10 Talented Women in the Java/JVM Community

A couple of weeks ago, Duchess, a global organization for women in Java technology, celebrated its 10th anniversary:

This got me thinking of the women in the Java/JVM community from whom I have learned a lot, whether through their books, courses, or presentations.

So I compiled a list of 10 women who are doing an amazing work in the Java/JVM community.

Of course, this list is just a tiny part of them. I chose the ones I'm more familiar, but please, add in the comments those who I missed.

Here's the list — in no particular order.

Yolande Poirier

@ypoirier
Yolande Poirier manages the online experience for the world's biggest IT community. She empowers developers to successfully grow their projects, businesses, and careers. Telling the story of how people use technology, she curates technical content, interviews IT professionals around the world, and writes blogs about Java technologies and projects. She is a speaker at international conferences, a JavaOne Rockstar, this year's track lead of the developer community da,y and a long time member of @jduchess, a network of women in Java. She manages @Java, a network of over 350,000 developer enthusiasts.

Yolande is the person behind the Java Source blog and @java, always sharing interesting news, videos, and articles related to Java. Her efforts have helped grow the Java community. Watch her talk Java Community Insider Secrets Creating Change!.=

Trisha Gee

@trisha_gee
Trisha has developed Java applications for a range of industries and companies of all sizes, including finance, manufacturing, and non-profits. She has expertise in Java high-performance systems, is passionate about enabling developer productivity, and dabbles with open source development. Trisha blogs regularly on subjects that she thinks developers and other humans should care about, she’s a leader of the Sevilla Java User Group, a key member of the London Java Community, a MongoDB Master, and a Java Champion. She believes we shouldn't have to make the same mistakes again and again, and as a Developer Advocate for JetBrains, she can share all the cool stuff she's discovered so far.

Trisha is a Java champion and a great speaker. Her live-coding sessions are awesome, and just as an example, watch her talk about Java 9.

Jessica Kerr

@jessitron
Jessica Kerr is a developer with 18 years of coding in Java, Scala, Clojure, Elm, Ruby, etc. She's also an international speaker, podcaster, and occasional blogger. She teaches functional programming, development automation, and conscious pragmatism. Jessica works remotely at her dream job for Atomist, where she shaves yaks to make yaks easier to shave. Find her at home in St. Louis, Missouri; on audio as a panelist on >Code; and on Twitter as @jessitron.

Jessica is another great speaker and developer. As mentioned, she is really into functional programming. I have watched her giving talks using Ruby, Elm, Clojure, and others languages on a variety of topics. All her talks are must-watch.

Linda van der Pal

@DuchessFounder
Linda is a developer at Finalist, the founder of Duchess, Java Champion, founder of Duchess, co-organizer of Devoxx for Kids in the Netherlands, and an active member of the Java community in general. She has been a Java developer for several companies since 2002.

Do I really need to say more? Watch her talk about another of her initiatives, the Devoxx Buddies Program.

Katharine Beaumont

@katharineCodes 
Katharine is a Java developer, having worked on medical software, Big Data and complex event processing, web development, and machine learning. She has given a number of international conference talks on her experiences in the software industry. With a background in law, science, mathematics and more recently machine learning, she (unsurprisingly) loves learning! She enjoys playing with Matlab/Python/Ruby, cycling, walking her dogs, and living on a farm.

Think of any of the most influential developers/speakers in the Java community, and I'll bet you'll find they've already been interviewed by Katharine (did you watch the video about the Devoxx Buddies Program?). She was the Community and Content Manager for Voxxed, but now I have seen her focusing on machine learning, neural networks, and AI topics. The content is first class.

Heather VanCura

@heathervc
Heather VanCura is Chair and Director of the JCP Program at Oracle and is a leader of global community-driven adoption through the user group programs. Heather drives efforts to transform the JCP program and broaden participation and diversity in the community. She is passionate about Java, women in technology, and developer communities, serving as an international speaker and community organizer of developer hack days around the world.

Heather enjoys speaking at conferences such as OSCON, Devoxx, JFokus, and the JavaOne conferences. She resides in the San Francisco Bay Area, California, USA and enjoys trying new sports and fitness activities in her free time.

Heather has been working at the JCP since 2000 in many roles. Her community-building efforts are amazing, especially about women inclusion in tech and diversity in the Java community. Just visit her Twitter feed to see what I'm talking about. To know more about Heather and her work, read this interview, and watch this video.

Mala Gupta

@eMalaGupta
Mala is passionate about making people employable by bridging the gap between their existing and required skills. In her quest to fulfill this mission, she is authoring books to help IT professionals and students succeed on industry-recognized Oracle Java certifications.

When someone asks me about books for the Java programmer certification exams, I always recommend one of Mala's books, they are well-written and the pictures really help you understand the concepts. She's also the founder of eJavaGuru.com, which offers courses for Oracle certifications. Watch her video about what you need to get started with the OCA Java certification.

Jeanne Boyarsky

@jeanneboyarsky
Jeanne Boyarsky has worked as a Java developer for over 12 years at a bank in New York City where she develops, mentors, and conducts training. Besides being a senior moderator at CodeRanch.com in her free time, she works on the forum codebase. Jeanne also mentors the programming division of a FIRST robotics team, where she works with students just getting started with Java.

For the Java 8 certification exams, I also recommend Jeanne's books. She has contributed to many other books and has some tough certifications under her belt. At this year's JavaOne, she participated in two talks: JUnit 5 Hands On Lab and Intro to Mutation Testing. Unfortunately, the talks were not recorded, but you can find some of her excellent presentations on YouTube. Watch this one, for example: Welcome to Java 9.

Holly Cummins

@holly_cummins
Holly Cummins is the technical lead of IBM’s Bluemix Garage London and the former delivery lead for the WebSphere Liberty Profile. She is a co-author of Enterprise OSGi in Action and has spoken at JavaOne, Devoxx, JavaZone, The ServerSide Java Symposium, JAX London, GeeCon, and the Great Indian Developer Summit, as well as a number of user groups.

Holly has worked on IBM since the beginning of her career, mostly in things related to Websphere and OSGi. She's a big expert in her field, and this year, she was recognized as a Java Champion. She has participated in many challenging and interesting projects, from the Garbage Collection (GC) and Just in Time (JIT) compilation of the IBM J9 JVM to an app to help blind marathon runners. Know more about Holly and her work in this talk.

Svetlana Isakova

@sveta_isakova
Svetlana Isakova has been part of the Kotlin team since 2011. She worked on the type-inference and overload-resolution subsystems of the compiler. Now she’s a technical evangelist, speaking about Kotlin at conferences and working on the online course for Kotlin.

Around 2015/early 2016, people didn't talk much about Kotlin and there wasn't a lot of resources to learn this language. Luckily, you could watch Svetlana's talks on YouTube, for example, Kotlin: the Swift of Android. I learned a lot of Kotlin's concepts from her. Later, she and Dmitry Jemerov wrote Kotlin in Action (a must-read if you're learning Kotlin). Recently, I watched her talking about Kotlin types. I'm only going to say that I completely agree with one of the comments of that video, that's the best explanation of Unit and Nothing types on the Internet.

There you have it. Ten talented women doing amazing things for the Java/JVM community.

Now follow them.

Watch their talks.

Read their books.

Get inspired by them.