applications.

Nikolche is the author of Rapidoid framework (open-source high-performance TCP/IP and HTTP server, web framework and more), OhmDB (open-source hybrid RDBMS + NoSQL database), JAnnocessor (a modern annotation-based code generator), RDXPL (experimental multi-paradigm programming language), and much more…

Nedelcho Delchev

Nedelcho Delchev is Development Architect at SAP Labs Bulgaria in Development Experience & Research for HANA Cloud Platform.

He has 14+ years of experience in various programming languages, technologies and architectural styles.

Based on the lessons learnt from the past Java EE and SOA times, along with a group of a few colleagues he started SAP’s internal innovation project targeting a new approach for Cloud Development. The project name is Dirigible. It focuses on the simplest yet common use-cases and provides full-fledged capabilities for developing, running and operating cloud applications. It is based on a huge set of open-source Java based projects from Eclipse, Apache, Mozilla, JCraft, OW2 and many more and in turn it is also open source.

Atanas Raykov

Atanas Raykov is manager Consumer Mobile Products and Value Added Services at VIVACOM. He is responsible for the mobile strategy and innovation efforts of the company. He has overseen numerous successful product launches, which have made VIVACOM the leader in the mobile data in Bulgaria. Currently he and his team are engaged in building a local eco-system for development and monetization of Android smartphone services through VIVA Apps Market place and through operator charging SDK for third party apps, which is due to be released by the end of the year.

Borislav Traykov

Borislav Traykov is a software engineer in the Test Automation team at Milestone Systems with interests in quality, automation and processes.

He currently has 9 years of experience in the IT industry. He strives to experience software development from different vantage points and his background consists mostly of customer support, sales, backend development, database administration, web development, release engineering and quality assurance.

He has a passion for sharing ideas, spreading knowledge and solving problems and having fun along the way.

Stojan Peshov

Stojan Peshov is Java developer with more than 10 years experience in web and back-end development. He has worked on a wide range of projects and business domains using open source libraries and frameworks such as Spring, Hibernate, Magnolia CMS, IceFaces, Hessian, RobotFramework, AngularJS, etc. As such, he has tasted different flavors of Java: JSP, JSF, JPA, JTA, CDI, as well as Test Automation, ETL, HTML5, Javascript and Web Services.

Ventsy Popov

Ventsy Popov is a Technical Evangelist in Microsoft Bulgaria where he focuses on the newest trends round Microsoft Development Platform and positioning its values amongst developers and software companies. Before that, he worked for years on the development field, dealing with technologies like ASP.NET, Windows Forms, .NET Compact Framework, Microsoft SQL Integration Services, Microsoft SQL Reporting Services, Microsoft SQL Server, Oracle Database. Ventsy is a Microsoft Certified Trainer and since 2008 has been participating as a speaker on numerous events and university courses. His latest passion and practice is with Windows Azure cloud computing and Windows Store App development.

Martin Benkov

Martin Benkov is senior software architect at Avus Capital with more that 7 years of professional experience.
Has a bachelor degree in computer science from Sofia University, but his passion for programming dates way before that.
He's keen on building high performant applications which are optimized in all layers - from page load time in the frontend, through algorithms and data structures in the business layer, to SQL query optimizations.