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.
Mickael is a self-taught developer turned DevOps, passionate about automation, innovation, and creative problem-solving. Mickael enjoys challenging himself and experimenting with new technologies and methodologies. Currently, he is working on developing the next-gen K8s troubleshooting platform at Komodor, and doubling as a French cuisine connoisseur.
Naresh Kumar Amrutham is a Software Professional specializing in Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) and Infrastructure Engineering, with deep expertise in Compute Infrastructure and Kubernetes. Throughout his career, Naresh has focused on building and scaling resilient distributed systems for mission-critical applications and managing large-scale compute platforms. He specializes in optimizing Kubernetes-based infrastructure and implementing robust strategies for high availability, observability, and performance.
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.
YouTube: youtube.com/JimmyAngelakos
Mastodon: fosstodon.org/@vyruss
Bluesky: bsky.app/profile/vyruss.org
LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/vyruss
Alex Balashov is the Principal of Evariste Systems, an established VoIP engineering consulting company founded in 2007, based in northeast Georgia, USA. His expertise is focused on open-source infrastructure and platform-building for SIP service providers, chiefly with Kamailio, but has diverse interests, from UI development to AI to road cycling and racing.
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. After being kicked out of some of the best colleges in the country, and a short stint in telecom, he founded an open source-focused company and ran it for twenty years. Once that company was sold, he started working at Amazon Web Services with the goal of making AWS the most welcoming place to run open source workloads.
Liz Barry is the Executive Director of Metagov.
Before joining Metagov, she served as Head of Partnerships at The Computational Democracy Project, the 501(c)3 organization she established with the creators of the Polis technology to steward its open source code and methods. Liz works with facilitators, social movements, civil society organizations, journalists, indigenous nations, democratic governments both young and old, and peacebuilders to implement "listening at scale." The collaboration began when her presence at Taiwan's 2014 Sunflower Revolution and subsequent relationship with g0v led to her writing up the first coverage of vTaiwan in the west, in the 2016 piece for Civicist titled "vTaiwan: Public Participation Methods on the Cyberpunk Frontier of Democracy," now republished by Taiwan's government.
Priyatham (Pri) Bazaru is a Technical Lead and Full Stack Software Consultant with over 6 years of experience architecting secure, scalable systems across finance, education, and SaaS. A passionate Linux user and self-hoster, he builds infrastructure leveraging open-source tools, containerization, and cloud-native stacks. His work spans serverless architectures, microservices in Go and Python, and platform observability using tools like Datadog and Sentry. Pri has led cross-functional teams through complex deployments, CI/CD automation, and AI-integrated workflows. With experience in university innovation and a privacy researcher, he actively contributes to open discussions about self-managed infrastructure, secure software development, and developer tooling in regulated environments. He enjoys speaking about building resilient systems from scratch using Linux, containers, and OSS foundations.
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
Adam Gordon Bell is a software engineer, content creator, and community builder currently serving as Community Engineer at Pulumi, where he focuses on infrastructure as code and developer education. He previously spoke at SCaLE 20x on container runtime internals.
Adam created and hosts the CoRecursive podcast, which explores the stories behind the code. Since 2018, he's interviewed developers behind projects like SQLite, Git, and Erlang, building a reputation for in-depth technical storytelling.
Before Pulumi, Adam was Director of Developer Relations at Earthly Technologies, where his technical content regularly reached the front page of Hacker News. He previously worked at Tenable developing cloud and container security solutions. He's been working remotely from Canada since 2011 and is known for combining deep technical knowledge with clear explanations and treating engineers as the heroes of their own stories.
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.
Dan is the founder of ITsysCOM, an experienced communications architect and VoIP specialist. He is a double graduate of Politehnica University, Timisoara, with postgraduate specializations in Communication Protocols and Software Development. A frequent and well-known contributor to the open-source community and co-founder of the CGRateS Project, Dan is a firm believer in merging the very best production-ready software to create high-quality, scalable, and cost-effective communications solutions.
Ryan is a Solutions Engineer at pganalyze focusing on PostgreSQL. Ryan has been working as a PostgreSQL advocate, developer, DBA and product manager for more than 20 years, primarily working with time-series data on PostgreSQL and the Microsoft Data Platform.
Ryan is a long-time DBA, starting with MySQL and Postgres in the late 90s. He spent more than 15 years working with SQL Server before returning to PostgreSQL full-time in 2018. He’s at the top of his game when he's learning something new about the data platform or teaching others about the technology he loves.
James Bottomley is a Partner Architect at Microsoft where he works on
Linux and allied technologies. He is also Linux Kernel maintainer of
the SCSI subsystem. He has been a Director on the Board of the Linux
Foundation and Chair of its Technical Advisory Board. He went to
university at Cambridge for both his undergraduate and doctoral
degrees after which he joined AT&T Bell labs to work on Distributed
Lock Manager technology for clustering. In 2000 he helped found
SteelEye Technology, a High availability company for Linux and
Windows, becoming Vice President and CTO. He joined Novell in 2008 as
a Distinguished Engineer at Novell's SUSE Labs, Parallels (later Odin)
in 2011 as CTO of Server Virtualization, IBM Research in 2016 and
Microsoft in 2024.
Michael is a Senior Software Engineer and member of the core Asterisk team at Sangoma. With a remarkable career spanning 25 years, he has dedicated his expertise to building and supporting a wide array of VoIP services and applications.
Erin Browning is a staff security engineer at Notion, where she focuses on application and product security with concentrations on static analysis and automated vulnerability management. Beyond her day-to-day work securing software, Erin dove headfirst into the world of communications technology. She obtained her Ham radio Technician level license and has been exploring Meshtastic networking, bringing her security engineering mindset to decentralized communication systems. When she's not thinking about vulnerabilities or radio waves, she's usually with her cats or making terrible puns. You can find her on bluesky @efrowning.
Thomas Cameron has been in IT since 1993. He started out with Novell NetWare, then worked with Microsoft technologies, then discovered Linux in 1995. He's been an Open Source geek ever since. He's managed large scale Linux environments for organizations from banking to real estate to chip manufacturing. He worked at Red Hat from 2005 through 2019, as a chief architect and global technical evangelist. He then went to AWS, where he was a senior technical trainer. Recently, Thomas came back to Red Hat as a senior principal solution architect specializing in Ansible. Thomas has achieved Red Hat Certified Architect, AWS Solutions Architect Professional, and had numerous other technical certifications. He's delivered technical presentations on Open Source in twenty countries on five continents.
Leonora is a nonprofit leader with extensive experience in movement-building and organizing. She currently serves as Executive Director of Democracy Without Elections, a sortition movement-building organization, and Director of Public Access Democracy, a democratic lottery advocacy organization based in Los Angeles. Previously, Leonora was the Executive Director of Abundant Housing LA, a pro-housing movement organization that grew from an all-volunteer group to a staffed organization of 10 under her leadership.
Thomas Charlon received his Computer Science PhD at the University of Geneva, Switzerland (2019) while being employed as a Bioinformatician at Precision for Medicine, Quartz Bio to perform unsupervised clustering of genome-wide data in systemic autoimmune diseases. He then independently researched withheld content on social networks and pursued entrepreneurial projects as a real-estate price estimation web app.
As a Research Associate with Prof. Tianxi Cai, he applies NLP to texts related to mental health and suicide prevention, such as scientific publications and electronic health records, to assist psychiatrists in identifying at-risk patients for the Center for Suicide Research Prevention project. He also develops standardized codebooks used by many other labs (MGB, CHA, Duke, Pittsburgh), creates web apps to support and facilitate dissemination of results, and helps setup reproducible analysis processes.
Elizabeth is a developer advocate at Snowflake on the Postgres and Open Source team. Elizabeth is passionate about PostgreSQL and hosts a online Postgres Meetup for All and is on the board of the United States PostgreSQL Association (PgUS). She also co-hosts PostGIS Day. Elizabeth enjoys writing about Postgres for Newbies and teaching people about databases whenever she gets the chance. Elizabeth hails from Lawrence, Kansas and spends most of her free time pretending like she lives on a farm in the 1860s.
Ram is a Senior Software Engineer at JFrog R&D . Previously worked for startup companies like CallidusCloud (SAP Company), Konylabs. Loves Automation, Linux, openSource
Gabriel is a seasoned database consultant with nearly 20 years of experience optimizing performance across MySQL, Oracle, MongoDB, and SQL Server in enterprise environments. As both a developer and engineer, he has contributed to MySQL plugins and built two custom MySQL DBaaS platforms. Gabriel holds degrees in electronics, industrial engineering, and a master’s in information systems engineering, along with certifications from Google Cloud, Oracle, and Microsoft. In 2022, he founded query-optimization.com to help developers fix slow SQL queries. In 2024, he joined Releem to advance automated query optimization, making performance tuning one less thing businesses need to worry about.
Jacob Coffee is an Infrastructure Engineer at the Python Software Foundation and triager for the CPython runtime. He supports key Python services such as PyPI.org and Python.org while also contributing to the maintenance of the Litestar ecosystem which boasts libraries such as Litestar, Advanced Alchemy, Polyfactory, and more. He is passionate about open-source development, the mission of the PSF, and enhancing the tools that empower developers worldwide.
Cindy Cohn is the Executive Director of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, which works to ensure that technology supports freedom, justice and innovation for all the people of the world. Before becoming Executive Director a decade ago, Cindy was the organizations Legal Director from 2000-2015, and led the organization’s impact litigation work on bringing balance to copyright law, stopping mass spying and protecting freedom of expression online. She’s won many awards for her work and even more court decisions.
Joshua Colp is the Asterisk Project Lead. This is just a fancy way of saying he makes sure the ship is pointed in the right direction. He originally started in the community submitting simple patches and grew into improving and creating new core components of Asterisk itself. He is a self-taught programmer who believes in finding the balance between doing things the way they should be done and doing what is right for the people using the software. In his spare time he enjoys smashing fax machines.
Douglas Earl Comer is a professor of computer science at Purdue University, where he teaches courses on operating systems and computer networks. He has written numerous research papers and textbooks, and currently heads several networking research projects. He has been involved in TCP/IP and internetworking since the late 1970s, and is an internationally recognized authority. He designed and implemented X25NET and Cypress networks, and the Xinu operating system. He is director of the Internetworking Research Group at Purdue, editor of Software - Practice and Experience, and a former member of the Internet Architecture Board.
Nenad Corbic is a seasoned technology leader who has served as Chief Technology Officer since 2017, overseeing Sangoma’s technological vision and driving research and development initiatives. With a passion for innovation, Nenad specializes in implementing cutting-edge solutions in large-scale cloud systems, cybersecurity, and artificial intelligence. His leadership has been instrumental in Nenad Corbic is a seasoned technology leader who has served as Chief Technology Officer since 2017, overseeing the Sangoma’s technological vision and driving research and development initiatives. With a passion for innovation, Nenad specializes in implementing cutting-edge solutions in large-scale cloud systems, cybersecurity, and artificial intelligence. His leadership has been instrumental in the Company’s success and growth, including cultivating high performance teams, guiding technical due diligence and integration efforts for various acquisitions.’s success and growth, including cultivating high performance teams, guiding technical due diligence and integration efforts for various acquisitions.
Ben Cotton is a meteorologist by training, but weather makes a great hobby. Ben works as the open source community lead at Kusari and is a contributor to OpenSSF projects like GUAC and OSPS Baseline. Previously, he was Fedora Program Manager at Red Hat and has worked at Docker, Microsoft, and Purdue University. He is an Open Organization Ambassador and author of Program Management for Open Source Projects.
Conrad de Wet is the founder and lead architect of SIPERB, a scalable WebRTC softphone and SIP proxy platform. With 15+ years in VoIP and real-time communication, he specializes in bridging legacy telephony with modern technologies. His expertise includes high-availability softphone design, WebRTC connectivity, and AI-driven communication workflows. As a contributor to open-source VoIP projects, Conrad is passionate about simplifying telecom deployment and empowering developers with innovative tools.
Fatih is a Senior Manager, Core Platforms QE at SUSE, specializing in automation, infrastructure, CI/CD, DevOps, and QE.
Before joining SUSE, Fatih served as the Executive Director of the Continuous Delivery Foundation (CDF) at the Linux Foundation, where he led initiatives to enhance cross-industry and cross-community collaboration in the CI/CD domain. Prior to that, he was a Principal Developer at Ericsson, where he played a key role in several large-scale CI/CD initiatives.
Fatih is an active contributor to the open-source community. He has served on the OPNFV TSC and the CDF TOC. He founded the OPNFV Cross Community CI (XCI) project, the CDF SIGs on Interoperability and Software Supply Chain, and co-founded the OpenCI Initiative
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 19 years at the Los Angeles Air Force Base. He has been using Unix since 1983 and Linux since 1996.
Quentin is a senior software engineer specializing in Linux kernel networking and BPF development. He is a core contributor to the bpfilter project, an initiative to modernize Linux packet filtering by combining the accessibility of iptables with the performance of BPF. His work spans kernel networking internals, Netfilter hooks, and systemd integration. Based in France, Quentin is passionate about building efficient, maintainable systems-level software.
Engin is a Customer Success Architect at Pulumi and has been in the IT industry for over 15 years.
He started as a Java backend developer and later migrated to the fronted development.
This is where he found his passion for CI/CD, Cloud technologies and in particular Kubernetes.
Engin is a very curious person and loves learning and testing new technologies.
Henrietta (Hettie) Dombrovskaya is a database researcher and practitioner with over 40 years of academic and industrial experience. She holds a Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Saint Petersburg, Russia. At present, she is
– Database Architect at DRW Holdings in Chicago, IL
– Founder and President of Prairie Postgres NFP
– ACM Chicago Chapter Communications Chair
– LPI Board of Directors member
– Illinois Prairie Postgres User Group Organizer
– PG DATA 2026 conference organizer
Database administrator with extensive experience designing, administration, implementation and supporting next-generation MySQL and MongoDB database solutions in the hybrid Cloud. Looking for Python development with intermediate experience and Terraform projects.
With over 15 years of experience in the VoIP industry, Samir Doshi is the Co-founder and CTO of Inextrix Technologies Pvt. Ltd. and the modern founder of ASTPP, an open source VoIP billing and routing platform used globally for enterprise and carrier-grade deployments.
Samir has deep expertise in FreeSWITCH, Asterisk, OpenSIPS, and WebRTC, giving him a broad perspective on open-source telephony systems. He has designed and implemented solutions handling thousands of concurrent calls, integrating AI-driven analytics, and ensuring high availability for large-scale deployments.
David is from a traditional computer telephony background (think ISDN interfaces and DSPs), and began his Asterisk journey around 2004.
He participated in every AstriCon from Dallas 2006 to Atlanta 2019, has been delivering Asterisk training since 2007 and was the Worldwide Community Director for the Asterisk project from 2012 to 2019.
Alongside the training, David also provides Asterisk consulting and support, with clients including Digium, Bloomberg, BT, TalkTalk, Tunstall and the Ministry for Gozo!
David will be speaking in his capactiy as Corporate Ambassador for Simwood - the straight-talking, forward-thinking UK/US software-defined wholesale carrier.
Simon Elmir started using Linux in the early 00's, building his early skills on computers built from hand-me-down machines and scavenged parts. He's worked as a sysadmin in places like computer labs, datacenters, and web hosting companies. Simon worked as a Production Engineer on infrastructure for artificial intelligence systems at Meta (Facebook), and is now the team lead for Scientific Computing Operating Systems at SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory
Max is an orchestration engineer at PlanetScale, where he works on making Vitess (sharded MySQL) and Postgres run on Kubernetes.
Olawale Fabiyi is the Technical Advisor for the Ministry of Higher Education, Research, Science and Technology in The Gambia, leading the World Bank–funded National Higher Education Management Information System (HEMIS), serving 50+ stakeholders across the education sector.
He holds an MSc in Artificial Intelligence and brings over 17 years of cross-sector experience in academia, government, and industry. Olawale specializes in contextual adaptation, architecting enterprise systems, and enabling inclusive digital transformation in resource-constrained environments, bridging technical divides through pragmatic, adaptive design.
He previously coordinated the Computer Science and Technology Department at the American International University in The Gambia and has published research on applied AI and sustainable digital infrastructure, integrating international standards like ToGAF with practical, on-the-ground realities.
Cheikhouna Fall is a full-stack developer and founder of Leonix AI, a Senegal-based startup focused on real-time Voice AI solutions using Asterisk. He builds intelligent voice assistants that can handle inbound and outbound calls, understand natural language through OpenAI Realtime, and interact with telephony infrastructure like Twilio.
With hands-on expertise in SIP, WebRTC, and low-latency streaming, Cheikhouna develops open source architectures that bridge traditional telephony and AI. His work also includes building secure, STIR/SHAKEN-compliant voice pipelines and web dashboards that allow businesses to manage calls, monitor live interactions, and automatically generate call summaries and actionable insights.
Based in Dakar, Senegal, Cheikhouna is passionate about making Voice AI accessible in emerging markets through resilient, multilingual, open source technologies.
Amy (Boone) Fermanian is a software engineer with interest in the intersection of clothing, sustainability, and tech. She has spent the last 10+ years building scalable systems at LinkedIn, MM.LaFleur, Rent the Runway, and EnergyHub. She’s been attending SCALE with her father since she was a teenager and feels strongly about supporting the open source community. Outside of tech, she is a passionate sewist of 20+ years and, in the last few years, has started taking formal courses in topics such as patternmaking and textile science.
Dr. Dawn Foster provides consulting services around open source strategy, contributor strategy, improving project governance, and similar topics. She also works as the Director of Data Science for the CHAOSS project where she is a board member, working group lead, and maintainer. Dawn is an OpenUK board member, and was previously a co-chair of the CNCF Contributor Strategy Technical Advisory Group. She has 20+ years of experience at companies like VMware and Intel with expertise in community, strategy, governance, metrics, and more. She has spoken at over 100 industry events and has a BS in computer science, an MBA, and a PhD. In her spare time she enjoys reading science fiction, running, 3D printing, and traveling.
Arthur Freyman is Director of Engineering at ZipRecruiter, where he leads the Core infrastructure and platform organization, focusing on cloud-native architectures, reliability, and developer experience. Active in infrastructure, security, and operations for multiple decades, he has held senior engineering and leadership roles at companies including Foursquare, Riot Games, Spokeo, and uSamp, and has consulted for enterprises such as Disney, DirecTV, Kroger, and L3 Communications. His work centers on building secure, resilient platforms at scale and enabling teams to deliver software quickly and safely.
Founder of Randoneering, LLC with a decade of experience in scaling IT Infrastructure and managing critical Data platforms. An Open Source Evangelist championing services and products from the community in professional settings.
Currently serving as Senior Data Engineer at RxBenefits, Inc, demonstrating expertise in the creation and maintenance of its enterprise data warehouse, supporting all reporting, and analytic functions within the company. Additionally, I analyze, test, and implement ELT, connections, and extract supporting various business applications (including definition, structure, documentation, long-range requirements, operational guidelines).
I am a proud father of three kids, a husband to an amazing wife, and a human trying to avoid negative energy. While I enjoy spending time building complex systems, writing automation, expanding my love for Nix, I spend my spare time outside. I believe that everyone has a place in this world and that we should treat each other with the respect we deserve.
Like my personal life, I like to keep my professional life private as well out of the respect for the people I work with. However, I am happy to speak about my experience. Finally, I consider myself an Open Source Evangelist and find ways I can contribute to the tools I depend, whether that is by physical code contributions or simply by monetary donations.
Alex Garnett is DevRel at Bluesky! He was formerly Staff DevRel at Temporal, a technical writer at DigitalOcean, and before that, a digital archivist. He knows too much about ffmpeg.
Justin is an engineer building communities and solutions.
Mushegh Gevorgyan is a software architect, founder, and engineering leader with more than fifteen years of experience designing and building distributed systems, developer platforms, and AI-driven products. His background spans hands-on software development, system architecture, and technical leadership across startups and enterprise environments.
He is the CEO and Founder of Dowork Technologies, where he has led the development of AI-powered voice agents and workflow systems used in production to automate complex, real-world processes. His work emphasizes reliability, observability, and explicit system design in environments where AI components are deeply integrated into core business logic. 
Earlier in his career, Mushegh served as a principal developer and software architect, working extensively with backend systems, distributed services, and large-scale application design. Across roles, he has consistently focused on reducing system complexity through clear abstractions, well-defined workflows, and strong architectural boundaries.
In recent years, his work has centered on the challenges of AI-assisted software development, specifically how unstructured use of AI can introduce hidden coupling, architectural entropy, and long-term maintenance risks. He advocates for disciplined, architecture-first approaches that allow teams to benefit from AI productivity gains while preserving system integrity, correctness, and human oversight.
Manish Gill works at ClickHouse Inc, where he is managing the AutoScaling team for ClickHouse Cloud. He is based out of Berlin and is deeply interested in Databases and Cloud challenges and runs https://berlinsystems.xyz/ on the side.
Denver is a software right-to-repair and standards activist who is currently Director of Compliance at Software Freedom Conservancy, where he enforces software right-to-repair licenses such as the GPL, and is also a director of the worker co-operative that runs JMP.chat, a FOSS phone number (texting/calling) service. Denver writes free software in his spare time: his patches have been accepted into Wine, Linux, and wdiff. Denver received his BMath in Computer Science from the University of Waterloo. He gives presentations about digital civil rights and how to ensure FOSS remains sustainable as a community and financially, having spoken at conferences such as FOSSY, CopyleftConf, FOSDEM, CopyCamp Toronto, FOSSLC's Summercamp, and the Open Video Conference.
Diego Gosmar is an AI expert specializing in Multi-Agent Systems, Generative Conversational AI, NLP, and ethical AI practices. As Chief AI Officer, he leads AI Competence Centers in Customer Care and Supply Chain domains. Diego is a member of Voiceinteroperability.ai and Trustmarkinitiative.ai with the Linux Foundation AI & Data, contributing to global standards for ethical AI. He is an author of AI-related publications and a machine learning book, as well as a seasoned international speaker and trainer at events such as AstriCon. Diego has also guided the global expansion of XCALLY AI-driven software to over 60 countries. He serves as Head AI Advisor for startups and Mentor at I3P, specializing in Explainable AI and synthetic data solutions.
Ted Gould is currently leading the engineering effort at Stealthium, providing insight into GPUs for security professionals. He is the chairman for Texas Linux Fest, a member of the Inkscape board, and an Ubuntu Member previously working on Ubuntu Phone. Ted has been speaking about Ubuntu and Open Source to a variety of audiences over the years from seminars at universities to conferences and user groups.
Kerri-Leigh is an Associate Solutions Architect, a recovering developer, and a writer of horror. She'll tell you how these are all related if you share your story with her first. She lives, works, and is a general menace in the PNW.
I’started using Linux in 1996, and PostgreSQL in 1998. Love to travel, listen to music, and enjoy life with friends. Joined PostgreSQL community around 1999. Currently maintaining PostgreSQL official RPM repository at https://yum.postgresql.org and https://zypp.postgresql.org . Contributed to many PostgreSQL related projects. Already a Fedora and EPEL contributor as well.
Working at EDB as Postgres Expert.
As VP of Engineering and General Manager at Sangoma, Kapil Gupta combines over 18 years of technical expertise with passion for leadership, overseeing Development, QA, and day-to-day operations in India. A "developer at heart," Kapil built Sangoma's Bangalore office from the ground up and possesses extensive experience in designing UCaaS and telecommunications products using C/C++, NodeJS, and ReactJS. His background spans open source telephony engines like Freeswitch and Asterisk, as well as complex VOIP, SS7, and Sigtran protocols. Kapil is dedicated to fostering collaborative, innovative environments that optimize processes and deliver high-quality, scalable communication solutions.
Magnus Hagander is a member of the PostgreSQL Core Team and a developer and code committer in the PostgreSQL Global Development Group.
Magnus is one of the original developers of the Windows port of PostgreSQL. These days, he mostly works on other parts of the PostgreSQL backend, recently with a focus on security features, monitoring and backup/replication interfaces and tools.
He is also one of the core members of the postgresql.org infrastructure team, maintaining the servers that power the project, and one of the maintainers of the postgresql.org website.
He's been a PostgreSQL user since version 6 (with some non-serious use of Postgres 95 before that), and currently serves on the Core Team and as President of the Board for PostgreSQL Europe.
To pay the bills, he is a PostgreSQL and open source software consultant at Redpill Linpro in Stockholm, Sweden, where he works on consulting, support and training service.
Programmer since 1969, Unix since 1980, Free Software since 1986, Linux since 1994
Jon "maddog" Hall is the Board Chair Emeritus of the Linux Professional Institute (lpi.org).
During his career in commercial computing which started in 1969, Mr. Hall has been a programmer, systems designer, systems administrator, product manager, technical marketing manager, author and educator.
He has worked for such companies as Western Electric Corporation, Aetna Life and Casualty, Bell Laboratories, Digital Equipment Corporation, VA Linux Systems, SGI and Linaro. He currently works as an independent consultant, and is currently involved with bringing environmentally friendly computing to emerging marketplaces through Project Cauã.
Nuri Halperin is a software architect, speaker, and author. He helps companies design scalable systems, websites, and business applications. He’s been turning projects into success stories for a variety of clients for over 2 decades.
He is the author of several Pluralsight.com courses. He's also a Microsoft MVP alum, a MongoDB Champions member, and recipient of MongoDB's William Zola Award for Community Excellence. He enjoys tinkering with Arduinos, 3D printing, and robotics.
Saad H. is a AWS Enterprise Support Lead & Technical Account Manager at Amazon Web Services (AWS), where he serves as a trusted technical advisor to enterprise customers navigating complex cloud transformations. Saad's technical expertise is backed by multiple industry-leading certifications, including AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Professional, AWS Certified Machine Learning – Specialty, AWS Certified AI Practitioner (Early Adopter), and Certified Kubernetes Application Developer (CKAD) from the Linux Foundation.
With a background spanning telecommunications and cloud computing, Saad has authored multiple patents related to network charging systems and wireless communication networks. His work on "Revolutionizing 5G Billing and Charging with AWS SageMaker" demonstrates his ability to apply modern cloud architectures and machine learning to solve complex, real-world problems in critical infrastructure systems.
Christian is a well rounded technologist with experience in infrastructure engineering, systems administration, enterprise architecture, tech support, advocacy, and product management. Passionate about OpenSource and containerizing the world one application at a time. He is currently a maintainer at the Argo Project, OpenGitOps, and is Co-Chair of ArgoCon. He focuses on GitOps practices, DevOps, Kubernetes, Network security, and Containers.
Robert Hodges serves as CEO at Altinity, an enterprise provider for ClickHouse. Robert has over 30 years of experience with database systems and applications including pre-relational databases such as M204, online SQL transaction processing, Hadoop, and analytics. In the last few years, his work has focused on analytical databases, Kubernetes, and open source. Robert is the founder of the Open Source Analytics Conference (osacon.io).
Philip is a Software Engineer in the Platform team at Grafana Labs, where they help develop the internal platform tools that support engineers across the organisation.
Before joining Grafana, they worked as a Platform Engineer and SRE, helping run and evolve data platforms. This experience includes building automation, refining CI/CD workflows, and improving the reliability and usability of internal developer tooling. They have a strong interest in streamlining cloud-native workflows and enabling teams to ship software more confidently.
Shaun is a Production Engineer at Meta, where they have been i shaping integrations with the public cloud infrastructure landscape. They specialize in creating intuitive platforms for container creation and Kubernetes management, with a particular focus on building infrastructure-level software to support both generic compute and large-scale Artificial Intelligence HPC training clusters. Shaun's work is dedicated to enhancing accessibility and efficiency for developers, driving innovation, and simplifying cloud computing at Meta.
Amir Jakoby is a seasoned technology executive with over 18 years of experience in software engineering, leadership, & product innovation. He currently serves as Co-Founder and CTO of Sawmills.ai.Previously, as VP of Engineering at New Relic, Amir led a global team of 85 engineers across 17 teams, driving AI innovation, including the launch of Grok, the first Observability GenAI-based assistant. Under his leadership, New Relic's was transformed into a profitable business of $60M in 2024.
Marcin Jakubowski is a Polish-American who came to the U.S. from Poland as a child. He graduated with honors from Princeton and earned his Ph.D. in fusion physics from the University of Wisconsin. Frustrated with the lack of relevance to pressing world issues in his education, he founded Open Source Ecology in 2003 in order to make closed-loop manufacturing a reality. He is now working on open-source blueprints for civilization - the Global Village Construction Set (GVCS)— an open source tool set of 50 industrial machines necessary to create a small civilization with modern comforts. His goal is to create the next economy - the open source economy. His work has been recognized as a TED Senior Fellow, in Time Magazine's Best Inventions of 2012, as a Shuttleworth Foundation Fellow, and a White House Champion of Change in 2013. See his TED Talk for an intro - http://bit.ly/2dsMUf0
Srinithin Jayabal is the Founder and CEO of XaasIO Group, focused on building sovereign, open-source infrastructure platforms for private and hybrid cloud and AI. He works on architectures spanning Kubernetes, OpenStack, Ceph, and modern MLOps stacks, helping enterprises and public-sector organizations modernize from proprietary platforms to upstream-first foundations. His interests include AI infrastructure, multi-cluster operations, observability, and building “hyperscaler-like” developer experiences on customer-owned infrastructure.
Allen Jones is the architect of Drasi and has deep expertise in building innovative solutions at high-tech startups and enterprises.
Abe Kazemzadeh is an Assistant Professor in the University of St. Thomas Graduate Programs in Software department. His undergraduate interest in linguistics led him to graduate studies in computer science that focused on natural language processing and a career that has included research and software engineering in speech recognition, voice and text dialog systems, sentiment and demographic analysis of social media, social network analytics, and extracting machine-learned signals from financial news. He currently teaches classes about databases, statistics, and data science.
Robert's journey with technology began in the early 1980s in the US Army, and he's been passionate about it ever since. His interest in VoIP sparked around 2004 with the Asterisk at Home project. He became involved with FreePBX when it evolved from AMP and has used it continuously while holding several different positions in the VoIP industry. Today, Robert is the Senior VoIP Engineer at Tekmetric, where he helps bring telephony services to their Shop Management software for independent automotive repair shops.
Issac Kim is a cyber security engineer doing mostly penetration testing, with previous experience doing cyber testing on government space systems. In his free time, he dabbles in self hosting and homelabbing with FOSS tools and services to break his own reliance on proprietary apps. He is also a coffee snob and baseball fan.
Noah King is a Senior Security Researcher and Founding Engineer at Horizon3.ai, specializing in vulnerability research and proactive threat mitigation. He holds an OSCP certification and previously taught at the University of North Carolina Coding Bootcamp and UNC Charlotte Cybersecurity Bootcamp. Based in North Carolina, Noah is passionate about researching emerging vulnerabilities and helping organizations secure their systems before attackers strike. His unique combination of offensive security expertise and teaching experience makes him adept at translating complex security concepts into practical, actionable guidance for technical audiences.
Jason is dedicated to advancing the state of the art in secure and robust AI. With a bachelor’s degree in computer science from San Diego State University, he is focused on ensuring trust, security, privacy, bias, and robustness of AI/ML models. Jason has led the development efforts of a commercial solution for the detection and repair of vulnerabilities in deep learning systems, and the co-author of multiple patents related to the cybersecurity of systems including AI/ML, embedded devices, supply chain, and others. His passion for improving the field has driven him to push the boundaries of what is possible and make a meaningful impact in the fields of AI and cybersecurity.
Jeff LaCoursiere is the CTO of StratusTalk, a whitelbel hosted PBX platform offering services in the US and Caribbean. Jeff has 30+ years of telecom experience, mostly contracting to large tier one companies for core network architecture. StratusTalk started as a side project in the US Virgin Islands, and has grown over twenty years to service thousands of phones for a large number of whitelabel resellers. Jeff has dabbled in AI since long before LLMs, having taken a stab at beating the dog track in the early naughts with a custom backprop algorithm. With the incredible tools available today, expect a flood of agent implementations and innovations from our team.
osh is a seasoned software developer with over a decade of experience, specializing in a broad range of topics including operations, observability, agile methodologies, and accessibility. His passion for technology is matched by his enthusiasm for sharing knowledge through public speaking. Currently, Josh serves as a Developer Advocate for Altinity, where he creates educational content on ClickHouse and OpenTelemetry.
Noam Levy is the Field CTO at groundcover. Over the last 10 years, Noam has been a part of and led development teams focused on microservices-oriented web applications, monitoring complex application pipelines, and system engineering. When not handling pull requests and responding to questions in the groundcover Slack community, you can find Noam attempting to reverse engineer musicals and indie rock music on the guitar and piano.
Yuning Liang is the Founder and CEO of DeepComputing, focusing on developing innovative technology products based on RISC-V SoMs. From the world's first RISC-V development laptop DC-ROMA to pads, workstations, remote-controlled cars, drones, and more, all are based on RISC-V chips.
The world's first RISC-V laptop, the world's first RISC-V pad capable of making phone calls, and so on, are all Yuning's masterpieces. Yuning's innovation and pioneering spirit in the RISC-V field have enabled him to create several world firsts, leading DeepComputing to gain widespread recognition in the global RISC-V product commercialization field, contributing significantly to the advancement and progress of RISC-V technology.
Yuning's career has taken him from the UK to Switzerland, then to South Korea, and finally to China. He has a strong practical background in embedded systems, platform APIs, and system software. In 2024, he was honored with the "RISC-V Community Contributor Award" and recognized as a "Ubuntu Summit Contributor," further solidifying his influence in the technology sector.
Victor Lyuboslavsky is a software engineering leader and author with over 25 years of experience building products and leading teams. He has co-founded startups, held technical leadership roles at AMD, and now architects secure, scalable systems for enterprise IT at Fleet Device Management.
His work bridges hands-on technical execution with strategic leadership. Drawing on experience in startups and open source communities, Victor focuses on clarity, transparency, and evolutionary design. These principles help teams scale architectures, adopt AI responsibly, and build resilient systems without creating chaos.
Scott Mabe is a Technical Enablement Manager at Datadog, and lives in Baltimore Maryland. He has been working in tech for close to 20 years. In a past life Scott has been a radio dj .When he’s not working Scott enjoys traveling to see punk rock shows.
Chris Maj is quick to answer the phone after twenty years of exploring telecommunications, programming dial plans, and satisfying customers in the Voice over Internet Protocol space. Last year, Chris joined the steady hands on deck at Sangoma as the Open Source Solutions Advocate, helping to lead Open Source development and community engagement inside both the Asterisk project and the FreePBX project code repositories. He is looking forward to his second year as AstriCon MC and the first year in a long while that the conference is being held west of the Mississippi River - now as part of SCaLE. While inside, he's probably standing at his desk in Denver, often next to a roll-up banner of the FreePBX mascot Tango the frog; outside, you might catch him at various elevations throughout Colorado, occasionally within reach of actual live frogs.
Slava holds a general-level license for Amateur Radio. When away from Meshtastic and HF, he manages DevOps, SRE, and Cloud teams - or provides consulting services in these fields. He has two orange cats and by now is probably one himself. Either get him a beer or a job - he’s currently unemployed.
Patrick Masson joined The Apereo Foundation as Executive Director in 2023. Before Apereo, Patrick served as General Manager for the Open Source Initiative after working within higher education IT for over twenty years, including roles as CIO within the State University of New York and CTO at the University of Massachusetts' Office of the President. Before these roles, Patrick was the Director of Technology at the SUNY Learning Network and the UCLA Media Lab.
Patrick is an adjunct instructor with SUNY Albany's College of Computing and Information and speaks frequently on topics related to open source software, open education, and educational technology. Patrick is the co-founder of EDUCAUSE's "Openness" Constituency Group and served on his local school board from 2014 to 2018.
Scott McAllister is a Principal Developer Advocate for vCluster. He has been building software in several industries for over a decade. Now, he's helping others learn about various web technologies and programming principles. When he's not coding, writing, or speaking, he enjoys long walks with his wife, skipping rocks with his kids, and is happy whenever Real Salt Lake, Seattle Sounders FC, Manchester City, St. Louis Cardinals, Seattle Mariners, Chicago Bulls, Seattle Storm, Seattle Seahawks, Seattle Reign FC, Seattle Kraken, Barcelona, Fiorentina, Borussia Dortmund or Mainz 05 can manage a win.
Author of the book "Getting Started with Grafana", Ronald McCollam is a geek of all trades with experience ranging from full stack development to IT operations to management and sales. He has a strong background in open source software, starting when a stack of 3.5" Slackware floppies was the easy way to install Linux. He's managed IT operations in datacenters from back when the "cloud" was new and scary, built and run an OS certification program for hardware running Linux, and spent entirely too long thinking about observability. He's also a Certified Irish Whisky Taster.
Jeremy is a seasoned DevRel & DevEx leader, an international speaker, and is currently the Director of DevRel at OneStream Software, previously at CircleCI, Solace, Auth0, and XDA. With almost 30 years in Tech, covering just about every functional area, including support, system and database administration, application and web development, project management, program management, and systems analysis, Jeremy is active in the DevRel and DevOps communities, a co-creator of DevOpsPartyGames.com, and organizer for DevOpsDays Kansas City. A lover of all things coffee, community, open source, and tech, he is also house-broken, and (generally) plays well with others.
Nick Meyer studied physics and computer science at Caltech, and is currently a Staff Software Engineer on the Platform Engineering team at Academia.edu. A major focus during his tenure at Academia.edu has been streamlining and modernizing the data layer, in particular projects around operations of Academia.edu's PostgreSQL clusters, including upgrades, partitioning, and backup tooling.
Jay Miller is a Staff Product Advocate at Aiven based out of Atlanta, GA.
Jay is also the Founder of Black Python Devs, a non-profit designed to help make the Python Community more accessible to Black and other racially diverse people.
Justin Miller lives in Los Angeles with his wife Megan and their dog Eddie. In his free time, he enjoys photography and learning about machine learning.
As a Principal Platform Engineer at ZEFR, Justin has introduced tools like Ray, developed data pipelines integrating NLP and CV embeddings with Qdrant and Snowflake, and implemented cost-saving measures that reduced expenses by reducing resource utilization. He also modernized infrastructure, transitioning services to Kubernetes and streamlining deployments using GitHub Actions and ArgoCD.
With prior roles at GoSpotCheck, ProtectWise, and eHarmony, Justin has extensive experience building scalable systems with Scala, Java, and Python. His projects include Kafka stream processors, Spark and Snowflake data warehouses, and media retrieval/storage services. He has extensive experience mentoring engineers across all levels to strengthen team capabilities.
George Miranda is a data scientist currently serving on the LA County CEO ACE team, where he leverages open-source technology to modernize County analytics and infrastructure. He specializes in transforming complex datasets into gold-layer analytical products using SQL, Python, and R within Databricks. Notably, he develops and maintains internal Python and R packages hosted on GitHub, designed to streamline data processing and Shiny dashboard creation using custom County style templates.
Previously, as an HR Data Scientist at NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory, George built secure data frameworks and utilized R-Shiny for text analysis and employee sentiment clustering. With a deep history in public service, he has successfully deployed machine learning models for risk assessment and public-facing web applications for career pathing, proving that open-source tools can drive efficiency and creativity in the public sector.
Liudmila Molkova is a Developer Advocate at Grafana Labs working on OpenTelemetry. She is a member of the OpenTelemetry Technical Committee and a maintainer of the Semantic Conventions. Previously, she led observability efforts for Azure client libraries at Microsoft. Liudmila co-authored distributed tracing implementations across the .NET ecosystem, including HTTP client instrumentation and Azure Functions. She is also the author of Modern Distributed Tracing in .NET: A Practical Guide to Observability and Performance Analysis for Microservices
Bruce Momjian is co-founder and core team member of the PostgreSQL Global Development Group, and has worked on PostgreSQL since 1996. He has been employed by EDB since 2006. He has spoken at many international open-source conferences and is the author of PostgreSQL: Introduction and Concepts, published by Addison-Wesley. Prior to his involvement with PostgreSQL, Bruce worked as a consultant, developing custom database applications for some of the world's largest law firms. As an academic, Bruce holds a Masters in Education, an honorary doctorate, was a high school computer science teacher, and lectures internationally.
I got my start working in the tech world back in the dot-com days, at an Idealab! startup. I have also spent time in Web2 at MySpace, and more recently in Web3 at my own startup. I have worked extensively with systems and networks, including as a Principal Architect in the CDN world. I present on various topics at a wide variety of venues, with recordings and slide decks posted online. I am currently the Principal Architect at Inertia Labs, a consulting firm dedicated to issues around serving infrastructure quality such as SRE, Observability, and Platform Architecture
Alexandre has been a computer and telecommunications enthusiast since a young age. 30 years ago, he founded Eurice/Callibri, which develops a telecommunications and CRM platform for remote secretarial services. More than 80 million calls cross their platform every year.
Autumn is a product manager at Microsoft Azure specializing in Linux security. In her previous role at AWS as a software engineer, she focused on the development and release of Amazon Corretto (Java) while actively engaging in the OpenJDK community; before that, she worked as an AWS NoSQL Solutions Architect and created educational content in Python and Java.
Autumn co-hosts the exciting new "Fork Around and Find Out" podcast, sharing stories on tech lessons learned, with her previous co-host of the popular "Ship It!" podcast. A proud mom and "Rewriting the Code" alumni, Autumn serves as the Board Chair of Education at MilSpouse Coders, leading the chapter in the Greater Seattle Area, due to her advocacy for collaborative learning and community development.
Joe is a security researcher who loves to experiment with embedded devices, signals, and really anything with electrical signals. He lives in a server room and would love to be let out from time to time. When not stuck in a server room or being electrocuted he also dabbles with cloud research. He is currently a full time student at California Polytechnic Pomona.
Phong is a Production Engineer at Meta, bridging Meta’s production stack with public cloud and the wider cloud-native world. He ships platforms for everything from standard services to GPU workloads, then grabs the pager when things catch fire. And yes - when the smoke clears, he’s yapping about what worked so you don’t repeat the pain.
Vinh is a Senior Software Engineer on the Core Infrastructure team at ZipRecruiter, working on Kubernetes infrastructure and developer tooling. He is passionate about open source, automation, and platform engineering. Outside of work, he enjoys drinking coffee, working on his home lab, and golfing.
Sajal Nigam is an Expert Application Engineer specializing in cloud-native platforms, DevOps automation, and intelligent Kubernetes governance. With more than 17 years of industry experience—seven of them in the United States—he has led large-scale modernization initiatives across financial services, distributed systems, and platform engineering.
His work has been featured across technical communities, DZone publications, and emerging research in AI-augmented DevOps. Sajal has authored multiple white papers on service mesh intelligence, observability, and agentic AI in cloud operations, and actively contributes to the open-source ecosystem with a focus on CNCF technologies.
Sajal speaks and writes about platform engineering, intelligent automation, and the future of cloud-native reliability, helping organizations build safer, faster, and more autonomous delivery systems.
Brendan O'Leary is a Developer Relations Engineer at Kilo Code. He spends his time connecting with developers, contributing to open source projects, and sharing his thoughts on cutting-edge technologies on conference panels, meetups, in contributed articles and on blogs.
