Petar Tahchiev (@ptahchiev) is a founder and CEO of Nemesis Software Ltd., a Bulgarian company which builds next-generation cloud-native e-commerce platform. He is a graduated award-winning mathematician from Bulgaria, who once worked as Jakarta Cactus lead developer at the Apache Software Foundation.

In 2010 he co-authored the best-selling second edition of “JUnit in Action”. Nowadays he is part of the Maven development team and is a regular speaker at some of the biggest open-source software conferences in the world – ApacheCON, JavaONE, SpringONE2GX, SpringIO, etc.

Radimir Bitsov is a front-end engineer with a passion for web performance, accessibility, and interface animation. He worked for several startups in Sofia and Berlin. Recently, he joined the Project A Ventures team. He loves the open source community and enjoys sharing techy discoveries.

Have you seen a fire breathing dragon dual wield my little pony figurines? How about an IT Security employee with a burning passion for keeping users safe, and security fun and accessible? Siren Hofvander delivers on the latter and strives for the former in her daily job as CSO for Min Doktor. She specialises in building security into the SLDC and firmly believes that security is a task for everyone, not just the hacker elite. She also heads up the Malmö based IT Security group SecuriTea and is an avid forum contributor.

Marina Simakov is a security researcher at Microsoft, with a special interest in network security and authentication protocols.

She holds an M.Sc. in computer science, with several published articles, with a main area of expertise in graph theory. Previously spoke at BlueHat IL 2016 and DefCon 2017.

Michael Schrenk has developed software that collects and processes information for some of the biggest news agencies in Europe. Additionally, he has lectured at journalism conferences in Belgium, The Netherlands, and created several weekend workshops for The Centre for Investigative Journalism in London. Mike has also consulted on information security everywhere from Moscow to Silicon Valley, and most places in between. Along the way, he’s been interviewed by BBC, The Christian Science Monitor, National Public Radio, and many others. In addition to his interest in Journalism, Mike conducts a Competitive Intelligence consultancy in Las Vegas and is the author of “Webbots, Spiders, and Screen Scrapers” (San Francisco: No Starch Press, 2012). Michael Schrenk is also an eight-time speaker at the notorious DEF CON hacking conference.

Steve Kosten is a Principal Security Consultant at Cypress Data Defense and an instructor for the SANS DEV541 Secure Coding in Java/JEE: Developing Defensible Applications course. He’s previously performed security work in the defense and financial sectors and led the security department for a financial services firm. At Cypress, Steve performs secure code review assessments, vulnerability assessment, penetration testing, and risk management reviews. He is also the Open Web Application Security Project (OWASP) Denver chapter leader, and presents security talks at various conferences. Steve holds a bachelor of science in Aerospace Engineering from the Pennsylvania State University and a Master of Science in Information Security from James Madison University. He currently maintains GSSP-JAVA, GWAPT, CISSP, and CISM certifications.

Nikolay Stoitsev is a software engineer at Uber where he is working on distributed systems handling payments. He is also a teaching assistant at Sofia University. He knows both what the CAP theorem is and how to center things with CSS.

Elaine is an engineer at Global Financial Access, a company that works on cryptographic integrity for smart contracts. She is a core developer for Ethereum Classic and contributor at Bloomberg View. Previously she was co-founder of Sand Hill Exchange, a Bitcoin bucket shop.

Javier Godinez is a Principal Security Engineer, Red Team Founder and Software Developer at Intuit. He has been working in the Cloud security space for the last five years and has developed a number of applications for testing the security of Cloud deployments and patterns for operating in the Cloud securely. He has previously worked for SAIC and SSC San Diego delivering unique security platforms to support cybersecurity. Javier is a Certified Information Systems Security Professional (CISSP) and Certified AWS Solutions Architect.