Mary is a Java Champion, and an experienced, passionate Developer Advocate.  She has serviced companies as an advocate, such as IBM and DataStax in topic areas that include, most recently, GenAI, Streaming systems, Open source, Java, Cloud, and Distributed Messaging 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.