Pronouns She/Her/They/Them
Jessica is a Head of Architecture / Distinguished Architect, Event Organiser, International Speaker & avid learner.
She was awarded an Microsoft MVP in Developer Technologies in 2019. Topics that they speak about include community building, monitoring and continuous improvement of systems.
They are a Director and Co-Founder of DDD East Midlands, a technology conference which first took place in October 2019. She also manages the public repos for a couple of meetups and their blogs, including reviewing code and setting up issues for events like Hacktoberfest which encourages people contributing to open source.
In 2022, Jessica was elected to be a board member of the .NET Foundation. Before this she was a very active member of the membership committee and nomination committees, and she hopes to help the foundation with her experience in community building.
Jessica has Crohn's disease, which is a part of her, but doesn't hold her back (even if it slows her down sometimes). She didn't start in a traditional tech background, having spent a LONG time studying at university before finding her place in tech. She strongly believes that the support she has had from others has helped her tremendously and tries to pay it forward where she can. As such she strongly believes in supporting bootcamps, mentorship programs and meetups.