I (Gergely) sometimes get reachouts to do talks at events in Amsterdam (where I am based,) the Netherlands, or somewhere in Europe. Unfortunately, rarely do talks – I do one conference per year.
However, I asked around in the community about tech professionals who do paid talks that software engineers find interesting, engaging, and educational. Below are experienced speakers who have presented at conferences and have confirmed they are open to such opportunities (including traveling to locations in the Netherlands.) All of them have reference recordings at conferences linked.
Based in the Netherlands
- Kwo Ding (Amsterdam, at Booking.com.) Talks about various testing topics. See his talk on linting (SeleniumConf, London, 2020) and on Mobile testing (SauceCon, San Francisco, 2017)
- Sendil Kumar N (Amsterdam, Uber). Talks about software engineering topics and managing teams. (Amsterdam, engineering manager at Uber). See his talk at React Live 2023 (a case study of a successful migration) and at JSWORLD 2022 (designing high-performance React applications.) See more past talks.
- Alessandro Mautone (Amsterdam, formerly WeTransfer.) Talks about Android, automation (CI/CD workflows) and soft skills (e.g. how to review PRs, or how to handle incidents at scale.) See his talk at Droidcon 2023 (how to handle incidents at scale) and at Droidcon 2024 (what if ADB does not have to be that complicated?)
- Bert Jan Schrijver (Utrecht). CTO and cofounder of OpenValue, speaker for 10+ years in front of audiences up to 1,000 professionals. Talks about developer-focused talks about topics like software architecture, developer productivity and DevOps, and also does keynotes. See his talk at GOTO Amsterdam 2023 and see his speaker profile for more details on talks he does.
- Dennis van der Stelt (Rotterdam): "I love sharing stories with software engineers and architects. My talks are usually tech agnostic, so a fit for multiple occasions." Watch past talks from Dennis at NDC 2023 (autonomous microservices) , NDC 2022 (dealing with eventual consistency.) Dennis also talks at conferences like Techorama, Øredev and others." See current talks Dennis offers.
- Anita Kalmane (Twente). Talks about neurodiversity on tech product teams. Listen to her talk on The Agile Within podcast (neurodiversity within Scrum teams) and on the Scrum Facilitators podcast.
- Agnes Molnar (Eindhoven): talks about leadership development and information/knowledge management. See her past presentations she gave and learn more about her.
- Nikola Yovchev (Amsterdam): Talks about platform teams and operational excellence cultures. See his talk at an Amsterdam meetup (growth vs complexity) and at a panel at GOTO meetups (reducing time to market.)
If you are a software professional based in the Netherlands and are open to paid speaking engagements, please send reference recordings at conferences and details on topics you talk about on LinkedIn, and I can add you to this list.
Based in neighboring countries and open to travelling to talk
These speakers confirmed that traveling to Amsterdam or to a location in the Netherlands is something they are open to doing – and they are close enough that it's a sensible trip in time and cost. Naturally, you would need to cover their (reasonable) travel cost, plus their speaking fee.
- Abby Bangser (UK, founding principal engineer.) Talks about the platform engineering space. See her talk at DevOpsDays London 2023 (on platform engineering), at Navigate Europe 2023 (bringing product thinking to platform).
- Florian Goerisch (Switzerland, formerly at Google for 9 years.) "I do talks on how products are build in tech-led companies and how this approach is so different from how things are done here in Europe." See a past talk from Florian on how European tech companies can operate better.
- Blanca Garcia Gil (UK.) Talks on a variety of topics about staff+ engineers (career ladders, archetypes, developing leadership skills, promoting into the role) and women in tech. See her talk at QCon 2022 (behaviours to become an effective staff-plus engineer), and at LeadDev 2022 (solving the puzzle of staff+ time management.) She also facilitates panels.
- Emad Ghorbaninia (Denmark, mobile lead engineer.) Frequent speaker at mobile conferences, and holds workshops. See his talk at try! Swift Tokyo 2024 (on mobile and AI), and at SwiftConf 2023 Germany (open sourced Apple Health frameworks.) He talked at AppDevCon, SwiftConf, App Builders, Swift Craft and many other mobile conferences. More about Emad.
- Itoro Liney (UK, technology manager at Just Eat Takeaway.com.) Career development for software engineers and managers, and AI ethics. See her talk at Big Data LDN 2023 (on machine learning ethics.) More about Itoro.
- Anemari Fiser (Spain, formerly at ThoughtWorks.) Talks on a variety of topics about tech leads (developing leadership skills, promoting into the role), career development and women in tech. See her talk at Tech Lead Conference Amsterdam 2024 (tech leadership is more about people than tech) and a presentation about leveling up your tech career.
- Dave O'Connor (Ireland, 17 years as an SRE leader at Google). "Software Resiliency, Customer Management for SaaS (internal and external), SRE history and development, OKRs, Managing Distributed Teams, Performance Management, Coaching high-level engineers and managers, Interrupts, on-call, incident management." See his talk on SRECon EMEA 2022 (oncall: an equal opportunity waste of time) and other past talks.
- Martin Thwaites (UK, at Honeycomb): developer, engineer and professional speaker. Specialized in observability, open telemetry, and production-first engineering. See past talks from Martin.
- Gus Fune (UK, CTO at Div Brands) "I speak about Leadership, Team Building Productivity, Digital Transformation and eCommerce (MACH, Composable, Platforms, etc), and on a minor degree CX, DX and UX." See his talk at LeadDev London 2022 (on development setup.) Gus also talked at Turing Fest (Edinburgh), MACH Three (NY), and HasuraCon (Remote), amongst others. See his past talks.
- Maciej Jedrzejewski (Switzerland.) Talks about domain-driven design, event storming, domain storytelling, software architecture, continuous deployments and tech leadership. See his talk at DevoxxPoland 2024 (what every software architect should know about infra), and at VIScon 2021 (a way to avoid handshakes.)
- Michele Brissoni (Slovakia.) Talks about software craftmanship, agility, DevOps and behavioural engineering. See his talks at IT Revolution 2024, at Italian Agile Moment 2023 and in 2020.
- Jennifer Riggins (UK, tech culture journalist.) See her talk at Kubernetes Community Days UK 2023 (how to cultivate belonging in open source communities) and a panel she hosted on developer productivity. See other talks by Jennifer.
- Ivett Ördög (Germany, founder at Lean Poker) Engineering culture topics, topics on short feedback loops and incremental delivery. Ivett is he creator of the devops training tool "Lean Poker." See current talks Ivett offers and a past one at Future Tech 2024.
See more speakers in responses to this LinkedIn post asking for tech professionals interested in giving talks.
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