Build & maintain complex distributed systems
October 1–2, 2017: Training
October 2–4, 2017: Tutorials & Conference
New York, NY

Keynote Speakers

Hear from creative leaders and inspiring innovators at Velocity. Keynote presentations take place Tuesday, October 3 and Wednesday, October 4.

Craig Adams

Craig Adams
Vice President, Product , Akamai Technologies

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... Read More.

9:40am Wednesday, October 4, 2017
As the industry moves to distributed systems and a DevOps model, companies must adopt DevOps in order to automate CI/CD workflows and increase deployment velocity. Craig Adams explores the traditional DevOps pipeline, addresses how to think about CDN automation, and explains how Akamai is baking automation into its CDN. Full Details
Kristopher Beevers

Kristopher Beevers
CEO, NS1

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... Read More.

9:25am Tuesday, October 3, 2017
During active operational incidents, we experience very human reactions that get in the way of resolution. Approaches like Incident Command provide solid foundations for incident response. Kristopher Beevers explains how to augment Incident Command with simple tools and processes that help your team focus, communicate effectively, and respond calmly and precisely during mission-critical events. Full Details
Robert Castley

Robert Castley
Senior Performance Engineer, EMEA, Catchpoint Systems

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... Read More.

10:10am Wednesday, October 4, 2017
Some quarters of our market believe that real-user measurement (RUM) is the end-all and be-all of customer experience management. But with the advancement of ad blockers, RUM tags are often getting blocked. Robert Castley explores the relevancy of real-user data if real users are blocking RUM tags and shares some solutions. Full Details
Richard Cook

Richard Cook
Physician, Educator, and Researcher, Ohio State University SNAFUcatchers

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... Read More.

9:25am Wednesday, October 4, 2017
David Woods and Richard Cook offer a glimpse at the SNAFUcatchers Stella Report. Full Details
Matt Cutts

Matt Cutts
Distinguished Engineer, United States Digital Service (USDS)

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... Read More.

10:15am Tuesday, October 3, 2017
In government, you can still find out-of-date tech practices like writing requirements for years or launching systems without monitoring. The government wants more effective technology. Meanwhile, everyone else wants a more effective government. Matt Cutts discusses how better technology can improve not just software systems but also trust in government itself. Full Details
Dino Dai Zovi

Dino Dai Zovi
CTO, Capsule8

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... Read More.

9:50am Wednesday, October 4, 2017
Jessica Frazelle and Dino Dai Zovi—technologists who have spent their careers managing the balancing act between community and commercial perspectives—discuss how to be effective at open source in your company. Full Details
Jessica Frazelle

Jessica Frazelle
Software Engineer, Microsoft

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... Read More.

9:50am Wednesday, October 4, 2017
Jessica Frazelle and Dino Dai Zovi—technologists who have spent their careers managing the balancing act between community and commercial perspectives—discuss how to be effective at open source in your company. Full Details
Joe Goldberg

Joe Goldberg
Lead Solutions Marketing Manager, BMC Software

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... Read More.

9:50am Tuesday, October 3, 2017
Business transformation has led us to adopt new technologies and process and cultural changes. How batch application automation is built, tested, and run must evolve to keep pace. Joe Goldberg explores jobs as code, which looks at batch application automation from an SDLC perspective—an approach that embeds expectations within a modern automation platform. Full Details
Lara Hogan

Lara Hogan
Coach and Trainer, Wherewithall

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,... Read More.

10:15am Wednesday, October 4, 2017
To grow your technical leadership skills, it's critical to lean on your network of support. Mentors—people who can give you helpful advice—are usually easy enough to find. Lara Hogan explains that what can be even more valuable is finding sponsors—people who can help you find new opportunities and improve the visibility of your work. Full Details
Claire Le Goues

Claire Le Goues
Assistant Professor, Carnegie Mellon University

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... Read More.

9:55am Tuesday, October 3, 2017
Claire Le Goues shares recent advances in academic software engineering and programming languages research that aims to bring that dream to reality, using everything from metaheuristic search to program synthesis to machine learning and search over big databases of existing code to make it happen. Full Details
Carin Meier

Carin Meier
Software Developer, Cognitect

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... Read More.

9:05am Tuesday, October 3, 2017
As technology advances, our systems are growing more and more complex, reaching the threshold of what we can handle and even comprehend. We need more than tools to keep it under control. We need new ways of thinking. Carin Meier explores new ways to approach systems and tame complexity for the rapidly changing future. Full Details
Neha Narula

Neha Narula
Director of Research, Digital Currency Initiative

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.... Read More.

10:25am Tuesday, October 3, 2017
Bitcoin showed us a new way of moving value around the internet without intermediaries. Neha Narula explains how this paradigm might apply to our traditional ways of thinking about databases that cross organizational boundaries. As data on the web becomes consolidated around a few key players, the blockchain might help users gain more control. Full Details
Nick Rockwell

Nick Rockwell
Chief Technology Officer, The New York Times

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... Read More.

9:05am Wednesday, October 4, 2017
For most of us, the best approach to scaling complex distributed systems is to not do it at all. Nick Rockwell asks, so why isn't serverless a bigger deal? Full Details
Cynthia Savard Saucier

Cynthia Savard Saucier
Director of Design, Shopify

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... Read More.

9:30am Tuesday, October 3, 2017
We like to think that technology can make the world a better place, but we (conveniently) forget how it can make it worse. Primum non nocere (first do no harm) is the first concept taught in medical school, serving as a reminder of the possible harm that any intervention might do. Cynthia Savard Saucier challenges the tech industry to come up with its own fundamental principle. Full Details
Ines Sombra

Ines Sombra
Director, Engineering, Fastly

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... Read More.

9:00am Tuesday, October 3, 2017
Mary Treseler, James Turnbull, and Ines Sombra welcome you to the first day of keynotes. Full Details
9:00am Wednesday, October 4, 2017
Mary Treseler, James Turnbull, and Ines Sombra welcome you to the second day of keynotes. Full Details
Mary Treseler

Mary Treseler
Vice President, Content Strategy, O'Reilly Media

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... Read More.

9:00am Tuesday, October 3, 2017
Mary Treseler, James Turnbull, and Ines Sombra welcome you to the first day of keynotes. Full Details
9:00am Wednesday, October 4, 2017
Mary Treseler, James Turnbull, and Ines Sombra welcome you to the second day of keynotes. Full Details
James Turnbull

James Turnbull
VPE, Glitch

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... Read More.

9:00am Tuesday, October 3, 2017
Mary Treseler, James Turnbull, and Ines Sombra welcome you to the first day of keynotes. Full Details
9:00am Wednesday, October 4, 2017
Mary Treseler, James Turnbull, and Ines Sombra welcome you to the second day of keynotes. Full Details
David Woods

David Woods
Professor, Ohio State University SNAFUcatchers

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... Read More.

9:25am Wednesday, October 4, 2017
David Woods and Richard Cook offer a glimpse at the SNAFUcatchers Stella Report. Full Details