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.

Ben Wilson is passionate about automated application modernization and has over 20 years of experience leading a broad set of aspects ranging from R&D of transformation tooling products to project management of modernization projects in Fortune 5000 companies.

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.

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.

Joonas is the co-founder of Vaadin and wrote most of the original framework. Luckily, the team has rewritten all of that many times over. His ongoing passion is to simplify the development of beautiful web apps. To do that better, and being overly curious, he would like to hear your guidance for Vaadin’s roadmap. Give him a ping at joonas@vaadin.com.

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.

Luis works as a Product Manager at Vaadin. He's now focused on improving the user experience and onboarding and is contributing to making the Vaadin Design System the most accessible and best possible.

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 AI Research 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.

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.

René Wilby is a seasoned freelance software engineer specializing in full-stack development for mobile and web apps, system integration, APIs and DevOps. René also has extensive experience in technical product and project management and serves as a university lecturer and trainer.

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, owner of 72 Services LLC, has 27 years of experience in Java development. He lectures on modern architecture and Java at Bern University of Applied Sciences. Awarded the Vaadin Community Award, he focuses on enhancing full-stack development with Java and shares his insights through articles, conferences, and his blog: 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.

Vesa Nieminen is a Senior Software Engineer at Vaadin with a passion for both software development and game creation. He recently built Liukuri with Vaadin Flow to track electricity usage and market price fluctuations during the recent energy crisis in Finland. Outside of his professional work, Vesa enjoys exploring game development as a hobby.