Mary is a Java Champion and a passionate Senior Developer Advocate at DataStax. Previously she was a very effective advocate at IBM, focusing on Java, Open Source, Cloud, and Distributed Systems. She started as an engineer in Unix/C, then transitioned to Java around 2000 and has never looked back since then. She is an active tech community builder outside of her day job, and currently the President of the Chicago Java Users Group (CJUG), as well as the Chicago Chapter Co-Lead for AICamp.