Round 5 Speakers Now Live! 25 world-class thoughts leaders

September 10, 2020

WENDY JOHN

Head of Global Diversity & Inclusion, Fidelity Investments

Wendy John is the head of global diversity and inclusion for Fidelity Investments. Wendy assumed her current position in 2020 and leads the effort to ensure that Fidelity is a workplace and service provider where everyone can fully be themselves. She is responsible for creating and attracting a more diverse workforce, tapping into the power of our differences to develop and retain talent, creating a culture of inclusion, and showcasing Fidelity’s reputation and brand as an inclusive employer and service provider.

TANIA ALLARD

Senior Developer Advocate, Microsoft

Tania Allard is a Sr. Developer Advocate at Microsoft with vast experience in academic research and industrial environments. Her main areas of expertise are within data-intensive applications, scientific computing, and machine learning. She has conducted extensive work on the improvement of processes, reproducibility and transparency in research, data science and artificial intelligence. She is passionate about mentoring, open source, and its community and is involved in a number of initiatives aimed to build more diverse and inclusive communities. She is also a contributor, maintainer, and developer of a number of open source projects and the Founder of Pyladies NorthWest.

MANRIQUE LOPEZ

CEO, Bitergia

Manrique Lopez is the CEO and shareholder in Bitergia and a free, libre, open source software development community passionate. He is a graduate Industrial Engineer with research and development experience from the Technological Center for Computer Science and Communications of the Principality of Asturias (CTIC), W3C working groups, Ándago Engineering, and Continua Health Alliance. Former executive director of the Spanish Open Source Enterprises Association (ASOLIF), and expert consultant for the Spanish National Open Source Reference Center (CENATIC).

ABHIJEET RAJWADE

Cloud Engineer, Google

As a Cloud Engineer, Abhijeet Rajwade ensures that the business problems of the largest manufacturers and energy companies in the US have the right technical solution. With close to 15 years of experience across various technologies including Citrix, Microsoft, Azure, IBM and Pivotal, he has broad expertise in solving the “how” in Digital Transformation journeys. Abhijeet strongly believes that embracing open source technologies is an efficient way to avoid “”public cloud”” lock in.

BRENT LASTER

Director, R&D, SAS

Brent Laster is a global trainer, presenter, and the author of the books Professional Git and Jenkins 2: Up and Running: Evolve Your Deployment Pipeline for Next Generation Automation. In his day job, he is a Director of software development in SAS’s Research and Development Division, based in Cary, North Carolina, where he manages several groups involved with cloud technology development, security, SaaS, and internal tooling. He also serves as a resource for the use of open source technologies and contributes to enterprise DevOps development. Brent also develops and presents training and workshops for a wide variety of technical conferences. His workshops and informational sessions have been featured at such venues as Jenkins World, OSCON, DevOps World, the Gradle Summit, Open Source 101, UberConf and others. You can also find Brent regularly conducting live web training courses on the Safari platform. Brent’s passion is teaching and doing so in a way that makes difficult concepts relatable to all. You can contact him at @BrentCLaster on Twitter or on LinkedIn.

LIZ FONG-JONES

Principal Developer Advocate, Honeycomb

Liz Fong-Jones is a developer advocate, labor and ethics organizer, and Site Reliability Engineer (SRE) with 16+ years of experience. She is an advocate at Honeycomb for the SRE and Observability communities, and previously was an SRE working on products ranging from the Google Cloud Load Balancer to Google Flights. She lives in Brooklyn with her wife Elly, metamours, and a Samoyed/Golden Retriever mix, and in San Francisco and Seattle with her other partners. She plays classical piano, leads an EVE Online alliance, and advocates for transgender rights.

WILLIAM P. DAVIS

Assistant Editor, News Platforms, The New York Times

William Davis is an assistant editor at The New York Times and a product lead on The Times’s publishing tools team. He is responsible for developing tools and workflows that make it easier for The Times to produce great journalism. Prior to joining The Times, Will worked at the Bangor Daily News in Maine, where he helped transform the company to focus on covering the entire state for a digital readership. His work has spanned reporting, editing, engineering and product management. Will is a semiprofessional violin and viola player, and spends his time outside of work playing chamber and symphonic music, as well as skiing and hiking, when traveling is allowed.

RAY PAIK

Community Manager, GitLab

Ray Paik is a Community Manager at GitLab where he is helping to grow the community of contributors to GitLab. Prior to GitLab, Ray was responsible for the day-to-day operation of the Open Platform for NFV (OPNFV) community since its launch in 2014. He has over 15 years of experience in the high-tech industry in roles ranging from software engineer, product manager, program manager, account manager, and team lead at companies such as EDS, Intel, Linux Foundation, and Medallia. Ray lives in Sunnyvale, CA with his wife and daughter and all three are loyal season ticket holders of the San Jose Earthquakes soccer team. Previously Ray spoke at CHAOSScon, Community Leadership Summit, FOSDEM, GitLab Commit, and Open Source Summit.

HONG PHUC DANG

Founder, FOSSAsia

Hong Phuc Dang is an Open Source advocate with more than a decade of experience in open source development and community building. She currently serves as the Vice President of the Open Source Initiative. In 2009 Hong Phuc co-founded FOSSASIA, an organization that strives to improve people’s lives through sharing open technologies, knowledge and fostering global connections and sustainable production. She chairs the annual FOSSASIA Summit in Singapore and organizes Open Tech Summits in countries from Vietnam, India, China, Sri Lanka, to Germany. She spoke at conferences such as Fosdem, OSCON, DebConf and CCC.

KOREN TOWNSEND

Senior Application Developer, Red Hat

Koren Townsend is a senior application administration and developer at Red Hat, where she focuses on supporting, administering, and developing training guidance for the WalkMe project. She has been with Red Hat for 8 years. Koren is a technology industry veteran, with a combined 20 years of QA and application development experience ranging from small start-ups to the leading software company in open source technologies today, Red Hat. She helped to revamp the entire redhat.com website, implement a content management tool to support the site, and helped to deploy the learning management system (LMS) to several countries around the world. Most recently, she has been working on the Digital Adoption team to develop WalkMe implementations for Red Hat tools and products.

ALAN S. KOCH

Senior Technical Lead Instructor, CPrime Learning

Alan S. Koch is a speaker and writer on effective Project Management, software development, IT operations, and public speaking methods. He holds these certifications: Project Management Professional (PMP), PMI Agile Certified Professional (PMI-ACP), Certified Scrum Master (CSM), ICAgile Certified Professional in Agile Testing (ICP-TST), Foundations of DevOps (ICP-FDO) and Implementing DevOps (ICP-IDO), DevOps Foundation (DevOps Institute), Certified ITIL Expert, COBIT 5 Foundation, and a Certified Toast Master (CTM).

GERIE OWEN

Senior Test Manager, Cubic Transportation Inc.

Gerie Owen is a QA Architect at Medullan. She is a Certified Scrum Master, Conference Presenter and Author on technology and testing topics. She enjoys mentoring new QA Leads and brings a cohesive team approach to testing. Gerie is the author of many articles on testing and technology including Agile and DevOps topics. Gerie can be reached at gerie.owen@gerieowen.com. Her blog,Testing in the Trenches, is at https://testinggirl.wordpress.com/ and she is available at www.gerieowen.com

SAHDEV ZALA

Senior Software Engineer, IBM

Sahdev Zala is a senior open source developer and strategic leader in the IBM Open Technology division. He is contributing to various open source projects – Kubernetes, etcd, OpenStack, TOSCA – for over seven years. Sahdev is a maintainer of the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) etcd project, a subproject owner in Kubernetes Cloud Provider, and an active member of the Kubernetes Contributor Experience special interest group. He is also a core reviewer in the OpenStack project and a technical committee member of OASIS TOSCA. He has been a speaker at many KubeCon + CloudNativeCon, OpenStack summits, LinuxCon, IBM Think, and Meetups. He was a Keynote Speaker at the European Grid Infrastructure (EGI) Conference 2017.

TIMIRAH JAMES

Founder, Technigal LA

Timirah James is a Technology Evangelist and influencer creating awareness around STEM and diversity in tech as well as helping others build great technical skills and become great developers. She is also a Swift Instructor on the O’Reilly Media Platform. Timirah is best known for being a leader in the Los Angeles and Silicon Beach tech community, her active roles in the hackathon realm, the mobile and serverless community, and mentoring through TechniGal LA, her non-profit organization for women exploring the world of STEM. Timirah is highlighted as a figure in the Faces of Open Source Project.

GREG HISLOP

Professor, Drexel University

Greg Hislop is a Professor in the College of Computing and Informatics at Drexel University. He has been a Principal Investigator on four NSF grants to develop HFOSS education. He has developed HFOSS materials to include in existing courses and has also developed a complete HFOSS course. He is a facilitator of the POSSE workshops that prepare instructors to teach their students how to participate in open source projects. Prior to Drexel, Gregory spent almost 20 years working in the software and IT industry.

KARA DE LA MARCK

Open Source Community Manager, Cloudbees

Kara de la Marck is CloudBees Open Source Community Manager. Previously, she worked as a developer for a Fortune 500 company and as a freelancer. Kara is an open-source contributor and advocate. She has been a mentor and org admin for Outreachy and Google Summer of Code. She is involved in the Continuous Delivery Foundation’s Interoperability SIG and MLOps SIG. As an organizer and board director of codebar.io, Kara works to increase diversity in the tech industry. She is passionate about making technology accessible and building welcoming tech communities.

ERIC TICE

Global Open Source SME Lead, Enterprise Architect, Wipro Technologies

Eric is the Global Open Source SME Lead at Wipro. He provides consulting services to clients and leads a team of SMEs in the US and Europe to assist the clients with strategic planning and transformation using Open Source technologies. Eric has a rich experience of over 20 years in the IT industry and has played varied roles such as that of developer, solution architect, enterprise architect and Manager. His interest in open source goes back to his developer days and over the years he has gained considerable tact and expertise in leveraging open source to deliver business value and drive business agility for customers.

LEISKA EVANSON

Managing Director/Lead Consultant/General Manager/Producer, Evansons Strategy Consultants

Leiska Evanson (Lee-ska Ev-an-son) is celebrating 4 decades as a crafty black woman with a penchant for business, technology, farming and gluten-free cuisine. She is currently:

the managing director and lead consultant of Evansons Strategy Consultants, specialising in sustainability and resilience projects;
executive producer of the “”Live from the Caribbean”” podcast, showcasing outstanding people of Caribbean heritage who excel in diverse locations around the globe;
general manager of Healing Grove Contained Farms, a family-owned aquaponics enterprise, and
an active member of the Internet Society of Barbados, supporting privacy, security, copy-left and open standards.

An avid gamer, maker, writer, web designer and Linux user, she’s been skilled in creating, fixing and hacking everything since wiping her dad’s Mac at 4 years old.

DAVE STOKES

MySQL Community Manager, Oracle

Dave Stokes is a MySQL Community Manager for Oracle Corporation and travels extensively to promote MySQL, speaking over thirty times each year for the past several years. He is also the author of MySQL & JSON – A Practical Programming Guide which is a guide for those wishing to take advantage of the JSON data type and the MySQL Document Store. With degrees in computer science and business, you can find him on the road at shows like FOSDEM, SCaLE, Confoo, PHP UK, Scotland PHP, PyCaribbean, or maybe you local meetup (please let him know if you need a speaker!). Dave actually started programming in FORTRAN on punch cards on a Digital Equipment Corporation KL1091 36-bit computer and wants you to know that the dinosaurs roaming the earth at the time did make on-campus parking especially daunting. Has has been playing guitar (badly) for way too long. Dave resides in Texas with the mandatory hound dog and pickup truck.