About Velocity

Nikki McDonald

Nikki McDonald is a content director at O'Reilly Media where she writes, edits, and develops content to help engineers and developers collaborate more effectively and create and deploy complex distributed systems. She also co-chairs O'Reilly's Velocity conference, which is held annually in San Jose, New York, and London. Nikki started out as a features editor at MacUser magazine back when people were still dialing up to the Internet with AOL. She now works with the industry's leading practitioners to develop books, online courses, and video training for engineers, product managers, and developers. Nikki lives in Ann Arbor, MI.

Ines Sombra

Ines Sombra is a distributed systems engineer 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, Ines was a data engineer.

James Turnbull

James Turnbull is a CTO in residence at Microsoft. A longtime member of the open source community, James is the author of 11 technical books about open source software. Previously, he was CTO 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.

Committee Members

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

Baron Schwartz (VividCortex) 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.

Elaine Greenberg (Fastly) is the senior communications manager at Fastly and coorganizer 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.

Seth Vargo (Google) is a Developer Advocate at Google. Previously he worked at HashiCorp, Chef Software, CustomInk, and a few 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 enjoys spending time with his friends and advising non-profits.

Bridget Kromhout (Microsoft) is a principal cloud developer advocate at Microsoft. Her CS degree emphasis was in theory, but she now deals with the concrete (if the cloud can be considered tangible). After 15 years as an operations engineer, Bridget 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.

Greg Poirier (Sensu, Inc.) is the SVP of Engineering, where he leads the team building a scalable monitoring product for modern infrastructure. Previously, he was a systems engineer at Stripe, Oracle, Los Alamos National Laboratory, and Earthlink. He has a background in monitoring, systems, and infosec and holds a BS in Computer Science from Auburn University.

Liz Fong Jones (Google) is a Staff Site Reliability Engineer at Google and works on the Google Cloud Customer Reliability Engineering team in New York. She lives with her wife, metamour, and two Samoyeds in Brooklyn. In her spare time, she plays classical piano, leads an EVE Online alliance, and advocates for transgender rights.

Jennifer Davis (RealSelf) is the co-author of Effective DevOps. In her day job, she is a senior site reliability engineer at RealSelf. Previously, she developed cookbooks to simplify building and managing infrastructure at Chef. Jennifer speaks about DevOps, tech culture, and monitoring and gives tutorials on a variety of technical topics. When she’s not working, she enjoys learning to make things and spending quality time with her family.

Tanya Reilly (Squarespace) 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.

Mike Roberts (Symphonia) is a partner at Symphonia - a cloud technology consultancy based in New York City. He 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 can be reached at mike@symphonia.io.

Camille Fournier (Two Sigma) is the former head of engineering at Rent the Runway. She was previously a vice president at Goldman Sachs. Camille is an Apache ZooKeeper committer and PMC member and a Dropwizard framework PMC member.

Dean Wilson (Government Digital Service) is a Lead Site Reliability Engineer at Government Digital Service 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.

Mathias Meyer (Independent Consultant) is the former CEO and Co-founder at Travis CI. He used to be an engineer and is now focusing on the intersection of distributed systems, teams, company culture, resilience engineering, and building healthy businesses.

Sebastien Goasguen (Author/Consultant) is a twenty-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 the founder of Skippbox, a Kubernetes startup acquired by Bitnami. An avid blogger he enjoys spreading the word about new cutting-edge technologies. Sebastien is the author of the O’Reilly Docker Cookbook and 60 Recipes for Apache CloudStack and the co-author of Kubernetes Cookbook.