Nicole Zhu is the Vice President of Fraud & Risk at GO-JEK, a ride-sharing and payments company, and Indonesia's first unicorn. Previously Nicole has worked as a product engineer at IDEO, Pivotal Labs, and graduated from Stanford in Mechanical Engineering and Computer Science. In her spare time, Nicole contributes to open-source and maintains an engineering community.
Keynote Presenter
Nicole Zhu
Go-Jek - Vice President of Fraud & Risk
Presenting - “DevRel in the next 10 years”
Vanessa Radd is Founding Partner of the XR Alliance and is ranked a global top 10 augmented reality (2016) and TOP 50 global VR & AI (2017) changemaker. Radd is also the founder of XR Women in Asia and WebXR Asia dev community, and a Board member of The Media Alliance. Radd represents and consults for international media & tech brands in Asia.
Master of Ceremonies
Vanessa Radd - @vanradd
XR Alliance - Co-Founder
Victor Neo is the Head of Engineering at Carousell, and drives strategy and execution with the engineering team to achieve Carousell's mission of inspiring the world to start selling. He was the first employee and engineer to join Carousell, and his goal is to build a world-class engineering team in the Asia-Pacific region. Within the tech community, Victor is most active with the Python User Group and has been the main organiser for a few PyCon conferences in Singapore.
Victor Neo
Carousell - Head of Engineering
Yohan Totting has been active for over 8 years in the web creative workers community, launching groups such as FOWAB in Bandung, and starting the first coworking space in Indonesia called HackerspaceBdg. For the past 4 years, he's been involved in various developer relations work specifically in Asia. Some of his previous works include organizing the Indonesia election hackathon, Myanmar election hackathon, and the APEC App Challenges. Now with the Google Web Developer Relations team, Yohan focuses on expanding the web ecosystem in Indonesia by working with startups and companies to help them build better web experiences for their products.
Yohan Totting
Google - Web Developer Relations
Elisha Tan is passionate about bringing people together to solve big problems. As the Developer Programs Manager for APAC at Facebook, she helped launch the Developer Circles program globally and scaled it to reach tens of thousands of developers in the region, upskilling and helping developers with employment and startup opportunities.
Outside of Facebook, she's the founder of TechLadies - a community for women in Asia learn technical skills to switch careers into the tech industry. Prior to Facebook, she founded an online skills marketplace called Learnemy .
Elisha enjoys sharing her startup experiences and lessons learned on building developer communities. She has been featured on various media such as The Straits Times, The Business Times, Her World, e27, and High Net Worth. She has spoken at Slush Singapore, MaGIC Academy Symposium, RubyConf MY, SRECon, and Techsauce Summit to name a few, and have mentored at Startup Weekends (San Francisco & Penang) and SPARK Global Acceleration Program.
Elisha Tan
Facebook - Developer Programs Manager, Asia Pacific
Keir Whitaker is an Offline Marketing Lead at Shopify with a focus on the Partner ecosystem of designers, developers, freelancers, and agencies specialising in the platform.
He originally joined the Partnerships team in 2012 and for five years was responsible for building numerous outreach and education programs focused on Shopify theme building and development. As well as contributing to numerous online publications he’s conceived and run workshops, helped curate developer-focused events, and spoken at many meetups and conferences.
Keir Whitaker
Shopify - Offline Marketing Lead
Tomomi Imura (a.k.a girlie_mac) is aa writer, speaker, software engineer, and a technology advocate, who has been working for Developer Relations at five different companies in San Francisco Bay Area, including the current role at Slack. She is also an advisor for a coding bootcamp, Code Chrysalis in Tokyo.
Tomomi Imura - @girlie_mac
Slack - Developer Relations
Thomas Gorissen is best known for his conference series JSConf.Asia that brings together the web developer community from around Southeast Asia and the world in Singapore on a yearly basis. It strives to educate, inspire and entertain for a better and more inclusive web and to advance representation of our Southeast Asian communities in tech. In his day-to-day he works alongside with and advises small and big startups, venture funds and enterprise companies as a web platform evangelist with past and current engagements including the early Redmart, DBS and Standard Chartered Bank, Jungle Ventures and Sequoia.
Thomas Gorissen
JSConf Asia - Founder
Ali Spivak is the Head of Developer Ecosystem at Mozilla, and chairs the MDN Product Advisory Board. She has managed MDN for 5+ years and is committed to to an interoperable, cross platform web. Prior to Mozilla, she managed web production at Cisco, Edmunds.com, and numerous startups.
Ali Spivak
Mozilla - Head of Developer Ecosystem
Warit Wanwithu serves as Technical Consultant in Developer Relations team for LINE Thailand. He leads many local developers community activities such as speaking at conferences, writing blog posts and creating code samples. He is also the founder of the LINE Developers Thailand community group with over 5,000 members. In addition to growing the developer community, he is also responsible for consulting LINE’s technical solutions to serve clients’ needs, and maintaining strong relationships with LINE Developers through both internal and external communities as well.
Warit has over 9 years of experience in various challenging roles in the technology area, having worked at leading IT companies such as IBM, Amadeus, Thomson Reuters before joined LINE Thailand.
Warit Wanwithu
LINE - Developer Relations
Joe Nash is the student program manager at GitHub, focused on helping the next generation of tech leaders create inclusive and diverse communities. Joe is a strong believer in the educational benefits of hackathons and hacker culture, and helped to bring student hackathons to Europe as part of Major League Hacking. In the past, Joe has served developers across many industries including fintech and gaming, as a developer advocate at PayPal and Improbable.io. As a developer, Joe favours statically-typed functional languages such as Haskell. When not working with technical communities, Joe is a level 10 Triton sorcerer.
Joe Nash
GitHub - Student Program Manager
Jarod Reyes serves as the Developer Evangelist Manager of APAC & West Coast at Twilio leading its Developer Education team, a group of talented developers who challenge the status quo by redefining what technical documentation can be. His mission is to improve the developer lifestyle by focusing on the developer experience at Twilio.
Jarod Reyes - @jreyesdev
Twilio - Developer Evangelist Manager
Raylene Yung leads the payments engineering team at Stripe. She oversees the engineering work underpinning Stripe’s products for multi-sided platforms (Connect), fraud prevention (Radar), and core payment acceptance (Elements). Raylene’s teams also handle the technical integrations with Stripe’s global banking and financial partners, as well as internal tooling for billing and treasury functions. Prior to Stripe, Raylene was an Engineering Director at Facebook, where she led initiatives around privacy, content creation, and the Facebook news feed. Raylene holds a BS and MS in Computer Science from Stanford University.
Raylene Yung
Stripe - Head of Payments Engineering
Victoria Sim graduated with an Honours Degree in Communications. She is an explorer at heart who is passionate about human connection and conserving the beautiful natural world. She leads the video teams at VSStory, using a human-centered approach to storytelling.
Victoria Sim
VSStory - Creative Lead
Closing Panel Session - Women Who Code Directors
Women Who Code serves to inspire women to excel in technology careers. It’s vision is to create a world where women are proportionally represented as technical leaders, executives, founders, VCs, board members, and software engineers. When you become a part of Women Who Code you gain access to programs and services that are designed to help you step up your tech career. We have over 100,000 members who are career-aged tech professionals operating at each level of the industry.
Yue Lin is a Machine Learning enthusiast. Have been programming for more than 20 years, and still loving it. With a passion to be involved with the local community and supporting it.
Yue Lin Choong
Women Who Code - Singapore, Singapore
Michie is the director of Women Who Code Manila, a global non-profit organization that inspires women to excel in the Tech Industry. She helps companies understand how to leverage tech into their businesses and is the co-founder of TecsoftApps. She also organizes SwiftPH (iOS and Apple Developers Community in the Philippines), SwiftLadies and goes around the Philippines to inspire the younger generation to code!
Currently, inspired to solve the issue of security of visitors and establishments by building YeyPass (YeyPass.com), your secured identity pass for the real world.
Michie Ang
Women Who Code - Manila, Philippines
Lydia is an engineer, builder and coder who constantly thinks about “how does a great product and team looks like?”
She previously worked in HR tech for a decade and most recently she’s a Solution Architect @ Pulsifi, a HR tech startup. In 2015, she helped to build a community of female in tech and unwittingly became the director of Women Who Code KL.
Lydia is intrigued (or distracted) by a lot of things - travel, hiking, photography, IoT. Her favourite drink is coffee, understandably so.
Lydia Lim
Women Who Code - Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia
Purnima is the Director Women Who Code Singapore, Evangelist YOW! Conferences & Workshops, Volunteer Engineers.sg. Loves to build communities and enjoys working with people. Has previously worked for large financial institutions like Credit Suisse and Lehman Brothers. Also a painter in oils and an avid sci-fi, fantasy & mystery reader.
Purnima Kamath
Women Who Code - Singapore, Singapore
Pushpalatha G.P is a Senior Quality Engineering Manager at VMware, Bangalore, India. She comes with around 20+ years of rich IT experience. Prior to VMware, she worked with RSA/EMC, Dell R&D, Symphony Services, i2 Technologies and C-Dot, Bangalore, India. Her experience spans a/c multiple domains like Security, Storage, ERP, CRM, Satellite communication, Virtualization, SDDC, etc., She managed versatile teams like QE, Development, Product Installer, etc., In her role, she work closely with cross functional teams like Development, Product Management, SDDC Solution Architects, etc., She is a certified Scrum Master and being Product Owner, she drives best practices like CI/CD, RCCA, etc.,
She holds Bachelor of Engineering degree in Electronics and Communications and currently pursuing PhD in Strategy and also doing the course in CSR and Sustainability.
Currently she manages the SDDC Quality Engineering team in Bangalore, India, responsible for design and validation of VMware Validated Design documents to design your own Data Center, more efficiently and also performance testing of Software Defined Data Center, based on vCloud Foundation, offered by VMware. She is active in external conferences like GHC, GTW, etc., Also a core team member of VMware D&I team, representing ISBU, R&D, India.
Pushpalatha G.P
Women Who Code - Bangalore, India
Sujin is a fronted-end engineer and mostly works on data visualizations that inspires on the web. Since she started hosting workshops for Django Girls Seoul in 2015, she has been promoting diversity by supporting women to advance in the IT industry and tech communities. She leads the Women Who Code Seoul Network and is trying to build a more diverse and inclusive tech community here in Korea. Everywhere she goes she always has a pair of running shoes with her to run.
Sujin Lee
Women Who Code - Seoul, South Korea
Speaker’s Talk Titles and Descriptions
“The Broken Feedback Loop in Eng Management Communities” - Victor Neo / Carousell
Description: Engineering Management communities typically adopt a share, adapt and execute model, often with no feedback loop back to the person sharing. This is exacerbated by dispersed engineering management communities, which makes it even harder for feedback to flow back. This talk will cover the challenges around sharing feedback today, and how we might potentially solve that.
“Fueling Growth (& how more diversity can help)” - Ali Spivak / Mozilla
It can be difficult to measure the impact of developer relations. We too often end up focusing on the most easily measured numbers – like downloads, views & attendees. While these are important, it can lead to things like diversity and inclusion being treated as side projects or "secondary" objectives. At Mozilla, we are thinking about diversity, broadly, as a strategy for growth.
In this talk, I'll show how we measure the impact of our work, set strategy, and use things like cross-industry representation, adapting to different learning styles, and regional representation to reach and include a more diverse global audience.
“Applying a Localization Approach for Developers in Asia” - Yohan Totting / Google
Supporting developers in Asia and especially in Indonesia has some unique challenges. The developers within this region are culturally not very open or familiar with actively seeking for help. Their English literacy level (on technical level as well a basic global communication) is also sometimes not on par with the Western expectations. There are gender equality issues, and even localization of language becomes one of the accessibility challenges available and published information. Understanding these issues and applying a “think global but practice local” approach is the best solution to tackle all these challenges.
“Building WOW DevRel” - Warit Wanwithu [Tan]/ LINE
In this session will sharing the story of how ordinary developer can become community builder. How LINE approaches and form relations toward developers, also how we have driven the community growth and what are the tips and tricks we have learned so far.
“Friendly Leverage: Ways to strengthen ties with your developer community” - Keir Whitaker /Shopify
Investing in your advocates can pay dividends for both your company and the wider partner/developer ecosystem. Over the last six years, Keir has worked with Shopify Partners and has been involved in many mutually beneficial initiatives that have strengthened ties and helped increase Shopify's position in the agency and developer community. In this session, he'll share his experiences and the many lessons learned from the coal face of working with the Shopify Partner ecosystem.
“Creating the next generation of open source developers.” - Joe Nash / GitHub
Over 28 million developers use GitHub, building and maintaining 67 million projects. Those projects include huge names in open source, such as React, Kubernetes, Tensorflow, and NodeJS. With the world increasingly reliant on these projects developed and shared in the open, it is more important than ever to ensure that new developers are taught not only that open source exists, but of the part they may play in helping to keep these vital projects around in the future. In this talk, we will learn how GitHub's education programs not only grow its user base and help burgeoning developers enter the industry, but how it helps guarantee the future of vital open source projects.
“Delivering a Global Teaching Method: Because we learn things differently” - Tomomi Imura / Slack
“RTFM!” -- Really? Is that how you shame your developers for not reading the entire docs?
Giving developers some APIs and its documentation doesn’t automatically make developers want to build awesome apps on your platform. This is why developer relations teams exist - it’s too much to expect developers to just read documentations, especially only in one language (usually English), to go forth and build something awesome.
Tomomi Imura, with her extensive experience interacting with developers from all around the world, and especially in Japan, will focus on developer education and how we should offer learning materials in various styles and formats to support diverse developers, plus some interesting facts I have learned by advocating technology internationally.
“Shining a light on dark matter developers” - Jarod Reyes/ Twilio
It's 2018 and we still use the term "developer" as a one-size fits all term for all people who code for a living, however over the last six years serving developers, Jarod has discovered the pitfalls of the one-size fits all framework. Traditional approaches to reaching developers often leave a major segment of the population behind. In his talk, Jarod will uncover some data that has helped Twilio shine some light on those dark matter developers and some approaches that may help others better serve to a more diverse set of developers.
“The role and influence of the Software Developer in Southeast Asia” - Thomas Gorissen / Founder, JSConf Asia
With 7 years of experience producing the conference series JSConf.Asia in Singapore, along with mentoring and advising more than 40 young and mature companies in Southeast Asia, Thomas Gorissen looks back into recounting some incredible stories and adventures in the evolution of software development in Southeast Asia. Unsurprisingly many of the drivers, approaches and the mentality in the industry is different to what’s familiar in Germany and the US. And based on survey data collected from more than 2500 event attendees and from his daily observations going in and out of local development offices, Thomas will shed more light on the role and influence of the software developer in Southeast Asia.
“The 3 Secrets of Power Storytelling” - Victoria Sim / Strategy Lead at Vision Strategy Storytelling
During this workshop, you will learn:
The 3 triggers of every audience
The 3 pillars of powerful storytelling and how to craft your key messaging
An easy methodology to help you evaluate whether your stories are powerful
“Lessons from Stripe: scaling engineering effectiveness” - Raylene Yung / Stripe - Head of Payments Engineering
Stripe now employs more than 1,000 people across the globe and is now investing in Singapore as their fourth hub and first in APAC. Get insights on how Stripe builds internal infrastructure, tools and workflows to increase engineering effectiveness—all while enabling teams to ship new features every week to millions of users on top of resilient and reliable infrastructure.
