Jessica has over twenty years of experience in software development, DevOps, and architecture. She is an energetic and positive collaborator who inspires teams with her lively keynotes and blogs.
Jessica played an integral role in development automation at Atomist, deployment systems at Stripe, and creating a platform-as-a-service at Bayer. She has worked in biotech, micropayments, insurance, retail, and telecom leveraging languages including Java, TypeScript, Scala, Clojure, Ruby, Elm, and PowerShell. Jessica focuses on continual improvement of the experience for developers as well as customers with a soft spot for automation and for good error messages.
Her first experience with an Agile style started a love of pair programming and explicit collaboration. Jessica believes that the core activity of development is learning, including learning how to work within each team — and that the most important part of the process is continually changing the process. This change includes herself; she contributes to the DevOps, Resilience Engineering, and Domain Driven Design communities as well as Agile.
Jessica is in demand as a keynote speaker for software conferences around the world, inspiring collaboration and symmathesy. Recent examples include RubyConf, Deliver: Agile, GOTO Copenhagen, Velocity, Explore DDD, and YOW! Australia. She serves on the podcast panel of ArrestedDevOps and Greater than Code. Jessica blogs and tweets as @jessitron where she often makes analogies between software, philosophy of science, and household chores.
Jessica lives in St. Louis, MO with two daughters and two cats. For fun, she runs a Dungeons & Dragons campaign for the family and plays Beat Saber.