NSNorth 2016

Melissa Nightingale

Head of Marketing at Wattpad

As Wattpad's Head of Marketing, Melissa is responsible for the company’s strategic marketing, communication, and branding initiatives. Prior to Wattpad, she ran the global PR team at Mozilla and then founded a small marketing agency to help startups of all sizes. Melissa got her first startup job during the original dot com boom and after nearly two decades in tech, she has a ridiculous collection of tech branded t-shirts. Find her on Twitter @shappy.

Topic: "The Higher the Fewer - Diversity in Senior Leadership"

Andray Domise & Samuel Allemang

Co-Founders of Techsdale

Techsdale (TXDL) is a startup with a mandate to teach youth from underprivileged, diverse communities how to make games, apps and websites, and to diversify the tech sector by mentoring these youth into employability, higher education and internships. Using holistic project-based learning, mentorship and skills training, Techsdale helps participants to develop portfolios in game, app, and website design and forges a path into the tech industry for young people with barriers to access. Andray Domise is a community advocate, writer (VICE; Torontoist; Hazlitt) and podcaster with Canadaland Commons. Sam Allemang is a front-end web developer (Cactus Design), who volunteers and works on tech-skills mentorship and education for youth (Boys & Girls Club; CoderDojoTo).

Topic: "The Pipeline Problem with Diversity in Tech"

Kirsten Hunter

API Evangelist at Akamai Technologies, Inc.

Kirsten is an unapologetic hacker and passionate advocate for the development community. Her technical interests range from graph databases to cloud services, and her experience supporting and evangelizing REST APIs has given her a unique perspective on developer success. In her copious free time she’s a gamer, fantasy reader, and all around rabble-rouser. Code samples, recipes, and philosophical musings can be found here .

Topic: "Telling your story - Speaking for Non-Speakers"

Troy Hannah

Founder of Third Beach Technology

Troy is a relative newcomer to iOS development but what he lacks in experience he makes up for in enthusiasm. Having studied Geography and GIS technologies, he is now starting his move into the exciting world of geo-apps and indie development. In between the time Troy spends teaching himself Swift, UI design, marketing, and self promotion, you can find him travelling, and searching out the best coffee shops and cafes.

Topic: "How independent developers are becoming more like artists and why this is a positive change."

Anne Cahalan

Application Developer at Detroit Labs

Anne is an iOS developer and recovering iOS apprentice at Detroit Labs. She is passionate about clean code, craft cocktails, and the NWHL (GO PRIDE GO). She is contractually required to mention her three-legged cat, Wobbles. She can make you an app, a sweater, or a Manhattan.

Topic: "Truths Universally Acknowledged: Swift Design Patterns as Jane Austen Heroes"

Matthew Garden

Cocoa Developer at Lightspeed POS

Matt likes to make things: drawings, bread, paintings, pillow forts, and sometimes even code. He started programming in high school, entered university in the Fine Arts program, and eventually wound up in Computer Science studying artificial intelligence and how to make good movie recommendations. Matthew has written software professionally for psychophysics experiments, Ethernet switches, OS X, and currently iOS. He is an active member of the Cocoaheads Ottawa community and mentors in grade 10 Computer Science at A.Y. Jackson high school.

Topic: "My product owner is in grade 3"

Leonard Cervantes

Senior Product Manager, Mobile & Apps at the CBC

Leonard Cervantes is Senior Product Manager for Mobile & Apps at the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation. Len has lived in the Mobile space since the early days of smartphones. After launching the mobile arm for MTV Canada, Len took his talents to the CBC to manage the Corporation's portfolio of apps and has since been a part of big launches such as the FIFA and Olympic Games apps, Apple Watch and Apple TV. Len's focus is on effective Product Management, Team Building, Diversity and the intersection between Technology and Social Enterprise.

Topic: "Storytelling for Techies: The Hero's Journey and You"

Nael El Shawwa

VP Engineering at FlashStock

Nael is a software craftsman who has spent the last decade wrangling software and people. At FlashStock, he is responsible for the technology that helps brands create beautiful on-demand visual content at scale. After a short stint in Objective-C exactly 10 years ago, Nael has been mostly focused on web technologies; mainly large JavaScript applications, and helping teams see the "good parts" of JavaScript.

Nael is also one of the co-founders of #DevTO; one of Toronto's largest developer communities, that organize monthly meet ups and annual events for the everybody in tech. You can find him at various other meet-ups in the city, or at #DevTO on the last Monday of every month.

Topic: "A Fork In Your Career: To Code Or Not To Code"