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Top 13 Vaadin Developers in the World

vaadin developers - Top 13 Vaadin Developers in the World

Vaadin’s global community is driven by talented developers excelling in open-source contributions, startup leadership (while still coding), influential tech content, impactful enterprise use, and even coding competition accolades.

Below is an updated list of outstanding Vaadin developers who have demonstrated these qualities. Each has actively shaped the ecosystem – from core framework innovation to community education – and continues to inspire Vaadin’s growing devbase.

  1. Josh Long
  2. Artur Signell
  3. Simon Martinelli
  4. Freddy Peña
  5. Frank Delporte
  6. Martin Vyšný
  7. Syam Pillai
  8. Josiah Haswell
  9. Richard Fichtner
  10. Nicolas Fränkel
  11. Alejandro Duarte
  12. Christian Knoop
  13. Andrea Bosio

Now, let’s delve deeper into their remarkable journeys and impacts.

Josh Long

YouTube Video

Nationality: American

Josh Long is widely known as the first Spring Developer Advocate and a Java Champion, and he has also made his mark in the Vaadin world.

An author of 7 books (including “Reactive Spring”) and numerous video courses, Josh has a massive influence on enterprise Java development. He contributed to Vaadin by helping implement the initial Spring Boot integration, ensuring Vaadin works seamlessly with Spring Boot’s ecosystem. Josh often features Vaadin in his talks and video series when demonstrating full-stack Java, highlighting Vaadin as a powerful UI option for Spring applications. As an open-source polyglot, he’s contributed to Spring Cloud, Activiti, and even Vaadin itself. His outreach (podcasts, YouTube “Spring Tips”, etc.) has introduced Vaadin to thousands of Spring developers, bridging communities.

Artur Signell

Nationality: Finnish

Artur Signell has been instrumental in Vaadin’s development since the early days and now serves as Vaadin’s Chief Technology Officer.

He previously led the Vaadin product team, overseeing the framework’s evolution through major versions. Artur’s focus on technology and research has driven innovations like Vaadin’s declarative UI, client-side views, and modern theming. With over 15 years at Vaadin, he remains a key technical architect behind Vaadin Flow and Hilla. Artur frequently shares experimental ideas on Vaadin Labs and engages with the community via forum tips and GitHub projects.

Simon Martinelli

Simon Martinelli - Top 13 Vaadin Developers in the World

Nationality: Swiss

Simon Martinelli is one of the most recognized names in the Vaadin community.

A Java Champion and Oracle ACE Pro, he has 27+ years of software experience and leads 72 Services LLC as an architect and trainer. Simon received Vaadin’s Community Award two years in a row for his commitment to sharing knowledge. He regularly speaks at international Java conferences and writes about Vaadin on his own blog. In recent years, Simon has focused on improving full-stack Java productivity with Vaadin, publishing articles and even co-authoring testing libraries. He remains an active open-source contributor and helps Vaadin users on Stack Overflow and Discord.

Freddy Peña

Vaadin allows developers to build powerful web apps without having to master JavaScript frameworks.

Nationality: Dominican

Freddy Peña is a software engineer and influential Vaadin Champion who has expanded Vaadin’s reach in Spanish-speaking regions. Hailing from the Dominican Republic, Freddy runs educational initiatives to make Vaadin accessible to Spanish-speaking developers.

He creates Spanish-language Vaadin tutorials, live streams, and workshops, lowering the language barrier for the community. Freddy also organizes JConf Dominicana and leads one of the most active Java User Groups in Latin America, where Vaadin often features in talks and demos. With expertise in Java, Spring Boot, and Jakarta EE, he advocates Vaadin as a productivity tool for full-stack Java devs. Freddy’s contributions in 2022–2025, including conference sessions and social media content (via YouTube and X), have significantly grown Vaadin’s popularity in LATAM. He exemplifies community leadership by mentoring new Vaadin users and sharing success stories in their native language.

Frank Delporte

Frank Delporte - Top 13 Vaadin Developers in the World

Nationality: Belgian

Frank Delporte is a veteran Java developer and technical writer who has embraced Vaadin throughout his career. Now a Developer Advocate at Azul, Frank is also a Java Champion and a frequent blogger on WebTechie.be and Foojay.io. He authored “Getting Started with Java on the Raspberry Pi” and often combines Java with electronics in his writing. Frank first encountered Vaadin over 15 years ago when transitioning from C# to Java, and he later used Vaadin at work to build internal UIs exposing backend data. Impressed by Vaadin’s flexibility and rapid development, he adopted Vaadin for side projects like a Pi4J API UI and an online drum app for his son. Frank’s blog posts and conference talks in 2022–2025 frequently highlight Vaadin tips, showcasing how modern Java can power rich web UIs.

Martin Vyšný

Nationality: Slovak

Martin Vyšný is the creator and maintainer of Vaadin’s Kotlin ecosystem, notably the Karibu-DSL and Karibu-Testing libraries. As a Senior Software Engineer at Vaadin, Martin bridges the Java and Kotlin worlds, enabling developers to build Vaadin UIs using idiomatic Kotlin.

He started the Vaadin-on-Kotlin project to provide a fluent DSL for Vaadin components and a lightweight framework for building apps with Kotlin. Martin also developed Karibu-Testing, a popular framework for fast, browserless Vaadin UI testing. His open-source contributions (Vaadin Kotlin DSL, testing tools, and examples) have lowered the barrier for Kotlin developers adopting Vaadin. With over a decade of experience, Martin actively shares knowledge via blog posts and GitHub, and his work has been featured by Vaadin and community bloggers (e.g., Simon Martinelli).

Syam Pillai

Syam Pillai - Top 13 Vaadin Developers in the World

Nationality: Indian

Syam Pillai is a seasoned software architect who champions Vaadin at the enterprise level. As Group Head of IT at Habib Bank AG Zurich, Syam brings over 35 years of development experience – from assembly and C in the ’80s, to C++ in the ’90s, and Java since 1996.

He has been a Vaadin user for over a decade and has contributed several valuable components to the Vaadin Directory. Syam develops and maintains the “SO” series of Vaadin add-ons – including SO Charts, SO Components, and SO Helper – which extend Vaadin with advanced charting and helper utilities. These tools have become go-to solutions for other Vaadin developers building enterprise apps. Recognized as a 2023 Vaadin Champion, Syam frequently shares his architecture expertise on forums and inspires others to modernize legacy systems with Vaadin.

Josiah Haswell

Nationality: American

Josiah Haswell is the co-founder and CTO of Sunshower.io, a cloud optimization startup, and a prolific Vaadin open-source contributor. With a background in compilers and distributed systems, he led his team to create Aire UX, an impressive library of Vaadin components and utilities, as a fully open-source extension to Vaadin.

Aire UX provides web components, a testing framework, and theming tools that augment Vaadin Flow applications, reflecting Josiah’s commitment to improving the developer experience. He actively participates in Vaadin’s community Discord and shares Vaadin tips on social media. In 2022, Josiah was honored with Vaadin’s Community Award for his contributions. Beyond coding, he often writes about tech entrepreneurship and was featured on Vaadin’s blog for his work on Aire UX.

Richard Fichtner

Richard Fichtner - Top 13 Vaadin Developers in the World

Nationality: German

Richard Fichtner is a driving force in the Vaadin community in Germany. He is a key figure at XDEV Software, where he helps develop RapidClipse – a rapid IDE for Vaadin – and he’s known for fostering the wider Vaadin ecosystem.

Richard co-founded and organizes JCON Europe, the world’s second-largest Vaadin-centric conference, bringing together Vaadin enthusiasts annually. He also leads the Java User Group Oberpfalz, where he advocates Vaadin and Java FX, and mentors developers. As a recognized Vaadin Champion (2024), Richard shares his expertise through talks, webinars, and blog posts. His work at XDEV involves building tooling that simplifies Vaadin app development, reflecting his passion for developer productivity.

Nicolas Fränkel

Nationality: French

Nicolas Fränkel is a developer advocate with 15+ years of experience and a familiar name in the Java world. Currently at Hazelcast, he is known for his personal tech blog and his books on software crafts.

Nicolas has written and spoken about Vaadin’s capabilities, often comparing it with other web frameworks. Notably, he authored a guest article on using Vaadin with Hazelcast, showing how Vaadin can integrate with in-memory data grids for real-time data. As an enthusiastic speaker, he has highlighted Vaadin in the context of Java stacks (Spring, Micronaut, etc.), helping enterprise developers discover Vaadin. While his expertise spans many areas (from Spring to CI/CD), Nicolas’ contributions in 2022–2025 included advocating server-side UIs like Vaadin for secure, stateful web apps. His balanced, critical insights (e.g., in conference talks and on his blog) have been valuable to the Vaadin community.

Alejandro Duarte

Alejandro Duarte - Top 13 Vaadin Developers in the World

Nationality: Colombian

Alejandro Duarte is probably one of Vaadin’s most famous former evangelists. Originally from Colombia and later based in Finland, he served as Vaadin’s Developer Relations Manager, becoming the public face of Vaadin for many developers.

Alejandro has written three Vaadin books – “Vaadin 7 UI Design by Example”, “Data-Centric Applications with Vaadin 8”, and “Practical Vaadin” – that have helped thousands learn the framework. During 2022–2025, he continued to engage the Vaadin community through blog posts, conference talks, and video tutorials (even after moving to a DevRel role at MariaDB). He has a knack for integrating Vaadin with other technologies, demonstrated by his popular examples of using Vaadin with Spring Security and OAuth. A passionate open-source advocate, Alejandro remains active on social media where he frequently discusses Vaadin and answers community questions.

Christian Knoop

Nationality: German

Christian Knoop – better known by his online alias “knoobie” – is a Vaadin Champion renowned for his community support. A software engineer from Germany, Christian works at DVZ M-V GmbH (the IT service provider for Mecklenburg-Vorpommern’s state government) where he builds Vaadin apps for public authorities.

In the Vaadin community, however, he’s recognized as the top helper on Stack Overflow, Discord, and GitHub, often answering questions and troubleshooting issues for others. With deep knowledge of Vaadin Flow internals, Christian has contributed bug fixes and small enhancements to the Vaadin framework on GitHub. He also maintains example projects (like multi-module Vaadin setups) as open source. Awarded the Vaadin Community Award in 2022, “Knoobie” embodies the collaborative spirit of Vaadin’s community.

Andrea Bosio

Nationality: Italian

Andrea Bosio is an Italian software veteran who has championed Vaadin in the enterprise SaaS space. He founded Zero11 in 2006, a software company focusing on e-commerce and CRM solutions, and serves as its Head of Business Development.

Andrea’s team discovered Vaadin in 2010 and quickly adopted it as their official web framework, delivering rich web UIs for clients. In 2011, they launched Rewix, an e-commerce platform entirely built with Vaadin, showcasing the framework’s strength in complex, data-driven apps. Andrea not only leads a Vaadin-centric development team but also actively promotes and teaches Vaadin at local Java user groups in Italy. As a Vaadin Champion, he often shares success stories of migrating from legacy JEE to Vaadin, inspiring others in the region to modernize with Vaadin.

Wrap Up

These legends represent exceptional talent, making them extremely challenging to headhunt. However, there are thousands of other highly skilled IT professionals available to hire with our help. Contact us, and we will be happy to discuss your hiring needs.

Note: We’ve dedicated significant time and effort to creating and verifying this curated list of top talent. However, if you believe a correction or addition is needed, feel free to reach out. We’ll gladly review and update the page.

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