Vaadin Create 2025
Speakers

Anton is a Developer Advocate on the Kotlin team at JetBrains. With a professional background in server-side development, Anton has been building tools for developers for more than 10 years. Recognized as a Java Champion since 2014, he often presents as a speaker at large software conferences and contributes to the Kotlin YouTube channel.

Artur Signell works as CTO at Vaadin. He earlier lead the Vaadin products team and was responsible for all Vaadin products. Currently he is focusing on technology and research.

Alex Burov is an open-minded, self-driven leader passionate about turning innovative ideas into real business value. With deep experience bridging technology and strategy, he excels at guiding global teams, building strong customer relationships, and aligning product, sales, and service efforts to deliver outstanding results and lasting satisfaction.

Christian Tzolov is a R&D Software Engineer at the Spring Framework team in Broadcom. Lead for the Spring AI and Spring AI MCP projects, contributor to various Spring and ASF projects including Spring Integration, Spring Cloud DataFlow. His work focuses on system integrations, distributed data processing, data engineering and AI.

Dominik Kreppold is a versatile UX designer at AKDB with a passion for tackling complex challenges and continuously learning new things. His expertise spans user research, concept development, design, prototyping, user testing, and design systems — all aimed at creating intuitive, user-centered digital experiences.

Giovanni (@heruan) has been building with Vaadin for over a decade, and for the past five years, he’s done it from inside the herd. His journey spans leading the development of edge products like Collaboration Engine, pioneering the Acceleration Kits, and now heading up Control Center. With a strong focus on the production side of Vaadin apps, Giovanni brings deep experience in crafting tools that power real-world deployments at scale.

Josh (@starbuxman) has been the first Spring Developer Advocate since 2010. Josh is a Java Champion, author of 7 books (including "Reactive Spring") and numerous best-selling video training, and an open-source contributor (Spring Boot, Spring Integration, Axon, Spring Cloud, Activiti, Vaadin, etc), a Youtuber (Coffee + Software with Josh Long as well as my Spring Tips series ), and a podcaster ("A Bootiful Podcast").

Jouni Koivuviita is the Principal Product Designer at Vaadin, focused on helping designers and developers create outstanding web apps. Jouni has a deep passion for web components, design systems, CSS, and web app UI design.

Leif keeps trying to improve how business web applications are being built through understanding why the current ways are difficult and then trying to come up with alternatives. Also product manager for Flow and Hilla.

Marc is a long-time Vaadineer, carrying a Product Strategist card in his left jeans pocket. Lately, he has mostly been thinking about the new #FFS and other ways to make the developers’ day more enjoyable.

Marcus has spent the past 20+ years combining modern web technologies and Java. More recently, he's been exploring how AI is changing the way we interact with computers. Marcus is always curious to learn new things and loves helping developers learn new things. Marcus is a Java Champion and currently works as the VP of Products at Vaadin.

Matti Tahvonen has worked on web apps for over two decades. The first-ever JS developer at Vaadin has turned into Java/JVM enthusiast over the years when working with a pure Open Source Java web framework and doing some business on top of it. When Matti is not working, time is mostly spent on nature-related hobbies and software to support those.

Matthias Heicke is a creator at heart — a software developer and entrepreneur driven by the mission to build solutions that truly add value to people’s lives. As co-founder of Sweap, he’s redefining how companies run and measure events, turning them from “fun moments” into powerful, data-driven marketing channels. Guided by a balance of creativity, simplicity, and problem-solving, Matthias brings vision and practicality together to create meaningful impact.

Miikka is a versatile software engineering and product business professional with over two decades of experience. He joined Vaadin as a Technical Product Marketing Manager in mid-2024 to drive product growth and connect technical solutions with customer needs.

Petter (with two T’s) has been building with Vaadin for over 15 years. Most of that time was spent in the trenches—helping customers architect and implement business-critical applications. These days, he’s focused on documenting best practices and shaping the Vaadin Way: a strongly opinionated, full-stack approach to building modern Java web apps. When not wrangling code or content, Petter enjoys putting out fires—sometimes literally.

Rolf manages the research and development work around Vaadin’s components and theming features. Originally a developer-turned-designer, Rolf is passionate about improving developer-designer collaboration through design systems.

Sami is an original team member at Vaadin, dedicated to "empowering developers to build cool things." He is an experienced web application developer who has crafted web applications and reusable components for Vaadin and other frameworks. An open-source enthusiast and conference speaker, Sami is currently working on a software-hardware project for his sailing boat. Talk to him about innovative web technologies, hardware hacking, or sailing adventures.

Sebastian Kuehnau has been a Java enthusiast for two decades and fell in love with Vaadin during his time at university in Berlin. Since 2016, he has held various technical roles at Vaadin and currently serves as a Senior Developer Advocate and Solution Architect. He assists customers in building tailored web applications and is actively engaged in Java events and the Vaadin community.

Simon Martinelli is a Java Champion, Vaadin Champion, and Oracle ACE Pro, with over 30 years of experience as a software architect, developer, consultant, and trainer. He frequently shares his expertise by speaking at international conferences, writing articles, and maintaining his blog, Keep It Simple: https://martinelli.ch.

Steven is a builder and a coder who has been a technology leader for over 20 years. He deeply believes in the power of open source software to change the world and that commercial open-source software is the future of not only enterprise software development but software development as a whole.

Tatu is the team lead of the Expertise team and has close to 10 years of experience in Vaadin and 23 years in Java. The expertise team provides online support and micro consulting for our customers with Prime or Ultimate subscriptions and maintains Vaadin’s legacy products.

Tim is a Design System Software Engineer at AKDB, where he develops cutting-edge software solutions for German municipalities. As a part of a team known for leading the public sector in UX/UI innovation, he collaborates closely with designers to craft themes and components for Vaadin Flow, Web and Vue.js since 2019. Beyond coding, Tim enjoys exploring new technologies and fostering discussions on the evolving landscape of design systems in modern web development.

Viktor Fadeev is a tech-driven entrepreneur dedicated to simplifying complex software development. He’s passionate about empowering enterprise Java developers with high-productivity tools that eliminate boilerplate code and streamline modern web UI development. By bridging backend and frontend worlds, Viktor and his team are redefining how developers build full-stack applications — making powerful enterprise software faster and easier to create.