Abby Fichtner

Abby Fichtner is The Hacker Chick. She’s been developing custom software professionally, wearing every hat imaginable, since 1994. Although, technically, she got her start at the age of 8 when her father brought home an Atari 800. In the evenings, they would sit together and type in the machine code from the Atari magazines – because that was the way serious geeks got their computer games!

Abby is also a Developer Evangelist for Startups at Microsoft where she has the most awesome job of getting to help startups as they build out the next generation of software. There is simply no end to the extreme coolness and hacker potential she gets to see each and every day in this job that was clearly created special for her.

In the blur between Atari 800 and Microsoft, Abby banged out code for a number of startups, a little company called Oracle, and a boutique firm that helped teams improve how they develop software through Lean/Agile practices. She’s particularly passionate about how we can develop better software and is extremely excited to be working with startups to help them develop the next generation of software.