Round 2 Speakers Announced!

ALYSSA MILLER

Application Security Advocate, Snyk

Alyssa Miller is a hacker, security advocate, cyber security professional and public speaker with almost 15 years of experience in the security industry. Her experience includes penetration testing, threat modeling and working with business leaders to build enterprise security programs. She speaks internationally at industry, vendor, and leadership conferences on topics ranging from technical security vulnerabilities, to high-level security program strategies, to issues within the security community itself. She is a member of the Chapter Leader for Women of Security (WoSEC), an Advisory Board member for Blue Team Con in Chicago, and she currently works as an Application Security Advocate for London-based Snyk Ltd.

BURR SUTTER

Director of Developer Experience, Red Hat

A lifelong developer advocate, community organizer, and technology evangelist, Burr Sutter is a featured speaker at technology events around the globe—from Bangalore to Brussels and Berlin to Beijing (and most parts in between)—he is currently Red Hat’s Director of Developer Experience. A Java Champion since 2005 and former president of the Atlanta Java User Group, Burr founded the DevNexus conference—now the second largest Java event in the U.S.—with the aim of making access to the world’s leading developers affordable to the developer community. When not speaking abroad, Burr is also the passionate creator and orchestrator of highly-interactive live demo keynotes at Red Hat Summit, the company’s premier annual event.

MELINDA THIELBAR

Director of Data Science, Fidelity Investments

Melinda Thielbar is a researcher and statistical software developer with over twenty years of industry experience. Her career ranges from statistics education to developing algorithms for commercial software to Hollywood script consulting. She co-founded Research Triangle Analysts, a 501(c)(3) not-for-profit focused on education and training for people working in the analytics field in the Raleigh-Durham area. She currently works in the People Analytics group at Fidelity Investments.

MATT ASAY

Head of Open Source Strategy and Marketing, Amazon Web Services

Matt Asay is a principal at AWS, managing the company’s Open Source Strategy and Marketing (OSSM) team. Prior to AWS, Matt ran Adobe’s developer relations team, and also held a number of executive roles at open source startups, including vice president of business development, marketing, and community at big data database company MongoDB; vice president of business development at real-time analytics company Nodeable (acquired by Appcelerator); vice president of business development and interim CEO at mobile HTML5 startup Strobe (acquired by Facebook); COO at leading Linux and cloud vendor Canonical; and head of the Americas at content management startup Alfresco (acquired by private equity firm Thomas H. Lee). Matt is an emeritus board member of the Open Source Initiative (OSI) and holds a JD from Stanford, where he focused on open source and other IP licensing issues. He writes regular columns for the TechRepublic and InfoWorld.

ADHITHI RAVICHANDRAN

Software Consultant, Author, Speaker, Surya Consulting, Inc.

Adhithi Ravichandran is a Software Consultant, Pluralsight Author and Speaker based in Kansas City. She currently works for a Healthcare startup Redivus Health, that builds mobile and web apps for critical healthcare scenarios. She is the owner and founder of Surya Consulting, Inc that provides various software consulting services.

JASON BREWER

Engineering Manager, Mailchimp

Jason has always had a passion for technology and people, and this is what led him to a career in engineering management. An alumni of a large telecom, a hosting company, and a VC startup, he has had a career spanning, operations, development, project & program management. The cornerstone for all aspects of his life can be found in the mantra “helping others achieve excellence!” He believes social change is on the precipice and he’s going to do his part by providing exposure, opportunity and mentoring to the underrepresented.

ASHISH GUPTA

Director, Software Engineering, Capital One

Director, software engineering for the API Gateway, Tokenization platform @ Capital One

DEREK WEEKS

Vice President, Sonatype

Derek E. Weeks is the world’s foremost researcher on the topic of DevSecOps and securing software supply chains. For the past seven years, he has championed the research of the annual State of the Software Supply Chain Report and the DevSecOps Community Survey. He currently serves as vice president and DevOps advocate at Sonatype, creators of the Nexus repository manager and the global leader in solutions for software supply chain automation. Derek is also the co-founder of All Day DevOps, an online community of 95,000 IT professionals. In 2018, Derek was recognized by DevOps.com as the “Best DevOps Evangelist” for his work in the community.

LOUISE POUBEL

Ignition Technical Lead, Open Robotics

Louise Poubel is a software engineer at Open Robotics working on free and open source tools for robotics, like the robot simulator Gazebo and its new version called Ignition, and the Robot Operating System (ROS). Louise first got involved with Open Robotics through GNOME’s Outreach Program for Women. Louise grew up in Brazil and went to college in Japan, where she received her BS in electromechanical engineering from Chiba University. She also holds a joint MEng in advanced robotics from École Centrale de Nantes and Warsaw University of Technology, where her research focused on real-time, whole-body human motion imitation by humanoid robots.

ALYSSA ARVIN

Senior Program Manager, Salesforce

Alyssa Arvin is a Senior Manager for Open Source Programs at Salesforce. She has managed community and marketing programs within the engineering organization for the past 7 years. She started her career in events and has brought that need for fun, unique, inclusive experiences to each of the open source programs. In her spare time she likes to hang out with her cats, water ski, and eat a lot of cookies.

RICARDO FERREIRA

Developer Advocate, Confluent

Ricardo is a Developer Advocate at Confluent, the company founded by the original co-creators of Apache Kafka. He has over 20 years of experience where he specializes in streaming data architectures, big data, cloud, and serverless. Prior to Confluent, he worked for other vendors, such as Oracle, Red Hat, and IONA Technologies, as well as several consulting firms.

ALEXANDER KRIZHANOVSKY

CEO, Tempesta Technologies

Alexander is the CEO of Tempesta Technologies, Inc., and is the architect of Tempesta FW, a high performance open source Linux application delivery controller. Alexander is responsible for the design and performance of several products in the areas of network traffic processing and databases. He designed the core architecture of a Web application firewall, mentioned in the Gartner Magic Quadrant, and MariaDB temporal data tables.

LIN SUN

Senior Technical Staff Member and Master Inventor, IBM

Lin has been working on container and cloud-native since 2014 from Docker to Kubernetes to Service Mesh. She is currently an Istio maintainer, a member of the Istio steering committee and technical oversight committee. She is passionate about new technologies and loves to play with them. She is an IBM master inventor, holds 150+ patents issued with USPTO.

ELLEN SPERTUS

Professor of Computer Science, Mills College

Ellen Spertus is a computer science professor at Mills College in Oakland, California, and has worked as a software engineer and research scientist at Microsoft, Google, and Mozilla. She had led or been a core contributor to numerous open source projects, including App Inventor, Blockly, and the Hour of Code. She earned her bachelor’s, master’s, and doctoral degrees in CS from MIT, where she did research in computer architecture, compilers, and information retrieval. She has been active in promoting diversity in CS for thirty years. Highlights include co-founnding the annual conference Tech Intersections: Womxn of Color in Computing and teaching in a graduate reentry program for people wanting to transition into computing from other fields.

JAMES VASILE

Partner, Open Tech Strategies

James Vasile has fifteen years experience as a user, developer, advocate and advisor in the free and open source software world. His expertise is in software licensing and community-building, as well as non-profit and small business startup. He focuses on free software and open source production, although his work and interests often take him far beyond the world of software. Much of what James does involves teaching people how to build successful businesses around free software and ensuring licensing alignment in multisource FOSS stacks. James’s technical experience also allows him to act as outsource CTO/Architect, due-diligence open source expert, new venture advisor, fiscal sponsorship facilitator, and more.

JÖRG SCHAD

Head of Engineering and Machine Learning, ArangoDB

Jörg Schad is Head of Machine Learning at ArangoDB. In a previous life, he has worked on or built container infrastructure and distributed systems at Mesosphere, and in-memory databases. He received his Ph.D. for research around distributed databases and data analytics. He’s a frequent speaker at meetups, international conferences, and lecture halls.

ABIGAIL MAKOLO

Product Designer and Open Source Design Advocate

Abigail is a Product Designer and Open Source Design “”Avocado”” 🥑. She has over 3 years of experience in technology; focusing on web and product design. Over the past 2 years, she has worked on more than twelve products that are contributing to saving lives and improving healthcare delivery.

Abigail loves open source and is passionate about helping people learn how to grow as open source contributors. She is a member of the Open Source Community Africa (OSCA), a community of creative minds driving the open source movement in Africa. She was a Google Code-In 2019 mentor for Anita B.org, a community that encourages the participation of all women involved in technology and open source.

TANMOY SEN

Senior Product Manager - Technical, Amazon Web Services

Tanmoy Sen is a Senior Product Manager at Amazon Web Services where he focuses on helping customers and embedded developers connect microcontroller-based devices to the cloud using FreeRTOS. Prior to joining AWS, Tanmoy received a Masters in Engineering and Management from MIT and held senior roles at STMicroelectronics and Cypress Semiconductors.

BEN NUTTALL

Software Engineer, BBC News Labs

Ben works at the BBC as software engineer in BBC News Labs, a team driving innovation for BBC News. This team builds prototypes of new news experiences, and develops tools to help journalists. Previously Ben spent six years working as Community Manager and Technical Manager at the Raspberry Pi Foundation. He created the gpiozero Python library and the piwheels project, and he writes articles for opensource.com.

VICKY (VM) BRASSEUR

Corporate Open Source Strategist

VM (aka Vicky) spent most of her twenty-plus years in the tech industry leading software development departments and teams, providing technical management and leadership consulting for small and medium businesses, and helping companies understand, use, release, and contribute to free and open source software in a way that’s good for both their bottom line and for the community.

ALEX WILLIAMS

Founder and Publisher, The New Stack

Alex Williams is founder and publisher of The New Stack, a media platform for the people who build and manage software the world relies on. He’s a longtime technology journalist who did stints at TechCrunch, SiliconAngle and what is now known as ReadWrite before leaving in 2014 to start The New Stack. Alex hosts The New Stack Makers and Analysts podcasts and livestreams from tech events around the globe with the generous support of more than 40 sponsors in the cloud native ecosystem.

GOPAL AKSHINTALA

Senior Software Engineer, Microsoft

Gopal S Akshintala is currently a Software Engineer at Microsoft OneNote team. He is a passionate developer and loves being an **Influencer & Mentor** in the dev community through his Blog-posts, Tech-Talks and Social-media. He started as an Android Developer and switched to the server-side as a Full-Stack Developer (Kotlin, Java for Backend, React Js for Frontend). Wearing multiple hats, aided him to perceive Patterns, Solutions, and Trade-offs. He is a practitioner of Domain-Driven Design (DDD) and Clean Architecture. A massive fan of Test-Driven Development (TDD). He believes Expressive Code is fun and profitable, which enthused him towards Functional Programming. He’s a language geek, currently fluent at Kotlin, Java, and dabbling with Scala and Javascript. In addition to his Software Engineering experience, he gains more _experiences-per-year_ by open-source collaborations & contributions, active participation in the Dev discussions, and Speaking at User Groups and Conferences. He loves being on Stage, as a Singer and a Tech-Speaker and writes about Nature & Life.

KIM MAIDA

Head of Developer Relations and Community, Gatsby

Kim is the Head of Developer Relations & Community at Gatsby, an Auth0 Ambassador, Microsoft MVP, and Google Developer Expert. She’s passionate about web development, constant learning, and developer communities. As a developer relations leader, engineer, and international speaker, she loves learning from and sharing with other inhabitants of the tech space. She also enjoys building automation with Slack Apps and mentoring engineers who are interested in leadership.

PARIS BUTTFIELD-ADDISON

Producer, Secret Lab

Paris Buttfield-Addison is a cofounder of Secret Lab, a game development studio based in beautiful Hobart, Australia. Secret Lab builds games and game development tools, including the multi-award-winning ABC Play School iPad games, the BAFTA- and IGF-winning Night in the Woods, the Qantas airlines Joey Playbox games, and the popular open source Yarn Spinner narrative game framework. Previously, Paris was a mobile product manager for Meebo (acquired by Google). Paris particularly enjoys game design, statistics, blockchain, machine learning, and human-centered technology. He researches and writes technical books on mobile and game development (more than 20 so far) for O’Reilly; he recently finished writing Practical AI with Swift and is currently working on Head First Swift. He holds a degree in medieval history and a PhD in computing. Paris loves to bring machine learning into the world of practical and useful. You can find him on Twitter as @parisba.

VEETHIKA MISHRA

Senior Product Designer, GitLab

Veethika is a Product Designer at Gitlab with the Continuous Integration team. In the past few years, her primary focus has been on providing developers with the best of application development experiences. Having worked for companies like Red Hat and GitLab, Veethika believes in open design practices and enjoys working in close proximity with the communities involved to shape the product. In her free time she enjoys illustrating, learning to code, playing board games, and even designing them.

DEVLIN DULDULAO

Senior Consultant, Inmeta

Devlin Duldulao is a Filipino software developer based in Norway. He is a Microsoft MVP, an Auth0 Ambassador, a trainer, a conference speaker, and a senior consultant at Inmeta. He loves going to universities and user groups to share his expertise.

ABHISHEK KOSERWAL

Senior Software Engineer, Red Hat

Abhishek Koserwal is working as a Senior Software Engineer at Red Hat. He is involved in communities focused on Operators, Openshift/Kubernetes, and Middleware products. Frequent blogger, speaker, open-source enthusiast and committer on various open-source projects specific to Operators. He has developed extensive experience building customer-facing enterprise applications integrated with RedHat SSO and deployed over the Openshift platform, supporting Open Hybrid Cloud strategy. You can find his publications regarding Operators & Keycloak at: https://developers.redhat.com/blog/author/akoserwa/  & https://medium.com/keycloak

DAWN FOSTER

Open Source Strategist, VMware

Dawn is Director of Open Source Community Strategy within VMware’s Open Source Program Office. She is on the board of OpenUK, an organization committed to developing and sustaining UK leadership in Open Technology. Dawn is on the Governing Board and is a maintainer for the Linux Foundation’s CHAOSS project and is on the Board of Advisors for Bitergia. She has 20+ years of experience at companies like Intel and Puppet with expertise in community building, strategy, open source software, metrics, and more. Dawn holds a PhD from the University of Greenwich along with an MBA and a BS in Computer Science. She has spoken at dozens of industry events, including many Linux Foundation events, OSCON, SXSW, FOSDEM and more.

JACK KOPPA

Lead Front-End Developer, POLITICO

Jack Koppa is a front-end developer, focused on modern web apps & best practices for maintainable, collaborative code. He especially enjoys Vue.js & TypeScript in his work @ POLITICO, along with front-end CI/DevOps practices. Passionate about clean tech, journalism, & hiking.

ROMMEL GARCIA

Solutions Data, Imply Data

Rommel is an author of the book Virtualizing Hadoop: How to install. Deploy, and Optimize Hadoop in Virtualized Infrastructure. He has over 20 years of combined experience with distributed systems, open source big data platforms, GPU, and cloud including Azure, AWS and GCP. His core focus currently is tuning Apache Druid for performance and scale that powers realtime intelligence on a large amount of data.

GUY ROYSE

Developer Advocate, Redis Labs

Guy works for Redis Labs as a Developer Advocate. Combining his decades of experience in writing software with a passion for sharing what he has learned, Guy goes out into developer communities and helps others build great software. Teaching and community have long been a focus for Guy. He is President of the Columbus JavaScript Users Group, an organizer for the Columbus Machine Learners and Columbus Functional Programers, and has even helped teach programming at a prison in central Ohio.

CHRISTIAN BROMANN

Senior Software Engineer, Sauce Labs

Christian Bromann is a member of the Open Source Program Office at Sauce Labs and is working on various open source projects related to test automation and Node.js. He represents the company as Advisory Committee representative at the W3C and the WebdriverIO project as core contributor in the OpenJS Foundation Cross-Project Council. In the past he has been leading various product initiatives at Sauce Labs including extended debugging capabilities for automated tests as well as frontend performance testing using WebDriver.

ALYSSA WRIGHT

Director of Community and Growth, Open Collective

Alyssa Wright is an experienced leader of open and civic technology development. She works to build innovative products and processes that replace the mantra of “move fast and break things” with the awareness of “move purposely and fix things.” Most recently, she is the Director of Community at the Open Source Collective, a nonprofit that promotes a sustainable and ethical open ecosystem with the legal and financial infrastructures to thrive.

KATIE WASSELL

Software Engineer, IBM Watson, IBM

During her time on the IBM Watson Performance Engineering team, Katie Wassell made sure that IBM’s cognitive computing services such as Watson Assistant, Discovery, and Speech to Text could handle fluctuating enterprise workloads at any hour of the day or night. She introduced guidelines for Watson service teams to adopt and right-size Kubernetes autoscaling practices for pods and nodes inside their IBM Cloud Kubernetes and Openshift clusters. Katie’s work allows teams to keep cloud resource costs low while maintaining reliability and performance.

ERIC HART

TLCP Senior Principal Engineer, Optum

Eric is a TLCP Senior Principal Engineer at Optum. In his current role Eric currently drives security automation throughout the organization with a focus on cloud technologies. He is also the founder of an internal security program called Optum Security Advocate and the creator of an internal training on Threat Modeling. Eric is also a frequent presenter at Optum’s Developer Day’s corporate conferences.