Mary is a passionate Developer Advocate leader who recently joined the Streaming team at Datastax. She spent 3.5 years as a very effective advocate at IBM, focusing on Java, Open Liberty, Microprofile, Jakarta EE, OpenJ9, Open Source, Cloud, and Distributed Systems. She transitioned from Unix/C to Java around 2000 and has never looked back since then. She considers herself a polyglot and loves to continue learning new and better ways to solve real-life problems. She is an active tech community builder outside of her day job and is currently the President of the Chicago Java Users Group (CJUG), as well as a co-organizer for several IBM-sponsored meetup groups in the Greater Chicago area.