Chris PetersMacquarie

Chris Peters is an Associate Director in Personal Technology Automation at Macquarie Group. He is passionate about automation, and for the past 10 years has been involved in creating restAPIs with .net core and various front-end frameworks, automating common business reporting and IT support tasks. Chris has over 20 years of professional work experience having worked as a Senior System Analyst at Abbott Laboratories and a Primary Developer at Menoko, prior to joining Macquarie Group 6 years ago. He now leads a team of passionate developers who he enjoys working with to deliver modern applications and new automation opportunities, helping to drive dramatic business growth.

Chris is excited to be speaking at this year’s Techspire event. His speech will explore how “you are already becoming the leader you will be in 30 years”, and will draw on his own learnings from his career to date.

Nick PatrikeosAtlassian

Nick is a Software Engineer with a passion for education and helping others learn and grow. After growing up in Perth, Nick moved to Sydney to study Engineering at the University of New South Wales where he went on to work as a casual academic.

Nick now works as a Software Engineer at Atlassian and oversees the software development at a Perth-based startup called The Growth Hunting Company. At Atlassian, Nick works on Post Office, Atlassian’s new unified messaging platform to power emails, notifications and in-product messaging. He works day-to-day with TypeScript, React and BitBucket CI pipelines in Atlassian’s Monorepo.

Nick’s talk is titled “Why you should pay more attention to non-functional requirements” and discusses how we focus on the wrong thing - what we’re building - when we should be focusing on how we’re building it, in software engineering.

Nelson TamApple

Nelson is an engineering manager at Apple. He studied Computer Engineering at UNSW, with a focus on operating systems and microkernels. He has done a diverse range of roles over time - from sales and marketing, project management, product, then full circle back to engineering.

Prior to joining Apple, Nelson has worked on kernels, static analysis, e-commerce marketplaces, and self-driving cars. Some of his previous employers include Freelancer.com and Ghost Locomotion.

Nelson enjoys running and cycling, and had recently finished the Sydney Marathon 2024. He is a follower of Jesus, married to Sophia with three children. He is passionate about investing in people and sharing his life story with others.

Richard HofmanGoogle

Richard Hofman is a Software Engineer in Google’s enterprise security team. He has long held a fascination with privacy and cryptography, and holds a Bachelor’s Degree in Computer Science, from the University of Auckland in New Zealand.

In his role at Google, Richard’s work mostly encompasses cryptographically attested device identity and the infrastructure needed to issue and validate credentials based on these identities. He has also worked on improving the cryptographic security of SSH traffic at Google.

Richard will be speaking about WebAuthn and FIDO2, two closely related, privacy-aware standards for online cryptographic authentication. These technologies form the basis for “Passkeys”, but are surprisingly broad in their own right.

James JiTikTok

James graduated from UNSW in 2023. He currently works at TikTok on the LIVE app, where he develops core revenue features that are innovative, secure and intuitive for our users.

While at UNSW, he built Circles, the defacto degree planner for CSE students. He would later run CSESoc Projects (now DevSoc) where he spawned many new initiatives such as the Training Program and Techspire.

We invited James back to share his unique experiences on building projects, starting initiatives, challenges in the industry and more.

Sebastian GraysonUNSW

Sebastian Sequoiah-Grayson is a Senior Lecturer in Epistemics at the School of Computer Science and Engineering at the University of New South Wales. His work covers issues in applied matters for the ethics of technology and artificial intelligence, and also abstract mathematical matters in substructural epistemic logics and epistemics broadly.

More speakersTo be announced

Check back later for more updates to the list of speakers for this year.

Ticket sales begin Friday October 18 starting from $5