Cezar Alevatto Guimaraes, Microsoft
Cezar Guimaraes is a Site Reliability Engineer Lead on the Microsoft Azure team. He has more than 15 years of experience and has worked at Microsoft for 11 years as a Software Engineer. Currently, he is working on Azure to identify and resolve problems that stand in the way of service uptime through engineering solutions such as bots and intelligence/correlation engines.
Derek Arnold
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.
Camille Baldock, Salesforce
Camille Baldock is an infrastructure engineer with the Heroku Department of Data. She works on distributed systems monitoring, operations, automation, and tuning for Heroku Postgres.
Robert Ballance, Independent Computer Scientist
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.
Daniel Barker, DST Systems
Dan spent 12 years in the military as a mechanic on fighter jets, like the F-16, before transitioning to a career in technology as a Software Engineer, then a DevOps Engineer, and now a Software Development Manager. He’s leading a team of engineers dedicated to bringing DevOps principles and practices to a financial and health services company. This team is core to a multi-million dollar transformation program. Dan is also an organizer of the DevOps KC Meetup and the DevOpsDays KC conference.
Kevin Barron, University of California, Santa Barbara
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.
Doug Barth, Stripe
Doug is a software generalist with extensive operational experience. Currently an SRE at Stripe, Doug has run the gamut of technical responsibility. Having previously worked with Evan Gilman as an SRE at PagerDuty, he and Evan are co-authors of the upcoming O'Reilly book "Zero Trust Networks".
George Beech, Stack Exchange
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.
Blake Bisset,
Blake Bisset got his first legal tech job at 16. He won’t say how long ago, except that he’s legitimately entitled to make shakeyfists while shouting “Get off my LAN!” He’s done 3 start-ups (a joint venture of Dupont/ConAgra, a biotech spinoff from the U.W., and this other time a bunch of kids were sitting around New Year’s Eve, wondering why they couldn’t watch movies on the Internet), only to end up spending a half-decade as an SRM at YouTube and Chrome, where his happiest accomplishment was holding the go/bestpostmortem link for several years.
Chastity Blackwell, Yelp
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.
David Blank-Edelman,
David is one of the co-founders of the now global set of SREcon conferences. He has over thirty years of experience in the systems administration/DevOps/SRE field in large multiplatform environments and is the author of the O'Reilly Otter book. David is honored to serve on the USENIX Board of Directors where he helps to organize and engineer conferences like LISA and SREcon. He prefers to pronounce Evangelist with a hard 'g'.
Silvia Botros, Sr. DBA at Sendgrid
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!).
VM Brasseur, Freelance Open Source Consultant
In VM (aka Vicky)'s nearly 20 years in the tech industry she has been an analyst, programmer, product manager, software engineering manager, director of software engineering, and C-level technical business. She is now a consultant on open source strategy, policy, and processes. Vicky is the winner of the Perl White Camel Award (2014) and the O'Reilly Open Source Award (2016).
Vicky occasionally blogs at anonymoushash.vmbrasseur.com, often writes and is a community moderator for opensource.com, and frequently tweets at @vmbrasseur.
Dash Buck
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, Clover Health
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.
Gabriel Ciciliani, OSDB Internal Principal Consultant at Pythian
Gabriel has been dedicated to databases as a DBA and consultant for the last 10 years. He has lead and participated in multiple projects across many technologies, including Oracle, MySQL, SQL Server and MongoDB. Gabriel defines himself as an automation super fan, he is one of the developers of the MySQL/MongoDB DBaaS solution currently in use in MercadoLibre, the largest e-commerce platform in Latin America and top ten world wide. Gabriel holds a college degree in electronics, a degree in industrial engineering and he is currently studying for his masters in systems information engineering. He is also an Oracle, AWS and Microsoft certified professional. Currently he is a Internal Principal Consultant at Pythian specializing in MySQL and MongoDB.
Stella Cotton, Heroku
Stella Cotton is a Tools engineer at Heroku and co-founder of AndConf and Fog City Ruby. She loves good abstractions and boring technology.
Jennelle Crothers, Microsoft
Jennelle Crothers is a Microsoft Technical Evangelist who likes computer networking, server administration, dogs, quilting, popcorn and on most days, public transportation. Before joining Microsoft, Jennelle Crothers spent 15 years as a Systems Administrator "jack of all trades" overseeing Windows domains, Exchange Server, desktops and other IT systems where she struck fear into the hearts of end-users with complex password policies and email retention tags. Now she supports platform awareness for Azure, Windows Server and related technologies, containers and DevOps. Jennelle is a Microsoft Azure Specialist and prior to joining Microsoft, she was a four-time Microsoft MVP.
When not thinking about technology, Jennelle volunteers with Guide Dogs for the Blind and sneaks away to read dystopian novels.
Matt Cutts, Acting Administrator, US Digital Service
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.
Biplob Debnath, NEC Laboratories America, Inc.
Dr. Biplob Debnath is a researcher at NEC Labs, where his works over the last six years have spanned building end-to-end log analtytics solutions, non-volatile memory-systems, and systems for data deduplication. His work on log analytics ships in NEC's Log Analysis Service. His PhD research on flash based key-value stores ships in Bing ObjectStore, research on data deduplication ships in Windows Server 2012, and research on caching ships in IBM Storage Array. Biplob received a Ph.D. and an M.S. from the University of Minnesota.
Jessica Deen, Microsoft
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.
Christopher DeMarco, Rhiza, a Nielsen Company
Sysadmin-turned-IT-turned-DevOps, I've been coding automation since 1998.
Will Dennis, NEC Laboratories America, Inc.
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.
Caskey Dickson, Microsoft
Morgan Drake, Chef Software
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.
Courtney Eckhardt,
Courtney Eckhardt first got into retrospectives when she signed up for comp.risks as an undergrad (and since then, not as much has changed as we’d like to think). Her perspectives on engineering process improvement are strongly informed by the work of Kathy Sierra and Don Norman (among others).
Damon Edwards, Rundeck, Inc.
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.
Tyler Fitch, Adobe
Tyler is a Site Reliability Engineer for the Adobe Stock site—working to automate all the things done to build and release changes to the Stock platforms. He recently finished three years of "post graduate work" in DevOps as an Architect in Chef's Customer Success Program where he helped Chef's largest enterprise customers have delightful experiences in IT Automation. He lives in Vancouver, Washington, and when he’s not programming enjoys lacrosse and using his passport.
Allison Flick, UC San Diego
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.
Eben Freeman, Honeycomb.io
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.
Evan Gilman
Evan Gilman is a Network Engineer turned SRE. With experience in protocol analysis, distributed systems design and network security, Evan has been building systems in untrusted networks his entire life. An open source contributor, author, and speaker, Evan's passion lies in designing systems which strike a balance with the network they run on.
Sasha Goldshtein, Sela Group
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.
Sasha Goldshtein, Sela Group
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, Netflix
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, Red Hat, Inc.
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.
Ben Hartshorne
Ben Hartshorne has been looking for the needles in a haystack of servers for a decade. He has finally figured out that (with the right kind of needles) magnets can make a huge difference. Observability tools may look different but have mostly kept the same leftover ideas in the last 15 years—it's time to shake it up. Ben joined Honeycomb.io to bring some of the tools the big companies have to the rest of us and help every engineer build better products, sleep better, and resolve problems faster.
Jessica Hilt, UC San Diego
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.
Christopher Hoey, Datadog
Christopher Hoey currently leads the SRE Team at Datadog. Prior he was Director of Engineering, Operations at Mortar Data and Senior IT Manager at Amplify. Chris is a seasoned veteran having ridden the growth roller coaster numerous times while leading the operations teams that keep things running smoothly.
Outside of work Chris enjoys spending time with his family, riding downhill mountain bikes and tinkering on projects like open source telemetry systems.
Jonah Horowitz, Stripe
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.
Ryan Jarvinen, Red Hat
Ryan Jarvinen is an Open Source Advocate at CoreOS, focusing on improving developer experience in the container community. He lives in Oakland, California and is passionate about open source, open standards, open government, and digital rights. You can reach him as ryanj on twitter, github, and IRC.
Michael Jennings, Los Alamos National Laboratory
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.
Suman Karumuri, Pinterest
Suman Karumuri is the lead for distributed tracing at Pinterest. Previously, he served as the lead for Zipkin project at Twitter. He is the author of an upcoming book Distributed Tracing from O’Reilly.
Mark Lamourine, Red Hat
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.
Peter Lega, Merck and Company
Pete Lega is Director of Emerging Technology at Merck & Company, where he has been shepherding the DevOps program over the last 3 years.
Before this position, he led Merck’s enterprise web and mobility services, as well as providing swat-team expertise to ongoing tactical technical initiatives.
Prior to joining Merck, he was VP of technical architecture at c|net networks where he led development of several franchise sites (shareware.com, download.com, and buydirect.com). He also held senior roles including Technical Director at Digital Equipment, Divisional CIO at Bear Stearns, and was a rapporteur on Digital Content for the European Commission.
Peter holds a B.Sc. in Computer Science from Moravian College.
Tom Limoncelli, Stack Overflow, Inc.
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.
John Looney, Intercom
John Looney is an SRE in Intercom, pretending to be a Product Engineer, improving infrastructure and reliability while pretending to also add features customers want.
Previously, he spent a decade in Google SRE running GFS, Borg, Colossus, Chubby, Datacenter Automation, Ads Quality pipelines and Ads Serving systems.
He has been on the programme committee of SRECon Dublin for the last three years, and presented a 'Large Scale Design' tutorial at LISA in 2012.
Cory Lueninghoener, Wireless Couch Labs
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.
Renee Lung, PagerDuty
I’m a full-stack engineer at PagerDuty, and I work on one team in a fairly large engineering department. One of the things I love most about my job is that I get to work on back end services to make sure all the wiring and plumbing is doing its job, but also I get to do some front-end development so I can see my code in action. Working at PagerDuty is my first experience with DevOps, so in addition to learning a lot about the systems that back up my code, I’ve also learned to really appreciate the work my colleagues do and the services they are responsible for. Before discovering how much I love programming, I was a graduate student, a bread baker, and a graphic designer. When I'm not lost in the endless tubes of internet, I'm playing roller derby, cross-stitching, or watching Star Trek with my cats.
Branson Matheson, Cisco Systems, Inc.
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...."
Avantika Mathur, Electric Cloud
Avan (Avantika) Mathur is the Product Manager for ElectricFlow. In her previous role, Avan was the Global Technical Account Manager at Electric Cloud, helping large enterprises across Finserv, Retail and Embedded accelerate their DevOps adoption. Avan has worked with customers to design complex automation solutions and optimize their delivery pipeline, to speed up software-driven innovation and increase Agile throughput. Avan holds a degree in Computer science. Prior to Electric Cloud, she worked as a software engineer at IBM for five years as a Linux kernel developer.
Chris McEniry, Sony Interactive Entertainment
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.
Amy Nguyen, Stripe
Amy Nguyen is a software engineer passionate about making data understandable for everyone. In the past, she studied computer science and philosophy at Stanford University, served on the board of Stanford Women in Computer Science for three years, and helped in making computer science the most popular major for female undergraduates during her time there. Outside of work, Amy writes about the tech industry, loves baking, and reads too many self-improvement books.
Daniella Niyonkuru, Shopify
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.
Dan O'Boyle, Stack Overflow
Dan works as an Internal Support Engineer on the IT team at Stack Overflow. He started his career as high school teacher and transitioned into a System Administrator. He enjoys creative collaboration to solve solvable things, and using automation for everything else.
Heather Osborn, Ticketmaster
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.
Jérôme Petazzoni, Docker Inc.
Jerome is a senior engineer at Docker, where he helps others to containerize all the things. In another life he built and operated Xen clouds when EC2 was just the name of a plane, developed a GIS to deploy fiber interconnects through the French subway, managed commando deployments of large-scale video streaming systems in bandwidth-constrained environments such as conference centers, operated and scaled the dotCloud PAAS, and various other feats of technical wizardry. When annoyed, he threatens to replace things with a very small shell script.
Jake Pittis, Shopify
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.
Brian Pitts, Eventbrite
Brian studied political science in college, but when his thesis contained more python code than prose it was clear where his true loyalties lay. He’s worked in operations roles for the past eight years and currently carries the pager for Eventbrite. He lives in Nashville with his wife, son, two cats, and collection of 1990s Unix workstations.
Martin Preisler, Red Hat, Inc.
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.
Reid Priedhorsky, Los Alamos National Laboratory
I am a staff scientist at Los Alamos National Laboratory. Prior to Los Alamos, I was a research staff member at IBM Research. I hold a Ph.D. in computer science from the University of Minnesota and a B.A., also in computer science, from Macalester College.
My work focuses on large-scale data analysis from both systems and applications perspectives. Recent lines of research include using social media and web traffic to monitor and forecast the spread of disease as well as developing technology to bring data-intensive computing and user-defined software stacks to existing high-performance computing systems.
In my spare time, I enjoy reading, bicycling, hiking (especially in the mountains and deserts of the American West), tinkering with things, photography, and hanging out with my wife and son.
Matt Provost, Yelp
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.
Corey Quinn, Last Week in AWS
Principal at The Quinn Advisory Group, Corey has a history as an engineering manager, public speaker, and advocate for cloud strategies which speak to company culture. He specializes in helping companies control and cost optimize their AWS cloud footprint without disrupting the engineers using it.
Outside of his professional work, Corey is known for overdressing, telling entertaining stories, and carrying a cigarette case full of drink umbrellas.
Teddy Reed, Facebook
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.
Tanya Reilly, Google
Tanya Reilly has been a Systems Administrator and Site Reliability Engineer at Google since 2005, working on low level infrastructure like distributed locking, load balancing and bootstrapping. Before Google, she was a Systems Administrator at eircom.net, Ireland's largest ISP, and before that she was the entire IT Department for a small software house.
Jamie Riedesel, HelloSign
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.
Raquel Romano, Engineering Lead, Digital Service at Veterans Affairs
Raquel spent nearly a decade as a software engineer at Google before becoming obsessed with how government delivers critical services to millions of people. She currently builds software that Veterans and their families rely on for such benefits as health care, education assistance, and disability compensation. She is a remote member of the USDS team at the Veterans Affairs department and lives in the San Francisco Bay Area with her spouse, children, and a highly unusual collection of pets.
Carolyn Rowland, National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST)
Carolyn is an IT/Dev manager at NIST. She provides the calming influence to the chaos introduced in this tutorial.
Nina Schiff, Facebook
Nina is a software engineer working on Facebook's disaggregated network switches, making sure the packets go where they should. Before that she spent time working on deployment, containers and the occasional site outage.
Jeanne Schock, Armstrong Flooring Inc.
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.
Baron Schwartz, VividCortex
Baron is the founder and CEO of VividCortex, the best way to see what your production database servers are doing. He is the author of High Performance MySQL and many open-source tools for MySQL administration. He's also a frequent participant in many database communities, including Postgres, Redis, MongoDB, and more.
Michal Sekletar, Red Hat
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.
Suchakrapani Sharma, ShiftLeft Inc.
Suchakra is currently a Scientist at ShiftLeft Inc. He completed his PhD in Computer Engineering from École Polytechnique de Montréal where he worked on eBPF and hardware-assisted tracing techniques for advanced systems performance analysis. He has been involved in research on performance analysis domain for last 4 years and has delivered talks on systems analysis at Tracing Summit 2015 (LinuxCon, Seattle), TracingSummit 2016 (Embedded LinuxCon, Berlin) and FUDCon 2015 (Pune) where he has demonstrated advanced kernel and userspace tracing tools in a very "friendly manner". He has developed one of the first hardware-trace based VM analysis techniques, and wants to see to it that systems analysis tools are ready for the future. He is also a member of Linux Foundation's IOVisor Project and a contributor to the BPF Compiler Collection. In the past, he has been involved in biomedical and automotive electronics as an embedded Linux engineer. More information about him can be found at : https://suchakra.wordpress.com/about/
Niall Sheridan, Intercom
Niall Sheridan is an SRE on Intercom's infrastructure team. His main interests are automation, monitoring, and he loves a good post-mortem.
Carol Smith, Microsoft
Carol Smith has over 12 years experience with programs, communities, and partnerships. She worked at GitHub managing education partnerships for the Student Developer Pack and at Google managing the Google Summer of Code program. She has a degree in Journalism from California State University, Northridge, and is a cook, cyclist, and horseback rider.
Chris St. Pierre, Cisco Systems, Inc.
Chris St. Pierre is currently serving the fourteenth year of a life sentence to hard labor at the command line. He works as an software engineer at Cisco focusing on CI/CD for OpenStack, Docker, and Kubernetes. In his spare time he is a bicycle advocate and civic hacker.
Rock Stevens, University of Maryland
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.
Mohit Suley, Microsoft
Mohit is an Availability Engineer on Bing's Live Site Engineering team. By day, he investigates all the issues that subtly affect Bing’s availability and performance. Designing systems to proactively improve availability, route around problems, is a core mission of the team. He loves long walks, talking about end-user availability and how network-level data can tell interesting stories about customer experience in aggregate. R is his go-to data analysis tool these days. Opportunities to dive into network flows, architecture issues or scaling problems never go ignored.
Mike Svoboda, LinkedIn
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.
Theodore Ts'o, Google
Theodore Ts'o is the first North American Linux Kernel Developer, and started working with Linux in September 1991. He previously served as CTO for the Linux Foundation, and is currently employed at Google. Theodore is a Debian developer, and is the maintainer of the ext4 file system in the Linux kernel. He is the maintainer and original author of the e2fsprogs userspace utilities for the ext2, ext3, and ext4 file systems.
Aleksey Tsalolikhin, Vertical Sysadmin, Inc.
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.
Maarten Van Horenbeeck, Fastly, Inc.
Maarten Van Horenbeeck is Vice President of security engineering at Fastly, a content delivery network that speeds up web properties around the world. He is also a board member and former chairman of the Forum of Incident Response and Security Teams (FIRST), the largest association of security teams, counting 300 members in over 70 countries. Previously, Maarten managed the Threat Intelligence team at Amazon and worked on the Security teams at Google and Microsoft. Maarten holds a master’s degree in information security from Edith Cowan University and a master’s degree in international relations from the Freie Universitat Berlin. When not working, he enjoys backpacking, sailing, and collecting first-edition travel literature.
Trevor Vaughan, VP Engineering - Onyx Point, Inc.
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.
Avleen Vig, Facebook
Avleen is a Production Engineer at Facebook, where he helps scale Facebook’s infrastructure. Before joining Facebook he worked at several large tech companies, including EarthLink, Google, and Etsy.
Heidi Waterhouse, Consultant
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.
Mike Weilgart, Vertical Sysadmin, Inc.
Mike Weilgart has loved maths and computers all his life. Graduating high school at the age of 13, he thereafter worked in a variety of positions including software QA, calculus teacher, and graphic design, before resolving to put his love of computers to professional use as a Linux sysadmin and trainer. Mike currently consults at a Fortune 50 company as an automation specialist, and enjoys nothing more than training people to full mastery of their tools.
James Whitehead II, Chief Scientist, Formularity
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.
Cody Wilbourn, Parse.ly
Cody has been working in various operational roles for almost a decade, and been on call for most of that time. His background is in batch compute systems, having formerly managed storage and compute resources at Intel Austin for Atom processor design, and now helps provide realtime web analytics for some of the world's top news sites and publishers with Parse.ly. At Parse.ly, Cody reduced pager alerts by 85% and informational notifications by 70%, most of which were false alarms.