Aneela Idnani is Cofounder & President of HabitAware. HabitAware created it's Keen smart bracelet to help people “Retrain The Brain” from detrimental behaviors to positive ones. Having grown up with hair pulling disorder, Aneela is now an outspoken mental health advocate, raising awareness of these very common yet unknown conditions. Aneela is a HAX hardware accelerator alumnus.

HabitAware recently received a research grant from the NIH to improve their device and validate Keen as a treatment for these disorders. And has been featured as a TIME Magazine 2018 Best Invention, BuzzFeed, SELF Magazine, The Washington Post, Prevention Magazine and was also the 2018 MN Cup winner.

Sarita Parikh is focused on growing businesses that do good and do well. She started her career in software engineering, took a windy path through different industries and roles, and is now Director of Consumer Experience and Strategy at GED Testing Service, a business focused on helping more adults use education as a path to the middle class. She is also on the Board for the Wedge and Linden Hills Co-Ops and Ellevate Twin Cities.

When Sarita isn’t thinking about consumer behavior and analyzing cost-benefit ratios, you’ll find her training her children in the art of the pun, working on her daily step count, or unrolling her yoga mat.

Samantha Grumdahl has spent more than twenty years in the realms of network and security. She is currently a Lead Engineer at Target on the Network Data Insights and Intelligence team.

She will happily geek out with anyone about astronomy, tea, and video games. Her volunteer efforts are focused on increasing interest in the STEM fields, especially among women and minorities.

John Sheehan was co-founder and CEO of Runscope (acquired by CA Technologies), and an early employee at Twilio and IFTTT. When not making software you can find him playing or talking about hockey.

Ian Coldwater is a DevSecOps engineer turned Red Teamer, who specializes in hacking and hardening Kubernetes, containers and cloud-native infrastructure. They have spoken at numerous national conferences about Kubernetes and container security, including DerbyCon, O'Reilly Velocity, and DevOpsDays MSP. In their spare time, they like to go on cross-country road trips, participate in Capture the Flag competitions, and eat a lot of pie. Ian lives in Minneapolis and tweets @IanColdwater.

Tamara Temple is seasoned software developer with a lot of experience in web development, server software, devops, and testing. She has always been passionate about helping people learn about and improve their skills in programming, tooling, and organizing. Tamara currently leads a weekly drop-in study group for women learning how to code. Tamara attended two Hack-the-Gap weekends as a participant, and is looking forward to mentoring teams this year.

Aaron is a principal software engineer and problem solver. He specializes in building web services and single page applications with JavaScript/Node.js and aspiring to solve problems with machine learning.

Magdalena Cassel is a senior engineer with Etsy.  Before that, she was a traveling consultant and learned a different tech stack for every project.  Her favorite things to geek out about include React, Agile practices, and knitting.

Adrian Rocke has been developing web applications for 4 years. He got his start programming for a physics education startup in high school and then graduated from the University of Minnesota - Twin Cities in December of 2018. Now he is a freelance developer in Minneapolis and is excited to jump in and see the tech community in Minnesota grow.

Eric joined the tech community in the summer of 2017, graduating from Prime Digital Academy in October of 2017. He has been happily employed at CH Robinson in Eden Prairie since January of 2018 working primarily in C#, .NET, and ServiceStack. 

In his free time he chases tornadoes, races cars, and spends time with his wonderful fiancee Sabrina and their yellow Lab Irma.

After playing on her dad’s Commodore 64 as a child and hacking online multiplayer games as a teenager, Jessica discovered that she had much more fun programming than playing! With over 15 years of experience as a Software Engineer, she is versed in a variety of web biaccessibility standards and has a strong background in multiple coding languages. When not basking in the glow of a computer, she can be found romping around with her standard poodles, Jasper and Gideon.

Ben is a software engineer working on things from UX to Unix, often in Python and React. Known to get excited about distributed systems and software quality, and also getting back into cross-stitching this year.

Joe Karlsson is a Software Engineer from the frozen tundra known as Minneapolis, Minnesota. He writes code, builds teams and gives tech talks. He is the creator of feminist software, including bechdel.io which tells you if a movie script passes the Bechdel Test or not. 

Having graduated from the University of Waterloo with an electrical engineering degree, Adeel has been an engineer, startup entrepreneur, and advisor. After 15 years in San Francisco, he is now based in St. Paul working as an engineer manager for the new Caterpillar Digital Labs. Using his experience running multiple startups and side projects, he has presented a popular talk at Minnebar for the last two years: "Side Projects for Fun and Profit".

Casie Siekman is a software developer based in Minneapolis. She graduated from Prime Digital Academy in July of 2015 and went on to work there until September 2016. She has been with SDG ever since. She is passionate about making the Minneapolis and Midwest tech community more diverse and accessible to all.