About the Organizers

Brian Prince
President, Board of Directors / Co-Founder

Brian has been an international speaker and community leader for over twenty years. He is one of the founders of CodeMash, and is the current President. Brian is as an Executive Director at JPMorgan Chase. He is the co-author of Azure in Action, published by Manning Press. Brian holds a Bachelor of Arts degree in Computer Science and Physics from Capital University, Columbus, Ohio. He is also a zealous gamer. For example, he is a huge fan of Factorio, Wingspan, and pretty much every other game (video or board) he plays. He loves to backpack, backwoods camp, and cycle.

Cassandra Faris
Sponsor Wrangler, Board of Directors

Cassandra Faris is passionate about the human side of technology. Her career has focused on supporting tech professionals through training, community outreach, open source, marketing, hiring, mentoring, and employee engagement. She is an international speaker who specializes in teaching people how to communicate, be more inclusive team members, advance their careers, and take care of their mental health. She is President of the Stir Scholarship for women pursuing technology degrees. She has an MBA in Organizational Leadership. When she’s not busy with the tech community, she is an avid tabletop gamer, corgi mom, and soccer fan who travels as much as possible.

Jem Sauer
Production Management, Board of Directors

Jem Sauer is a Web & Windows Developer, father, gamer, and videographer/photographer. They enjoy A/V production and playing with many forms of technology. They are also an organizer for AnthrOhio. Jem has a passion for making people’s lives better through their code and Live Streams! They are an innovator who loves “playing with code” and believes that making fun, wacky, and unexpected things is a fantastic way to exercise creativity and learn new skills. They enjoy teaching others new skills and learning from them in return.

Dave Goerlich
Production Team, Director of Shenanigans

A bad idea looking for a place to happen.

Laura Zobre
Content Co-Chair

Laura is a Product Manager at Greenlight Guru. Prior to her current role, she led product initiatives at DOmedia, growing marketplace transactions and expanding platform integrations. She has been volunteering with CodeMash for the past four years and is excited to serve as Content Co-Chair this year. In her spare time, she loves hunting for new coffee shops to feature on her blog or planning her next travel adventure.

Alyssa Diaz
Content Co-Chair, Transpo Lead, Evening Events, Emeritus Board

Alyssa is a Principal Engineer at Stitch Fix with 20 years of experience developing software. Prior to her current role designing and building in ruby, she taught software development at Dev Bootcamp in Chicago. Before that, she worked primarily in Enterprise Java in Columbus, OH. She has enjoyed mentoring and teaching with various organizations over the years. In her spare time, you can find her making all sorts of things. She works in many mediums (metal, wood, fiber, and glass) and is always hungry to learn more!

Christopher Judd
Content Co-Chair

Christopher Judd is CTO and partner at Manifest Solutions (http://www.manifestcorp.com), an international speaker, Java Champion, an open source evangelist, and the Central Ohio Java Users Group (http://www.cojug.org) leader.  He is an accomplished writer having co-authored Beginning Groovy and Grails (Apress, 2008), Enterprise Java Development on a Budget (Apress, 2003) and Pro Eclipse JST (Apress, 2005) as well as the author of the children’s book “Bearable Moments”.  Based in Columbus Ohio, he has spent over 25 years architecting and developing software for organizations ranging from Fortune 50 companies to start-ups across various industries including insurance, health care, education, retail, government, manufacturing, service, and transportation.  Mr. Judd spends most of his time consulting while continuing to focus on mentoring and training in Java, mobile and related technologies.

Rick Ridgley
Registration/Front Desk/Problem Solver

Rick is an Incident Response Consultant at [Redacted]. While he is the odd one at a developer conference, he has been connected and helping with the CodeMash community for over ten years, keeping up with the latest trends and technologies and helping inspire all to have a passion for security. He also runs the Blue Team Village at Hackers Teaching Hackers. He also enjoys competing in and helping create Capture The Flag events, snowboarding, video games, and generally all things that make blinky lights.

Scott Zischerk
Volunteer Coordinator

Scott has been attending CodeMash since the beginning. He has designed t-shirts, hoodies and signs for CodeMash. He is now the CodeMash volunteer  coordinator. He currently works for Interactive Business Systems, consulting, developing software and managing projects. He primarily develops in the Microsoft stack, but has been doing some mobile projects in PhoneGap lately. He was one of the organizers of the Day of .NET in Ann Arbor and, for a short time, the Vice President of the Ann Arbor .NET User group. He is an avid snowmobiler and woodworker, dabbles in home automation and has built a few MAME arcade cabinets. In his spare time he coaches baseball, football and basketball for his 3 sons.

Melissa Webster
Co-Wrangler of Interns, Prerequisites Cowboy

Melissa is the Mobile Developer for ECPI University in Virginia Beach, VA. She graduated from an iOS Development bootcamp at Grand Circus and with an Associates in Computer Science. Melissa has interned at CodeMash since 2016 and in 2020 she was asked to step up and help manage the volunteer tasks. Outside of programming, she has an extreme addiction to books (buying them, collecting them, AND staring at them) and she’s in the middle of writing her own – Choose Your Own style literary fiction.

Zagg Studios
Photography, Graphic & Web Design

Zagg Studios is based in Akron, Ohio but has clients across the country. It consists of a creative mind (Missy Walko) and a techie (Matthew Hopkins). This dynamic duo started as photographers for CM in 2012, but have picked up designing graphics for the theme, and managing the website.

Amanda Stamper
Communications Lead and Menus

Amanda is responsible for Communications, and she is also responsible for deciding the meal and reception menus. Amanda graduated with a bachelor’s degree from Ohio University. She is a mother, substitute teacher, and a room mom.

Kristin McGee Villalobos
Diversity/Equity/Inclusion Chair

We’re not sure what she does, but we hear she’s pretty great at it. She is passionate about DevOps, workplace culture, community-building, and Really Interesting Words. When not at work, she can be found throwing pottery, playing board games, and reading as many books as possible in a human lifetime. Kristin currently resides in Columbus, OH with her husband, children, and Very Good Dogs.

Damon Stamper
MakerSpace Organizer – CodeMash MarkerSpace

Damon Stamper was born to geekness by being named after the *nix daemon background processes. From there he played a “toy making game” where he’d design robots. He then got started in coding and building computers at the age of 8. It turns out tiny fingers are great for setting DIP voltage switches for CPUs! Damon currently works as a Senior DevOps consultant but enjoys gardening, coding, gaming (video and RPG), raising the next generation of gamers, and electronics. He’s still trying to figure out how to get the “wet” of gardening and electronics to play nice together!

Brian Carnes
Director and Instructor/Speaker – Codemash CAD/3D printing room

Brian is professional creative based out of Dublin Ohio. In addition to to being a lifelong artist, he also worked for over 20 years on various IT support/infrastructure engineering teams. He runs a small studio business as well as working on various freelance and consulting projects involving digital sculpting, emerging technology, gamification, additive manufacturing, and 3D printing! His studio, Sea Dog Game Studios, is a publisher/maker of tabletop games and accessories. He is the game designer, author, and sculptor for “Sailpower: Fun Scale Combat in the Age of Sail,” a tabletop miniature ship combat game first released in 2005. He also is the owner of Valkyrie Pewter, a renaissance and fantasy pewter hand-sculpted and handcrafted jewelry maker sold at retail shops at the Ohio Renaissance Festival and Great Lakes Medieval fair. Brian hopes to be a voice for 3D printing, and agile short run customer reactive manufacturing (Industry 4.0) and empower people of all ages with the tools to bring ideas to life through CAD and 3D printing.

Elizabeth Carnes
Codemash CAD and 3D printing room Coordinator and Logistics director

A resident of Dublin Ohio, Elizabeth is the other half and CFO of Sea Dog Game Studios. She is also a Senior infrastructure support engineer for over 20 years at Nationwide Insurance. She is passionate about all things Disney and travel and is the co-founder of We Take Great Trips, a small travel agency. At Codemash Elizabeth handles logistics and coordination for the CAD and 3D printing room.

Gabrielle Sempf
KidzMash Lead

Gabrielle is a wife, mother, and business owner with over 25 years of experience in accounting and process management. She has been the “geek herder” for her husband, Bill Sempf, for over 30 years and the “geekling herder” for their two children for over 19 years. Supposedly all this qualifies her to lead KidzMash for the past 10 years continuing the tradition of encouraging young geeklings to grow. In her spare time, she enjoys blacksmithing, reading, playing Stardew, and Muay Thai. However, most of her time is devoted to running the business, teaching, raising her children, laundry, and lumberjacking.

Robin Deems
KidzMash

Robin is a wife, mommy, and educator dedicated to making science education equitable and accessible for all. Robin is a Science Education Consultant and the State Coordinator for the Presidential Awards for Excellence in Mathematics and Science Teaching (PAEMST) with the Ohio Department of Education and Workforce. She loves camping, cycling, hiking, reading, board-gaming, and gardening. Robin lives in Lewis Center, Ohio, with a multi-generational household which includes her husband; Andy, mother; Barbara, mother-in-law; Pauline, wonder-twins, Laura and Peter, and their 2 super-pups, Willow Chewbarka and Holly Noel Snickerdoodle Gingersnap.

Julie Fuller
KidzMash

My family and I have been attending CM since the first year and helping with KidzMash since the years of finding CM families in the waterpark hoping to find someone to “Hangout” with at the park. I am married to Russ and mom to three adult children, who all grew up with the annual tradition of attending CodeMash and KidzMash every January. Now that they’re grown, I”m back to figuring out what I want to be when I grow up. I was a Recreational Therapist before staying home for the past 25 years. I look forward to CM every year, catching up with old friends and making new!

Courtney Eaton
KidzMash

Kidzmash attendee since it began and family attendee since year two of Codemash. Kidzmash staff for…I’m not sure anymore. 😉 Wife of speaker and attendee, Michael; Mom of two, Katie and Jacob; former teacher to 4-year-old preschoolers; and finally, friend to many! My philosophy – “Roll with it, there’s a reason for everything!”

Nathan Loding
KidzMash

I’m a nerd, and proud of it! I love solving problems and technology is the best way to do that. I work professionally as a Developer Advocate for Camunda. On the side I’m a husband, father, collector of hobbies, gardener, and outdoorsman (hiking, camping, canoeing/kayaking). I enjoy working analog, with my hands, whenever possible. I hate chores and cleaning up after myself.

Charles Yost
KidzMash

Charles is the proud dad of two “why” kids, and a wife prone to squirrelling. Even so he manages to keep the chaos restrained! He is passionate about his work in information security, along with a multitude of ever-evolving hobbies. He loves puzzles & games (much to the delight of his kids) and he is always looking for new ways to learn & grow. CodeMash has been a highlight of his year since first attending in 2015. He has been selected as a speaker multiple times through the years, and is excited to be part of the KidzMash staff.

Jim Holmes

Jim is a Father.  Husband.  Geek. Veteran. Around 25 years IT experience. Co-author of “Windows Developer Power Tools.” Coffee Roaster.  MVP for C#.  Ex-Chief Cat Herder of the CodeMash Conference. Diabetic. Runner. Liked 5^th grade so much he did it twice. One-time setter, middle blocker, and weakside hitter. Blogger (http://FrazzledDad.com). Big fan of naps.

W. Jason Gilmore

W. Jason Gilmore is a software developer (http://www.wjgilmore.com/) and consultant with more than 15 years of experience helping companies of all sizes build amazing solutions. He is the author of over six books, including the bestselling “Beginning PHP and MySQL, Fourth Edition” and “Easy PHP Websites with the Zend Framework, Second Edition”. Over the years Jason has published more than 300 articles within popular publications such as Developer.com, PHPBuilder.com, JSMag, and Linux Magazine, and instructed hundreds of students in the United States and Europe. He’s recently led the successful development and deployment of a 10,000+ product e-commerce project, and is currently the lead developer of an e-commerce analytics project for a globally recognized publisher. Jason is cofounder of the wildly popular CodeMash Conference (https://codemash.org), the largest multi-day developer event in the Midwest. Away from the keyboard, you’ll often find Jason hunched over a chess board or having fun with DIY electronics.

Rob Gillen

Rob is a member of the Intelligent Computing Research Team within the Computational Data Analytics Group at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory. In his role as a research professional, works alongside domain scientists to deliver solutions to complex problems at a national scale. Prior to coming to ORNL, Rob spent 11 years as a software developer and architect consultant helping companies around the world deploy various technologies in support of the businesses. When he’s not at the lab, he can be found with his family, on his bike, or at a conference talking about cyber security topics.

Jason Follas

Jason is a Sr. Software Engineer for Rocket Mortgage. He has spent the past 25 years delivering software for clients in the manufacturing, engineering, and financial services sectors. He loves the opportunity to teach as well as to learn from others and is a frequent speaker at conferences and user groups. Recently, he earned his private pilot certificate and has a lot of fun flying around and interacting with the General Aviation community.