About
DevFest WI takes place every August at the Memorial Union on the University of Wisconsin campus as part of Forward Fest, Wisconsin’s largest tech and entrepreneurship festival.
Madison’s DevFest was launched in 2019 by Pearl Lattier and Abraham Williams. It’s one of numerous DevFests, which are community-led developer events hosted by Google Developer Groups around the world.
Starting in 2022, DevFest WI implemented an ongoing theme of “inclusivity in tech”. We hope you can join us in 2024!
Organizers
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Hilary Stohs-Krause
Hilary Stohs-Krause is a senior software engineer at Red Canary, and focuses on the intersection of tech, entrepreneurship, and social good. She co-runs Madison Women in Tech, is a Forward Fest board member, and is a member of the advisory board for the Social Good Accelerator.
She’ll read any fantasy or sci-fi she can get her hands on.
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Naveen VK
Naveen VK, Tech Director at nvisia, a full tech-stack software development partner. She has over 23 years of experience designing and building applications in both Java and DotNet stack on the cloud as well as on-prem.
Social Media:
https://www.linkedin.com/in/naveenvkm/
https://www.facebook.com/naveen.vk
https://twitter.com/navnoonCompany website:
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Annette Mechelke
Annette is a software engineer with a decade of experience primarily building web services. She has spent much of her career so far at early stage startups and enjoys the breadth of skills it requires. She is currently a Staff Software Engineer at Grow Therapy, working to make therapy more accessible. In her spare time, she is an organizer at Codecinella, a meetup group for women in technology based in Madison, WI.
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Elspeth Stalter-Clouse
After a long and storied career as a violinist, Elspeth Stalter-Clouse dove headfirst into the world of software development and never looked back. She has always been passionate about making useful things in service of a better world, and has been striving towards that goal in the wonderfully complex world of health tech, in which she currently works as a full-stack developer at Moxe Health. A perennial wearer of many hats, Elspeth enjoys building accessible UIs just as much as she loves designing backend architecture or shepherding small fleets of microservices in the cloud.
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Jill Kelly
Jill Kelly is a Principal Operations Manager at Zendesk, seeing the startup’s growth firsthand in the early days before the opening of the Madison, WI office in 2013. She serves on the Forward Fest, Doyenne, and Madison Public Library Foundation Boards and enjoys working with organizations focused on civil and human rights, economic empowerment, and advancing diversity in STEAM fields and entrepreneurship.
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Sadik Shahidain
Sadik Shahidain is a software engineer interested in developer experience, testing, observability, understanding sociotechnical production systems, and above all else, web accessibility. He enjoys connecting with others and organizes the local Everything but Programming and A11y Chats meetups to this end.