LISA17 Speakers and Instructors

Derek Arnold has worked in many different parts of technology across multiple sectors as a system administrator, developer and instructor in the telecommunications, manufacturing, education and government sectors for the last 20 years.

Dr. Robert Ballance recently completed a White House Presidential Innovation Fellowship where he applied his skills with R to analyzing and delivering broadband deployment data to communities across the U.S.A. He first developed his R-programming skills while managing large-scale High-Performance Computing systems for Sandia National Laboratories. While at Sandia, he developed several R packages used internally for system analysis and reporting. Prior to joining Sandia in 2003, Dr. Ballance managed systems at the University of New Mexico High Performance Computing Center. He has consulted, taught, and developed software, including R packages, PERL applications, C and C++ compilers, programming tools, Internet software, and Unix device drivers. He is a member of USENIX, the ACM, the IEEE Computer Society, the Internet Society, and the American Association for the Advancement of Science. He was a co-founder of the Linux Clusters Institute and recently served as Secretary of the Cray Users Group. Bob received his Ph.D. in Computer Science from U.C. Berkeley in 1989.

Kevin Barron is IT Director at the Institute for Theoretical Physics, located at the University of California, Santa Barbara campus. He's been working in advanced network activities since 1983, including instigating the first dark fiber, customer-owned network in the country: CENIC connects all EDU (universities and K-12) and many government agencies in California. He was the founder and chair of the Santa Barbara Broadband Coalition, and is generally the chief trouble-maker when it comes to internet issues. He is a contributing author of two best-selling books on the Internet, and has given numerous seminars, classes, and presentations on the subject of networking.

George has been an SRE generalist at Stack Exchange for Since October, 2011. Before that he worked for a Multinational CRM company running their IVR infrastructure. He has worked on every part of the stack from Windows, to Linux, to the network infrastructure. He is currently serving his first term as a LOPSA Director. His experience working in the IT field over more than a decade has led him to love working with multiple technologies, and allowed him to experience everything from running a small network as a consultant to being part of a large team running very large scale infrastructure.

In the past he has spoken at LISA, Velocity NYC, Local user groups, and LOPSA-EAST. As well as writing about his experience working on a high volume web infrastructure on his personal blog as well as the Server Fault blog.

Chastity Blackwell took her first job as a system administrator in 1999 just to pay the bills until she could get a writing job. After 12 years working in infrastructure operations at the University of Illinois, she decided this might actually be a career, and was lured out to the Bay Area to work for a startup. She survived a yearlong stint as a manager before returning to the front lines as a Site Reliability Engineer at Yelp.

Silvia Botros is a Sr Database engineer at SendGrid, a cloud email provider for household names like Spotify, Pandora, Airbnb and Ebay. In her spare time she is busy with 3 Jr DBAs at home (start them early!).

Dash Buck began developing WordPress websites in early 2014. They give their clients the ability to confidently communicate with developers. Dash lives in Seattle with two adorable cats and one adorable human. When not coding, Dash reads, parolas en Esperanto, and yells excitedly about science facts. (Did you know that there's more water in the Earth's mantle than in all surface oceans combined!?) http://emdashbuck.com/pronouns

Leslie Carr is an Infrastructure Engineer at Clover Health and a Board Member of SFMIX.

In her past life, Leslie most recently worked at Cumulus Networks in DevOps, helping to push automation in the network world. Prior to that, she was on the production side of the world at many large websites, such as Google, Craigslist, and Wikimedia.

Leslie is a lover and user of open source and automation. She dreams of robots taking over all of our jobs one day.

Stella Cotton is a Tools engineer at Heroku and co-founder of AndConf and Fog City Ruby. She loves good abstractions and boring technology.

Matt worked on Google’s web search for over 16 years, where he created and led Google’s webspam team. In 2016, he joined the US Digital Service and quickly got hooked on its impact. He now lives in DC with his wife and two very lazy cats.

Jessica is a Technical Evangelist for Microsoft focusing on Azure, Infrastructure, cloud and OSS. Prior to joining Microsoft, she spent over a decade as an IT Consultant / Systems Administrator for various corporate and enterprise environments, catering to end users and IT professionals in the San Francisco Bay Area. Jessica holds three Microsoft Certifications (MCP, MSTS, Azure Infrastructure), 3 CompTIA certifications (A+, Network+, and Security+), 4 Apple Certifications, and is a former 4-year Microsoft Most Valuable Professional for Windows and Devices for IT. In 2013, she also achieved her FEMA certification from the U.S Department of Homeland Security, which recognizes her leadership and influence abilities during times of crisis and emergency.

Will Dennis has been employed at NEC Laboratories America for the last 10 years, currently as a Sr. Systems Administrator in the central Information Technology Services group. In the two decades before his employment with NEC Labs, he held various IT/Operations roles in banking, healthcare and web application development (startup). Will is an avid learner and enjoys working with the many disparate technologies in use in an industrial lab setting.

Morgan Drake is a Chef Solutions Architect, Linux engineer, and CS master’s student. She’s all in on enabling individuals and organizations to build faster, more reliable, and more humane IT infrastructures, and you’ll see her running Chef’s training courses, meetups, and weekly open source Office Hours. She has extensive professional experience in the academic and nonprofit sectors, and continues to volunteer in academia with a focus on enabling the technical skill sets of nontraditional students and dislocated workers. In her free time you’ll often find her watching professional wrestling while perfecting the art of hand embroidery.

Damon Edwards is a Co-Founder of Rundeck, Inc., the makers of Rundeck, the open orchestration and scheduling platform. Damon Edwards was previously a Managing Partner at DTO Solutions, a DevOps and IT Operations improvement consultancy. Damon has spent over 15 years working with both the technology and business ends of IT operations and is noted for being a leader in porting cutting-edge DevOps techniques to large enterprise organizations. Damon is also a frequent conference speaker and writer who focuses on DevOps and operations improvement topics. Damon is active in the international DevOps community, including being a co-host of the DevOps Cafe podcast with John Willis, an early core organizer of the DevOps Days conference series, and a content chair for Gene Kim’s DevOps Enterprise Summit.

Allison Flick is an IT professional who has spent her career within higher education. After spending 10 years as a programmer and database designer, she has shifted her focus to supervision, systems administration, and user support. She is a mentor to many student employees and sysadmins in their early careers. In her spare time, she organize and run a Women in Advanced Computing group at UC San Diego that help women with career development and advancement.

Now largely reformed after stints studying theoretical mathematics and climbing rocks, Eben is fascinated by tools that help humans better understand the systems they create. He works as an engineer at Honeycomb.io.

Sasha Goldshtein is the CTO of Sela Group, a Microsoft MVP and Regional Director, Pluralsight author, and international consultant and trainer. Sasha is the author of two books and multiple online courses, and a prolific blogger. He is also an active open source contributor to projects focused on system diagnostics, performance monitoring, and tracing -- across multiple operating systems and runtimes. Sasha authored and delivered training courses on Linux performance optimization, event tracing, production debugging, mobile application development, and modern C++. Between his consulting engagements, Sasha speaks at international conferences world-wide.

Brendan Gregg is an industry expert in computing performance and cloud computing. He is a senior performance architect at Netflix, where he does performance design, evaluation, analysis, and tuning. He is the author of Systems Performance published by Prentice Hall, and received the USENIX LISA Award for Outstanding Achievement in System Administration. Brendan has created performance analysis tools included in multiple operating systems, and visualizations and methodologies for performance analysis, including flame graphs.

Marek Haicman works as Quality Engineer at Red Hat, Inc. He is lead Quality Engineer of the SCAP domain in RHEL QE, working in downstream and upstream of SCAP project. Apart of catching computer bugs, he enjoys boxing and dragon boat racing.

I’ve worked as a extroverted, career-savvy technologist for more than a decade in areas ranging from politics to start-ups. At the University of California, San Diego, I teach soft skills, community building, and storytelling to our technical community to increase adoption of new technologies, create consensus, and help people understand each other. I run a Women in Advanced Computing group that helps women with career development and advancement. I also create, develop and customize educational programs that suit the needs of the technologists at UC San Diego, including our own 500-person technical conference. I have been an invited speaker at several technical conferences and IT organizations including the City of San Diego, Intuit, USENIX LISA, and the UC-wide technical conference, UCCSC.

Jonah Horowitz is a Site Reliability Engineer with Stripe. He works with all of the individual engineering teams at Stripe to drive reliability efforts. This includes monitoring, alerting, deployment pipelines and chaos resiliency. Before coming to Stripe he worked at several startups around the Bay Area including: Netflix, Quantcast - a leading ad-tech startup where he grew their network to process over 3 million events per second, Looksmart - a contextual advertising company, and he was on the founding team of Wal-Mart.com (now Walmart Labs) where he built out their software deployment pipelines and their product image management systems.

Michael Jennings has been a UNIX/Linux Systems Administrator and a C/Perl developer for over 20 years and has been author of or contributor to numerous open source software projects including Eterm, Mezzanine, RPM, Warewulf, and TORQUE. Additionally, he co-founded the Caos Foundation, creators of CentOS, and has been lead developer on 3 separate Linux distributions. He currently works as a Scientist at Los Alamos National Laboratory and is the primary author/maintainer for the LBNL Node Health Check (NHC) project. He is also the Vice President of HPCXXL, the extreme-scale HPC users group.

Mark Lamourine fell into system administration when the VAX shop he worked in as a student inherited a set of HP/UX boxes. He became the de-facto admin because he was the only one in the group who had read a man(8) page. Since then he's done stints as a developer, a QA engineer, a lab infrastructure manager and infrastructure admin at a now-defunct world-wide ISP. These days he plays the Sysadmin Advocate to software developers who think software is done when they've installed it once in Vagrant.

When not computer geeking Mark geeks on road bicycles. He's been riding road fixed-gear for fun since before that was a thing.

Tom is the SRE Manager at StackOverflow.com and author of Time Management for System Administrators (O'Reilly). He is co-author of The Practice of System and Network Administration (3rd edition just released) and The Practice of Cloud System Administration. He is an internationally recognized author, speaker, system administrator, and DevOps advocate. He's previously worked at small and large companies including Google, Bell Labs/Lucent, and AT&T. His blog is http://EverythingSysadmin.com and he tweets @YesThatTom.

Cory Lueninghoener is a large-scale systems guy who has helped design, build, and manage some of the largest scientific computing resources in the world. During his time working with HPC systems at Argonne National Laboratory and Los Alamos National Laboratory, he worked with HPC platforms ranging in size from 100,000 to 900,000 processors. He is especially interested in turning large-scale system research into practice, and has also worked on configuration management and system management tools in the past. Cory was co-chair of LISA 2015 and is active in the large scale system engineering community.

Branson is a 29-year veteran of system architecture, administration, and security. He started as a cryptologist for the US Navy and has since worked on NASA shuttle and aerospace projects, TSA security and monitoring systems, secure mobile communications, and Internet search engines. He has also run his own company while continuing to support many open source projects. Branson speaks to and trains sysadmins and security personnel world wide; and he is currently a senior technical lead for Cisco Cloud Services. Branson has several credentials; and generally likes to spend time responding to the statement "I bet you can't...."

Chris "Mac" McEniry is a practicing sysadmin responsible for running a large ecommerce and gaming service. He's been working and developing in an operational capacity for 15 years. In his free time, he builds tools and thinks about efficiency.

Daniella Niyonkuru is a Production Engineer at Shopify where she helps build a better, faster and more resilient platform. Previously, Daniella worked as an Aircraft System Software Specialist, and researched Formal Model Driven Development for Embedded Systems.

Heather Osborn has been working in technology as a system and operations engineer for the last 25 years. Although not common in the tech world, she's stayed with Ticketmaster for the last 19 years through the various incarnations - partly because of multiple technology reinventions and unique challenges, and partly because she wants to see what will happen next. She's looking forward to this new era of public cloud and container orchestration.

Heather is an avid long distance runner who has lots of time to think about these things while pounding the pavement.

In between teaching his team about jazz, Jake can be found on the Production Engineering Team at Shopify. He's worked preparing the platform for massive celebrity sales, making Shopify run out of multiple data centres, and the resiliency stack to protect the app against misbehaving resources, and itself. Canadian Geese are his favourite animals. While the hipster movement of his nation has recently taken to eating these poor birds, Jake has yet to taste one. And never plans to. We don't eat our friends.

Martin Preisler works as a Software Engineer at Red Hat, Inc. He is working in the Security Technologies team, focusing on security compliance using Security Content Automation Protocol. He is the principal author of SCAP Workbench, a frequent contributor to OpenSCAP and SCAP Security Guide, and a contributor to the SCAP standard specifications. Outside of work he likes playing guitar, skiing, billiards and indoor climbing.

Matt Provost is an Engineering (SRE) Manager at Yelp, based in London. Prior to this he was the Systems Manager at Weta Digital in Wellington, New Zealand where he was responsible for the Top 500 supercomputers used to render such films as Avatar and the Hobbit trilogy. Matt has been a system and network administrator for over twenty years. He has a BA from Indiana University, Bloomington.

Teddy is a Security Engineer at Facebook developing tools to help protect the company. He is very passionate about trustworthy, safe, and secure code development. Ask me about: osquery, firmware, secure roots of trust, and operating system hardening.

Jamie Riedesel is a DevOps Engineer at HelloSign and has been performing acts of systems administration and engineering since 1997, and more dev-like things since 2010. She moved from corporate IT to the startup space in 2010 and experienced the good kind of culture shock. Jamie has been blogging as sysadmin1138 since 2004, a community elected moderator on ServerFault since 2010, and awarded the Chuck Yerkes community award by LOPSA in 2015.

Jeanne Schock has a background in Linux/FreeBSD/Windows system administration that includes working at a regional ISP, a large video hosting company and a Top Level Domain Registry services and DNS provider. About 7 years ago she transitioned to a role building and managing processes in support of IT operations, disaster recovery, and continual improvement. She is a certified Expert in the IT Infrastructure Library (ITIL) process framework with in-the-trenches experience in Change, Incident, and Problem Management. Jeanne also has a pre-IT academic and teaching career and is an experienced trainer and public presenter.

Michal Sekletar joined Red Hat in 2011 and currently works as Senior Software Engineer in the "Plumbers" team. He spends his days working and supporting init systems and other low level user-space components. He holds a Masters degree from Brno University of Technology. His other professional interests include programming languages, algorithms, and UNIX-like (other than Linux) operating systems.

Niall Sheridan is an SRE on Intercom's infrastructure team. His main interests are automation, monitoring, and he loves a good post-mortem.

Rock Stevens is a lifelong student of information technology, earning his first certification as a network administrator at the age of 15. He is a U.S. Army Cyber Officer and served as a Madison Policy Forum Military-Business Cybersecurity Fellow in 2015. He is actively pursuing a Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Maryland and M.A. in National Security and Strategic Studies from the United States Naval War College.

Mike Svoboda is a Senior Staff Engineer, working in Production Operations at LinkedIn for the past seven years. Mike has built or has been involved with most of LinkedIn's configuration management infrastructure using the CFEngine framework.

Aleksey Tsalolikhin is a practitioner in the area of Operations of information systems. Aleksey's mission is to improve the lives of fellow practitioners through effective training in excellent technologies. Aleksey is the principal at Vertical Sysadmin, which provides on-site training on UNIX shell basics, version control with Git, Configuration Management, Continuous Integration/Continuous Deployment, SQL basics and more.

One of the co-founders of Onyx Point, Inc., Trevor has been working in various systems administration and automation related fields for over 20 years. Recently, he has been focusing on automated compliance for Federal and commercial systems and helped start Open Source SIMP project to help provide that capability to the widest audience possible.

Heidi Waterhouse is a freelance technical writer, information architect, and active conference speaker. Her experience as an in-demand consultant has given her insight into the interview process across several industry segments and allows her to generate meaningful answers to a wide variety of weird interview questions. In her spare time, she considers the technical writing aspects of sewing patterns.

Brad Whitehead is Chief Scientist for Formularity, an electronic forms company dedicated to the secure collection and processing of personal information. Formerly, he was a Partner and Master Technology Architect with Accenture. Brad has architected and implemented several national-scale information processing systems based on the Actor model and queues. One such system processes billions of biometric transactions per day for the Republic of India, while another handles millions of biometric identification transactions each day while safeguarding the borders of the United States. He has served as a security advisor to several US Federal agencies, including the Department of Homeland Security, the Department of Defense, and the United States Postal Service. Brad holds a BS from Carnegie Mellon University and an MS from the University of Liverpool. He can be reached at brad.whitehead@formularity.com.