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.
Kelis Hightower is an Informatics student at the University of Washington with an interest in cloud-native technologies and the beginner learning experience. As part of a generation that grew up alongside modern infrastructure, she is curious about how people learn complex systems that are often assumed to be “basic” but rarely taught from the ground up.
She enjoys learning through hands-on projects and sharing her experiences to help make technical spaces more approachable for newcomers. Kelis is especially interested in the intersection of technology, learning, and community, and is excited to continue growing her skills while connecting with others who are passionate about teaching and building.
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.
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.
Mark Hudson is a pro software engineer with a side hobby of electronics and ham radio. https://www.linkedin.com/in/markhud
He has attended SCaLE ever since the single digit days.
George is an undergraduate at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign studying computer science and physics. He has used Nix for cross compiling to embedded systems in space, creating dev environments for CTFs, and making his install of macOS as indistinguishable from GNU/Linux as possible.
Craig Jackson is a DevOps Engineer at NetActuate, a global infrastructure and networking services provider. He's been a BSD/Linux Hobbyist since his teens, and was an orthopedic surgical sales consultant for 15 years. Craig's passions are development, operations, and supporting NetActuate's edge networking customers. He focuses on DevOps workflows and providing flexibility and efficiency for customer deployments.
Anirudha Jadhav is a Senior Engineering Manager at Amazon Web Services, where he leads observability and platform development for the OpenSearch project—the open-source, Apache 2.0-licensed search and analytics suite used by organizations worldwide. His team drives the evolution of OpenSearch Dashboards, the project’s visualization and analytics platform, and is at the forefront of building agent observability capabilities that give engineering teams deep visibility into the behavior, performance, and reliability of AI agents and autonomous systems in production.
Under Anirudha’s leadership, OpenSearch’s observability stack has grown to encompass trace analytics, metrics federation with Prometheus and OpenTelemetry, log analytics with query-time field extraction, and integrated alerting—providing a unified, open-source alternative for full-stack and agent observability. His work on query infrastructure, including SQL and Piped Processing Language (PPL), has made OpenSearch a powerful platform for investigative and operational analytics at massive scale.
Anirudha brings nearly two decades of experience building search and data platforms at the highest scale. His contributions include architecting one of the largest Lucene-based search deployments in production, managing over 86 billion documents. Prior to AWS, he spent 11 years at Bloomberg LP, where he founded the company’s Search as a Service platform and served as Lead Search Architect for Bloomberg Vault, re-engineering its search stack on Solr/Lucene for a multi-data-center cloud deployment.
Anirudha holds a Master’s degree in Computer Science from New York University’s Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences. He is a passionate open-source advocate and a frequent contributor to the OpenSearch community through technical talks, blog posts, and hands-on community engagement.
Areas of Expertise
Agent observability and AI system monitoring, OpenSearch Dashboards and visualization platforms, distributed search and analytics at scale (Lucene, Solr, Elasticsearch, OpenSearch), open-source observability and telemetry (OpenTelemetry, Prometheus), query language design (SQL, PPL, DSL), enterprise data platform architecture, and large-scale data ingestion and retrieval systems.
LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/ianirudha
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.
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.
Allen Jones is the architect of Drasi and has deep expertise in building innovative solutions at high-tech startups and enterprises.
Hobbyist programmer who became an embedded and mobile security engineer for Viasat, and later a member of SNUG. Works on mobile devices for a day job, and may have read Ken Thompson's Reflections on Trusting Trust one too many times.
Elizabeth K. Joseph leads the Open Source Program Office for IBM Z (mainframes!). Previously, she spent time working on Apache Mesos, and four years as a systems engineer on the OpenStack Infrastructure team and six years on the Ubuntu Community Council and has held various roles in the Ubuntu community and is the co-author of The Official Ubuntu Book, 8th and 9th Editions. At home in San Francisco, she sits on the Board of Directors for Partimus.org, a non-profit in the Bay Area providing Linux-based computers to schools in need.
Farzan Karimi is a seasoned cybersecurity leader who has built and led offensive security programs at organizations including Google, Microsoft, Electronic Arts, and Moderna. He is a four-time Black Hat and DEFCON speaker, most recently presenting at DEFCON 2025 on Recursive Request Exploits (RRE), a new web hacking technique that garnered broad industry attention and was nominated as one of the Top Web Hacking Techniques of 2025 by PortSwigger.
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, conversational AI, 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.
Conor Kelly Gerakos is a member of and electrical team lead for FIRST Robotics Team 2404 and is in his junior year at South Pasadena High School. He is interested in electrical engineering, embedded hardware and computer architecture.
Avni Khatri is Sr. Director of Education in GitHub's Developer Relations organization, helping learners access the tools and resources they need to successfully build software products. Avni is passionate about working with learners and educators of all kind to make coding available to the next generation of developers around the globe. She also volunteers with Internet-in-a-Box.
Originally receiving a Bachelor's degree from Columbia in Computer Science, Ines Khouider has moved to the Open Source Space Foundation and is the power-house software lead behind the Open Source Proves software stack launching on 5 satellites in 2026. Ines is looking to apply her talents to green technologies, robotics, and space technologies.
In her spare time, Ines enjoys a hot cup of tea and a deep discussion on the politics of various artistic movements. She loves alpacas.
Maira Khwaja is a Service Delivery Manager and AI product innovator with over 16 years of experience driving complex technology delivery, AI-driven products, and large-scale service operations. At the Kwaai Summit at SCALE 23x, she will present “Benchmarking Open Source Vector Databases” and co-host the event, bringing a practitioner’s perspective on how to evaluate and operate open-source vector databases in real-world AI systems.
At RealNetworks, Maira leads global service delivery for KONTXT Messaging and Voice Solutions, where she has successfully managed high-availability deployments, demanding SLAs, and cross-functional teams spanning engineering, product, and customer success. Previously, as a Lead Software Test Engineer, she built and scaled automation frameworks and quality practices that improved release reliability and accelerated product delivery across multiple product lines.
Maira also serves as a Board Officer and AI Product Innovation Lead at Kwaai, helping shape the roadmap for an open-source Personal AI Operating System focused on user empowerment and ethical, transparent AI. In that role, she has contributed to AI product strategy, process improvement, and community-led initiatives that resist concentration of power in closed platforms while making advanced AI capabilities accessible to more people.
Her background in software quality, AI product strategy, and service reliability gives her a systems view of how infrastructure choices—like vector databases—affect performance, trust, and user experience in AI-native applications.
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.
Dustin Kirkland is the SVP of Engineering at Chainguard, the safe source for open source. Spanning 25 years as an engineer, product manager, SVP of Engineering, VP of Product, CTO, and CPO, Dustin has launched successful hardware, software, and services products at some of the world’s largest companies (IBM, Google, Goldman Sachs), as well as leading growth startups (Canonical/Ubuntu, Gazzang, Apex Fintech, Chainguard). Open source software, cloud security, IoT devices, and financial services technology are among his passions and expertise. Dustin enjoys advising startups on strategy, and well-tuned product and engineering methodologies.
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.
Raffi Krikorian is Chief Technology Officer at Mozilla, where he leads the organization's strategy to increase adoption and usage of open source AI throughout the world. He has spent his career scaling systems that serve millions - as Vice President of Platform Engineering at Twitter, as Director of Uber's self-driving car program, as the first CTO of the Democratic National Committee, and as CTO of Emerson Collective, where he focused on technology for social good. Raffi also created Technically Optimistic, a podcast exploring technology's impact on society that reached #2 on Apple's tech charts. His work centers on a core belief: that powerful AI tools should be transparent, open, and owned by the people who use them - not rented from corporations.
Anjana is an accomplished Senior Technical Executive with over 18 years of distinguished experience in customer-facing roles, driving innovation through DevOps, cloud solutions, and cutting-edge technology across diverse industries and global markets. Currently serving as an AWS Enterprise Support Lead & Senior Technical Account Manager at Amazon Web Services since July 2021, Anjana has established herself as a trusted cloud strategist and technical advisor, specializing in AI/ML, security, and infrastructure optimization.
Her technical expertise is validated through an impressive portfolio of AWS certifications, including AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Professional, AWS Certified Security – Specialty, and AWS Certified Machine Learning – Specialty, among others. This deep technical foundation enables her to architect comprehensive cloud solutions that balance innovation, security, cost optimization, and operational excellence.
Beyond her technical contributions, Anjana is a dedicated champion for diversity and inclusion in technology. As an active supporter of Women in Tech and an engaged member of Women in Cybersecurity(WiCys) and Grace Hopper communities, she works tirelessly to create pathways for underrepresented groups in the technology sector. Her commitment to knowledge sharing is demonstrated through her role as a speaker and facilitator at numerous AWS GameDays and AWS Jam events, both internally at AWS and at external conferences, where she creates engaging, hands-on learning experiences that empower technical teams to build confidence and expertise in cloud technologies.
Daniel Krol is a software developer living in New Hampshire. He is currently working on the new version of Maps for Internet-in-a-Box. In his free time enjoys juggling and editing OpenStreetMap.
Bradley M. Kühn is the Policy Fellow & Hacker-in-Residence at Software Freedom Conservancy (SFC), and co-Editor-in-Chief of copyleft-next. Kühn began volunteering in the software freedom movement in 1992 — as an early adopter of Linux and contributor to many FOSS projects — including Perl. As Free Software Foundation (FSF)'s Executive Director from 2001-2005, Kühn led FSF’s GPL enforcement and invented the Affero GPL. Kühn was SFC’s primary volunteer from 2006–2010 and its first staffer in 2011. At SFC, Kühn’s work focuses on enforcement of copyleft and the GPL agreements, FOSS licensing policy and FOSS non-profit infrastructure. Kühn holds a summa cum laude B.S. in Computer Science from Loyola University in Maryland and an M.S. in Computer Science from University of Cincinnati. Kühn received the 2012 Open Source Award and the 2021 Award for the Advancement of Free Software — both in recognition for his lifelong policy work on copyleft licensing and its enforcement.
Follow @bkühn on the Fediverse (via Mastodon).
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.
Balaji Lakshmanan is Co-Founder and Chief Technology Officer at Studiobit.io and a senior technology advisor to Kwaai, where he helps design and build open, personal AI systems and distributed computing architectures for privacy-preserving, human-centered assistants. With more than 20 years of experience in video, cloud, and AI, he has earned multiple patents for cloud switch architectures and ultra–low-latency audio/video systems, and has led the creation of secure, scalable voice and video delivery platforms used at enterprise scale.
At Kwaai, Lakshmanan has been instrumental in prototyping Personal AI capabilities, including conversational agents such as Lumi, custom NLP assistants for educators and creators, and KwaaiNet, a distributed compute layer with OpenAI-compatible APIs and integrations into tools like OpenWebUI and n8n for agentic workflow automation. A self-described AI visionary and “multimedia maverick,” he focuses on turning emerging technologies into practical, future-proof architectures that give individuals more control over their data and digital experiences.
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.
Tina Lekshmi Kanth is a Software Engineer II at Microsoft in Charlotte, NC, specializing in data engineering, machine learning, and big data analytics.
At Microsoft, Tina has architected real-time financial event processing systems that achieved 100X processing speed improvements for near real-time revenue reporting using Azure-based Spark Streaming and Kubernetes microservices. She developed AI automation solutions that improved SRE efficiency by 40% and led the design and implementation of business continuity and disaster recovery systems for financial data pipelines.
Tina holds a Master's degree in Data Science (Computer Science and Mathematics) from Illinois Institute of Technology and a Bachelor's degree in Electrical & Electronics Engineering from College of Engineering Perumon, Kerala, India. Her technical expertise includes Scala, Python, SQL, C#, Apache Spark, Azure, Kubernetes, and various machine learning frameworks.
Previously, she worked as a Data Engineer at Red Ventures, where she designed scalable ETL pipelines that contributed to a 20% revenue increase through improved marketing analytics. She also served as a Data Scientist at Wolters Kluwer Legal, developing NLP-based search optimization systems for legal content, and worked as a Marketing Data Intern at Maestro Health, building predictive lead scoring models with 78% accuracy.
Her earlier experience includes roles as a Warranty Data Analyst at Qfab in Qatar and a Data Warehousing Programmer Analyst at Cognizant Technology Solutions, where she achieved 30% cost reductions through data-driven process improvements.
Tina led the creation of the "Responsible AI in Microsoft Sovereign Clouds" white paper and has developed various projects, including real-time traffic data processing systems, multilabel classification models achieving 89% accuracy, and CNN-based image recognition systems with 91.7% accuracy.
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.
Burke has been working on developer tools for most of his 14 years at Shopify, and has been the driving force of three and a half out of five generations of developer tooling at the company, if you don't count the markdown file that he was handed when he joined.
Stephanie Lieggi is executive director for the Center for Research in Open Source Software (CROSS) and the UC Santa Cruz Open Source Program Office (OSPO). In her current role, she supports the work of academic-based open source projects and enables a sustainable contributor base through the establishment of hands-on mentorship programs. Stephanie promotes the use of open source in academic settings as well as increasing diversity and inclusion in open source ecosystems.
John is a software engineering lead at Apple for the Apple Container open source project.
You can find him on GitHub @jglogan
I am focused on creating content for the RHEL community.
Over a Decade in IT, cybersecurity advocate, conference organizer, and open-source enthusiast.
Hobbies include homelabs, podcasting and 3D Printing.
Federico Lucifredi is the Product Management Director for Ceph Storage at IBM and Red Hat and a co-author of O'Reilly's "Peccary Book" on AWS System Administration. Previously, he was the Ubuntu Server product manager at Canonical, where he oversaw a broad portfolio and the rise of Ubuntu Server to the rank of most popular OS on Amazon AWS. A software engineer-turned-manager at the Novell corporation, he was part of the SUSE Linux team, overseeing the update lifecycle and delivery stack of a $150 million maintenance business. A CIO and a network software architect at advanced technology and embedded Linux startups, Federico was also a lecturer for over 200 students in Boston University's graduate and undergraduate programs, and simultaneously a consultant for MIT implementing fluid-dynamics simulations in Java.
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.
Amy Marrich is a Principal Technical Marketing Manager at Red Hat. She currently serves as the Chair of the CentOS Project, Vice Chair of the Open Infrastructure Foundation (OpenInfra) Board of Directors, and is on the Community Health Analytics in Open Source Software (CHAOSS) projects governing board. In addition, she serves on the Red Hat OpenStack technical committee, is Chair of the OpenInfra Diversity and Inclusion Working Group, contributes to several OpenStack projects, and previously served as the Chair of the OpenStack User Committee.
Nathan is an engineering manager at Grafana Labs and is based out of beautiful Monterey, California.
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.
Shaun is the CentOS Community Architect at Red Hat. He's an occasional developer and tech writer. He's worked on documentation and documentation systems in a number of open source communities, most notably as part of GNOME for the last two decades.
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.
Paul is an SRE and HPC automation engineer by day and wears his physicist hat by night to solve physics and engineering problems on computing systems using FOSS software. Motivated by a passion to bridge gaps between science, engineering, and computing, Paul stands on the proverbial shoulders of giants to demonstrate that difficult, time-consuming calculations can be codified to scale out and return desired results in a timely manner, and enjoys sharing that learning process with others.
Ashley Mensah is a Developer Relations engineer at NetBird, working on open source networking and developer experience. An avid homelabber, He runs his entire lab on NixOS and is passionate about applying declarative principles to real-world infrastructure problems, from mesh networking to reproducible systems and security.
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.
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.
Since February, Justin Miller has joined LanceDB and is working on their feature engineering system Geneva.
As a Principal Platform Engineer at ZEFR, Justin 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.
Noel Miller is a Dedicated Operations TAM at Red Hat, and Maintainer at Bazzite.
He has been working in IT for a little over 10 years, with most of his career being focused on Small and Medium Size businesses. For his day job, he works at Red Hat as a Dedicated Operations TAM with a focus on RHEL.
Bazzite is an open source gaming image OS that works on all gaming hardware - HTPCs, desktops, laptops, and over 70 models of handhelds.
Outside of his IT endeavors, he enjoys spending time with his family, playing video games, listening to heavy metal music, and playing guitar.
For more information, please visit: https://noelmiller.dev/pages/about
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 VP of Application Development at Pennymac, a major mortgage lender and servicer. I specialize in the practical application of AI to improve the developer experience and reduce the cycle time between ideation and implementation.
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.
Kat Morgan is a Tech Lead in Cisco's Product Innovation group, where she specializes in cloud native infrastructure and platform engineering. She brings over a decade of experience building and operating Kubernetes platforms at scale from homelab experiments to hyperscale enterprise deployments across regulated industries, airgapped environments, even extreme edge cases including submarine deployments and contributions to orbital satellite projects.
Prior to Cisco, Kat held engineering and advocacy roles at Pulumi, Kong, Red Hat, Canonical, and Dell, developing deep intuition and insight into the full stack including bare metal, virtualization, container orchestration, and developer tooling. She founded and maintains ContainerCraft.io and BrainCraft.io, open source communities dedicated to cloud practitioners and DevOps engineers.
Her Linux journey began in the early 2000s with a Red Hat book discovered at her local library, a spark that launched her career dedicated to making opensource infrastructure accessible and helping others level up.
Osama Munir is a transformational Senior Technical Executive with over 17 years of distinguished experience driving exponential growth through innovative end-to-end IT and cloud solutions across diverse industries and global markets. Currently serving as a Senior Technical Account Manager at Amazon Web Services since January 2022, Osama has established himself as a trusted cloud and generative AI strategist. His technical prowess is validated through an impressive portfolio of 11 AWS certifications, including AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Professional, Gen AI Professional Developer, and complemented by specialized certifications in Kubernetes (CKAD), Red Hat OpenShift Administration, and Cybersecurity.
Throughout his tenure at AWS, Osama has spearheaded complex cloud transformation initiatives for enterprise customers, leading one of AWS's biggest customer accounts while consistently driving impact and unlocking new opportunities. His strategic approach combines deep technical expertise with exceptional relationship-building skills, enabling him to architect cloud solutions focused on cost optimization, security, resilience, and innovation. As a FinOps expert and data storyteller, he has enabled significant customer savings through immersion days, hackathons, and training workshops that accelerate adoption of AWS services including Observability, Generative AI, and Cloud FinOps.
Ahmed N. is a seasoned Technical Account Manager at Amazon Web Services (AWS), serving as a strategic technical advisor to enterprise Healthcare customers undergoing complex cloud transformation initiatives. His deep technical expertise is validated through prestigious industry certifications, including AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Professional, AWS Certified Security – Specialty, and Project Management Professional (PMP) certification.
Leveraging his extensive background in networking and telecommunications, Ahmed excels at architecting innovative cloud solutions and implementing machine learning technologies to address mission-critical infrastructure challenges. He combines technical acumen with strategic thinking to deliver scalable, secure solutions that drive business transformation and operational excellence for enterprise customers.
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.
Dave Neary has been active in free and open source communities for more than 20 years. In that time, he has worked on projects relating to infrastructure management, cloud computing, and the telecommunications industry. He currently leads the Developer Relations team at Ampere Computing, promoting the adoption of Arm64 Cloud-Native Processors.
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.
Jussi Nummelin is a tech veteran with 20 or so years in IT and software. Currently a Senior Principal Engineer at Mirantis, he leads the k0s Kubernetes distro development efforts. Jussi embraced containers early, deploying Docker 0.6 to production. Since 2017, he's been working in and around Kubernetes. Being hardheaded he still takes joy from building tools and solutions to bring cloud-native to masses. Beyond tech, he finds peace as an avid fisherman.
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.
Jowan Österlund is a Swedish biotech entrepreneur and body-hacker best known as the founder and former CEO of Biohax International, a company that has implanted thousands of people with RFID microchips to enable seamless interaction with the digital world. A former professional body piercer, he combined his expertise in sterile procedures and body modification with emerging electronics to become one of the world’s leading safe biochip installers, performing “chipping” sessions for companies, commuters, and tech hubs across Sweden.
As Co-Founder and President of MYRA, based in Sweden, Österlund continues to explore circular, resilient biotech solutions that bring the “internet of us” vision closer to reality by integrating identity, access, and everyday services into the human body in controlled, privacy-aware ways. His work has featured in global media, TEDx talks, and corporate deployments where implanted chips replace keys, cards, and tickets, fueling debates on convenience, ethics, and the future of human–technology integration.
Ray is a Community Manager at PingCAP where he is helping to grow the TiDB community. Prior to PingCAP, Ray managed open source communities at Cube Dev, GitLab and the Linux Foundation. Ray has been a speaker at open source conferences such as All Things Open, Community Leadership Summit, FOSDEM, GitLab Commit, Open Source Summit, and SCaLE.
Ray lives in Sunnyvale, CA with his wife and daughter and all three are loyal season ticket holders of the Bay FC women's soccer team.
Amy Parker is a researcher and Ph.D. student at the University of California, Irvine. Her research focuses on distributed and embedded systems as well as computer architecture, with additional interests in networking, cybersecurity, and censorship evasion. She has previously presented papers on translation pipeline design for system emulators like QEMU and on the applicability of full-packet encryption models to modern censorship evasion.
Rajan Patel is the Product Manager of Livepatch and Landscape, and focuses on systems management and security at scale. In his spare time, Rajan tinkers with FreePBX and Asterisk on public clouds.
Stormy Peters is Head of Open Source Strategy & Marketing at AWS. Throughout her career, Stormy has been passionate about open source software and has worked to educate companies and communities on how open source software is changing the software industry.
Previously, she was VP of Communities at GitHub where she led the teams responsible for enabling the online creators and open source communities on GitHub, including GitHub’s community product efforts, developer relations, education, and other strategic programs. Prior to GitHub, Stormy was the Director of the Open Source Programs Office at Microsoft, enabling 30,000+ developers to consume and contribute to open source effectively. She’s also held leadership positions working with the open source community at Mozilla, Red Hat, OpenLogic and Hewlett-Packard, as well as non profit organizations such as serving as a board member of the Linux Foundation, Executive Director of the GNOME Foundation and Kids on Computers.
Stormy graduated from Rice University with a B.A. in Computer Science. She lives in Northern Colorado with her family. In her free time, she likes to run with her dog, challenge herself with high intensity interval workouts, give historical walking tours of the New Orleans French Quarter, and read lots of sci-fi.
Christophe has been working with PostgreSQL since 1997. He is the CEO of PostgreSQL Experts, Inc.
Karol Piekarski is a Lead DevSecOps Engineer working in Financial Services, where he oversees the security posture of complex enterprise systems. Joining via the acquisition of insurtech startup Gabi in 2021, Karol played a key technical role in the transition, combining startup agility with enterprise rigor.
Recognized as a Wiz MVP for his contributions to the cloud security community and an active contributor to the Cloud Security Alliance (CSA), Karol holds comprehensive credentials including CCSP, CKA, and AWS Security & DevOps Professional. His daily focus spans the full defensive stack, from CSPM, KSPM, and CIEM to the cutting edge of CDR and AISPM. Recently, Karol has focused on adapting these mature DevSecOps methodologies to the emerging "wild west" of Generative AI, researching how to secure open-source LLMs against injection and extraction attacks.
Hello! My name is Jack Pierse and I I am a high school senior at Redondo Union High School. I’m an aspiring mechanical engineer, but have a strong passion for computer science and electronic systems. I’m additionally interested in both mathematics and physics, which provide as a foundation for my journey of engineering.
I am a forensic analyst by trade and a writer and lifelong gamer in my free time. I enjoy learning how to leverage open-source tools to run the technological processes that underlie my life. I am a big fan of Android and Linux because they offer me the flexibility to run things any way I want with very little oversight from big corporations. FOSS is a great deal!
When I'm not geeking out over computers and tech, you can find me reading philosophy, history and great literature from all ages or writing something. I have a Substack page dedicated to philosophy and technology where you can read about the books I enjoy, the tech I play with and some of the cool forensic projects I do.
Kevin Purdy is a reporter, writer, speaker, and sourdough baker from Washington, D.C. He has written about technology and productivity for Lifehacker, Fast Company, and Ars Technica. He reviewed products—including standing desks, pens, and mattresses—for Wirecutter. He was a repair and clean energy raconteur for iFixit and Carbon Switch. At Tailscale, he writes and edits blogs, and asks questions about DNS.
Kyle is the creator of DockerSlim (aka MinToolkit/SlimToolkit), a popular tool to minify, inspect, build, run and debug containers. He's the founder/CEO of AutonomousLayer (aka AutonomousPlane) and he's also the founder/CTO of Slim.AI. He's building an AI agent to automatically fix vulnerabilities in the cloud native applications. Kyle has been building applications and platforms using many different programming languages since the early days of cloud computing. His "50 Shades of Go" is still one of the popular guides for Go gotchas for many new developers learning the language. Kyle been involved in security for more than two decades wearing many different hats as a builder, breaker and defender.
As Distributed Systems Lead at Kwaai, Brian focuses on building decentralized AI training and inference systems with an emphasis on privacy, security, and performance. Previously, he has held key roles at companies and systems integrators architecting cloud-native solutions, automation frameworks, and AI-driven platforms, including a provably accurate medical technology infrastructure. A passionate advocate for open-source technology, Brian co-founded the San Fernando Valley Linux User Group (SFVLUG), fostering a community of engineers, developers, and technology leaders.
Ramiz Rahman is the Director of CodeDay Labs, CodeDay Labs is a program that helps students and early-career developers gain real-world experience by contributing to open-source projects under the guidance of industry mentors. Prior to joining CodeDay Labs, Ramiz served as the Head of Product at the ed-tech company Edudigm, where he played a pivotal role in launching their new startup, STEMPowered. STEMPowered focuses on bringing hands-on learning in Robotics and AI to high school and college students.
In his free time, Ramiz enjoys reading about philosophy and geopolitics, tinkering with electronics, taking photographs, playing ukulele.
Nish is a Production Engineer at Meta in the Cloud Foundation team. The scope of his team's work spans running compute workloads in the Cloud for many applications running at Meta. Outside work Nish is also a photographer (https://www.nish.photo). At SCaLE, Nish takes professional headsots at the Open Source Career Day.
Venky Raju is Field CTO at ColorTokens, advising CISOs and business leaders on resilient, Zero Trust strategies to stay ahead of AI-enabled cyber threats. With a career spanning embedded systems, cloud-native platforms, and global networks, he brings a unique lens to securing complex environments. Previously, Venky was a founding member of Samsung Knox, the groundbreaking Android security platform protecting billions of devices. He is a named inventor with multiple patents and holds CISSP and CCSP certifications. He is also passionate about giving back through hackerspaces and maker communities.
Matt runs Emarketed, a digital agency he’s led for 25+ years, and is building Scrub AI. He organizes a monthly AI Builders meetup in LA and is a member of OWASP LA and AI LA. He focuses on practical, revenue‑minded AI workflows that real teams can actually use.
Kyle Rankin is a security and infrastructure expert with over two decades of professional Linux experience. He is the author of How To Write A Tech Book, The Best of Hack and /: Linux Admin Crash Course, Linux Hardening in Hostile Networks, DevOps Troubleshooting, The Official Ubuntu Server Book, Third Edition, Knoppix Hacks, 2nd Edition, and Ubuntu Hacks, among other books. Rankin was an award-winning columnist and tech editor for Linux Journal, and speaks frequently on Free and Open Source software including at SCALE, FOSDEM, O’Reilly Security Conference, Linux Fest NorthWest, OpenWest, BSidesLV, CactusCon, OSCON, Linux World Expo, and Penguicon.
Alex is a freelance data engineer who helps his clients build, manage, and maintain their data infrastructure. He's spent over a decade building high-performance, robust data management and processing systems. As an early member of a couple fast-growing startups, he’s worn a lot of different hats, serving at various times as an individual contributor, tech lead, manager, and executive. He holds a Ph.D. in Computer Science and Engineering from UC San Diego, where his research focused on efficient large-scale data processing.
Reza Rassool is the Founder of Kwaai.ai, driving AI democratization through a Personal AI Operating System.
Formerly CTO at RealNetworks, he led their pivot to AI leadership. With a track record of >$1Bn exits, Reza is an award-winning innovator with 27 US patents. His extensive expertise spans computer vision, edge AI, and founding roles at Zya and Widevine Technologies (acquired by Google), and contributions to the development of Lightworks NLE, a Technical OSCAR/EMMY-winning product.
Drummond has spent over three decades in Internet identity, security, privacy, and trust infrastructure. He is currently leading the First Person Project. From 2021 to 2025, he was Director of Trust Services at Gen (formerly Avast) after their acquisition of Evernym, where he was Chief Trust Officer. He is co-author of the book, Self-Sovereign Identity (Manning Publications, 2021), and co-editor of the W3C Decentralized Identifiers (DID) 1.0 specification. He currently serves as Governance Lead for the Ayra Association. He is founding board member of the OpenWallet Foundation and Trust Over IP (ToIP), where he serves as co-chair of the Technology Stack Working Group, the Concepts and Terminology Working Group, and the Decentralized Trust Graph Working Group. In 2002 he received the Digital Identity Pioneer Award from Digital ID World, and in 2013 he was cited as an OASIS Distinguished Contributor.
Henry Reed is a Cyber Engineer at Zetier, Inc. where he reverse engineers embedded systems. Previously, Reed was a Project Leader at The Aerospace Corporation, where he led several vulnerability research projects and supported programs across the space enterprise, including GPS IIIF. Henry's technical interests revolve around cryptologics and cryptosystems; embedded systems; computer networking; and bulk data analysis. In his free time, Henry works on various cryptography and embedded systems projects.
Davis is an embedded Linux engineer with more than 15 years of experience designing and delivering consumer electronics, including home security systems, in vehicle electronics, and electric vehicle charging infrastructure. He has worked across the entire product lifecycle, transforming early ideas into dependable, production ready systems built to last. A dedicated advocate for Linux and open source software, Davis values engineering that is transparent, resilient, and purpose driven. Based in Fremont, California and originally from New York City, he enjoys pineapple pizza and finding opportunities to explore the world whenever the road, or trail, allows.
