Technical Oversight Committee
The Reactive Foundation Technical Oversight Committee (TOC) is responsible for technical direction and project oversight for the Reactive Foundation. The TOC works with the Governing Board to set and achieve the multi-project goals and standards for the Reactive Foundation. The TOC representatives are:
James Townley
Board Appointee (Chair)
James Townley serves as a Senior Product Manager at Lightbend and a development polyglot. He is an experienced Reactive Systems Architect, Project Manager, Agile coach, Leader, Trainer and Developer. He has a love of simple and tries to have that reflect in his work.
Simon Baslé
VMware Appointee
Software Development Enthusiast. Reactor Software Engineer.
Ben Christensen
Advisory Council Board Appointee
Ben is a software engineer at Facebook building fleet management systems for its private cloud. Previously, he built software infrastructure for the Netflix API and Edge Services to provide optimized performance for each streaming device and resilience to failure while handling billions of requests. That work led to open-sourcing Hystrix, RxJava, and RSocket. Presentations on work done at Netflix can be found at
Oleh Dokuka
RSocket Representative
Software Engineer who knows how to work with Reactive as a user as well as a developer. Java Champion. Co-author of the book “Hands‑On Reactive Programming in Spring 5”. Works on RSocket and improves Project Reactor along the way
Sergei Egorov
Advisory Council Board Appointee
Sergei works at VMware on Project Reactor in Berlin, Germany and, as part of his job, creates tools such as BlockHound and ReactorDebugAgent. He is an active member of the Open Source community, member of the Apache Foundation, co-maintainer of the Testcontainers project, maintainer of docker-java, and a contributor to various OSS projects (Apache Groovy, Testcontainers, JBoss Modules, Spring Boot, to name a few).
Roland Kuhn
Reactive Streams Representative
CTO and co-founder of Actyx, author of Reactive Design Patterns, a co-author of the Reactive Manifesto, and teacher of the edX course Programming Reactive Systems. Previously I led the Akka project at Lightbend. I also hold a Dr. rer. nat. in particle physics from TU München and have worked in the space industry. I spend most of my life in the central European timezone.
Mark Paluch
R2DBC Representative
Mark Paluch leads the Spring Data efforts at VMware and is involved in various other Spring projects. He designed the reactive Spring Data stack, and he’s very involved in the Reactive Programming scene being the spec lead for the Reactive Relational Database Connectivity (R2DBC) project and maintaining the reactive Lettuce Redis driver. Outside of work, he is a passionate trance music producer.