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.
Low level programmer, OS/Zig/Linux dev, Nixpkgs & LLVM committer. Likes to watch 大空スバル (Subaru Oozora).
Hrittik is currently Platform Advocate at Loft Labs and a CNCF Ambassador, who has previously worked at various startups helping the scale their content efforts. He loves diving deep into distributed systems and creating articles on them and has spoken at conferences such as Azure Cloud Summit, UbuCon Asia and Kubernetes Community Days - Lagos and Chennai among others! His best days are when he finds ways to create impact in the communities he’s a part of either by code, content, or mentorship!
Mark Russinovich works at Microsoft in the Microsoft Azure product team as Chief Technology Officer.
Guinevere Saenger started out her professional life as a classical pianist, and after a few adventures transitioned to a second career in tech. She found her happy place in the world of SRE/platform engineering and developer tooling, and today, she works on open source cloud provider plugins for Pulumi.
Guinevere has been active in the Kubernetes community, where she has created documentation and workshops for new contributors, and served as Release Lead for the 1.17 Kubernetes release.
She is @guincodes on Bluesky, @guineveresaenger on GitHub, and can be found on the Kubernetes and Pulumi community slacks as well.
A resident of Seattle, Guinevere enjoys music, food, and the outdoors.
As a Community Architect at Red Hat, Laura Santamaria bridges engineering disciplines by breaking down complex systems to foster open-source collaboration. She serves as a global core member for DevOpsDays, a steering committee member for Cloud Native Rejekts, and a long-standing program committee member for Open Source Summit. In addition, she organizes DevOpsDays Austin, PyTexas, and Cloud Austin to serve the Austin community. With a background in technical education, she spent years teaching Python for Women Who Code ATX, helping to lower the barrier to entry for engineering disciplines. While she is a veteran podcaster (currently heard on Technically Leadership from Packet Pushers and Cloud Native Compass with David Flanagan (rawkode) and previously on things like Quick Bites of Cloud Engineering), her primary focus remains building sustainable, contributor-driven ecosystems. Outside of tech, Laura runs, reads, and watches clouds—the real kind.
David founded App Dev for All in 2023 to help bridge the divide between communities that have access to digital education materials and those that do not. App Dev for All’s first product is Code on the Go, is a FOSS, offline-first IDE that runs on low-end Android phones, designed to enable the two billion people who lack a laptop, lack reliable internet access, or live under repressive regimes to develop the apps they need. Previously, David was Vice President at BNY Mellon and held senior engineering roles at companies including LinkedIn, Zynga, Disney Interactive, and Oracle. He developed a love of teaching programming at Hewlett-Packard, where he designed and led the Software Job Skills program, which retrained hardware engineers and technicians to become programmers.
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.
Doc Searls is the former editor-in-chief of Linux Journal, where he was on the masthead for 24 years. During that time he did much to establish open source as a Thing, earning a Google-O'Reilly Open Source prize for Best Communicator in 2005. In 2006 he became a fellow with Harvard's Berkman Klein Center and started ProjectVRM, which is all about increasing personal agency in networked markets, and which informed his 2012 book The Intention Economy: When Customers Take Charge. He also co-authored The Cluetrain Manifesto in 1999, which has been a hot topic ever since. And he sees personal AI as required approach to making many long-held dreams of cyber-utopians such as himself come true.
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.
Tanisha is an AI Developer Advocate specializing in production multi-agent systems. Also a private pilot. Both pursuits taught her the same lesson: know when to trust automation and when human judgment matters most.
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.
Leonard coached various companies on automating builds and plumbing deployment pipelines. All things configuration as code and cloud infrastructure are his main interests these days. He originally hails from Kuching, Malaysia, and currently lives in the outskirts of Oslo, Norway. He claims that he enjoys the picturesque nature and unpredictable weather, and try to prove it by kayaking in the fjords. Furthermore, he loves to immerse himself with diving in the tropics.
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.
Maya is a Product Manager at Microsoft who is passionate about using data to drive product decisions. She has PM experience in Financial Services and Ed-Tech, and is excited to now work on the cloud and open source. Maya holds a Bachelor's degree in Biomedical Engineering and an MBA, both from the University of Virginia. She is a die hard UVA sports fan and loves to try new restaurants and play tennis in her free time.
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 the DBeaver Community Manager. He is a fan of open-source software and databases. 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.
Diana is a Developer Experience Engineer at VictoriaMetrics. She has worked as a Senior Site Reliability Engineer focused on Observability. She is an active member of the OpenTelemetry CNCF open source project, co-organizer of Cloud Native Days Romania, co-lead of neurodiversity working group (part of CNCF initiative merge-forward) and supports underrepresented groups in tech.
Artemis Tosini has been an avid user of nix since 2018. She is a nixpkgs committer who loves working with the internals of every system she comes across.
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.
Tae U. is a Technical Account Manager at Amazon Web Services (AWS) serving as a strategic technical advisor to enterprise customers undergoing complex cloud transformation initiatives. His technical expertise is validated through industry certifications, including AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Professional and AWS Certified DevOps Engineer – Professional.
With experience supporting multiple enterprise-sized organizations, Tae excels at driving successful cloud adoption strategies across diverse business environments. He combines technical knowledge with collaboration skills to deliver solutions focused on operational excellence, reliability, performance efficiency, and cost optimization —helping enterprise customers transform their businesses.
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.
Just another engineer with a love for the STEM fields. Work experience at Qualcomm and TP-Link. Education background in physics and computer science.
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.
Nate Willis is a typeface designer and consultant who has been an active member of the free-software community for longer than he cares to remember. He currently develops open-source fonts, works on type-related free-software projects, and advocates for open standards in font development and publishing. At least, by day. By night, he works with the libre graphics community and helps organize Texas Linux Fest, a community open-source event in Texas.
In years past, he wrote and edited news about Linux, free software, and open source. Whatever time is left he spends hacking around in automotive computing.
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.
Michael Young has enjoyed working in the technology space for 25+ years. He works for CIQ as a Principal Systems Engineer on the Release All the Things team where he contributes his experience as a systems administrator, RPM packager, IT and all around support of Linux based operating systems. He has contributed over the years to different open source projects as a community developer and packager. Michael is a member of the Rocky Linux Software Foundation (RESF) and Rocky Linux project. He is a member of the Release Engineering Team.
Michael loves to read, investigate, learn anything that has to do with technology that can be used for improving operations and infrastructure.
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.
