Beantown BBQ: Cooking up a better Developer Experience

Join us for a summer evening of smoky bites and sharp insights as the Boston Atlassian Community comes together for a special edition meetup focused on Developer Experience (DevEx).

Enjoy delicious BBQ and fresh perspectives on DevEx from Appfire’s Ed Gaile and Christopher Pepe. They’ll dive into how disconnected tools and siloed workflows create challenges for developers - and how unifying your tools, teams, and priorities through apps like Compass can drive clarity and success. Then, GitKraken’s Jeremy Castile joins us to explore why DevEx is now a strategic imperative—and how modern teams are transforming Git workflows into productivity drivers through thoughtful integration with tools like Jira.

We’ll be serving up award-winning BBQ from SmokeShop, alongside cold beverages and great conversation with fellow Atlassian users, admins, and builders.

Whether you're in engineering, product, or IT - if you care about delivering better experiences for your teams and end users, this event’s for you.

Agenda

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Speakers

Ed Gaile - Appfire (Principal Solution Architect)

Edward Gaile is a Principal Solution Architect at Appfire. He has over 30 years of experience in software application development. His specialties include enterprise application design, DevOps, and change enablement optimization. He has been involved in the Atlassian eco-sphere for the past 15 years, including leading the Atlanta Atlassian user community for the past 10 years. He holds m…

Christopher Pepe - Appfire

In the beginning I was an embedded systems engineer, and tinkerer. Back in my day several of my projects were featured on Make’s website, and I contributed to the uClinux Blackfin community with software and hardware.
I have been using Jira since 2004, and an Atlassian partner since 2010. After engineering I held roles that would now all be considered DevOps. As a senior member of a smal…

Jeremy Castile - GitKraken (VP of Product Marketing)

As VP of Product Marketing at GitKraken, Jeremy works to connect the company's Developer Experience platform with 40+ million developers who rely on their tools daily. With experience at companies like Docker and New Relic, and having been on the engineering side himself, he's learned to translate complex technical solutions into stories that help teams understand how these tools can actually …

Moderators

Ben Topolski - HYCU (Director of Strategic Alliances)

Ben Topolski, Director of Strategic Alliances at HYCU, is a passionate technology leader dedicated to continuous learning and embracing new business challenges. With a robust background in Cloud and SaaS, he combines strong technical and business acumen honed from his early engineering career and subsequent roles in business development and product management. Prior to HYCU, Ben gained experie…

Joe Doherty

Joe Doherty is a people-first IT leader passionate about transforming enterprise collaboration and delivering exceptional user experiences. He’s worked across industries—including healthcare IT, robotics, and financial services—and most recently led the Enterprise Collaboration team at iRobot. With 10+ years of Atlassian admin experience, he’s led strategy, cloud migrations, and user training,…

Hosted By

Benjamin Topolski, Director of Strategic Alliances

Ben Topolski, Director of Strategic Alliances at HYCU, is a passionate technology leader dedicated to continuous learning and embracing new business challenges. With a robust background in Cloud and SaaS, he combines strong technical and business acumen honed from his early engineering career and subsequent roles in business development and product management. Prior to HYCU, Ben gained experience in roles at Rafay, AWS, CloudHealth, and LogMeIn.

Joe Doherty,

Joe is a people-first IT leader passionate about transforming enterprise collaboration and delivering exceptional user experiences. He’s worked across industries—including healthcare IT, robotics, and financial services—and most recently led the Enterprise Collaboration team at iRobot. With 10+ years of Atlassian admin experience, he’s led strategy, cloud migrations, and user training, while also integrating tools like Slack, Zoom, Mural, and Smartsheet. He enjoys life on the north shore of Boston with his wife and baby daughter.

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Global Partner

Atlassian (http://atlassian.com)
Millions of users globally rely on Atlassian products every day for improving software development, project management, collaboration, and code quality.

Partners

HYCU (https://www.hycu.com)
HYCU is the fastest-growing leader in the multi-cloud and SaaS data protection as a service industry. By bringing true SaaS-based data backup and recovery to on-premises, cloud-native, and SaaS IT environments, the company provides unrivaled data protection, migration, disaster recovery, and ransomware protection to thousands of companies worldwide. The company's award-winning R-Cloud platform eliminates complexity, risk, and the high cost of legacy-based solutions, providing data protection sim

appfire (http://appfire.com/)
The world's largest ensemble of award-winning Atlassian Add-ons and Services.

GitKraken (https://www.gitkraken.com/)
GitKraken is the world’s leading developer experience (DevEx) platform, serving more than 40 million developers from 100,000 organizations globally.

Our platform supports developers wherever they are and wherever they code, across the desktop, command line, IDE, web, and mobile.

GitKraken integrates seamlessly with all leading Git hosts, including GitHub, GitLab, Atlassian Bitbucket, and Azure DevOps, empowering developers to do more with less.

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For over a decade, Atlassian customers have come together to network, share ideas, solve problems, and find new ways to use Atlassian products. Today, more than 15,000 people take part in Atlassian community events in more than 30 countries.

Complete your event RSVP here: https://ace.atlassian.com/events/details/atlassian-boston-presents-beantown-bbq-cooking-up-a-better-developer-experience/.