Speakers
Brian Sletten - Forward Leaning Software Engineer @ Bosatsu Consulting
Brian Sletten is a liberal arts-educated software engineer with a focus on forward-leaning technologies. His experience has spanned many industries including retail, banking, online games, defense, finance, hospitality and health care. He has a B.S. in Computer Science from the College of William and Mary and lives in Auburn, CA. He focuses on web architecture, resource-oriented computing, social networking, the Semantic Web, AI/ML, data science, 3D graphics, visualization, scalable systems, security consulting and other technologies of the late 20th and early 21st Centuries. He is also a rabid reader, devoted foodie and has excellent taste in music. If pressed, he might tell you about his International Pop Recording career.
Rohit Bhardwaj - Director of Architecture, Expert in cloud-native solutions
Rohit Bhardwaj is a Director of Architecture working at Salesforce. Rohit has extensive experience architecting multi-tenant cloud-native solutions in Resilient Microservices Service-Oriented architectures using AWS Stack. In addition, Rohit has a proven ability in designing solutions and executing and delivering transformational programs that reduce costs and increase efficiencies.
As a trusted advisor, leader, and collaborator, Rohit applies problem resolution, analytical, and operational skills to all initiatives and develops strategic requirements and solution analysis through all stages of the project life cycle and product readiness to execution.
Rohit excels in designing scalable cloud microservice architectures using Spring Boot and Netflix OSS technologies using AWS and Google clouds. As a Security Ninja, Rohit looks for ways to resolve application security vulnerabilities using ethical hacking and threat modeling. Rohit is excited about architecting cloud technologies using Dockers, REDIS, NGINX, RightScale, RabbitMQ, Apigee, Azul Zing, Actuate BIRT reporting, Chef, Splunk, Rest-Assured, SoapUI, Dynatrace, and EnterpriseDB. In addition, Rohit has developed lambda architecture solutions using Apache Spark, Cassandra, and Camel for real-time analytics and integration projects.
Rohit has done MBA from Babson College in Corporate Entrepreneurship, Masters in Computer Science from Boston University and Harvard University. Rohit is a regular speaker at No Fluff Just Stuff, UberConf, RichWeb, GIDS, and other international conferences.
Rohit loves to connect on http://www.productivecloudinnovation.com.
http://linkedin.com/in/rohit-bhardwaj-cloud or using Twitter at rbhardwaj1.
Venkat Subramaniam - Founder @ Agile Developer, Inc.
Dr. Venkat Subramaniam is an award-winning author, founder of Agile Developer, Inc., creator of agilelearner.com, and an instructional professor at the University of Houston.
He has trained and mentored thousands of software developers in the US, Canada, Europe, and Asia, and is a regularly-invited speaker at several international conferences. Venkat helps his clients effectively apply and succeed with sustainable agile practices on their software projects.
Venkat is a (co)author of multiple technical books, including the 2007 Jolt Productivity award winning book Practices of an Agile Developer. You can find a list of his books at agiledeveloper.com. You can reach him by email at venkats@agiledeveloper.com or on twitter at @venkat_s.
Batel Zohar - Developer Advocate
Batel Zohar is a Developer Advocate for JFrog and has a background in DevOps support engineering, web development, and embedded software engineering. Prior to this, Batel served as an Enterprise Solutions Lead on a dedicated team that accompanies and assists large customers through the architectural implementation of the JFrog platform. She loves her dogs, plays guitar, and is a fan of Marvels movies
John Willis - Senior Director, Red Hat
John Willis is the Senior Director of the Global Transformation Office at Red Hat.
Prior to Red Hat, he was the Director of Ecosystem Development for Docker, which he joined after the company he co-founded (SocketPlane, which focused on SDN for containers) was acquired by Docker in February 2015. Previous to founding SocketPlane in Fall 2014, John was the Chief DevOps An Evangelist at Dell, which he joined following the Enstratius acquisition in May 2013. He has also held past executive roles at Chef and Canonical. John was one of the earliest cloud evangelists and is considered one of the founders of the Devops movement. John is the author of 7 IBM =Redbooks. He is also the co-author of the Devops Handbook and Beyond the Phoenix Project along with author Gene Kim.
Ant(on) Weiss - Software Delivery Futurist
15 years in tech, marketing and leadership roles. All about software delivery optimization. 5 years in technical and executive training. Expert in DevOps, Lean, Systems Thinking, Continuous Delivery, Cloud Native and Decentralized Systems. Coder, speaker, writer. Fixated on improving the ways humans collaborate by telling mind-provoking stories.
Aakash Singhal - Product Engineering Director, Developer Experience Enthusiast
Aakash is a seasoned Engineering Leader with experience in leading complex transformations in disruptive markets. Aakash is able to broker trusted relationships quickly, coupled with a strong executive presence to influence across organizations on how to build world-class product experiences. Having the opportunity to work across many industries like Retail, Healthcare and Financial Services, Aakash has led the innovation and experimentation of many new and modern practices. Aakash is always focused on taking a data-driven approach, learning from what has worked and what has failed before. Aakash solemnly believes that everyone in an organization is capable of delivering great outcomes and focuses on enabling high-performing nimble teams.
Aakash actively supports the next generation of talent through speaking engagements at universities and conferences. He participates as both a community collaborator (speaker) and an attendee, eager to connect with fresh minds, foster meaningful interactions and create borderless relationships.
Aman Sharma - Cofounder Lamatic.ai, DevOps Ambassador
Aman is a serial technology entrepreneur with 3 startups and has deployed over a dozen digital / AI products. He was a machine learning researcher at TU Wien (Vienna University of Technology), a UX / AI lead at upsell.ai and the founding lead at Mobile-web.dev . He is an active member of DevOps and AI community. He has delivered 50+ tech talks, shared advice on product building and mentored hundred of young entrepreneurs in technology and entrepreneurship. He was featured as a top CTO in India.
Jonathan Schneider - Co-Founder & CEO @ Moderne
Jonathan is co-founder and CEO at Miami-based Moderne which automates software maintenance activities at scale. He founded OpenRewrite at Netflix and went on to found the Micrometer project as a member of the Spring Team. Jonathan is the author of SRE with Java Microservices (OReilly). He is an Army veteran and two time bronze star recipient.
Baruch Sadogursky - Principal Developer Productivity Engineering Advocate, Gradle
Baruch Sadogursky (@jbaruch) did Java before it had generics, DevOps before there was Docker, and DevRel before it had a name. He started DevRel at JFrog when it was ten people and took it all the way to a successful $6B IPO by helping engineers solve problems. Now Baruch keeps helping engineers solve problems but also helps companies help engineers solve problems. He is a co-author of the “Liquid Software” and “DevOps Tools for Java Developers” books, serves on multiple conference program committees, and regularly speaks at numerous most prestigious industry conferences, including Kubecon, JavaOne (RIP), Devoxx, QCon, DevRelCon, DevOpsDays (all over), DevOops (not a typo) and others. After a tenure of eleven years in JFrog DevRel, Baruch is the Principal Developer Productivity Engineering Advocate at Gradle.
Valarie Regas - Developer Advocate
Valarie Regas is a DevOps fanatic, a Georgia Tech coding bootcamp graduate, and a veteran mommy. She holds a BA in Psychology and currently works as a Developer Advocate. After years being a stay-at-home mom, she decided to change her life by entering tech, and has learned a lot along the way. Outside of work, she enjoys mixed martial arts fighting, table-top role playing games, public speaking, creating tiny humans, and activism of all sorts.
Andrei Rebrov - CTO & Co-Founder of Scentbird
Andrei Rebrov has worked in the technology field for more than 15 years. He is the CTO and Co-Founder of Scentbird, a subscription service for perfumes and colognes, and has helped it grow to more than 500,000 active subscribers.
At Scentbird, Andrei was responsible for building early versions of the platform, growing a remote engineering team and making sure that the company has technology advantages in every department, from marketing to operations. He is also a startup adviser in various industries, from aerospace to video games.
Prior to Scentbird Andrei worked as an agile engineering coach, helping various companies with their technology. Prior to that he worked as a software engineer for UBS Investment Bank and Avis UK.
Steven Pousty - Helping you understand and implement technology
Steve is a dad, partner, son, and founder of Tech Raven Consulting. He can teach you about Data Analysis, Java, Python, PostgreSQL, Microservices, Containers, Kubernetes, and some JavaScript. He has deep subject area expertise in GIS/Spatial, Statistics, and Ecology. Before founding his company, Steve was a developer Advocate for VMware, Crunchy Data, DigitalGlobe, Red Hat, LinkedIn, deCarta, and ESRI. Steve has a Ph.D. in Ecology and can easily be bribed with offers of bird watching or fly fishing.
Adi Polak - Director of Advocacy and Developer Experience Engineering, Confluent
Adi is an experienced Software Engineer and people manager. For most of her professional life, she has worked with data and machine learning for operations and analytics. As a data practitioner, she developed algorithms to solve real-world problems using machine learning techniques and leveraging expertise in Apache Spark, Kafka, HDFS, and distributed large-scale systems.
Adi has taught Spark to thousands of students and is the author of the successful book — Scaling Machine Learning with Spark. Earlier this year, she embarked on a new adventure with data streaming, specifically Flink, and she can't get enough of it.
Sven Peters - DevOps Advocate at Atlassian
Sven Peters, DevOps advocate at Atlassian, has been studying trends in software development for the last 15 years uncovering the cultural and technical attributes to help development teams work effectively and drive innovation. He has 20 years experience in writing code, leading teams, and sharing his experience with thousands of developers at uncountable conferences in 25+ countries.
Jeremy Meiss - Director, DevRel @ CircleCI
Jeremy is the Director of DevRel & Community at CircleCI, formerly at Solace, Auth0, and XDA. With over 27 years in Tech, covering just about every functional area including Support, SysAdmin, Application Developer, Program Manager, and Business Analyst, Jeremy is active in the DevRel and DevOps communities, and is a co-creator of DevOpsPartyGames.com. A lover of all things coffee, community, open source, and tech, he's a husband and father, and is also house-broken, and (generally) plays well with others.
Brent Laster - Global author, trainer and founder of Tech Skills Transformations LLC
Hi, I'm Brent Laster - a global trainer and book author, experienced corporate technology developer and leader, and founder and president of Tech Skills Transformations LLC. I've been working with and presenting at NFJS events for many years now and it is always exciting and interesting.
Through my decades in programming and management,I've always tried to make time to learn and develop both technical and leadership skills and share them with others Regardless of the topic or technology, my belief is that there is no substitute for the excitement and sense of potential that come from providing others with the knowledge they need to help them accomplish their goals.
In my spare time, I hang out with my wife Anne-Marie, 4 children and 2 small dogs in Cary, North Carolina where I design and conduct trainings and write books. You can find me on LinkedIn (linkedin.com/in/brentlaster), Twitter (@brentclaster) or through my company's website at www.getskillsnow.com.
Gabriel L. Manor - Director of DevRel @ Permit.io
I'm a senior full-stack developer with a favorite kid named Frontend.
For over ten years now, I've enjoyed writing clean code, simplifying complex problems, leading feature development, and influencing innovation every day.
When Im not busy with code, youll find me talking about application performance, building confidence in code-bases, product architecture, developing organizational culture, and other nerdy dev stuff.
Besides all that, I'm a father of two, a hobbyist photographer, lego builder, and food creator.
Ignat Korchagin - Cloudflare, Linux Guru
Ignat is a systems engineer at Cloudflare working mostly on platform and hardware security. Ignats interests are cryptography, hacking, and low-level programming. Before Cloudflare, Ignat worked as a senior security engineer for Samsung Electronics Mobile Communications Division. His solutions may be found in many older Samsung smart phones and tablets. Ignat started his career as a security researcher in the Ukrainian governments communications services.
Andrew Korbel - VP, R&D Operations & Chief of Staff
Ive never had a set destination when considering my careermy first job out of college was as a cartographer! Ive always gravitated toward opportunities that challenge me to think differently while bringing a balance between big-picture thinking and execution.
Unsurprisingly, my interests have led me to various roles within software companies. Today, I currently lead R&D Operations at Clari. Before this role, I was a VP in the Product & Technology Center of Excellence at Insight Partners. While at Insight Partners, I worked closely with portfolio company executives to accelerate growth and create operational capabilities through lean and agile processes and data-driven strategies. Being a part of the team at Insight allowed me to leverage all my learnings and failures throughout my career to give back to Senior Executives across their portfolio. Previously to Insight Partners, I was the VP of Product Operations at Carbon Black, where I designed and built their product operations capabilities. Ive also been Chief of Staff to product and engineering leaders, along with leading R&D Operations at Rally Software and SignalFx through their ScaleUp journeys. Ive also spearheaded engineering at other B2B SaaS companies.
I love sharing my knowledge and experiences in scaling and orchestrating R&D organizations. I live in Colorado but grew up in West Virginia. I enjoy spending time with my family and taking advantage of all that Colorado offers, including hiking, camping, skiing, and the Nuggets, to name a few. Im an avid bike rider and Pittsburgh sports fan, and I love to cook and read!
Kohsuke Kawaguchi - Co-CEO, Launchable, Inc. Creator of Jenkins.
Kohsuke Kawaguchi is the creator of Jenkins and co-CEO of Launchable. He is a well-respected developer and popular speaker at industry and Jenkins community events. Kawaguchis sensibilities in creating Jenkins and his deep understanding of how to translate its capabilities into usable software have also had a major impact on CloudBees strategy as a company. Before joining CloudBees, Kawaguchi was with Sun Microsystems and Oracle, where he worked on a variety of projects and initiated the open source work that led to Jenkins.
Leonid Igolnik - VP of Product Development w/Oracle
Leonid Igolnik is self proclaimed a unix bigot and a java evangelist. In his current role as a Vice President of Product Development with Oracle he is responsible for product development of several SaaS applications. He has spent his entire professional career building on-line applications starting at one of the earliest internet service providers in Israel. Leonid first started building large scale applications in Java in 2002 while working for the 2nd largest domain registrar at the time at Tucows/OpenSRS where he led the platform team. Subsequently to that he held several technology leadership roles with companies in Canada and US. Most recently Leonid has been responsible for engineering teams at Taleo (acquired by Oracle) building applications that help millions of people find jobs that have propelled the company to a position of one of the 4 largest SaaS companies in the world.
Daniel Hinojosa - Independent Consultant
Daniel is a programmer, consultant, instructor, speaker, and recent author. With over 20 years of experience, he does work for private, educational, and government institutions. He is also currently a speaker for No Fluff Just Stuff tour. Daniel loves JVM languages like Java, Groovy, and Scala; but also dabbles with non JVM languages like Haskell, Ruby, Python, LISP, C, C++. He is an avid Pomodoro Technique Practitioner and makes every attempt to learn a new programming language every year. For downtime, he enjoys reading, swimming, Legos, football, and barbecuing.
Travis Gosselin - Distinguished Software Engineer, SPS Commerce
Travis is a Distinguished Software Engineer at SPS Commerce, the world's largest retail network, where he leads innovation, drives meaningful change, and amplifies team productivity. With a passion for technology and a talent for simplifying complex architectures, Travis focuses on creating seamless Developer Experiences and fostering high-performing teams. A seasoned speaker, architect, and blogger, he thrives on sharing insights, exploring emerging technologies, and championing impactful development practices.
Raju Gandhi - Founder, DefMacro Software
Raju is a software craftsman with almost 20 years of hands-on experience scoping, architecting, designing, implementing full stack applications.
He provides a 360 view of the development cycle, is proficient in a variety of programming languages and paradigms, experienced with software development methodologies, as well an expert in infrastructure and tooling.
He has long been in the pursuit of hermeticism across the development stack by championing immutability during development (with languages like Clojure), deployment (leveraging tools like Docker and Kubernetes), and provisioning and configuration via code (toolkits like Ansible, Terraform, Packer, everything-as-code).
Raju is a published author, internationally known public speaker and trainer.
Raju can be found on Twitter as @looselytyped.
In his spare time, you will find Raju reading, playing with technology, or spending time with his wonderful (and significantly better) other half.
Viktor Gamov - Principal Developer Advocate, Kong
Viktor Gamov is a Principal Developer Advocate at Kong, a cloud connectivity company.
Viktor has comprehensive expertise in building distributed systems and cloud-native architectures using open source technologies.
He enjoys helping architects and developers design and develop low latency, scalable, and highly available systems.
He is a professional conference speaker on distributed systems, streaming data, JVM, and DevOps topics.
He's regular on events including JavaOne, Devoxx, OSCON, QCon, and others.
He co-authored books O'Reilly's Enterprise Web Development and Manning's Apache Kafka in Action.
He blogs at http://gamov.io and co-hosts KongCast https://pod.link/kongcast.
Follow Viktor on Twitter @gamussa, where he posts there about gym life, food, open-source, and Kong and Cloud.
Hila Fish - Senior DevOps Engineer @ Wix.com
Hila Fish is a Senior DevOps Engineer at Wix, with 15 years of experience in the tech industry.
AWS Community Builder, Hashicorp ambassador, and a public speaker who believes the DevOps culture is what drives a company to perform at its best and talks about that and other DevOps/Infrastructure topics at conferences.
She carries the vision to enhance and drive business success by taking care of its infrastructure.
In her spare time, Hila is a lead singer of a cover band, giving back to the community by co-organizing DevOps-related conferences (Inc. “DevOpsDays TLV” & “StatsCraft” monitoring-focused event), providing mentorship and managing programs in Baot (The largest technical womens community in Israel), and enjoys sharing her passion and knowledge wherever she can, including across diverse technology communities, initiatives and social media.
Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/hila-fish
Twitter: https://twitter.com/Hilafish1
Pasha Finkelshteyn - Developer Advocate
Years of experience in software engineering and the team's leading roles combined with his passion for Java made Pasha know all the hidden details in this IT niche. As a Developer Advocate for @Bellsoft, he educates the public on the latest software tools built by BellSoft and helps to create and test instruments for developers. He writes in Kotlin, speaks at conferences, composes a new articles, or maintains his pet projects.
Misha Druzhinin - Application Performance Monitoring at DataDog
Engineering Manager at Datadog, working on observability and application performance monitoring. Previously in AWS and Finance.
Sasha Czarkowski (Rosenbaum) - Principal, Ergonautic
Sasha is a Principal at a new venture, Ergonautic
With a degree in Computer Science, an MBA, and two decades of experience across development, operations, product management, and technical sales, Sasha Rosenbaum brings a unique perspective to optimizing the organizational flow of work, bridging gaps with empathy and insight.
Tejas Chopra - Senior Software Engineer, Netflix
Tejas Chopra is a Senior Software Engineer, working in the Data Storage Platform team at Netflix, where he is responsible for architecting storage solutions to support Netflix Studios and Netflix Streaming Platform. Prior to Netflix, Tejas was working on designing and implementing the storage infrastructure at Box, Inc. to support a cloud content management platform that scales to petabytes of storage & millions of users. Tejas has worked on distributed file systems & backend architectures, both in on-premise and cloud environments as part of several startups in his career. Tejas is an International Keynote Speaker and periodically conducts seminars on Micro services, NFTs, Software Development & Cloud Computing and has a Masters Degree in Electrical & Computer Engineering from Carnegie Mellon University, with a specialization in Computer Systems.
Michael Carducci - Holistic Software Architect @ Truly Magic
Michael Carducci is a seasoned IT professional with over 25 years of experience, an author, and an internationally recognized speaker, blending expertise in software architecture with the artistry of magic and mentalism. His upcoming book, “Mastering Software Architecture,” reflects his deep understanding of the multifaceted challenges of building resilient, effective software systems and high-performing teams. Michael's career spans roles from individual contributor to CTO, with a particular focus on strategic enterprise architecture and digital transformation.
As a magician and mentalist, Michael has captivated audiences in dozens of countries, applying the same creativity and problem-solving skills that define his technology career. He excels in transforming complex technical concepts into engaging narratives, making him a sought-after speaker, trainer, and emcee for internal and tech events worldwide.
In his consulting work, Michael adopts a holistic approach to software architecture, ensuring alignment with business strategy and operational realities. He empowers teams, bridges tactical and strategic objectives, and guides organizations through transformative changes, always aiming to create sustainable, adaptable solutions.
Michael's unique blend of technical acumen and performative talent makes him an unparalleled force in both the tech and entertainment industries, driven by a passion for continuous learning and a commitment to excellence.
Daniel Bryant - Head of DevRel @ Ambassador Labs
Daniel Bryant is the Head of DevRel at Ambassador Labs. His technical expertise focuses on DevOps tooling, cloud/container platforms, and microservice implementations. Daniel is a long-time coder, platform engineer, and Java Champion, and he contributes to several open source projects. He also writes for InfoQ, OReilly, and The New Stack, and regularly presents at international conferences such as KubeCon, QCon, and JavaOne. In his copious amounts of free time, he enjoys running, reading, and traveling.