Jeff LaCoursiere is the CTO of StratusTalk, a whitelbel hosted PBX platform offering services in the US and Caribbean. Jeff has 30+ years of telecom experience, mostly contracting to large tier one companies for core network architecture. StratusTalk started as a side project in the US Virgin Islands, and has grown over twenty years to service thousands of phones for a large number of whitelabel resellers. Jeff has dabbled in AI since long before LLMs, having taken a stab at beating the dog track in the early naughts with a custom backprop algorithm. With the incredible tools available today, expect a flood of agent implementations and innovations from our team.
osh is a seasoned software developer with over a decade of experience, specializing in a broad range of topics including operations, observability, agile methodologies, and accessibility. His passion for technology is matched by his enthusiasm for sharing knowledge through public speaking. Currently, Josh serves as a Developer Advocate for Altinity, where he creates educational content on ClickHouse and OpenTelemetry.
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.
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.
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.
Slava holds a general-level license for Amateur Radio. When away from Meshtastic and HF, he manages DevOps, SRE, and Cloud teams - or provides consulting services in these fields. He has two orange cats and by now is probably one himself. Either get him a beer or a job - he’s currently unemployed.
Patrick Masson joined The Apereo Foundation as Executive Director in 2023. Before Apereo, Patrick served as General Manager for the Open Source Initiative after working within higher education IT for over twenty years, including roles as CIO within the State University of New York and CTO at the University of Massachusetts' Office of the President. Before these roles, Patrick was the Director of Technology at the SUNY Learning Network and the UCLA Media Lab.
Patrick is an adjunct instructor with SUNY Albany's College of Computing and Information and speaks frequently on topics related to open source software, open education, and educational technology. Patrick is the co-founder of EDUCAUSE's "Openness" Constituency Group and served on his local school board from 2014 to 2018.
Scott McAllister is a Principal Developer Advocate for vCluster. He has been building software in several industries for over a decade. Now, he's helping others learn about various web technologies and programming principles. When he's not coding, writing, or speaking, he enjoys long walks with his wife, skipping rocks with his kids, and is happy whenever Real Salt Lake, Seattle Sounders FC, Manchester City, St. Louis Cardinals, Seattle Mariners, Chicago Bulls, Seattle Storm, Seattle Seahawks, Seattle Reign FC, Seattle Kraken, Barcelona, Fiorentina, Borussia Dortmund or Mainz 05 can manage a win.
Author of the book "Getting Started with Grafana", Ronald McCollam is a geek of all trades with experience ranging from full stack development to IT operations to management and sales. He has a strong background in open source software, starting when a stack of 3.5" Slackware floppies was the easy way to install Linux. He's managed IT operations in datacenters from back when the "cloud" was new and scary, built and run an OS certification program for hardware running Linux, and spent entirely too long thinking about observability. He's also a Certified Irish Whisky Taster.
Jeremy is a seasoned DevRel & DevEx leader, an international speaker, and is currently the Director of DevRel at OneStream Software, previously at CircleCI, Solace, Auth0, and XDA. With almost 30 years in Tech, covering just about every functional area, including support, system and database administration, application and web development, project management, program management, and systems analysis, Jeremy is active in the DevRel and DevOps communities, a co-creator of DevOpsPartyGames.com, and organizer for DevOpsDays Kansas City. A lover of all things coffee, community, open source, and tech, he is also house-broken, and (generally) plays well with others.
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.
Nick Meyer studied physics and computer science at Caltech, and is currently a Staff Software Engineer on the Platform Engineering team at Academia.edu. A major focus during his tenure at Academia.edu has been streamlining and modernizing the data layer, in particular projects around operations of Academia.edu's PostgreSQL clusters, including upgrades, partitioning, and backup tooling.
Jay Miller is a Staff Product Advocate at Aiven based out of Atlanta, GA.
Jay is also the Founder of Black Python Devs, a non-profit designed to help make the Python Community more accessible to Black and other racially diverse people.
Justin Miller lives in Los Angeles with his wife Megan and their dog Eddie. In his free time, he enjoys photography and learning about machine learning.
As a Principal Platform Engineer at ZEFR, Justin has introduced tools like Ray, developed data pipelines integrating NLP and CV embeddings with Qdrant and Snowflake, and implemented cost-saving measures that reduced expenses by reducing resource utilization. He also modernized infrastructure, transitioning services to Kubernetes and streamlining deployments using GitHub Actions and ArgoCD.
With prior roles at GoSpotCheck, ProtectWise, and eHarmony, Justin has extensive experience building scalable systems with Scala, Java, and Python. His projects include Kafka stream processors, Spark and Snowflake data warehouses, and media retrieval/storage services. He has extensive experience mentoring engineers across all levels to strengthen team capabilities.
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.
Erik Alessandro Mondrian (he/they) is a writer, visual artist, vocalist, musician, filmmaker, scholar, coder, and longtime explorer of virtual worlds. He holds a BA in French, with a minor in Spanish, from the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa; an MA in Communication, with a specialization in Mass Communication and Media Studies, from San Diego State University; and an Interschool MFA in VoiceArts & Creative Writing, with a concentration in Integrated Media, from the California Institute of the Arts. He is currently pursuing a PhD in Media Arts and Technology at the University of California, Santa Barbara, with an MS along the way.
I got my start working in the tech world back in the dot-com days, at an Idealab! startup. I have also spent time in Web2 at MySpace, and more recently in Web3 at my own startup. I have worked extensively with systems and networks, including as a Principal Architect in the CDN world. I present on various topics at a wide variety of venues, with recordings and slide decks posted online. I am currently the Principal Architect at Inertia Labs, a consulting firm dedicated to issues around serving infrastructure quality such as SRE, Observability, and Platform Architecture
Yuval Moravchick is the Application Security Research Team Leader at Cato Networks. With over 10 years of technical experience in the cybersecurity industry, Yuval has built and led security teams at various organizations. He specializes in penetration testing, security research, and the development of offensive security tools. Before joining Cato Networks, Yuval held roles at Wix.com and ControlUp, where he led an application security research team, detected 0-day bugs, and managed the SSDLC activities. Prior to joining Wix.com and ControlUp, Yuval honed his expertise at BugSec in managing a team of skilled penetration testers and also conducted red team simulations, and developed malware. Yuval holds a B.Sc. in Industrial & Management Engineering and has several industry certifications, including Offensive Security Certified Professional (OSCP) and Offensive Security Web Expert (OSWE).
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.
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.
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.
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.
Prithvi Raj is a Community Manager & Developer Advocate at Mirantis working with the Open Source Program Office team. He is a CNCF Ambassador with 5+ years of experience who helped scale a CNCF incubating project in LitmusChaos and runs the Platform & Resilience Engineering Meetup group. He is an active member at SIG Project Reviews and is currently leading the community efforts for the k0s project, k0rdent, OpenSDN, and the other OSS initiatives Mirantis is contributing to.
He is a co-organizer to KCD Bengaluru, and previously did Chaos Carnival, LitmusChaosCon and KCD Chennai.
He was previously at Harness, ChaosNative, and MayaData.
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.
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.
I've been a software engineer for over 20 years. I've worked at a variety of places from UCLA to CUNY to Spotify and now Meta, where I focus on BPF-related things. Outside of work I enjoy cooking, playing the guitar, horology, and taking long walks with my wife and dog.
Mark Russinovich works at Microsoft in the Microsoft Azure product team as Chief Technology Officer.
I am the CEO of Oxen.ai. My background is in AI/ML and have been training deep neural networks since 2013. I've worked on natural language processing and computer vision as well as early iterations of IBM Watson. Since then I have consulted in the AI/ML space building generative image/audio/video models, real time computer vision models, and large language models.
At Oxen.ai are building a GitHub-like platform for collaborating on and customizing AI models. From testing prompts to fine-tuning models on your own data, Oxen.ai lets you own your model weights and datasets end to end. It is powered by open source, scalable version control tool called "oxen" that is built for the size and scale of data needed for modern day ML workflows. From low level merkle tree optimization, to hashing, to network protocols we make collaboration on large scale data easy.
I started Oxen.ai to solve a pain point I'd felt over and over again and am excited to help others manage the data that powers their AI.
I am the Chief Engineer at Veritas Automata, currently focusing on distributed systems, Kubernetes, and cloud-native applications. I am an enthusiastic believer in blockchain technologies, supply chain, cold chain, pharma applications, and trust in automation. I actively work on innovation, following the latest technologies and integrations, including AI and controls in automation.
My current most involving activity is the development of the Hivenet platform for VA, to provide k-native options to whoever needs to get a ready-to-use toolset to solve the future.
Since the completion of a liberal arts degree in 2019, Sharif has been working deeply in the Kubernetes ecosystem, building automation to help orchestrate the management of critical infrastructure. Beginning with IBM, he worked on developing new systems in K8s to automate the provisioning of bare metal servers for customers seeking greater hardware isolation and customization. In 2022 Sharif joined EDB and began contributing at the intersection of Postgres and cloud infrastructure. Working closely with the CloudNativePG Project, he has been providing enterprise grade infrastructure and support to Postgres. Bringing robust monitoring, high availability, disaster recovery, and cloud native extensibility to users of the beloved open source database. Most recently his work has expanded to include integration of analytics and AI workloads into the Postgres ecosystem. Him and his team have been accomplishing this through custom extensions and cloud plugins, allowing for constant adaptation to the ever growing open source cloud database landscape.
Gaurav is a Senior Software Engineer with a decade of experience in JavaScript, Node.js, and TypeScript. He excels at solving complex backend challenges, designing scalable systems, and diving deep into system design and performance. Outside of work, Gaurav is a thoughtful content creator who loves to travel, write, and capture peaceful moments in the mountains. He brings a curious, detail-oriented mindset to everything he does, always seeking to understand the "why" behind the "how."
Dr. Shen has been a Clinical and Bioinformatics Scientist at Children's Hospital Los Angeles since 2015.
He began working with next-generation sequencing (NGS) in 2007 using the earliest Illumina platforms.
Dr. Shen previously held research positions at Cornell University and Harvard University and explored various applications of NGS and omics technologies. He has also built and maintained a global mitochondrial disease consortium’s web resource since 2013.
He has spent the last decade specializing in NGS-based genetic disease testing in both academic and commercial settings, including leading the bioinformatics team at a NASDAQ-listed precision medicine company in Hong Kong.
Dr. Shen is currently focused on developing generative AI-based solutions for precision medicine. Today, he will present his recent work on leveraging GenAI for genetic disease diagnosis and clinical data transformation in rare diseases.
Nick Shook is an engineer on the Open Education team at Apple, where he teaches the Swift programming language and cloud computing to developers worldwide. Outside of work, Nick volunteers his time as an attorney with local legal aid foundations and strongly believes that open source software can significantly advance access to justice.
Erin has a B.S. Electrical and Computer Engineering from the University of Colorado - Boulder, as well as a M.S. in Telecommunications:Network Security, also from CU Boulder. Throughout her time as a student, she worked at LASP (Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics), aiding projects for data collection and flight software. She has been a Network Security Engineer at Meta for the past 8 years, honing in on security design and incident response readiness as her areas of interest and pursuit. Prior to becoming an engineer, Erin's previous life was as a ballet dancer, where she had the opportunity to perform with a major regional ballet company, as well as in several international ballet festivals.
To balance screentime, Erin loves backpacking through the Western wilderness, foraging for mushrooms in the Redwoods, exploring dances of all genres, and wrangling her two feline shadows.
Postgres consultant @NetApp with several years of experience scaling, securing, and managing Postgres instances and managed Postgres adjacent services.
Tony is a Software Engineer at LinkedIn, specializing in analytical databases. He has made significant contributions to LinkedIn's data infrastructure by leading a zero-downtime Kubernetes migration for the Apache Pinot production fleet, implementing fault-tolerant shard placement strategies, and developing a database node maintenance coordinator to optimize reliability and efficiency.
Dimitris is a Staff Software Engineer with background in Backend, DevOps, Release and Platform Engineering.
He has spent most of his career designing and scaling systems that empower teams to ship software with confidence, together with specializing in CI/CD architecture.
Dimitris focuses on building tooling and frameworks that had to do with CI/CD observability, minimizing delivery workflows struggles and improving developer experience in general. He is also involved with the OpenTelemetry foundation.
Sai leads all the Postgres efforts at ClickHouse. He was the CEO and Co-founder of PeerDB, which he sold to ClickHouse. Sai is a Postgres enthusiast who's helped thousands of companies get the most out of their databases. He built Postgres tools at Microsoft and was an early Citus Data employee (acquired by Microsoft).
Michael Stahnke is a seasoned engineering executive, having spent the last 15 years working in the development and operational tooling space where also did research and was an author on Puppet’s State of DevOps Reports.
Michael is VP of Engineering at Flox and is fascinated with the intersection of software engineering and business. He was previously in senior engineering leadership at CircleCI and Puppet where he grew engineering teams by 5x or more. He has spent time building high performing teams, organizations and researching engineering effectiveness in addition to hacking on packaging and release systems. He’s been speaking at DevOps and Automation events since 2007. He founded the package repository Extra Packages for Enterprise Linux (EPEL) and wrote a book on OpenSSH in 2005.
Kevin started working in the security industry at a webhosting company, analyzing malware with Perl daemons, ensuring system security, and building hardened kernels, before moving to manage the TechOps team assigned to maximizing uptime. He then moved to a CDN and managed a small team tasked with hardware evaluation, performance regression testing, and kernel engineering.
He picked up a small 3d printer to make knick-knacks but soon grew his collection to 3 and is now designing complex parts, usually electronics enclosures.
He holds a Technician License for Amateur Radio and is working towards his General License while also exploring the uses and limits of Meshtastic.
Many years ago amongst the snow drifts and tundra of the great frozen north, Michael Starch earned his Bachelor’s degree in Computer Engineering from the University of Michigan. Leaving his beloved homeland behind, he started a career at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in sunny Pasadena. He has remained there ever since working as a developer, operator, engineer, and open source community manager on a myriad of projects and missions. He also mentors at San Marino High School on Fridays.
Over the years, Michael has dabbled in big data research, ultra scale cloud computing, high-end data systems, and software destined for space. Currently he is working on embedded frameworks applicable to NASA's small-scale spacecraft, and is applying those frameworks to robots bound for other worlds.
Michael is a member of the Apache Software foundation and has volunteered for the ScaleAV team for many years right here at the Southern California Linux Expo. Most recently, Michael is furthering the efforts of the Open Source Space Foundation.
Dave Stokes is an open-source software and database fan. He has worked at companies ranging alphabetically from the American Heart Association to Xerox, has three college degrees, enjoys riding his Honda Goldwing motorcycle, lives in North Texas, and started with UNIX in the Version 7 days. He is the author of MySQL & JSON - A Practical Programming Guide, which is available at Amazon.com
Scott is a developer with over 20 years of experience in various languages. During that time, the only constant in his development stack has been MySQL. He has a passion for sharing what he has learned on his coding journey so others may learn from his mistakes.
Shalini Sudarsan is a DevOps Engineering Leader at Kindercare Learning Companies, USA. designing reliable, secure, and cost-optimized data and AI platforms. A Forbes Technology Council Member, Fellow of IETE and Women in Engineering (WIE) Oregon section, she drives enterprise AI adoption with a governed operating model that speeds time-to-market while lowering risk and spend. Shalini’s expertise spans BI strategy, data platform architecture, MLOps, observability, and value realization. She is known for translating complex engineering into measurable business outcomes. Shalini brings deep technical rigor and business expertise in the areas of DevOps and Reliability Engineering. A committed advocate for advancing technology, Shalini regularly presents at international conferences and contributes to IEEE and ACM as a technical reviewer.
Joe Thompson's IT career is at the beginning of its fourth decade. He's been a Linux user since 1998, a professional sysadmin since 2001, and part of the cloud-native community since 2014. He's spoken at KubeCon (6x), Cloud Native Rejekts (2x), SCaLE 22x, and various local meetups, and enjoys showing how well-known tools and techniques can be applied to new platforms.
Working on database-backed, internet-based systems for over a decade, Robert is a published author and long-time open source contributor, having been recognized as a major contributor to the PostgreSQL project for his work over the years. An international speaker on databases, open source, and managing web operations at scale, he occasionally blogs at https://xzilla.net.
Phil Vacca builds teams that scale. As Director of Datavail's Global Postgres Practice, he oversees distributed engineering teams that support mission-critical PostgreSQL deployments from AI-powered applications to high-speed analytics platforms spanning multiple continents.
With nearly two decades of experience wearing every hat from developer to production data engineer to engineering leader, Phil has navigated the evolution of data infrastructure firsthand. His leadership philosophy centers on transforming reactive teams into proactive platform services through visibility, accountability, and blameless collaboration.
An active voice in the PostgreSQL community, Phil is a member of pgMKE (Milwaukee Postgres User's Group) and has shared his expertise at conferences including Postgres Open, SCaLE, LinuxFest Ohio, and the Boston Data Summit. Whether he's architecting cloud-native solutions or mentoring the next generation of data engineers, Phil remains passionate about one thing: empowering teams to harness the power of the world's most advanced open source database.
Allen Vailliencourt is Solutions Engineer at Tailscale with a long history in working with DevOps, security, public cloud, development, systems administration and more. When not helping customers solve secure access problems with Tailscale, you can find him trying to catch fish, play a new board game, or just spend time with wife, 2 fast growing boys, and the family dog.
Sebastian Val has been using and supporting Linux for over 25 years and he can frequently be found tinkering with and occasionally releasing open source Linux software. Sebastian has extensive experience in algorithm development, computer security, software design and implementation, database administration, routing and network protocols, and containerization and virtualization stacks. He holds a Masters degree in Data Science from University of Southern California (USC), and is currently at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in the Science Data System Algorithm Development and Integration group.
Gina was wrong about wanting to be an English professor, but she didn't figure that out until she'd already earned her MA. She completed a web development bootcamp, started working in tech support, and made her way to DevOps Engineer at SOCi. She loves learning, teaching, and solving complex problems - preferably with a Bash script. She occasionally emerges from the shell to go hiking, play video games, and volunteer at a local horse rescue.
Xpaul acquired his nickname in the late 1900s at dot-com incubator Idealab! while still pursuing undergraduate studies at Caltech.
The Internet was all the rage, compiling X11 frame buffer drivers on Linux for laptops was the new hotness, and the apps of the time were X11 widgets like xterminal, xcalc, and x-googly-eyes, so when it turned out there was already a "paul" on the qmail server, "xpaul" was born.
Reared by ethical hackers, he since developed, operated, and supported production platform and development infrastructure for:
* dozens of teams,
* hundreds of websites,
* tens of thousands of servers,
* millions of users per month,
* hundreds of millions of dollars of assets under management,
* billions of pageviews per month,
at companies from startups to large enterprises, including Yahoo! and Disney, Deep 6 AI, Peer Street, and now Crexi, largely using Free/Libre and Open Source software.
His enthusiasm for solving intricate software problems has yet to wane.
David is a Senior AI/ML Engineer within the Office of the CTO at NetApp, where he’s dedicated to empowering developers to build, scale, and deploy AI/ML solutions in production environments. He brings deep expertise in building and training models for applications such as NLP, vision, real-time analytics, and even classifying debilitating diseases. His mission is to help users build, train, and deploy AI models efficiently, making advanced machine learning accessible to users of all levels.
Before NetApp, he was heavily involved in the AI/ML community, specifically in conversational AI solutions and driving AI platform growth in a DevRel and pre-sales role. David frequently shares his insights at industry conferences and events, offering hands-on guidance for implementing AI/ML in cloud environments. David's prior experience includes contributing to the Kubernetes and CNCF ecosystems, working hands-on with VMware virtualization, implementing backup/recovery solutions, and developing firmware and drivers for hardware storage adapters.
Open Source Contributions: http://www.github.com/davidvonthenen
LinkedIn: https://linkedin.com/in/davidvonthenen
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@davidvonthenen
Blog: https://davidvonthenen.com
Cong Wang is the Founder and CEO at Multikernel Technologies. He is a distinguished Linux kernel developer with 17 years of experience and has been a Linux kernel maintainer of the networking traffic control subsystem since 2017. With over 1000 commits to the Linux kernel project, he possesses a deep understanding of Linux kernel and cloud computing. Prior to founding Multikernel Technologies Inc., he worked at ByteDance, Twitter and Red Hat.
Michael White is a longtime IP telephony geek and the VP of Open Source Sales at Sangoma. He leads the strategy, growth, and community stewardship for Asterisk and FreePBX, two of the world’s most widely adopted Open Source communications platforms. Michael collaborates with engineering, product teams, and a global community to drive innovation, strengthen governance, and ensure the sustainability of the Open Source ecosystem. Passionate about turning community adoption into real business success, Michael helps organizations and partners build scalable, secure, and flexible voice solutions. His mission is simple: to empower businesses to achieve more with Open Source.
John Willis has worked in the IT management for over 40 years. He is researching DevOps, DevSecOps, IT risk, modern governance, and audit compliance. Previously, he was an Evangelist at Docker Inc., VP of Solutions for Socketplane (sold to Docker) and Enstratius (sold to Dell), and VP of Training & Services at Opscode, where he formalized the training, evangelism, and professional services functions at the firm. Additionally, Willis founded Gulf Breeze Software, an award-winning IBM business partner specializing in Tivoli technology deployment. As an author, Willis has written six IBM Redbooks on enterprise systems management and four books for IT Revolution, including the DevOps Handbook. He is working on his latest book, The Operational History of Generative AI.
Mark Wong is a Software Development Engineer at EDB and is a PostgreSQL Major Contributor. He first introduced himself to the PostgreSQL community in 2003 with open source benchmarking kits and performance data. Since then, he has continued to contribute to various aspects of the community such as a Google Summer of Code mentor, Conference Organizer, Portland PostgreSQL Users Group Co-Organizer, PostgreSQL Fundraising Group Member, and a Director on the Board of the United States PostgreSQL.
Dr. Fei Wu is a lead research scientist at Los Angeles County, Chief Executive Office, Chief Information Office. She received her Ph.D. from the Luskin School of Public Affairs, UCLA. Her research expertise includes longitudinal study, spatial analysis, and predictive analytics. She has been working closely with many County Departments and County-wide initiatives, such as the poverty alleviation initiative and justice reform, supporting complex data and research needs in the realm of public services.
Hunyue Yau from HYR, LLC (http://www.hy-research.com/) is an embeded Linux consultant, software and hardware developer and enthusiast with over a quarter century involvement in Linux touching on multiple Linux architectures including x86 and ARM. Areas of interest include almost any sensor/sensing technology, machine learning/AI low power and small footprint for embedded/mobility with focus on hardware/low level Linux infrastructure. Prior works include developement of one of the first Linux appliances and Android porting to new hardware. Recent work range from bringup, integration, and debugging of ARM systems with custom, Yocto/OpenEmbedded, and Android userlands. He is the author of Learning BeagleBone and has presented at venues including ESC, ELC, SCaLe, and MontaVista Vision on numerous topics from power management, system sizze reduction, bringup techniques and mobile related technologies.
Paul Yu is a Developer Advocate at Microsoft focusing on Cloud Native technologies and the Kubernetes landscape. Paul has over two decades of industry experience working as a Software Engineer and Solution Architect. He is passionate about promoting cloud native and sustainable solutions to help organizations optimize processes and workflows.
Maya is an IT Security Analyst at ServiceNow. Her interests focus on cybersecurity and digital technology harms.
Ming Zhao is an open source developer and Developer Advocate at IBM Research, where he helps IBM leverage open technologies while building impactful tools and growing vibrant open-source communities. He’s passionate about making open tech accessible to all and ensuring developers have the tools they need to succeed in the rapidly developing AI space. Ming now leads community efforts around Docling, IBM’s fastest-growing open source project, recently welcomed into the LF AI & Data Foundation.
