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Modern systems pose a number of thorny challenges: they are inherently complex, span multiple technologies, groups, and sometimes different organizations altogether. Most poignantly, they fail in the most unexpected and spectacular ways. The O'Reilly Velocity Conference is the best place on the planet for web ops and systems engineering professionals like you to learn from your peers, exchange ideas with experts, and share best practices and lessons learned for handling modern systems and applications.
Build Secure, Resilient Systems
The O'Reilly Velocity Conference provides you with real-world best practices for building, deploying, and running complex, distributed applications and systems.
Quality Time with Experts
Take advantage of this rare opportunity to meet face-to-face with a cadre of industry leaders who are taking systems performance and operations to the next level. Bring your entire team to share ideas and get your toughest questions answered by the experts.
Four Days Devoted to Web Operations, DevOps, and Systems Engineering
Velocity packs a wealth of big ideas, know-how, and connections into four concentrated days. You'll be able to apply what you've learned immediately and you'll be well prepared for what lies ahead.
Nikki McDonald
Ines Sombra
James Turnbull
Kevin Burke (burke.services) likes building great experiences. He helped scale Twilio and Shyp, and currently runs a software consultancy. Kevin once accidentally left Waiting for Godot at the intermission.
Nicole Forsgren (DORA) is the CEO and chief scientist at DevOps Research and Assessment (DORA). Nicole is an IT impacts expert who is best known for her work with tech professionals and as the lead investigator on the largest DevOps studies to date. She is a consultant, expert, and researcher in knowledge management, IT adoption and impacts, and DevOps. In a previous life, she was a professor, sysadmin, and hardware performance analyst. Nicole has been awarded public and private research grants (funders include NASA and the NSF), and her work has been featured in various media outlets, peer-reviewed journals, and conferences. She holds a PhD in management information systems and a master's degree in accounting.
Elaine Greenberg (Fastly) is the senior communications manager at Fastly and co-organizer for Papers We Love SF. Trilingual in Russian, French, and English, Elaine holds a BA in neuroscience from Wellesley College. In her free time, she obsesses over dogs, textured neutrals, and well-arranged florals.
Tiffany Jernigan (Amazon) is a developer advocate at Amazon for containers on AWS. Previously she worked at Docker and Intel in software engineering and as a hardware engineer after graduating from Georgia Tech in Electrical Engineering. In the majority of her free time, she dabbles in photography and spends time with family and friends.
Arun Kejariwal (MZ) is a statistical learning principal at Machine Zone (MZ), where he leads a team of top-tier researchers and works on research and development of novel techniques for install and click fraud detection and assessing the efficacy of TV campaigns and optimization of marketing campaigns. In addition, his team is building novel methods for bot detection, intrusion detection, and real-time anomaly detection. Previously, Arun worked at Twitter, where he developed and open-sourced techniques for anomaly detection and breakout detection. His research includes the development of practical and statistically rigorous techniques and methodologies to deliver high-performance, availability, and scalability in large-scale distributed clusters. Some of the techniques he helped develop have been presented at international conferences and published in peer-reviewed journals.
Bridget Kromhout (Microsoft ) is a Principal Cloud Developer Advocate. Her CS degree emphasis was in theory, but she now deals with the concrete (if 'cloud' can be considered tangible). After 15 years as an operations engineer, she traded being on call for being on a plane. A frequent speaker and program committee member for tech conferences, she leads the devopsdays organization globally and the devops community at home in Minneapolis. She podcasts with Arrested DevOps, blogs at Bridgetkromhout.com, and is active in a Twitterverse near you.
Edward Muller (Heroku) is the Engineering Manager of Heroku's Operational Experience team which focuses on helping customers understand how their Heroku apps are operating. During his career he has written open source and closed source software in several different programming languages, run an ISP, architected systems at a large financial company, owned a cyber cafe, and designed, installed and managed networks running all sorts of systems from Linux to Microsoft Windows to Novell Netware. He has spent the last 11 years working on PaaS systems with a focus on operations, logging and observability.
Devon O'Dell (Google) is a recovering competitive Guitar Hero and Rock Band addict, but still occasionally enjoys rhythm games and jamming on guitar and drums. Today, he is a Senior Systems Engineer at Google. Prior to Google, Devon held software leadership positions at Fastly and Message Systems, implementing high performance and low latency network servers. His experience over the past 17 years ranges from web applications to embedded systems firmware (and most areas in-between). His primary technical interests are developing and debugging low-latency concurrent network systems software and related tools.
Herman Radtke (Nordstromrack.com) is a sociologist turned full stack engineer turned VP of Engineering at Nordstromrack.com | HauteLook. He designed and built much of the original hypermedia API that drives the website and mobile applications. When not managing people, Herman hacks on Rust and leads the Rust Los Angeles user group. Outside of technology, he spends his time crafting pale ale homebrews.
Alex Rasmussen (Freenome) is the VP of Engineering at Freenome, a startup developing software to combat cancer and other age-related diseases. He holds a Ph.D. from University of California San Diego, where his dissertation focused on highly-efficient large scale data processing systems. While at UCSD, he led the TritonSort project, which set several world records in large scale sorting.
Casey Rosenthal (Backplane) is a CTO, executive manager and senior architect. He manages teams to tackle Big Data, architect solutions to difficult problems, and trains others to do the same. He seeks opportunities to leverage his experience with distributed systems, artificial intelligence, translating novel algorithms and academia into working models, and selling a vision of the possible to clients and colleagues alike. For fun, Casey models human behavior using personality profiles in Ruby, Erlang, Elixir, Prolog, and Scala.
Baron Schwartz (VividCortex) is founder and CEO of VividCortex, the best way to see what your production database servers are doing. He is the lead author of High Performance MySQL and a variety of open-source software.
Kerim Satirli (Method) is part of a team of engineers and helps the company by stewarding the adoption and expansion of DevOps techniques and practices. In the past, Kerim built web applications for advertising companies, worked on a content management system that was used by the top museums of the Netherlands and helped make music and video more accessible for a number of start-ups.
Melinda Shore (Fastly) is a Principal Security Systems Architect with Fastly, and has been heavily involved with network protocol development and standardization in the IETF and elsewhere, with published RFCs, a few patents, and a number of publications. Melinda lives with a team of Siberian Huskies in Two Rivers, Alaska (home to the best dog mushing on earth!), is a serious fly angler and fly tyer, and enjoys doing pretty much anything outdoors.
Cindy Sridharan (Apple) is a distributed systems engineer at Apple. Previously, she was an engineer at imgix, where she worked on API development, infrastructure, and other miscellaneous backend engineering tasks. She likes thinking about building resilient and maintainable systems and recently started writing about several of these topics.
Nathan Taylor (Fauna) is an Oakland-based software developer. He has hacked on low-level systems software such as the Twitter Java runtime and the Xen virtual machine monitor. Originally a Trombone major, he holds an M.Sc. from the University of British Columbia, where he researched full-system binary rewriting and dynamic analysis systems. When not in front of a computer, you're likely to find him either baking bread or suffering cycling up a steep hill.
Erica Windisch (IOpipe) has over 16 years of experience designing and building cloud infrastructure management solutions. She was an early and long-time contributor to OpenStack and a maintainer of the Docker project. Presently, Windisch is founder and CTO of IOpipe, bringing decades of experience in building operational tooling to serverless developers.
Dean Wilson (GOV.UK) is a Web Operations engineer at GOV.UK where he spends his time helping to build and promote digital Government. He was originally a software developer but has spent the last decade performing large scale operations at a number of well-known companies including Net-a-Porter and Mozilla. Dean occasionally blogs at https://www.unixdaemon.net, provides technical publication and architecture reviews and can often be found in the quiet back corner at London technical events.
Monitoring and Observability
Cindy Sridharan (Apple) is a distributed systems engineer at Apple. Previously, she was an engineer at imgix, where she worked on API development, infrastructure, and other miscellaneous backend engineering tasks. She likes thinking about building resilient and maintainable systems and recently started writing about several of these topics.
Leadership
Herman Radtke (Nordstromrack.com | HauteLook) is a sociologist turned full stack engineer turned VP of Engineering at Nordstromrack.com | HauteLook. He designed and built much of the original hypermedia API that drives the website and mobile applications. When not managing people, Herman hacks on Rust and leads the Rust Los Angeles user group. Outside of technology, he spends his time crafting pale ale home brews.
Distributed Data
Nathan Taylor (Fauna) is an Oakland-based software developer currently building globally-consistent transactional databases at Fauna. Previously, he has hacked on low-level systems software such as the Twitter Java runtime and the Xen virtual machine monitor. Originally a Trombone major, he holds an M.Sc. from the University of British Columbia, where he researched full-system binary rewriting and dynamic analysis systems. When not in front of a computer, you’re likely to find him either baking bread or suffering cycling up a steep hill.
Production Engineering, SRE, and DevOps
Kerim Seterili (Method) is part of a team of engineers and helps the company by stewarding the adoption and expansion of DevOps techniques and practices. In the past, Kerim built web applications for advertising companies, worked on a content management system that was used by the top museums of the Netherlands and helped make music and video more accessible for a number of start-ups.
Building Secure Systems
Kevin Burke (burke.services) likes building great experiences. He helped scale Twilio and Shyp and currently runs a software consultancy. Kevin once accidentally left Waiting for Godot at the intermission.
Kubernetes
Lachlan Evenson (Microsoft) is a Principal Program Manager on the Azure Containers team. He has spent the last two and a half years working with Kubernetes and enabling Cloud Native journeys. Lachie serves as a Cloud Native ambassador and TOC contributor and has deep operational knowledge of many Cloud Native projects.evenson
Systems Engineering & Architecture
Kiran Bhattaram (Stripe) is an engineer on the observability team at Stripe. She has previously written code for the New York Times, LinkedIn, and MIT CSAIL. In her spare time, Kiran enjoys making things, whether tinkering with circuits, sewing dresses, or woodworking.
Distributed Systems
Emily Shea (Fastly) is a Senior Software Engineer at Fastly, where she works on the platform for delivering core CDN configurations, and writes Perl. In a past life, she worked in HR at mobile gaming companies. Emily holds a BA in Architecture from UC Berkeley, and in her spare time likes to hang out in parks with her dog, named Chicken.
Serverless
Mike Roberts (Symphonia) is an engineering leader and cofounder of Symphonia, a serverless and cloud technology consultancy. Mike is a longtime proponent of Agile and DevOps values and is excited by the role that cloud technologies have played in enabling such values for many high-functioning software teams. He sees serverless architectures as the next technological evolution of cloud systems and is optimistic about their ability to help teams be awesome. Mike can be reached at mike@symphonia.io.
Thank you to our ambassadors, who have partnered with O’Reilly to raise awareness about the Velocity + Fluent conferences in their communities.
Tammy Butow (Principal Site Reliability Engineer, Gremlin)
Jessica DeVita (Senior Program Manager, Microsoft)
Stephen Fluin (Developer Advocate, Google)
Nicole Forsgren (Director, DORA)
Rachel Myers (Developer Program Engineer, Google)
Volkan Özcelik (Technical Lead, Cisco Systems)
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