dotJS 2026

Karen Li is a software engineer at GitHub with a unique path from concert pianist to elementary school teacher to technologist. She brings a teaching mindset to engineering, making complex systems easier to understand. She shares insights at the intersection of education and technology. Her motto, “ I invest in brains ,” reflects her commitment to learning and empowering others.

Lea has been improving the Web for nearly two decades. In her 14 years in the CSS WG, she designed many features you use daily. As a twice elected W3C TAG member, she helped document the Web’s Design Principles . She is also a TC39 delegate, and a WHATWG contributor. In 2025, she was awarded Pathfinder for Standards by the OpenJS Foundation , for her overall work and impact. Lea is passionate about making complex concepts approachable, through her talks , books , and open source work . She holds a PhD from MIT , where she spent a decade researching and teaching at the intersection of usability, design, and web technologies.

Maximiliano Firtman is a mobile and web developer, international speaker, trainer, and author of 14 books , including Vanilla Web (Manning), Hacking Web Performance (O’Reilly Media) and Learn PWA! (Google). He’s a frequent speaker at major conferences worldwide and a well-known voice in the mobile and web communities. He has created over 35 development courses for platforms like Frontend Masters, Pluralsight, and LinkedIn Learning. He teaches hands-on workshops on web performance, mobile development, progressive web apps, and AI — helping developers stay ahead with practical, modern skills. He is an OpenAI Codex Ambassador.

Hammad is a Software Engineer based in Germany working across the JavaScript and AI stack. He builds full-stack systems and practical AI integrations and actively speaks at conferences to share his learnings. He is the creator of callio , a unified API gateway designed to simplify external tool access for AI agents through a single key.

Bart Waardenburg is a full-stack developer, front-end expert, tech lead, and creator of Fallow , a Rust-native codebase intelligence tool for TypeScript and JavaScript. He works at the intersection of frontend engineering, static analysis, developer tooling, and AI-assisted workflows. Based in The Netherlands, he has led teams, built design systems, and now builds tooling that helps teams find dead code, duplication, complexity hotspots, and architecture drift before those issues turn into long-term drag.

Jad is an independent web performance consultant and educator. He has taught more than 20,000 developers through online platforms, in-person training, and university lectures (Hogeschool van Amsterdam and Fachhochschule Salzburg). He's also the creator of learnjavascript.online and several other courses. Jad is recognized by Google with the Developer Expert award for his contributions to the web community. He focuses on making Modern Web development enjoyable, clear, and accessible.

Thorsten is an IT consultant and senior full-stack web engineer who has been self-employed since 2014. When he's not assisting companies with their projects or providing guidance and support, he spends his time contributing to open-source projects, giving talks, and enjoying 3D printing.

Ryan is a creator of Node.js and Deno . He studied mathematics at UCSD and the University of Rochester before pursuing software engineering professionally. He has worked in various parts of the software - from server infrastructure to machine learning research . His current role is as the co-founder and CEO of Deno Land Inc.

Wes Bos is a Full Stack developer from Canada. Constantly learning, he creates web development courses focused on JavaScript, TypeScript, React, CSS, Node.js and whatever else comes his way. Wes is the co-host of the popular Syntax.fm podcast and has taught over half a million people JavaScript and has spoken at dozens of conferences around the world.

Kyle is a web-oriented software engineer, widely acclaimed for his "You Don't Know JS" book series and nearly 1M hours viewed of his online courses. Kyle's superpower is asking better questions, and he deeply believes in maximally using the minimally-necessary tools for any task. As a "human-centric technologist" , he's passionate about evolving engineering organizations towards solving the right problems, in simpler ways.

Sarah Drasner is Senior Director of Engineering, Core Web, Android, iOS and Multiplatform Infrastructure at Google . Sarah is formerly VP at Netlify, Principal IC for Microsoft Azure, Vue core team emeritus, and an O'Reilly author. Sarah also co-organized ConcatenateConf with Christian Nwamba, a conference for Nigerian and Kenyan developers.

Angie Jones is the Global VP of Developer Relations at Block , Inc. An award-winning educator, Angie shares her knowledge with software companies and events worldwide. As a Master Inventor, she is recognized for her innovative, out-of-the-box thinking, which has led to 27 patented inventions in virtual worlds, collaboration software, social networking, smarter planet initiatives, and software development processes.

Matteo is co-founder & CTO at Platformatic. With over 15 years of software engineering experience, he's known to author the Fastify web framework, the fast logger Pino, and his contributions to Node.js. Matteo is a member of the Node.js Technical Steering Committee , and is an active Open Source author, with modules he maintains being downloaded over 12 billion times per year.

Yohan Lasorsa is a Principal Developer Advocate at Microsoft , a Google Developer Expert for Angular, and an active open-source author and contributor. With 15+ years of experience across applied research, mobile, IoT, and cloud architecture, he has worked from low-level systems to full-stack web development. Whether building applications or DIY projects, he loves sharing knowledge and pushing the limits of what’s possible.