Featured Speakers
I discovered NixOS while looking for fleet management systems 10 years ago and contribute since then.
Linux sysadmin and DevOps engineer. Fedora contributor.
Jeremy has both a technical and a strategic streak. Passionate about people and entrepreneurship, integration and automation. He likes to work on tough, interesting problems that have a high impact (and to have fun while doing it). Jeremy is happiest when he's collaborating, learning, and sharing. DevOps, CI/CD, Platform Engineering, and automation are particular interest areas.
Annanay is a Software Engineer at Grafana Labs. He is the co-creator of Grafana Tempo, the open source distributed tracing database from Grafana, and now works on building AI-powered software to reduce the cognitive burden on SREs. When not at his desk, Annanay enjoys watching F1, playing badminton, ultimate frisbee and football.
Software engineer with a passion for Developer Experience, currently at Anthropic. Proud Nix user since college, now using it at work!
Usman is a Senior Developer Advocate at Grafana Labs from Nuremberg, Germany. He works with the Open Source community on the community forum, GitHub and Slack.
He has over 15 years of experience in IT and in Cloud Support where he served multiple customers all over Europe, US, Japan, etc.
He is an active international public speaker participating in multiple conferences and events.
In his free time, Usman likes to spend time with his family, go out on occasional traveling and play games or read comics.
Ibrar Ahmed, Principal Engineer at pgEdge, brings 25 years of experience in software design and open-source development, particularly PostgreSQL. With a strong background in system-level embedded development, Ibrar has made impactful contributions during his tenure at companies like EnterpriseDB, Percona, and Bitnine. Since 2006, he's been instrumental in enhancing PostgreSQL's core engine, driving performance improvements, and refining essential modules.
His expertise spans MySQL, Oracle, and NoSQL solutions like MongoDB and Hadoop, alongside tools like Hive, HBase, and Spark. A prolific author and blogger, Ibrar shares deep insights into PostgreSQL with several authoritative books. Over the past year, he’s delivered over fifteen talks worldwide at PostgreSQL conferences, further cementing his reputation. His dedication to advancing data management technology continues to shape the PostgreSQL landscape.
Bronwen Aker (M.S. Cybersecurity, GSEC, GCIH, GCFE) likes to describe herself as a “constantly evolving geek.” She has worked with computers since the dark ages when she was introduced to FORTRAN and bubble cards. These days, Bronwen works for Black Hills Information Security (BHIS) as a member of the Continuous Pen Testing team (AntiSOC), an AI researcher, and technical editor. When not working, she spends time playing with her dogs, LLMs, and studying data science.
Hamid worked extensively on PostgreSQL for more than 12+ years now. As an architect and developer, he's working on multi-active solution with pgEdge, In the past, he's also worked on transparent data encryption, the observability extension (pg_stat_monitor), ORC FDW, and an auto-tuner for PostgreSQL. He has also managed the official PostgreSQL installers.
At pgEdge, Hamid contributes to developing the Spock extension, enabling active-active logical replication for PostgreSQL. Spock is a significant step towards providing conflict-free replicated data and exception logging.
Product Manager for MicroCloud and LXD at Canonical. Her mission is to build a next-generation private cloud infrastructure that ‘just works’. Prior to Canonical, she spent years in telecommunications, leading modernization initiatives in OSS, infrastructure and data centre domains. She has an M.Sc. in Technology Management from Seoul National University.
Lenin Alevski is a Full Stack Engineer and generalist with a lot of passion for Cybersecurity. Currently working as a Security Engineer at Google. Before joining Google, Lenin worked at MinIO, OneLogin, Oracle and Websec Mexico as an appsec engineer, software engineer, security consultant and penetration tester. Lenin loves to play CTFs, contributing to open-source and writing about security and privacy on his personal blog.
Dr. Nikki-Rae Alkema, Doctor of Physical Therapy, is an orthopedic and pelvic health licensed physical therapist with a passion for improving quality of life through movement. In 2022, she received the esteemed Excellence in Biomechanics Award from the Doctor of Physical Therapy program at California State University, Long Beach. She believes in the power of using technological innovation to provide accessible and equitable healthcare. Some of her areas of special interest include Parkinson’s Disease, successful aging, and the biomechanics of road cycling.
Andrew is a highly skilled engineer and a former member of the Canadian Armed Forces.
With close to 20 years of experience in security and threat intelligence, he has an impressive track record.
As a former Technical Operations Agent and Senior Manager of the Counter Terrorism\Proliferation Technology Group at the Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS), Andrew continued to excel in his security career at the National Head Quarters (NHQ) and the Ottawa Regional office.
He has a wealth of experience leading and coordinating technical teams on data exploitation, physical access, online anonymity, and digital surveillance operations, in support of Canadian national security investigations.
In 2019, Andrew transitioned to the private sector, where he specializes in social engineering, dark web navigation, online privacy, risk management, and cyber attack incident response planning.
I am an accomplished professional with 10+ years of experience in software engineering infrastructure. I currently work for Microsoft Azure Cloud Shell service, where I deal with complex backend migrations, servicing a highly available infrastructure and solving interesting contextual security problems. My strength is perseverance and consistency that has helped me execute long haul engineering projects to completion. I believe in data driven approaches to demonstrate a before and after story. I have a Masters Degree in Computer Science from University of Southern California Viterbi School which helped me augment my expertise with data science oriented concepts and high scale systems. It also helped me broaden my exposure to people and disciplines other than tech.
In my free time, I am into reading, drawing toons/painting and enjoying the comic or graphic novel art form.
Jimmy Angelakos is a Systems and Database Architect and recognized PostgreSQL expert who has worked with, and contributed to, Open-Source tools for 25+ years. He is passionate about participating in the community, is a Contributor to the PostgreSQL project, and an active member of PostgreSQL Europe. Jimmy is a regular speaker at conferences and events, sharing his insights with the community. Author of PostgreSQL Mistakes and How to Avoid Them, co-author of PostgreSQL 16 Administration Cookbook.
Mastodon: https://fosstodon.org/@vyruss
Bluesky: https://bsky.app/profile/vyruss.org
Zach Antunes is a solutions architect at DBeaver and former sales specialist at Microsoft, VMware, F5 and NGINX. Zach has experience helping customers adopt open source technologies including NGINX and Kubernetes. Additionally, Zach has helped fortune 500 companies adopt and scale the tools and philosophies necessary to deploy successful businesses in the cloud.
CEO @ Sentinel.la. Computer Science Engineer from Chile with a vast experience on R&D and Cloud. I've deployed and worked with OpenStack clouds on production for 10 years. Followed by the desire to continue innovating and supporting OpenStack we founded Sentinel.la to help solve the main OpenStack pain points from a user's perspective in the real world from Chile and Mexico to Latin American markets, narrowing the gap between "everything works" in architecture and the "now, what?" operation.
Boaz Ardel
eBay, SRE
Experienced Site Reliability Engineer with mission-critical applications and working in large complex production
environments. Passionate about new technologies and challenges for building scalable and resilient systems. With 8 years of hands-on experience in development, cloud, service mesh, and networking. Willing to engage and deliver some of my insights to the community.
Fay Arjomandi is the Founder, CEO, and Board Member of mimik, a pioneering hybrid edge cloud company. She previously served as CEO of NantMobile and Vodafone xone, leading digital health, AI, and innovation initiatives. A serial entrepreneur, she co-founded three technology startups, including Mobidia and mimik. Fay holds multiple patents in telecommunications, edge computing, and mobile networks. Recognized as a Top 20 Canadian Tech Titan (2022) and Edge Woman of the Year (2020), she is a Forbes Technology Council member and advises startups and enterprises on digital transformation. A sought-after global speaker, she is passionate about digital equity and decentralized cloud technology. Fay holds a B.A.Sc. in Electrical Engineering from Concordia University and has worked across North America, Europe, and the Middle East.
Sushrut Athavale is a Developer Relations Engineer at Harness. He is passionate about DevSecOps and User Experiences and is always willing to hear book recommendations. In his free time, Sushrut likes to play video games, play board games, and go hiking. He firmly believes that computer science and engineering is a creative art, and likes to talk about it at length!
Murat Aydemir is a cloud security architect with a strong background in offensive security, specializing in both dynamic and static analysis techniques to identify vulnerabilities. Renowned for discovering over 30 CVEs and identifying zero-day vulnerabilities, he leverages his expertise in both offensive and defensive security to secure AWS environments while continuing his research in offensive techniques targeting cloud infrastructures. He is a big fan of Serverless concept, embracing its potential to drive innovation by eliminating infrastructure management overhead and optimizing scalability for cloud-native security solution architectures.
His expertise spans both security in the cloud and security of the cloud, blending application security and cloud-native defense strategies. He leverages AWS-native services to implement robust and scalable security measures that address critical risks and ensure the protection and resilience of the cloud workloads in dynamic environments.
Anton is AWS Community Hero and helps companies around the globe build solutions using AWS and specializes in infrastructure-as-code, DevOps, and reusable infrastructure components.
He spends much of his time as an open-source contributor on various Terraform & AWS projects. Such as Terraform AWS modules (downloaded more than 1 billion times), Terraform best practices ebook (www.terraform-best-practices.com), doing serverless with Terraform (serverless.tf), Terraform Weekly (weekly.tf), Your Weekly Dose of Terraform (http://bit.ly/terraform-youtube).
Anton co-founded and co-organizes AWS, DevOps, and HashiCorp User Groups in Norway and often speaks at technical meetups and conferences.
Sunny Bains has been developing software for longer than he can remember. He is currently a Software Architect at PingCAP where he is working on distributed storage and learning Rust. Before joining PingCAP he was a Senior Director of Software Development at Oracle. At Oracle he was the lead of the MySQL/InnoDB team and made the MySQL/InnoDB engine scale to what it is today.
Interested in formal methods, Haskell, Lean, type & category theory, and computational photography!
Daniel is engineer and mathematician turned software developer. He is passionate about reproducible build systems.
Tarus Balog has been involved in managing communications networks professionally since 1988, and unprofessionally since 1978 when he got his first computer - a TRS-80 from Radio Shack. Having worked as a network management consultant for many years, he was constantly frustrated in the lack of flexibility involved in commercial solutions such as OpenView and Tivoli, as well as shocked by their high prices. Looking for a better solution, he turned to open source and joined the OpenNMS project in 2001 and become the principal administrator of the project in 2002. Since then he has managed not only to make a living working with free software, but the OpenNMS Group, the services company behind the project, has thrived, and currently has customers in 27 countries.
Tim’s tech career spans over 25 years through various sectors, in large corporate environments and in small startups, honing his skills in systems administration, automation, architecture, and operations for large cloud-based datastores.
Today, Tim leverages his years in operations, DevOps, & Site Reliability Engineering to advise and consult with the open source and cloud computing communities. Tim is also a competitive Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu practitioner and instructor. He is the 2-time American National and 5-time Pan American Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu champion in his division.
Gabriele, a co-founder of 2ndQuadrant and open-source advocate, has been instrumental in PostgreSQL's global growth. Focused on enhancing business continuity for large-scale databases, he has championed stateful workloads in cloud-native environments since 2019. As a co-founder and maintainer of CloudNativePG, PostgreSQL Contributor, and Data on Kubernetes (DoK) Ambassador, he actively shapes PostgreSQL's evolution in Cloud Native environments. Currently, he is a VP at EDB.
As a Microsoft Principal Cloud Advocate, Anthony Bartolo takes great pride in architecting and carrying out "scientific experiments" that use Microsoft technology and services to solve a customer problem or opportunity. Anthony achieves this through hackathons with industry leaders to test hypotheses and develop Proof of Concepts (PoC) using Microsoft cloud services. Some of the more fascinating Proof of Concepts developed involve teaching drones to recognize items to aid in search and rescue efforts and automating research through Azure. Functions for extracting information from social media to assist law enforcement in the search for missing children. The community as a whole is then made aware of the outcomes and best practices of these and other projects in an effort to upskill everyone
Patrick Beaucamp is founder of the Vanilla project, the only true Open Source Business Intelligence Platform, and Data4Citizen, one of the leading Open Data Platform
Patrick is Ceo of Bpm-Conseil, the company behind the Vanilla and Data4Citizen projects.
Patrick is a teacher in university to address data visualisation and search engine topics, and chairman of a chair : https://icom.univ-lyon2.fr/institut/gouvernance
Patrick Beaucamp has been rewarded CEO of the YEAR 2023 in category software editor : https://www.eubusinessnews.com/issues/french-ceo-of-the-year-awards-2023/6/²
Life-long engineer. Worked at Google, flew jet planes in the Marine Corps, trained cyberware teams, formed and led teams to perform rapid hardware and software capability development, worked with the Digital Service to bring modern software practices to the DoD and government. Left the service to create a contracting startup bringing AI/ML products to DoD. Throughout have found a consistent set of challenges in the course of development; also found a set of superpowers to address those challenges using Nix. After several iterations of applying the Nix ecosystem in various teams, the difference was stark. This led to the desire to bring this set of superpowers to the rest of the world and make it more adoptable; hence the involvement in the Nix community as a maintainer, founding Flox, and leading efforts to improve user experience and communicate it to the world.
Life-long engineer. Worked at Google, flew jet planes in the Marine Corps, trained cyber-teams, formed and led teams to perform rapid hardware and software capability development, worked with the Digital Service to bring modern software practices to the DoD and government. Left the service to create a contracting startup bringing AI/ML products to DoD. After several iterations of applying the Nix ecosystem in various teams, the difference was stark. This led to the desire to bring this set of superpower to the rest of the world and make it more adoptable; hence the involvement in the Nix community as a maintainer and leading efforts to improve user experience and communicate it to the world.
Josh Berkus spends his time messing around with containers, automation, and community-building for Red Hat Inc. Prior to that, he spent nearly two decades working on PostgreSQL. From his home in Portland, he cooks, makes pottery, and looks after a cat.
Jess Bermudes is a software engineer passionate about open source software and STEM education. With over ten years of experience in areas from web, game development, and embedded systems, Jess hasn't met a computer he doesn't like. He is also active in the open source community as a community organizer for the San Gabriel Valley Linux Users Group and an annual volunteer for SCALE.
Jared is a proud father of five wonderful kids and a devoted husband. He is originally from Southern California, but now resides in a small Midwestern town. He works as an instructor at Metropolitan Community College in Omaha, where he teaches courses in Linux System Administration, Cisco Networking, and Cybersecurity.
OpenStack user since Kilo and currently a Kolla core reviewer, I bring extensive hands-on experience managing Linux, AIX, and Kubernetes environments. With a strong focus on performance, scalability, and reliability, I’m dedicated to advancing open-source cloud technologies.
Adisbladis is a Nix consultant & nixpkgs committer, where he mostly enjoys working on lower level plumbing such as lib & stdenv, but also maintains Emacs & it's package ecosystem. Python developer in a previous life. He is the author of previous Python packaging efforts like poetry2nix.
James is the project lead for the Zuul project gating system, and a
founding member of the OpenDev collaboratory team. As a sysadmin and
hacker he gets to write elegant code and then try to make it work in the
real world. He has previously worked for the Free Software Foundation,
UC Berkeley, and the OpenStack Foundation. He currently provides Zuul
support and services through Acme Gating.
Jose is a Senior Software Engineer at Microsoft, where he focuses on Kubernetes and eBPF technologies. He joined the Inspektor Gadget project in its early stages and is now one of its maintainers. Jose has also been actively evangelizing the benefits of eBPF for observability and system inspection at conferences around the world.
Kevin Blissett is a senior machine learning engineer who loves to dive into code, whether it's training neural networks or hacking together projects on Raspberry Pi. A big fan of open source, Kevin enjoys building and hacking on tools that make life easier for developers and anyone curious about tech. When he's not wrangling data or automating everything in sight, he's probably experimenting with new hardware or planing his next project to tinker on. Kevin's excited to bring his enthusiasm for all things machine learning and open source to SCALE this year!
Scott Bly is the Director of the API Security Practice at iSOA Group where he leads customer DevSecOps transformations through an API-first journey of cyber maturity and continual improvement.
Scott has served as a Cybersecurity Technical Account Manager (TAM) at Noname Security, and he led teams of TAMs at AWS where he ran the Enterprise Support Security Improvement Program, which has assisted thousands of customers to measure and improve their cloud security postures.
Scott’s background as a film production major at USC and longtime IT Consultant was the perfect fit during his tenure as the Director of IT for the American Film Institute, where he led their digital transformation and migration to the cloud.
Scott has served as a Cybersecurity Solutions Architect and holds more than 50 certifications in IT and security, including CISSP and CISM, and from vendors such as Fortinet, Cisco and AWS.
Scott lives in Santa Monica with his wife, son, and two cats.
Chelsea Boling is a seasoned technology professional with a diverse background in software engineering, customer success, and support. Currently, she is a Customer Success Architect at FOSSA, where she helps OSS practitioners manage open source risks. Prior to this, she worked at GitHub as a Solutions Architect and Implementation Engineer for Advanced Security and was a support and later a software engineer at Walt Disney Studios, where she gained interest in the DevOps and security interest by trade. Chelsea's favorite city is New Orleans, and she loves a good banh mi.
Peter is a Founding Engineer at Tigris. Before joining the Tigris team, he worked at Percona, Dropbox, Zuora and Sun microsystems. Peter’s background and professional interest is running databases at scale, he had the opportunity to work on very large MySQL deployments alone with other data stores. Also very performance minded.
Hey, I'm Russell. I a freelance animator here in Los Angeles making concert visuals for electronic musicians. I'm not a real developer, more an artist who happens to code, but that line has started to blur for me. I'm just comming back from a batch at a programming retreat / recruiting agency in NYC called the <a href="https://recurse.com">Recurse Center</a>, where I dove deep into Local First web develeopment, Rust and WASM. If you're in in the pasadena area or go to any programmer meetups in LA dont be a stranger, give me a shout!
Bouskill is a senior researcher at Meta where she works in Meta’s Reliability Engineering organization. An anthropologist by training, Bouskill has worked around the world on a range of issues related to technology, risk & security, and public health. She is an adjunct researcher at the RAND Corporation and professor at the Pardee RAND Graduate School. Bouskill holds a Ph.D. in Anthropology and an M.P.H. in Epidemiology from Emory University.
Rich has been contributing to open source since before we called it that. He's a member, and board member, of the Apache Software Foundation, and works on the Apache httpd project. Rich works on the Open Source Strategy team at AWS, where he educates teams about how to do open source.
I am a software engineer dedicated to supporting and accelerating scientific research. I am currently working at CliMA, the Climate Modelling Alliance, where I contribute to the development of a next-generation Earth-System Model.
Before joining CliMA, I obtained my PhD in theoretical and computational physics focusing on simulations of black holes. During my PhD, I was a NASA Future Investigator for Space Science and a Texas Advanced Center for Computing Frontera fellow. As part of my PhD, I contributed to the development of open-source software for high-energy astrophysics. I also contributed to packages for GNU Emacs. I am a reviewer for the Journal of Open-Source Software.
I am passionate about open-source software in science, research software engineering, and education.
Technology Evangelist at Instaclustr. Paul has extensive R&D and consulting experience in distributed systems, technology innovation, software architecture, and engineering, software performance and scalability, grid and cloud computing, and data analytics and machine learning. Over the last 4+ years Paul has written over 70 blogs on many open source technologies and talked at conferences including FOSSASIA, ApacheCon, Percona, ATO, etc. Here's the list of blogs: https://www.instaclustr.com/blog/author/paul-brebnerinstaclustr-com/
Tony came to Linux in 1994 and has never looked back. His entire professional career has been spent working with or on Linux.
Jason Brooks is a software analyst with Red Hat, in the company's Open Source and Standards group. Previously, Jason spent 12 years as an analyst and editor with eWEEK Labs, testing and writing about enterprise IT, with a particular focus on Linux and open source software. Jason lives in San Francisco, California, with his wife and two sons.
Liam Broza is an engineer and multi exit founder in AI and XR. Notable projects include Ethereal Engine, BitScoop Labs, LifeScope and Laguna Labs. Companion Intelligence originated from project LifeScope in 2015 with the goal of building an open platform for anyone to personal digital memory database. In 2019, the LifeScope Time Machine was released to give anyone access to global travel into their history through AR and VR. In 2020 Laguna Labs founded Ethereal Engine with a core community of WebXR engineers building the most powerful 3D web engine. After exiting Ethereal Engine to Infinite Reality in 2024. Liam restarted the dream of Companion Intelligence and is now offering CI Private Servers allowing individuals and businesses to use personal private agents with confidence, trust, and control.
Jonathan Bryce, who has spent his career building the cloud, is Executive Director of the Open Infrastructure Foundation. Previously he was a founder of The Rackspace Cloud. He started his career working as a web developer for Rackspace, and during his tenure, he and co-worker Todd Morey had a vision to build a sophisticated web hosting environment where users and businesses alike could turn to design, develop and deploy their ideal web site – all without being responsible for procuring the technology, installing it or making sure it is built to be always available. This vision became The Rackspace Cloud. Since then he has been a major driver of OpenStack, the open source cloud software initiative.
As a storyteller turned editor turned technical writer turned community manager for the Rocky Linux project, Krista knows a thing or two about reinvention. Her greatest joy is found in empowering people to do and become more than they knew they could. Krista and her family live on an overgrown hobby farm in central Texas with 9 cats and their own family dinosaur—a Sulcata tortoise named Suhaila.
Nolan Bushnell is a pioneering engineer and entrepreneur, best known as the founder of Atari, Inc. and the creator of Chuck E. Cheese's. In 1972, he co-founded Atari, revolutionizing the video game industry with the release of Pong, one of the first commercially successful arcade games. In 1977, Bushnell established Chuck E. Cheese’s Pizza Time Theatre, merging dining with arcade entertainment, which became a nationwide family destination. Over his career, he has founded more than 20 companies, including Catalyst Technologies, one of the first business incubators, and Brainrush, an educational software company leveraging game-based learning. A recognized industry visionary, Bushnell has been inducted into both the Video Game Hall of Fame and the Consumer Electronics Association Hall of Fame. He is also known for Bushnell’s Law, which states that great games should be "easy to learn and difficult to master."
Thomas Cameron is an Open Source technologist with 27 years of experience. He's watched the information technology industry grow from PC servers and client/server architecture to distributed, to cloud computing. He's worked with technologies from Novell NetWare to Windows servers to Linux, and now the cloud. He is a senior solution architect at Amazon Web Services, and was previously a global technology evangelist at Red Hat.
Leigh is building Flox and is active with the Kubernetes and Flux projects.
He has a background in infrastructure software with a security niche.
He authored Flux 2's security model and kubeadm's mTLS implementation and is currently working on Kubernetes authorization with SIG Auth.
Leigh and his wife love to snowboard in Colorado and have 3 dogs.
Roberto is a Principal AI Architect specializing in Container Orchestration Platforms (OpenShift & Kubernetes), AI/ML, DevSecOps, and CI/CD. With over 10 years of experience in system administration, cloud infrastructure, and DevSecOps automation, he holds two MSc degrees in Telco Engineering and AI/ML.
Component Engineer by day, mad scientist by night. Carter has experience in teaching technical subjects; hardware, software, and everything in between.
As a passionate advocate for open infrastructure, I’ve spent my career at the crossroads of innovation and practicality, delivering solutions that empower organizations to thrive in today’s rapidly evolving tech landscape. With a deep understanding of the power of open-source technologies, I’ve led teams that leverage AI and infrastructure to create scalable, sustainable, and future-proof systems. In my work, I focus on simplifying complexity, driving open-source adoption, and pushing the boundaries of what AI can achieve when combined with open ecosystems. At OpenInfra, I’m excited to share how we’re transforming the future of infrastructure and AI, building solutions that are not only innovative but also accessible and community-driven.
Davide Cavalca is a Production Engineer at Meta on the Linux team. Davide has been working in the systems space for over 15 years, always with a strong focus towards open source and automation.
Bassam Chahine is a Principal Consultant at NetApp Instaclustr, which provides a managed platform around open source data technologies including Apache Cassandra, Apache Kafka and Apache Spark. Bassam architects open source solutions for data analytics and AI
Zoë Chalfant studied Political Science and East Asian Languages and Civilizations at the University of Chicago. She worked for approximately 8 years at Facebook/Meta as a Production Engineer. Currently she is a Staff Engineer at BabyList, Inc working on infrastructure systems.
Partially trained as a psychotherapist, she volunteers as a phone counselor at the Seattle-based Crisis Connections hotline and volunteers with the Puget Sound Rangers (Burning Man affiliated) as an at-event crisis counselor who provides counseling to participants having intense emotional or other kinds of experiences. She also volunteers as a staff historian with the Burning Man Project.
Colin Charles is the Managing Consultant at GrokOpen. Previously, Colin was on the founding team of MariaDB Server, and has been around the MySQL ecosystem including being an early employee at MySQL, and worked actively on the Fedora and OpenOffice.org projects. Colin has been a MySQL user since 2000. He's well known within open source communities, enjoys building business and market entry in APAC and has spoken at many conferences.
Thomas Charlon is a research associate postdoc at Harvard Medical School. He completed his computer science PhD at the University of Geneva (2019) while being employed as a Bioinformatician at Quartz Bio (Merck Serono spin-off) to develop algorithms for clustering and sparse coding of genome-wide data in systemic autoimmune diseases. He then independently researched withheld content on social networks in European countries, and developed a Shiny web app for real-estate price estimation using 10 years of French tax office open-data. As a research associate in the CELEHS laboratory, he focuses on standardizing analysis processes, enhancing statistical visualizations, and facilitating the dissemination of analyses results using APIs. His research applies natural language processing to unstructured text data related to mental health and suicide prevention, as scientific publications and electronic health records, to assist psychiatrists and clinicians in identifying at-risk patients.
Iván Chavero wrote his first programs in BASIC at the age of 10, promoter and developer of free software since 1997, he is a systems engineer from the Autonomous University of Chihuahua where he spent over 15 years managing high availability systems, he is currently Senior software engineer at Red Hat. Iván, actively contributes to several open source projects mostly related to OpenStack and cloud computing.
He is a founding member of the Chihuhaua's Linux user group and professor of the Masters in free software and mobile networks of the accounting and engineering faculties of the University of Chihuahua. When not taming computers or programming you can find him riding his skateboard in skateparks Chihuahua or a bar of México or the US playing with his band Seis Pistos.
Noah Chelliah was born and raised in Grand Forks ND. While attending the University of North Dakota in 2009 he founded Altispeed Technologies. Altispeed is an IT company dedicated to helping people leverage their technology to it’s full potential using open source principals.
Noah launched the Ask Noah Show in 2017, a weekly talk radio show. The goal was to create a path to serve the open source community by answering questions on system administration, IT business operations, and using Linux as the operating system for your “daily driver”.
Today the Ask Noah Show has been downloaded over 6.7 million times in 7 countries. Each week Noah and his co-host answer questions and bring you weekly updates from geeks eating their own dog food.
In his free time Noah enjoys spending time with his wife, playing with his kids, water skiing, cryptocurrency, and shooting firearms.
Nikita Chepuri is a distinguished Product Manager, known for driving product development and delivering innovative, customer-focused solutions. Alongside her work, Nikita is also a prominent content creator and influencer on LinkedIn, where she shares insights on tech careers, personal branding, and professional development. At her previous company, Nikita mentored over 100 interns, showcasing her strong commitment to fostering talent and leadership.
I am a high school student at Polytechnic School in Pasadena.
I've spent twenty years in the bay area doing tech startups including Sauce Labs, Buoyant and now Stateful. My focus has been primarily at the cross section of devTools, test automation, cloud native and web. In time away from the screen I love spending time with my family, playing in the woods, traveling, and soccer.
I'm a software developer interested in building things I would use and also learning/teaching more about things I'm passionate in the industry. Topics that I'm currently into include software leadership, entrepreneurship, clean code and collaboration.
Gene is a software veteran and tech executive known for his expertise in mobile, social, cloud, Big Data, Search Marketing and eCommerce. He is most recently CTO of Flosports and has been head of engineering at P.volve, Beachbody, Sellbrite, Synctree and Oversee. Before that he was Director of Engineering at Chegg, Executive Director of AT&T Interactive and Director of Engineering at Yahoo Search Marketing/Overture where he built large-scale search marketing platforms. Gene is a LP at Hyphen Capital investing in AAPI founders, mentor for Mucker Capital and founder of CTO Slackers, a global community of over 1300 tech leaders. Gene was coach of First Lego League, San Marino Safety Commission Board, and volunteer in SMUSD School PTA. He graduated Magna cum Laude with a B.S. in Biochemistry from UCLA, where he met his wife, and lives in San Marino with 3 kids.
Jeremy Cline is an open source software developer and long-time member of the Fedora Project. In prior roles, he has worked on Fedora's developer tooling and infrastructure, maintained Fedora's kernel, and spent some time working on the Linux graphics stack. In his current role at Microsoft, he works to ensure community-developed Linux distributions like Fedora work well on Microsoft Azure. During the Fedora 40 and 41 release cycles, he contributed to the Fedora Cloud Special Interest Group's effort to provide Fedora Cloud images on the three largest cloud platforms.
Mark Collier is a co-founder of the OpenStack project and the Chief Operating Officer at the Open Infrastructure Foundation. A committed advocate for open-source principles, Mark has played a key role in the development and global success of OpenStack, establishing it as a leading cloud computing platform and one of the most active open source projects to ever exist. Recently, he has also been involved in defining “open source AI,” contributing to the industry’s efforts to create clear standards and guidelines. With a background in building multi billion dollar open source ecosystems, Mark is a respected voice in the technology community, sharing his insights at industry events and through various media channels.
Jon Connors, founder of restore-a-thon, brings together developers and AI enthusiasts to create solutions for real world social challenges. Through these high-energy hackathons, he helps technologists leverage artificial intelligence for action and policy innovation. Connors also co-founded Tax Free Gains, a startup tax advisory and serves as an AI advisor to early-stage startups, combining his passion for technology with sustainable business growth.
Ken Crandall runs Strategic Product Management for OpenStack and Kubernetes at Rackspace. His primary focus and passion at Rackspace is working with industry leading companies to help modernize IT infrastructure and practices. Ken has over 20 years of experience in product, IT managment, and in solution architecture. Ken has built his career around open source technologies and has contributed to many of the best practices that companies use today.
Since the age of 10 I’ve always been passionate about computers. I’ve been working with them ever since. In 2005 I got my degree in computer science. I used to work at a major Belgian university where I was developing the e-learning applications. In that position, I was the one who looked after the databases. From there on I grew to be their MySQL DBA. In 2017 I left the university and joined Pythian as a MySQL Database Consultant. Currently I am working at PlanetScale to support large enterprise type customers running MySQL at scale.
Jenson Crawford is a software engineering leader and an active volunteer based in Los Angeles. He spent the first half of his career focused on optimizing software and is now focused on optimizing software and volunteer teams. Jenson is currently VP of Software Engineering for Eastman Kodak and is also serving in multiple volunteer roles.
Jon Cruz is a Senior Engineer at Samsung's Open Source Group. He has been working in Open Source for quite some time and shipped his first linux-based appliance in 1996. He is currently collaborating on Wayland, is a sub-maintainer with IoTivity and is an Inkscape core developer and Board Member. He has participated as a mentor in Google’s Summer of Code since its inception. Jon is an international speaker, most recently presenting at SOSCON, linux.conf.au and OSCON.
Peter is a system engineer working as evangelist at One Identity, the company behind the syslog-ng logging daemon. He helps distributions to maintain the syslog-ng package, follows bug trackers, helps syslog-ng users, and talks regularly about sudo and syslog-ng at conferences (SCALE, FOSDEM, Libre Software Meeting, LOADays, etc.). In his limited free time he is interested in non-x86 architectures, and works on one of his PPC or ARM machines.
Anthony is an infrastructure architect, engineer, and manager who has run Ceph at scale for over eleven years and one can say that it is literally a part of him - ask him in person and he'll show you why. He is also an observability advocate and contributes daily to Ceph documentation and may be open to new opportunities.
I'm a contributor to the OpenStack's Shared File Systems as a service. I been working in OpenStack upstream core features for Manila project, as well as maintaining CI/CD infrastructures and Storage Drivers. I am passionate about the open source community and its open culture since the first time he had contact with it. I have been serving as PTL for Manila for several releases.
Ludo (any/all; legally, Daniel) is a software engineer, designer, and educator with a decade of experience writing code for companies, groups, hackathons, and personal projects. After graduating from one of the most competitive high schools in the United States as a valedictorian, he studied computer science as an honors student and National Merit Scholar at the University of Texas at Dallas, where he earned his bachelor's degree summa cum laude and with additional major-specific and university-wide honors. A few months later, he began working for CodeDay, a non-profit organization dedicated to empowering under-served students interested in pursuing a future in computing by guiding them through hands-on programming projects. Since then, Ludo has spent hundreds of hours on video calls helping scores of students, many of whom have praised his ability to impart both intuition and deep understanding, make their first-ever contributions to over a dozen open-source programming projects.
Jeff Deifik, CISSP, C|CISO, MS Cybersecurity has been involved in cybersecurity and software development for several decades. He has worked at Information Sciences Institute (first e-commerce system), The Jet Propulsion Lab, and for the last 9 years at the Los Angeles Air Force Base. He is currently employed at The Aerospace Corp. He has been using Unix since 1983 and Linux since 1996.
Douglas DeMaio is a Senior Consultant for the openSUSE project, a Free Open Source Software development. He was a marketing intern at Siemens where he managed and developed corporate communication tools for Siemens Healthcare. He worked as a Sales and Marketing Manager for microdrones GmbH where he negotiated business development, design informational products and was the press spokesperson. He has 15 years experience of Public Relations/Marketing/Public Affairs experience. He has worked as a Public Affairs Officer, Media Relation and Command Information Chief for the US Army. He has extensive experience in all aspects of newsgathering for local, national and international media.
Tim Dennis is the co-PI of the UCLA Open Source Program Office (OSPO), part of the UC OSPO Network, and the Director of the Data Science Center at UCLA Library. With expertise in data services in academia, he leads efforts to support data initiatives like the UCLA DataSquad and UCLA Dataverse. A regular user of R, Python, SQL, and command-line tools, Tim has extensive experience helping researchers and students apply these tools. As a member of The Carpentries, he co-leads workshops that teach foundational coding and data science skills globally, emphasizing concise, practical instruction.
I am a French tech enthusiast that got in tech very early as a kid.
Currently studying as part of an apprenticeship (50% studies / 50% work), I work as an Infrastructure Technician @ Sigma Informatique (French MSP) and part-time Community Manager @ Coder as an independent contractor, I'm also an open-source contributor & self-hoster in my spare time.
Ex-Google, @DocuSign Lead Software Engineer with a passion for cloud, AI, and data.
Vinit is a seasoned software engineer with a demonstrated history of building on-premise and cloud-native distributed systems at scale. Currently, Vinit serves as a Lead Software Engineer at DocuSign, contributing to the Docusign's Storage team. With expertise encompassing cloud storage, distributed systems, and virtualization technologies such as Kubernetes, Docker, and the Linux Kernel, Vinit stands out as a thought leader in the tech industry. Throughout his career, Vinit has held pivotal roles at notable companies like Google, Box, Commvault, and Marvell, where he played an instrumental role in developing highly scalable and distributed cloud storage solutions. His proficiency in object-oriented design and systems programming, coupled with his capability to scale infrastructures to handle concurrent requests and planet-scale storage, positions him as a tru