Reid has been involved in software development projects for 40+ years and leads the technical staff at Yoppworks. He sets the general technical direction of the company, overseas the execution of current projects, and assists Yoppworks' customers with architecture and organization consulting. 

Francis is a software developer, convinced agilist and trainer with 14+ years experience developing highly scalable web/mobile/backend applications, optimizing work processes and leading dev teams. Currently, he is exploring Functional Programming and distributed systems.

Josh is a software developer enthusiastic about data structures, data engineering, and stream computing. He has been working with Scala since 2015, mostly with Spark, Flink and Akka, and has contributed towards the collections redesign in the upcoming Scala 2.13 release.

Adam has been working with customers for 25 years, helping them adopt technology changes.  Joining YoppWorks in 2016 provided exposure to Reactive Microservices and the amazing transformational opportunities it presents.  Adam leads YoppWorks' customer engagements, helping organization understand the use of this technology and presenting a path to successful deployment through support and knowledge development.

Chris is a software problem solver with 15+ years in the software development field. Chris discovered Akka and Scala 8 years ago while researching distributed computing. Chris has been a big fan of the Lightbend ecosystem since and continues to work full time using the Lightbend stack. 

Jonny is a software architect, consultant and trainer with over two decades of diverse industry experience and a master’s degree in computer science. He is an advocate for functional programming and reactive principles. Jonny has a commitment to learning new technologies, and a passion for teaching and empowering others.

James Townley has been using Scala in production environments for 11 years. He is a passionate and dedicated engineer who loves simple solutions to complex problems. James currently lives in Edmonton and is a software developer at Yoppworks.

Neil has worked in many different business domains, including a Fortune 500 logistics company, a SEM/SEO, supply chain simulation, and educational analytics. He has worked as a full stack developer in .NET technologies, as a data science team lead, and as a data engineer.  Neil has 10+ years of software development experience. Currently, Neil works at Yoppworks as a reactive microservices software development consultant.

Martin Allaire one of YoppWorks amazing YopProfessors, teaching Lightbend and Reactive courses. Prior to joining YoppWorks, Martin worked as a consultant contributing to the development of a large scale reactive e-commerce solution. Martin co-founded two companies using reactive architecture principles and the Lightbend stack to build the products. 

Tri is a Data Engineer with a Data Science background and is familiar with a Scala centric development environment. Currently, Tri is working on a modern big data streaming solution involving reactive programming, Spark, Lightbend stack, CI/CD, monitoring and container platform.

Jack is the founder and CEO of the Ottawa-based company YoppWorks Inc. Founded in 2016, YoppWorks facilitates the development and implementation of open source environments and products. YoppWorks has successfully developed and deployed multiple products using Lightbend reactive architectures, engaged in consulting initiatives globally, and developed a team of certified Lightbend training professionals. In addition, Jack Gulas is also a Partner and Co-Founder of Eclipsys Solutions Inc, a Canadian company with more than $50M in annual revenue.

Jack is an Ottawa born entrepreneur with a passion for technology and growing companies from infancy. He holds an MBA from University of Ottawa and a Bachelor of Science degree from Franciscan University in Ohio. His drive and endless energy has led him to found a total of 8 different companies across both retail and technology sectors.

Kikia has a passion for leading enterprise transformations, creating innovative solutions using emerging technologies to modernize heritage environments. She finds a certain joy developing large scale distributed systems using Reactive Principles, especially when building with Lightbend Reactive Platform - Akka and friends. Kikia has a slight Scala bias, but at least half of her time is spent with Java. She enjoys the benefits of broad industry experience having worked in entertainment, hospitality, retail, life science, and others. Kikia does play favorites, but you’ll have to ask  her on the right day. Her personal passion project involves non-profit missions in anti-human trafficking with a focus on prevention and aftercare. For fun, she lives “simultaneously” on different continents and wander all the earth and seas between.

Mike Kelland leads Professional Services for Lightbend and brings over 15 years of software industry experience to Lightbend. Mike was most recently the CEO of BoldRadius Solutions, a services company focused on the Lightbend Platform. Prior to that, Mike was an early employee or founder in a variety of technology companies working in the infrastructure, custom software, network security, web development and hardware sectors where he excelled in creating successful growth through curiosity, culture and focused execution. Mike holds a Bachelor degree in Electrical Engineering from Carleton University in Ottawa.

Zac is passionate about technology, having worked with Steve Jobs at NeXT Computer and co-founded several Silicon Valley startups. As Senior Director of Services, Zac is responsible for best practices across the organization and ensuring Lightbend customers exceed their goals and achieve stellar successes.
Zac is a certified Lightbend Reactive Architect. He’s a passionate teacher of Scala, Reactive Architecture, functional programming, and an adept agile coach. Formerly, he led Accenture’s Scala practice and spent many years in the defense industry.