Closing Keynote – Kathy Sierra

Kathy Sierra created the award-winning Head First book series that has sold over 1 million copies. Published by O’Reilly Media, these instructional guides employ an unorthodox combination of visuals, puzzles, jokes, and an engaging conversational style to help people develop skills in programming, software engineering, and user experience design.

Her background is in developing education games and software for the motion picture industry, and she also created the first interaction design courses for UCLA Entertainment Studies. For more than 15 years Kathy helped large companies, small start-ups, non-profits, and educators rethink their approach to user experience, and to build sustainable, genuine customer loyalty.

In 2007, Kathy made a high profile exit from the technology industry after being subjected to a sustained campaign of harassment that included doxxing and death threats.

Since then, Kathy has emerged as a hero for horses by pioneering better ways to rehabilitate and motivate horses and by cultivating an international community of people who love learning more gentle ways to teach horses with her ground-breaking online classes and conversations.

Over the course of an illustrious career, Kathy has reinvented herself again and again, while nurturing a lifelong passion for discovering and sharing better ways to teach and learn.