Faisal Afzal is a CNCF and Platform Engineering Ambassador and Principal Technical Consultant Lead at AHEAD specializing in cloud and platform engineering. He organizes Cloud Native LA, co-organizes Cloud Native Days Los Angeles, and volunteers at SCaLE, helping socialize and make cloud-native technologies accessible to the broader community.
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.
Hamid Akhtar is a Senior Software Engineer at Microsoft, specializing in PostgreSQL internals and large-scale data replication. Over the years, he has worked hands on across various aspects of the PostgreSQL ecosystem, including core database features, extension development, performance, security, and observability.
At Microsoft, Hamid focuses on change data capture (CDC) extension for PostgreSQL for fabric mirroring. Before joining Microsoft, Hamid served as an architect and senior developer across multiple PostgreSQL-focused organizations. His past work includes multi-active (active-active) replication with pgEdge’s Spock, Transparent Data Encryption (TDE), the pg_stat_monitor observability extension, the ORC FDW, and an auto-tuning framework for PostgreSQL. He also led the development and maintenance of the official PostgreSQL installers.
Hamid’s contributions span deep systems engineering, replication internals, extensibility, optimization, and building developer-friendly tools that enrich the PostgreSQL experience.
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.
Anjelica Ambrosio is a Developer Advocate at Mirantis with a specialty in Kubernetes, DevOps, and AI infrastructure. With a background in both software development and education, she creates technical content such as blogs/guides, talks/webinars, and hands-on workshops that simplify complex technical concepts and operational challenges. Through her developer advocacy work, Anjelica supports developers at all experience levels by turning advanced tools and platforms into clear, practical guidance that helps teams build, run, and scale applications with confidence.
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
Dondy Aponte leads at the intersection of technology, people, and purpose. He has spent his career helping teams navigate complex technical systems while fostering environments rooted in trust, inclusion, and accountability. With deep experience in infrastructure and observability, he values clarity over noise and progress over perfection.
As a servant-leader, Dondy believes the best leaders create space for others to grow, contribute, and succeed. He brings a thoughtful, people-first approach to leadership—shaped equally by his professional experience and by life outside of work as a father.
Snir Aviv is an application security researcher at Cato Networks and member of Cato CTRL. Snir specializes in penetration testing, vulnerability research, and development of offensive security tools. Prior to joining Cato in 2024, Snir built and led the penetration testing team at Clear Gate, delivering high-impact security assessments for clients across diverse industries. Snir holds a Burp Suite Certified Practitioner (BSCP) certification, has published multiple CVEs, and is known for his practical approach to security challenges and his ability to uncover complex vulnerabilities.
Monica is an open source community advocate who loves connecting people to help them and their projects succeed. They have worked on the Community Team at Canonical, and currently serve on the Ubuntu Community Council. Right now, they are bringing their A+ gif game to the Thunderbird project as a contract marketing specialist. Their background is in the humanities, with a degree in Ancient Greek from DePauw University, Maritime Studies from East Carolina, and graduate coursework in history at the University of Alabama (insert obligatory Roll Tide here).
A Southern California native, Monica now lives in Atlanta with her husband and burgeoning collection of watercolor paint, tea, and fountain pens.
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.
James Bayer leads the product team at Flox. James has experience as a co-founder and helped grow HashiCorp and Pivotal to IPOs. James’s career has been centered around enterprise middleware and open source. He earned a BS in Mathematics and Computer Science at the University of Nebraska at Lincoln.
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.
Andres is a Software Engineer with 5 years of experience working with Linux systems for Microsoft Azure Boost. He has contributed to Open-Source systems including the Yocto project, gRPC, and systemd, adding features for buildhistory, socket activation, DHCP, and quota support. He graduated from Case Western Reserve University and is currently pursuing a Master's degree in Systems by the Georgia Institute of Technology, USA. Andres is based in Seattle, WA.
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.
Nate is a long time tech specialist and devops fanboy who has recently turned Developer Advocate. Lawful Neutral. Retro gaming enthusiast and all around goofball. Loves talking about anything tech related, both old and new.
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.
Michelle Brenner (she/her) is a Senior Software Engineer with 13 years of experience. She started in engineering support and now leads large-scale development projects. A Philadelphia native who currently calls Los Angeles home, she is an art school graduate and a self-taught engineer. During her career, she has most enjoyed creating software that enables others to succeed, from digital artists to restaurateurs to fellow engineers.
Michelle has shared her technical travails, team-building advice, and career growth techniques as a speaker at more than 30 conferences, as a podcast host and guest, and as a writer in STMPE, 97 Things Every Cloud Engineer Should Know, and online at LeadDev, dev.to, and OpenSource. She hopes others can learn from her successes and challenges.
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.
Bill Budington is a longtime activist, cryptography enthusiast, and a Senior Staff Technologist on EFF's Public Interest Technology team. His research has been featured in The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, The Guardian, and cited by the U.S. Congress. He is the lead developer of Cover Your Tracks, apkeep, led HTTPS Everywhere from 2015 to 2018, and has contributed to projects like Let's Encrypt and SecureDrop.
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.
Leigh helps build Flux and consults teams using it in global deployments.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Just as at home with electro-acoustic synthesizer electronics as with site reliability engineering, I find joy in operating inherently chaotic complex systems. I have a passion for exploring relationships between the artistic mind and the operation of socio-technical systems: my research on improvisation and intuition spans both the arts and resilience engineering. My experiences have led me to talk about reliability and resilience at LISA, SRECon, Music City Tech, Disney JETA, RE:Deploy, CMG ObservabilityCon, DevWeek, and several years at SCaLE.
My work sits at the intersection of technology, behavior, and organizational systems. I’m interested in how fast-moving environments shape human decision-making—what people pay attention to, what gets rewarded, and what quietly gets overlooked as systems scale.
Having spent years working alongside technical teams in complex, high-performance settings, I’ve seen how productivity tools and metrics influence culture just as much as leadership intent. My perspective is informed by both practical experience and ongoing study in organizational behavior, with a focus on motivation, recognition, and sustainability in modern work.
This talk reflects a long-standing interest in how communities—whether corporate or open source—can design systems that support people as effectively as they support output.
Koshan Dawlaty is a junior in South Pasadena High School. He is interested in computer programming broadly, and operating systems more specifically. He has been part of FIRST Robotics Competition team 2404 for over two years, and he is currently the programming lead.
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.
Professional open source software engineer. Hardware hacker, digital archivist, and furry in my spare time. Accepting headpats.
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.
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Founder - https://commandprompt.com/ - 24x7x365 Postgres since 1997
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Founder and Co-Chair - https://postgresconf.org/
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Founder - https://postgresql.us - United States PostgreSQL
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Public speaker, published author, postgresql expert, and people believer.
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Host - More than a refresh: A podcast about data and the people who wrangle it.
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Experience - Fully living the 100% off-grid american dream in Montana
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.
A repeat founder, Ron dove into the world of developer tooling at Meta’s Facebook as the head of developer products, building the tools powering Meta’s 20,000-strong developer core. Realizing the limitations of existing tooling and recognizing the superpowers of Nix, Ron co-founded Flox to grow Nix and make it accessible to the wider engineering community.
Ron is on the board of the NixOS Foundation where he works on leading key efforts to strengthen and support the entire community. He also leads the largest Israeli tech community in California as president of INTRO, a non-profit.
Lola Egherman is Vice President of Product and Operations at CodeDay, a non-profit helping students use technology and creativity to work on meaningful problems. Lola's excitement for CS started from a young age, in part due to attending CodeDay's K12 events when she was in middle school. Lola is a strong advocate for Open Source software and the transformative power being an open source contributor can have.
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.
Eric Ernst is a software developer at Apple, where he focuses on virtualization, containers, container runtimes and Kubernetes. Eric is a contributor to Kubernetes and an architecture committee member for the Kata Containers project.
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.
Peter Farkas is a seasoned open source leader with over 15 years of experience building sustainable open source projects and businesses. He currently serves as the CEO of Percona, a global leader in open source database software and services.
Before joining Percona, Peter was the Co-Founder and CEO of FerretDB, the truly open source MongoDB alternative that enables developers to use MongoDB drivers seamlessly with PostgreSQL as the backend.
Peter is a strong advocate for open source solutions, believing that they can drive innovation and sustainable growth on par with-or beyond-proprietary software.
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.
Software, web, and game developer with a passion for Linux and open source.
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.
Nathan Handler is a Staff Infrastructure Security Engineer at Reddit, where he works within the SPACE (Security, Privacy, Assurance, Corporate Engineering) organization to ensure that Reddit’s rapidly evolving infrastructure is launched and operated securely. His work focuses on building tooling and visibility that make secure-by-default decisions easy for teams across the company. He helps surface misconfigurations early, automate common security controls, and enable developers to understand their security posture without slowing down innovation.
Nathan has been active in the open source community for nearly two decades, including roles as an Ubuntu and Debian GNU/Linux Developer and as a member of the freenode IRC staff. Prior to joining Reddit, he worked as a Developer Advocate and Software Engineer at Orchid Labs, building an open marketplace for bandwidth on Ethereum, and as a Site Reliability Engineer at Yelp.
Sam Hanna is a medical technician at Abbott Labs for the past 7 years. He has been a Linux user for over 15 years. He is self-taught individual who has been inspired many people in the linux community and loves working with many Linux distributions, server applications, and tools. He is an advocate of opensource software and self-hosting. His goal is to reach out and spread his knowledge to others and hope to inspire others just as the opensource community has done for him.
Shannon Harper is the Marketing Director at DBeaver, bringing over 20 years of experience in the tech industry. She is a firm believer in the power of community and an advocate for open, collaborative approaches.
Morgan Helton is a software engineer at Flox, working on cloud infrastructure and systems reliability. With prior experience in industrial controls and instrumentation and two decades of Linux and open-source use, Morgan blends practical engineering discipline with modern cloud-native practices.
Eric “The IT Guy” Hendricks is a former Linux Systems Administrator turned Product Marketing Manager at CIQ and an instructor at Johnson County Community College. He’s spent over 15 years in IT building, breaking, and teaching Linux systems. Eric now focuses on helping others navigate tech careers with honesty, humor, and a deep love for open source and community.
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).
Adam Holt is a computer scientist who was OLPC's Community/Support Manager, has served schools in Haiti, traveled the world building an understanding of technology around developing world schools, and catalyzes Internet-in-a-Box communities worldwide. He hopes you too will seize the day, unleashing grassroots learning libraries in all countries.
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.
Horovits lives at the intersection of technology, product and open source. With over 20 years in the tech industry as a software developer, a solutions architect and a product manager, he brings a wealth of knowledge in cloud and cloud-native architectures, big data solutions, DevOps practices and more.
Horovits is an international speaker, an Ambassador of the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF), OpenSearch Ambassador under The Linux Foundation, and host of the popular OpenObservability Talks podcast.
Currently working as senior developer advocate for the Open Source team at AWS, Horovits evangelizes on the OpenSearch project by the Linux Foundation and on Observability in IT systems.
Tom Howe is Director of Field Engineering at Hydrolix, where he focuses on customer facing engineering and technical strategy for real-time data analytics and observability. With more than 25 years of experience in software engineering, distributed systems, and technical leadership, Tom has built and scaled platforms that power some of the world's largest digital experiences.
Before joining Hydrolix, Tom served as Director of Software Engineering at Disney, where he led the automation and intelligent management of the global media distribution mesh behind Disney+, Hulu, ESPN+, and Star+. His earlier career includes work as a computational social scientist at the University of Chicago and Argonne National Laboratory, where he developed large-scale simulation and modeling systems for domains ranging from electric grids to biosecurity.
Tom lives in the Sierra Nevada foothills of Northern California with his partner, Melissa, and their son, Michael. As a founding member of the Mucca Pazza experimental marching band, Tom has performed at events including Lollapalooza and the Montreal Jazz Festival. When not working with data or customers, he enjoys tackling home projects and loving the frequent wildlife like turkeys and bats in his backyard.
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.
Tiffany is senior developer advocate at Grafana Labs and a CNCF Ambassador. She also formerly worked as a software developer and developer advocate at VMware, Amazon, Docker, and Intel. Prior to that, she graduated from Georgia Tech with a degree in electrical engineering. In her free time, she likes to travel and dabble in photography. You can find her at tiffanyfay.dev (and for Bluesky) and elsewhere on linktr.ee/tiffanyfay.
