Speakers

Craig Adams is vice president of web performance product management at Akamai, where he has global responsibility for the strategy and management of Akamai’s web experience solutions portfolio, which enables Akamai customers to deliver innovative, instant web experiences on any device, anywhere. Craig has a diverse background that spans over 15 years at Akamai, with leadership roles in sales, services and support, technical services delivery, and country management. Craig is passionate about creating and launching new programs and offerings that enable Akamai customers to successfully meet their business objectives while also contributing to Akamai’s growth and profitability. Under Craig’s leadership, Akamai adopted the use of the NetPromoter Score to monitor and increase customer satisfaction. Craig also launched Akamai University for Customers, which has certifed over 3,000 customers on Akamai solutions, the Customer Experience program, and the Customer Champion Awards, driving a customer-first focus at Akamai.

Tom Adams is a hands-on technical principal at ThoughtWorks, a software company and a community of passionate individuals who are seeking to revolutionize the IT industry. He believes the hardest problem for a developer is fighting the urge to solve a different, more interesting problem than the one at hand. Tom is interested in helping teams deliver awesome software products, sharing his knowledge, and all the tools (especially Java).

Neeraj Agrawal is an engineering manager on Quora’s infrastructure team, where he leads company-wide efforts to make Quora fast and responsive. He started as an engineer working on server-side performance and has since revamped how the company thinks about performance. In his role as the speed lead, he has built the speed team from the ground up and created a culture of “performance matters” at Quora. Previously, he worked on other parts of the product, including writing the first version of Quora for iPhone and building a distributed, real-time ranking service for the personalized news feed product.

Kevin Beck is a senior software engineer at New Relic working on the team responsible for data ingest and all things Kafka. Previously, Kevin spent 15 years at IBM and Informix, working on distributed relational databases.

Kristopher Beevers is founder and CEO of NS1, the next-gen DNS and traffic management company. Previously, Kristopher led platform development at Voxel.net (acquired by Internap), where he built cloud and bare metal platforms, content delivery networks, and other distributed infrastructure products. Kristopher holds BS, MS, and PhD degrees in computer science from RPI.

David Belson is senior director of internet research and analysis at Oracle+Dyn, where he drives thought-leadership efforts supported by the company’s unique portfolio of internet intelligence tools and associated data. Previously, David spent 18 years at Akamai Technologies, where he was most recently senior director of industry and data intelligence, responsible for data-driven evangelism, including Akamai’s quarterly State of the Internet report series, and for leading competitive intelligence and analysis efforts, and worked at GTE Internetworking/BBN, where he supported sales of one of the first enterprise-class managed web hosting services and worked on an early prototype of what would currently be considered an SaaS platform. He holds a master of technical and professional writing from Northeastern University and a BS in computer science and a BA in science, technology, and society, both from Stevens Institute of Technology in Hoboken, NJ.

Andrew Betts is principal developer advocate at Fastly. Andrew’s area of expertise is emerging web technologies, particularly on mobile and tablet platforms. Previously, he was a PHP and JavaScript developer, web standards advocate, and founder of FT Labs, an emerging web technologies division of the Financial Times, where he and his team created the FT web app, one of the best examples of what can be achieved with HTML5.

Blake Bisset got his first legal tech job at 16. He won’t say how long ago, except that he’s legitimately entitled to make shakey fists while shouting, “Get off my LAN!” He’s cofounded three startups—a joint venture with Dupont/ConAgra, a biotech spinoff from UW, and one that started this time a bunch of kids were sitting around on New Year’s Eve, wondering why they couldn’t watch movies on the internet—only to end up spending a half-decade as an SRM at YouTube and Chrome, where his happiest accomplishment was holding the go/bestpostmortem link for several years.

Shawn Bower is the cloud architect for Cornell University, where he has helped to move many of the university’s workloads to Docker and the cloud. When not coding, Shawn is sleeping.

VM (Vicky) Brasseur is the director of open source strategy at Juniper, where she leverages her nearly 30 years of free and open source software experience and strong business background to help Juniper be successful through free and open source software. She spent most of her 20-plus years in the tech industry leading software development departments and teams, providing technical management and leadership consulting for small and medium businesses, and helping companies understand, use, release, and contribute to free and open source software in a way that’s good for both their bottom line and for the community. She’s the author of Forge Your Future with Open Source, the first and only book to detail how to contribute to free and open source software projects (published by the Pragmatic Programmers). Vicky’s a moderator and author for Opensource.com, an author for Linux Journal, the former vice president of the Open Source Initiative, and a frequent and popular speaker at free and open source conferences and events. She’s the proud winner of the Perl White Camel Award (2014) and the O’Reilly Open Source Award (2016). She blogs about free and open source, business, and technical management.

Joseph Breuer is a senior software engineer on Netflix’s playback licensing team.

Yevgeniy “Jim” Brikman is the cofounder of Gruntwork, a company that uses Terraform to create infrastructure packages to get customers up and running on AWS in under two weeks; the company also provides Terraform training. Previously, Yevgeniy was a software engineer at LinkedIn, TripAdvisor, Cisco Systems, and Thomson Financial. He loves programming, writing, speaking, traveling, and lifting heavy things. He is the author of A Comprehensive Guide to Terraform, a series of informative blog posts published on Gruntwork’s blog, and the O’Reilly books Terraform: Up & Running and Hello, Startup: A Programmer’s Guide to Building Products, Technologies, and Teams. Yevgeniy holds a BS and a master’s degree, both from Cornell University.

Brendan Burns is a distinguished engineer at Microsoft Azure, where he runs the container service and resource manager teams, and a cofounder of the Kubernetes open source project. Previously, he worked at Google on cloud APIs and web search infrastructure and was a professor of computer science at Union College. Brendan holds a PhD in computer science from the University of Massachusetts Amherst and a BA in computer science and studio art from Williams College.

Pieter Buteneers is a data strategist and machine learning consultant at CoScale. Pieter is relatively new to the DevOps field. Previously, he was a postdoc at Ghent University, where he did research on AI, machine learning, and deep learning. Pieter has also given a TEDx talk (on a somewhat unrelated subject).

Robert Castley is senior performance engineer for EMEA at Catchpoint Systems. A web performance specialist, web developer, and all-around good-looking geek, Robert has been optimizing web page performance for years. He specializes in APIs, CSS, JavaScript, HTML5, XML, web design and UX, and performance.

Jack Chan is a senior engineering manager in Shutterfly’s Photos Group. He was recently heavily involved with helping the company with a hybrid cloud migration solution with Photos-related API services on AWS, paired with a set of core services in a private data center. Jack has been working in software engineering development closely partnered with operations for quite some time, helping startups scale up to millions of users with cloud solutions. Previously, he worked in IT organizations at Adobe, Apple, and 3Com.

Vinu Charanya is a senior software engineer at Twitter, where she is building Twitter’s internal cloud infrastructure management platform. Vinu is also a core team member of Women Who Code, a nonprofit organization dedicated to inspiring women to excel in technology careers. She is also a part-time teacher of iOS and Android development and a mentor at CodePath. She holds a master’s degree in computer science and engineering from the University at Buffalo, where she worked in the PhoneLab Testbed research group under Geoff Challen and Steve Ko.

Mark Cho is a software engineer at Pinterest.

Rob Claire is an engineer on the visibility team at Pinterest, where he focuses on extracting insight from real-time operational data. Rob has more than 17 years of experience in the fields of data engineering, DevOps, and performance tuning. His career has included stints at One King’s Lane, Slide, Ning, and eBay.

Richard Cook is a research scientist in the Department of Integrated Systems Engineering at the Ohio State University in Columbus, Ohio, and emeritus professor of healthcare systems safety at Sweden’s KTH. A physician, researcher, and educator, Richard is an internationally recognized expert on safety, accidents, and human performance at the sharp end of complex, adaptive systems. His most often cited publication is “Going Solid: A Model of System Dynamics and Consequences for Patient Safety.”

Matt Cutts is acting administrator and distinguished engineer at the US Digital Service, which delivers better government services through technology and design. Previously, Matt worked at Google, where he wrote the first version of SafeSearch, Google’s family filter, and led the webspam team, where he protected the quality of Google’s search results and answered questions about search engine optimization and ranking algorithms.

Arshan Dabirsiaghi is chief scientist at Contrast Security, where he draws on experience to guide the product line, drive new products and features, and spread the gospel about binary instrumentation. Arshan is an accomplished security researcher with over 10 years of experience advising large organizations on application security. Previously, Arshan held a research role at Aspect Security, where he used static and dynamic technology to perform security assurance work, including code reviews, architecture reviews, and penetration testing. Arshan quickly discovered that securing applications was a massive undertaking—one that requires innovative, deeply accurate technology and continuous testing.

Dino Dai Zovi is CTO at Capsule8. An established researcher and innovator in the cybersecurity community with over a decade of experience in red teaming, penetration testing, software security, information security management, and mobile security R&D, Dino is best known for winning the first PWN2OWN contest at CanSecWest 2007. Previously, he served as the mobile security lead at Square, building out the platform that ensures Square’s sellers’ mobile devices are safe. He has also held security leadership roles with Endgame, Two Sigma Investments, and Matasano Security. Dino is a member of the Black Hat Review Board and a regular speaker at information security conferences around the world, including DEF CON, Black Hat, and CanSecWest. He is a coauthor of The iOS Hacker’s Handbook, The Mac Hacker’s Handbook, and The Art of Software Security Testing.

Bart De Vylder is a data scientist at CoScale. Previously, Bart was active in software engineering and architecture, with a focus on distributed systems. His interests lie in machine learning and building reliable, scalable data processing systems. Bart holds a PhD in artificial intelligence from the Free University of Brussels.

Kate Deutscher is technical team lead at GreenSync, where she builds systems to make renewable energy sources reliable. Previously, she worked on a delivery engineering team at realestate.com.au, where she focused on building automation tooling that integrates with tech like Docker, AWS, and Kubernetes to make building, packaging, and deploying applications easy, and spent the first six years of her career as a developer, which gives her keen insight into delivery issues and a passion for writing the clean, well-tested, and maintainable code that is often missing from automation tooling. Kate is determined to make a difference by introducing more women into the tech community; she organizes free training events like Rails Girls and DevOps Girls in her hometown of Melbourne, Australia.

Frederik is a software engineer at Fastly. He has been a developer for nearly 20 years, mostly in C and a bit of Go. He has worked on on telecom systems for most of his carrier: from a fast carrier grade SMTP/DNS/SMS server to a satellite oriented TCP/HTTP proxy. He now leads the HTTP/2 efforts at Fastly, the real-time CDN.

Over the last 20 years, Rob has led development of monitoring and performance solutions at Xaffire, Dell Software and Intel. He founded resurface.io to strike a devops-friendly balance between deep API monitoring and the latest privacy and security standards. When Rob isn’t geeking out, he’s camping and snowboarding with his wife and three kids in Colorado.

Kellan Elliott-McCrea is the senior vice president at Blink Health, where he runs engineering, product, and design. Kellan spends a lot of time experimenting with how to get the best results from cross-functional teams building software. Previously, he took 18 months off to be a stay-at-home dad, taught engineering leadership seminars, was CTO at Etsy, and spent five years at Flickr doing what needed to be done. He’d like to apologize for coauthoring OAuth.

Bret Fisher is a Virginia Beach-based freelance DevOps and Docker consultant, trainer, speaker, and open source volunteer. Bret has been a cloud and data center ops and system administrator for 20 years. Currently, he helps teams Dockerize their apps and systems and improve their speed of deployment, resiliency, metrics, and awareness (all that DevOps-y stuff). Bret is a Docker Captain and Code for America Brigade Captain. He runs several monthly meetups, speaks at conferences, and is obsessed with containerizing any app he sees. (He’ll likely talk your ear off about it next time you meet.) Bret also develops in Node.js, Bash, and general web, usually for open source projects. In his free time, he does CrossFit, surfs a little, geeks out in the awesome local dev community in Virginia Beach, and travels with his wife. He writes at Bretfisher.com and tweets at @bretfisher.

Andrew Fong is an engineering director at Dropbox, where he is responsible for the Development Infrastructure Platform. In the past, he was responsible for storage, telemetry, and production systems. Previously, he was an SRE at YouTube and AOL.

Jessica Frazelle is a software engineer at Microsoft, where she works with Linux and containers. Jess loves all things involving Linux namespaces and cgroups and is probably most well known for running desktop applications in containers. Jessica has been a maintainer of Docker and a contributor to RunC, Kubernetes, Linux, and Golang, among other projects, and maintained the AppArmor, seccomp, and SELinux bits in Docker. She is quite familiar with locking down containers.

Nikhil Garg is an engineering manager at Quora, where he has led the quality, ads, and ML platform teams, among others. He is interested in the intersection of machine learning, distributed systems, and human psychology.

Felix Glaser is a production engineer at Shopify, where he works on networking and security-related applications. Previously, Felix ran and sold his own startup, room.me, which matched roommates. In his free time, he organizes and plays CTFs for fun.

Sebastien Goasguen is senior director of cloud technologies at Bitnami, where he leads all the Kubernetes efforts. Sebastien joined Bitnami through the acquisition of his startup Skippbox. Sebastien is a 20-year open source veteran. A member of the Apache Software Foundation, he worked on Apache CloudStack and Libcloud for several years before diving into the container world. He is an avid blogger and enjoys spreading the word about new cutting-edge technologies. He also trains developers and sysadmins on all things Docker and Kubernetes. Sebastien is the author of the O’Reilly Docker Cookbook and 60 Recipes for Apache CloudStack.

Joe Goldberg is the lead solutions marketing manager at BMC Software, where he helps BMC products leverage new technology to deliver market-leading solutions with a focus on workload automation and big data. Joe has more than 35 years of experience in the design, development, implementation, sales, and marketing of enterprise solutions to Global 2000 organizations.

Dina Goldshtein is a senior software engineer at Riverbed, which she joined through the acquisition of Aternity, a company that builds performance monitoring tools that run on millions of PCs and mobile devices. Dina is on the team responsible for the core collection mechanism, which hooks low-level Windows events and collects performance information from a variety of sources, where she works on boot performance monitoring, identifying bottlenecks in the Windows boot process, and monitoring user experience on the web. Previously, Dina worked at BrightSource Energy, where she lead the software foundations team, developing software infrastructure used by the entire R&D department. She was also responsible for bringing in new technologies, mentoring, and improving quality and development processes department-wide.

Sasha Goldshtein is the CTO of Sela Group, a Microsoft C# MVP and Azure MRS, a Pluralsight author, and an international consultant and trainer. Sasha’s consulting work revolves mainly around distributed architecture, production debugging, and mobile application development. Sasha is the author of Introducing Windows 7 for Developers (Microsoft Press) and Pro .NET Performance (Apress). He is also a prolific blogger and the author of numerous training courses, including .NET Debugging, .NET Performance, Android Application Development, and Modern C++.

Margaret Gourlay is a senior QA engineer at VictorOps. Margaret’s background is in video game quality assurance. She holds a degree in theoretical math. When she’s not working, she enjoys playing games with friends far and wide, learning new things, and playing outside with her kids.

Michael Hausenblas is a developer advocate for OpenShift and Kubernetes at Red Hat, where he helps app ops engineers build and operate distributed services. Michael shares his experience with distributed systems and large-scale data processing through demos, blog posts, and public speaking engagements and contributes to open source software such as OpenShift and Kubernetes. Previously, Michael was a developer advocate at Mesosphere, chief data engineer at MapR Technologies, and a research fellow at the National University of Ireland, Galway, where he researched large-scale data integration and the internet of things and gained experience in advocacy and standardization (World Wide Web Consortium, IETF).

Kelsey Hightower has worn every hat possible throughout his career in tech but most enjoys leadership roles focused on making things happen and shipping software. Kelsey is a strong open source advocate focused on building simple tools that make people smile. When he is not slinging Go code, you can catch him giving technical workshops covering everything from programming and system administration to his favorite Linux distro of the month.

Lara Hogan is an engineering leader, coach, and consultant at Wherewithall, and is also the author of Designing for Performance and Demystifying Public Speaking. She champions engineering management as a practice, helps people get comfortable public speaking, and believes it’s important to celebrate career achievements with donuts.

Jonah Horowitz is a site reliability engineer at Stripe, where he works with all of the company’s individual engineering teams to drive reliability efforts, including monitoring, alerting, deployment pipelines, and chaos resiliency. Previously, Jonah worked at several startups around the Bay Area, including Netflix, Quantcast (a leading ad-tech startup, where he grew the company’s network to process over three million events per second), and Looksmart (a contextual advertising company), and was on the founding team of Walmart.com (now @Walmart Labs), where he built out the company’s software deployment pipelines and its product image management systems.

Won Jun Jang is an observability engineer at Uber Technologies, working on distributed tracing, monitoring, and performance. In his spare time, he gets lectured by his life coach to write a more interesting Bio to sell himself better.

Oded Keret is a senior product manager at Micro Focus leading market research, roadmap definition, strategy, and innovation for the Performance Engineering product line.

Karthik Kirupanithi is a software development engineer at Amazon Web Services. Previously, Karthik worked for Amazon, Microsoft, Thomson Reuters, and Dow Jones. He enjoys solving everyday problems and automating and simplifying everyday work; his recent interests include systems management and Alexa skill development.

Ignat Korchagin is a systems engineer at Cloudflare, where he works mostly on platform and hardware security. Ignat’s interests are cryptography, hacking, and low-level programming. Previously, he was senior security engineer for Samsung Electronics’s Mobile Communications Division, and his solutions can be found in many older Samsung smartphones and tablets. Ignat started his career as a security researcher in the Ukrainian government’s communications services.

John Le Drew is founder and principal at consulting firm Wise Noodles, where he focuses on facilitating a safe, creative, collaborative environment. John’s move into consultancy has taught him the value of team dynamics and that most technical challenges are projections of underlying issues with collaboration. Previously, John spent most of the last two decades working in the software industry, focusing on web technologies, which included 10 years as a software engineer.

Claire Le Goues is an assistant professor in the School of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University, where she researches ways to automatically and confidently evolve, debug, maintain, and improve real-world software systems. Claire also directs CMU’s undergraduate research and education programs in software engineering and is passionate about training software engineering practitioners and researchers from all backgrounds and walks of life.

Richard Li is cofounder and CEO of Datawire. Datawire supports several popular open source tools for Kubernetes, including Telepresence (a local development on Kubernetes) and the Ambassador API Gateway. Richard is a veteran of multiple technology startups including Duo Security, Rapid7, and Red Hat. He is a recognized Kubernetes and microservices expert and has spoken at numerous conferences including ApacheCon, the Microservices Practitioner Summit, and O’Reilly Velocity. He holds both a BS and MEng in computer science from MIT.

Bryan Liles is an engineer at Heptio. When he is not writing software to help move teams to Kubernetes, he gets to speak at conferences on topics ranging from machine learning to building the next generation of developers. In his free time, Bryan races cars in straight lines and around turns and builds robots and devices.

Ben Linsay is an engineer. In past lives, he was an engineer at Bumpers, Kickstarter, Aggregate Knowledge, and Boundary.

Phil Lombardi is a senior platform engineer at Datawire, where he is building the cloud services for Datawire.io’s resilient microservices framework. Phil has extensive experience building and operating distributed systems and continuous delivery pipelines in both the internet of things and web services spaces.

Kelly Looney is the director of DevOps consulting at Skytap and a frequent public speaker at events like DevOps Days, as well as Skytap-hosted panels and roundtable discussions. Previously, Kelly led a large-scale Agile and DevOps transformation at bwin.party in Vienna, Austria, that involved over 900 development and operations personnel. Kelly has varied experience with all types of software development and operations, across many business areas at organizations such as Capgemini, Booz Allen Hamilton and, more recently, the Agile- and DevOps-focused firms ThoughtWorks and Valtech, where he consulted with development organizations all over the world. Kelly has personally worked with such industry luminaries as Dick Gabriel, Kent Beck, Jez Humble, and Luke Hohmann. He has a great grasp of both the theory and practical problems that go along with the transition to Agile and DevOps.

Duncan McAllister is a senior enterprise architect on the global consulting services team at Akamai, where he focuses on web performance. Previously, he was an enterprise architect supporting the architecture and platform domain for one of the top US retail enterprises, where he was responsible for the deployment and integration architecture and championed several foundational initiatives, including a hybrid-cloud-hosting migration, a multiregion deployment architecture, and a continuous application delivery pipeline.

Mark McBride is founder and CEO of Turbine Labs, building products that help engineers ship features more quickly and safely. Previously, Mark was services engineer lead at Nest Labs and Google, where he was responsible for the development of Nest’s server infrastructure that makes it possible for Nest customers to connect with their homes from wherever they are, and as an early developer on Twitter’s streaming API, delivering thousands of messages per second in real time to millions of users. During his time at Twitter, Mark managed developer productivity and led the web delivery, developer tools, and infrastructure test teams; he also worked with a variety of deploy pipelines and led development of some of Twitter’s early service migrations, which grew into a suite of tools used to migrate of millions of requests per second from legacy services to modern replacements.

Mike McGarr is the engineering manager for the developer productivity team at Netflix and a cohost of the Ship Show podcast. Mike has been developing Java/JVM-based applications for most of his career and been known to dabble in other languages as well. Previously, Mike was the director of DevOps at Blackboard and the founder of the DC Continuous Delivery meetup. He is passionate about building quality software through automation. Mike can frequently be found talking about Agile, continuous delivery, DevOps, or build and test automation.

Tyler McMullen is CTO of Fastly, where he is responsible for the system architecture and leads the company’s technology vision. As part of the founding team, Tyler built the first versions of Fastly’s instant purging system, API, and real-time analytics. Previously, Tyler worked on text analysis and recommendations at Scribd. A self-described technology curmudgeon, Tyler has experience in everything from web design to kernel development and loathes all of it. Especially distributed systems.

Carin Meier is a software developer at Cognitect. Carin started as a professional ballet dancer, but she studied physics in college and has been developing software for both the enterprise and entrepreneur ever since. Carin has a strong background in Ruby and Clojure and is interested in combining hardware and software at the intersection of the physical and digital world. She has helped clients develop home automation systems and written a control library for the Parrot AR Drone in Clojure. She is highly involved in the developer community and has spoken at many conferences, including keynoting at OSCON and Strange Loop. Carin also helps lead the Cincinnati Functional Programmers and is the author of Living Clojure.

Terran Melconian is a data science consultant and trainer at Air Network Simulation and Analysis. Terran has worked in the consumer web space for the last decade in roles that included software development, operations, data warehousing, and data science. Previously, he built up and managed teams at TripAdvisor and Jobcase, where he focused on hiring generalists and teaching them about the specifics. Terran is passionate about continuing education for high-performing professionals.

Jon Moore is the chief software architect at Comcast Cable, where he focuses on delivering a core set of scalable, performant, robust software components for the company’s varied software product development groups. Jon specializes in the “art of the possible,” finding ways to coordinate working solutions for complex problems and deliver them on time. He is equally comfortable leading and managing teams and personally writing production-ready code and has a passion for software engineering, continuously learning, and teaching colleagues new ways to deliver working, maintainable software with ever-higher quality and ever-shorter delivery times. His interests include distributed systems, fault tolerance, building healthy and engaging engineering cultures, and Texas Hold’em. Jon holds a PhD in computer and information science from the University of Pennsylvania. He resides in West Philadelphia, although he was neither born nor raised there and does not spend most of his days on playgrounds.

Neha Narula is director of research at the Digital Currency Initiative (part of the MIT Media Lab), where she teaches courses and leads cryptocurrency and blockchain research. Previously, she built fast, scalable databases and secure software systems. She speaks about these topics at industry and research conferences. In a previous life, Neha helped relaunch the news aggregator Digg and was a senior software engineer at Google, where she designed Blobstore, a system for storing and serving petabytes of immutable data, and worked on Native Client, a system for running native code securely through a browser. She holds a PhD in computer science from MIT.

Lex Neva is a site reliability engineer at Fastly. Lex originally trained in computer science, but he found that he most enjoyed applying his software engineering skills to operations. Previously, he kept large services running at Linden Lab’s Second Life, DeviantArt.com, and Heroku. A veteran of many large incidents, Lex has strong opinions on incident response, retrospectives, on-call sustainability, and good development and release processes.

Deb Nicholson is the director of community operations at Software Freedom Conservancy, where she supports the work of its member organizations and facilitates collaboration with the wider free software community. A free software policy expert and a passionate community advocate, Deb previously served as the community outreach director for the Open Invention Network, a shared defensive patent pool on a mission to protect free and open source software, and the membership coordinator for the Free Software Foundation. She won the O’Reilly Open Source Award for her work with GNU MediaGoblin, a federated media-hosting service, and OpenHatch, Free Software’s welcoming committee. She’s also a founding organizer of the Seattle GNU/Linux Conference, an annual event dedicated to surfacing new voices and welcoming new people to the free software community. She lives with her husband and her lucky black cat in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Michelle Noorali is a senior software engineer on the Azure Container Service team at Microsoft and a core maintainer on the Kubernetes Helm project, a package manager for Kubernetes. Michelle also co-leads SIG-Apps, the Kubernetes special interest group for running and managing applications on Kubernetes. She is primarily a Go developer but has Ruby roots. Michelle is passionate about developer experiences.

Alex Petrov is an infrastructure engineer, Apache Cassandra committer, interested in storage, distributed systems, and algorithms. Currently writing Database Internals book with O’Reilly.

Lisa Phillips is vice president of site reliability engineering at Fastly. With a focus on internet and web technologies with an emphasis on systems and database administration, architecture, engineering, and management, Lisa isn’t afraid of hard problems or scale. She brings extensive experience in implementation and management of internet services to ensure highest levels of system availability and performance globally.

Guy Podjarny is Snyk’s co-founder and CEO, focusing on using open source and staying secure. Guy was previously CTO at Akamai following their acquisition of his startup, Blaze.io, and worked on the first web app firewall & security code analyzer. Guy is a frequent conference speaker & the author of O’Reilly “Securing Open Source Libraries”, "Responsive & Fast” and “High Performance Images”.

Ilan Rabinovitch is vice president of product and community at Datadog, where he spends his days diving into container monitoring metrics, collaborating with Datadog’s open source community, and evangelizing observability best practices. Previously, Ilan spent a number of years leading infrastructure and reliability engineering teams at organizations such as Ooyala and Edmunds.com. He’s active in the open source and DevOps communities, where he is a co-organizer of events such as SCALE and Texas Linux Fest as well as a number of devopsdays events.

Prithvi Raj is an observability engineer working on Uber’s distributed tracing system, Jaeger.

Akshay Ranganath is an enterprise architect and web performance consultant with over 15 years’ experience in the world of IT and performance consulting. He works to make websites blazingly fast while remaining secure, and his DevOps consultancy focuses on integrating CDN into CI/CD pipelines and working to enable some of Akamai’s largest customers to build complex routing solutions and implement innovating business rules at the CDN layer.

Anant Rao is an engineering lead at LinkedIn, where he works on performance optimization and capacity planning, focusing on making LinkedIn’s apps go fast and working on infrastructure to prevent performance issues before they make it to production.

Tanya Reilly is a principal software engineer at Squarespace working on infrastructure and site reliability. Before Squarespace she spent 12 years in Site Reliability Engineering at Google. Originally from Ireland, she is now an enthusiastic New Yorker. She likes raspberry pi, coding on trains and building systems that are hard to break. She blogs at http://noidea.dog.

Robert Reta is a senior software engineer on Netflix’s playback licensing team.

Liz Rice is the technology evangelist at container security specialists Aqua Security and coauthor of the O’Reilly report Kubernetes Security. She has a wealth of software development, team, and product management experience from her years spent working on network protocols and distributed systems and in digital technology sectors such as video on demand (VOD), music, and voice over internet protocol (VoIP). When not building startups and writing code, Liz loves riding bikes in places with better weather than her native London or racing in virtual reality on Zwift.

Nick Rockwell is the chief technology officer at the New York Times. Throughout his career, Nick has worked at the intersection of media and the internet, building digital products for mass audiences. Previously, he was chief technology officer at Condé Nast and digital CTO at MTV Networks.

Andrew Rodland is a senior backend engineer for video systems at Vimeo. For over a decade, Andrew has been mixing the chocolate of dev in the peanut butter of ops. Previously, he was a developer at Shutterstock. Andrew has spoken at (and organized streaming video for) prominent Perl conferences and contributed some cool stuff to CPAN.

Alex Rukletsov is an Apache committer and Mesos PMC member at Mesosphere. He loves making programs run faster, reducing the cognitive load of code, and creating the right abstractions. In a previous life, Alex segmented medical images and investigated the behavior of human vessels at several German research institutes. His areas of interests include distributed systems, object recognition, and probabilistic and heuristic algorithms.

Cynthia Savard Saucier is director of design at Shopify, where she has sprinkled her creativity in many important projects, notably the company’s web and mobile interfaces. Passionate about human beings and their means of communication, Cynthia has always sought a deeper understanding of how people think, interact, and connect. In a field that is not always fully understood, she excels by creating smart, emotional connections between companies and users. Cynthia has a knack for strategic design, ergonomics, and problem solving. Her wide range of experience has brought her broad recognition as a leading expert on multiplatform interface design. She was awarded the 2010 RAÉDIUM prize for Chouette!, a technological communication platform to strengthen intergenerational relations. In addition to her day job, Cynthia mentors startups and is regularly invited to speak at events around the world, where her playful approach both startles and charms. In her conference presentations, she shares her passion for her point of view: user-centered design is a reality, not a utopian methodology. Cynthia holds a degree in industrial design from Université de Montréal.

Rafael Schloming is the CTO of Datawire. Rafael is a coauthor of the Advanced Message Queuing Protocol (AMQP) specification and the primary architect of the open source Apache Qpid Proton project. Previously, he was a principal software engineer at Red Hat, where he worked on messaging technologies.

Baron Schwartz is the founder and CTO of VividCortex, the best way to see what your production database servers are doing. Baron has written a lot of open source software and several books, including High Performance MySQL. He’s focused his career on learning and teaching about performance and observability of systems generally, including the view that teams are systems and culture influences their performance, and databases specifically.

Yuri Shkuro is a software engineer at Uber, working on distributed tracing, reliability, and performance. Yuri is the coauthor of the OpenTracing standard (a CNCF project) and the creator of Jaeger, Uber’s open source distributed tracing system (also a CNCF project).

Julien Simon is a technical evangelist at AWS. Previously, Julien spent 10 years as a CTO and vice president of engineering at a number of top-tier web startups. He’s particularly interested in all things architecture, deployment, performance, scalability, and data. Julien frequently speaks at conferences and technical workshops, where he helps developers and enterprises bring their ideas to life thanks to the Amazon Web Services infrastructure.

Michal Skiba is principal product line manager at Intel, where he leads product planning and marketing for Intel’s FPGA virtualization framework. Previously, he was a product line manager for Cisco’s data center switches. Michal holds an MASc from the University of Waterloo and a BASc from the University of Toronto. He has led several mountain-climbing expeditions in the Himalayas.

Ines Sombra is director of engineering at Fastly, where she spends her time helping the web go faster. Ines holds an MS in computology with an emphasis on cheesy ’80s rock ballads. She has a fondness for steak, fernet, and a pug named Gordo. In a previous life, she was a data engineer.

Cindy Sridharan is a Distributed Systems Engineer. She likes thinking about building resilient and maintainable systems. She maintains a blog where she shares her ideas and experience about several of these topics. She is the author of a report on Distributed Systems Observability with O’Reilly.

Mike Strickland leads the FPGA high-performance computing vision within Intel’s Programmable Solutions Group. Mike has more than 20 years of computer, networking, and storage experience with companies such as Hewlett-Packard, Silverback Systems, and Altera (acquired by Intel). Previously, Mike led the development and launch of products in the networking, storage management, TCP/IP offload, and iSCSI spaces. He holds a BS in electrical engineering from Brown University and an MS in management from the Sloan School of Management at MIT.

Swaminathan Sundaramurthy is a Director of Engineering at Salesforce Einstein, where he manages Machine Learning Services and Orchestration teams. Prior to Salesforce, Swami worked at Pinterest, where he initiated and managed the company’s stream platform and machine learning training platform, and managed anti-Spam and fraud efforts. He began his career as an IC, spending more than 12 years building distributed systems and cloud platforms at Amazon, Yahoo, Microsoft and Ask Jeeves. Swami is passionate about technology, distributed systems, promoting diversity and eliminating bias in the workplace.

M​ary Treseler is vice president of content strategy at O’Reilly Media, ​where she leads an editorial team that covers a wide range of topics from DevOps to design, and the chair of O’Reilly’s Velocity Conference. Mary has been working on technical content for 25 years, acquiring and developing content in areas such as programming, software engineering, and product design. A Boston native, Mary lives​ oceanside​ ​in Padanaram, MA.

Andrew Turley is a software engineer at Wallaroo Labs, where he works on Wallaroo, a system for building high-performance event-driven applications.

James Turnbull is VPE at Glitch. A longtime member of the open source community, James is the author of a number of books about open source software. Previously, he was a CTO in residence at Microsoft, founder and chief technology officer at Empatico and Kickstarter, VPE of Venmo, and an adviser at Docker. James likes food, wine, books, photography, and cats. He is not overly keen on long walks on the beach or holding hands.

Jeff Valeo is a lead site reliability engineer on the cloud infrastructure team at Grubhub. Previously, Jeff was a technical lead at Apple and an engineer at Google.

Seth Vargo is an engineer at Google Cloud. Previously he worked at HashiCorp, Chef Software, CustomInk, and some Pittsburgh-based startups. He is the author of Learning Chef and is passionate about reducing inequality in technology. When he is not writing, working on open source, teaching, or speaking at conferences, Seth advises non-profits.

Leif Walsh is an engineering manager at Two Sigma, where he works on the company’s next-generation data analysis platform for distributed time series research and simulation. Leif’s background is in high-performance storage. Previously, he built fractal trees at Tokutek. He loves the Oxford comma, cooking, and playing with cats.

Sarah Wells is the technical director for operations and reliability at the Financial Times. Her teams build operational and developer tooling and help engineering teams at the FT to support the systems they build, including coordination, communication and learning around major incidents. Previously, Sarah was a developer and tech lead for nearly 20 years. Building a new microservices-based system about five years ago led her to develop a deep interest in operability, observability, and DevOps—and learn a lot about containerization, Kubernetes, and Go in the process.

Jesse White is a Principal at Contino with more than 15 years of technology industry experience across financial services, healthcare, advertising, e-commerce, and IoT. A 10 year veteran of New York City’s startup ecosystem, he’s been busy building tech-focused human capital, with an eye for getting things done. As a founder of the DockerNYC Meetup group, Jesse has spent the last 5 years build teams and technology at the intersection of DevOps, cloud computing, and security. Jesse is an avid eater/listener/reader of good things.

David Woods is a professor at the Ohio State University, where he is the lead for the Initiative on Complexity in Natural, Social, and Engineered Systems and the codirector of Ohio State University’s Cognitive Systems Engineering Laboratory. David is a former president of both the Resilience Engineering Association and the Human Factors and Ergonomics Society.

Susie Xia is a senior software engineer at LinkedIn, where she focuses on scalability and capacity analysis. Previously, she worked on mobile applications and automation.

Zhenzhong Xu is a software engineer working on highly scalable and resilient streaming data infrastructure at Netflix. Previously, he was a core contributor to Microsoft Azure data center operating system reconciliation management and resiliency functionalities. He is passionate about anything related to real-time data systems and large-scale distributed systems.