Skipping for now due to deadline, will add
Linkedin for now https://www.linkedin.com/in/alexander-xander-smith-ccnp-cissp-18437491/

Angela Runge is a User Researcher who has worked on improving IBM Cloud's customer experience for over a decade.

While coming from a product design background with a Fine Arts degree, Angela has had hundreds of conversations with IT Architects, Admins, and Engineers to understand what it's like to work in enterprise IT and use cloud computing.

Angela loves learning about architecture, urban planning, and the development of cities, and is fascinated by the parallels between virtual environments and the built environment.

Angela lived in Austin for 9 years but recently moved to Chicago to trade triple digit summers for winters with -20 F wind chill.

Boyd Hemphill is the CTO of Victory CTO. He is a DevOps raconteur formerly of the Silicon Hills of Austin Texas.

Boyd is a big believer in community and founded the Austin DevOps meetup over 10 years ago, contributes to DevOps Days Austin as an organizer emeritus, and is getting a new community started in his new town of Grand Junction, Colorado in the US. You can find him skiing, mountain biking, paddling, hiking and jeeping.

Carl has been practicing what we call DevOps since before we started calling it DevOps: breaking down walls and working together towards a better technological future since 1996. He's a proud member of this community, organizes some local events, and is a RISC-V Ambassador. You can find him on Mastodon as @[email protected] or many weekend evenings in Star Citizen.

Chaitanya Rahalkar is a highly skilled software security engineer with expertise in cloud-native security pipelines, detection systems, and robust DevOps practices. With a Master’s in Cybersecurity from the Georgia Institute of Technology and a Bachelor’s in Computer Engineering from Savitribai Phule Pune University, Chaitanya excels in the development and implementation of innovative security solutions. His professional journey includes impactful roles at Block Inc., Praetorian Security, and Meta, where he contributed to security engineering, vulnerability detection, and fuzzing systems.

Chaitanya is proficient in a wide range of programming languages, frameworks, and security tools, including Rust, Python, AWS, Docker, Kubernetes, and advanced threat modeling methodologies. His academic contributions, including multiple peer-reviewed publications, highlight his commitment to advancing research in cybersecurity and privacy.

Beyond his technical expertise, Chaitanya is an advocate for continuous learning, mentorship, and collaboration, which have defined his approach to driving success in both technical and organizational transformations.

Chris Corriere has been working with data, phones, networks and writing software for over 20 years. His background in mathematics and engineering has allowed him to adapt to new and industry specific technologies and provided many unique consulting opportunities. As a devOps practitioner Chris is committed to culture, automation, learning, sharing, and having a good time while getting work done.

Daniel is a Microsoft .NET MVP and software consultant at Lean TECHniques. He helps teams deliver high-quality software while adopting lean practices such as effective CI/CD, automated testing, and product management.

With experience spanning multiple industries, including finance, retail, and agriculture, he has served as a technical coach, agile coach, and tech lead, with a primary background as a software developer.

Outside of work, he enjoys playing piano and guitar, swing dancing, and game development.

Dan McKinley is a freelance raconteur and engineer. He was in the first 20 employees at Etsy, and worked at Stripe, Mailchimp, and his own startups. His talk “Choose Boring Technology” is fairly popular online. Most recently he was a VP of Engineering at Mozilla.

Deeja is a Senior FinOps Analyst at Datadog. She operates as the translation layer between the Finance and Engineering areas of the organization.

Di is currently a Platform Engineer at Upside who considers herself a practical technologist focused on building solutions that work, not just chasing the latest trends. With experience in AWS, Terraform, and Python, she creates tools and systems that are cost-effective, scalable, and easy for teams to use. Di is not afraid to throw in a cringey pun when the moment calls for it—because, let’s face it, a little humor never hurts good documentation. Outside of work, you'll find her cooking or eating interesting foods.

Born and raised in the ever-expanding Greater Houston Area, Garo has been messing with software for at least 29 years, writing it for money for about 20 years, and loving every clock cycle of it. He has worked as the Software Whisperer for Baker Hughes, leading software teams, conducting design reviews, and coaching people on how to put the 0's and 1's in a close enough order to make things work. Later, he was a Principal Consultant at Headspring, making silky smooth software and spreading mirth and merriment. Currently, he is a Senior Software Whisperer (and Senior Manager) at Accenture, learning and doing software at a global scale.

Gene Gotimer is a DevSecOps Engineer with Praeses, LLC, helping to build products for the US Air Force and other government clients. He loves playing with new tools, focusing on agile processes, making development more secure, and automating everything. Gene considers himself a developer but usually focuses on DevSecOps practices such as continuous integration, repeatable builds, unit testing, automated testing, security tools, and automated deployments. He spends a lot of time helping build security and automated infrastructure into build processes, incrementally improving and moving teams towards DevSecOps. Gene feels strongly that repeatability, quality, and security are all strongly intertwined; each depends on the other two, making agile and DevSecOps crucial to software development.

Graziano is a software engineer and passionate about agile development and product management. Formerly a developer of distributed systems in enterprise environments and a product manager, he focuses on sharing the myriad beauties of the cloud-native world. Active in international communities with talks and articles, he mainly deals with architectures, AI, platform engineering, and environmental sustainability in the software realm. More on: https://www.castograziano.com/

When he's not writing or reviewing open-core device management code at Fleet, Ian is likely playing board games with friends, nudging the PHP community forward as a meetup/conference organizer (MergePHP, Longhorn PHP) and maintainer of a few conference-adjacent tools (Joind.in, OpenCFP), or hanging out with his wife and her two cats in one of the parts of Austin that has really good food.

Jeremy is an international speaker and is currently the Director of DevRel at OneStream Software, previously at CircleCI, Solace, Auth0, and XDA. With almost 30 years in Tech, covering just about every functional area, including support, system and database administration, application and web development, project management, program management, and systems analysis, Jeremy is active in the DevRel and DevOps communities, a co-creator of DevOpsPartyGames.com, and organizer for DevOpsDays Kansas City. A lover of all things coffee, community, open source, and tech, he’s also house-broken, and (generally) plays well with others.

John Willis has worked in IT management for 45 years and is a prolific author, including "Deming's Journey to Profound Knowledge" and "The DevOps Handbook." He is researching DevOps, DevSecOps, IT risk, modern governance, and audit compliance. Previously he was an Evangelist at Docker Inc., VP of Solutions for Socketplane (sold to Docker) and Enstratius (sold to Dell), and VP of Training & Services at Opscode (Chef), where he formalized the training, evangelism, and professional services functions at the firm. Willis also founded Gulf Breeze Software, an award-winning IBM business partner specializing in deploying Tivoli technology to the enterprise. Willis has authored six IBM Redbooks for IBM on enterprise systems management and was the founder and chief architect at Chain Bridge Systems.

Kirsten Hunter is a seasoned developer advocate with over 20 years of experience empowering developers and fostering strong technical communities. With a passion for making complex concepts accessible, Kirsten excels at bridging the gap between developers and the technologies they use. Throughout her career, she has worked with leading tech companies to drive API adoption, advocate for best practices, and build tools that make developers’ lives easier.

Known for her engaging presentations and deep technical expertise, Kirsten has spoken at conferences around the globe, sharing insights on topics ranging from API design to emerging technologies. When she’s not on stage or coding, Kirsten is an avid reader, mentor, and advocate for diversity in tech. Her experience, energy, and commitment to developer success make her a sought-after voice in the developer community.

Krishiv Piduri is a passionate high school student with a deep interest in technology, DevOps, and personal growth. From mastering Python at age 9 to earning multiple AWS certifications, Krishiv has embraced challenges and turned setbacks into stepping stones. He has organized an international hackathon, and explored homelabbing with Kubernetes and Docker. Krishiv is excited to share his journey of resilience, curiosity, and experimentation to inspire others in the DevOps community.

Lerna is a Senior Solutions Engineer at Clockwork Systems where she helps customers meet their performance goals with software solutions built on Clockwork.io’s foundational research. Prior to this, she was a Senior Solutions Architect at AWS for 3 years. Before that, Lerna spent 17 years as an infrastructure engineer in large financial services companies working on authentication systems, distributed caching, and multi region deployments using IaC and CI/CD to name a few. In her spare time, she enjoys hiking, sightseeing and backyard astronomy.

A brilliant, talented, self-taught, ambivert who loves attending and speaking at conferences. I love tinkering with small board computers like raspberry pis.

☕ If you see me around, don't hesitate to come say hi!
🏒 Hockey player since I was 7
💻 Programming since I was 14
✏️ Writer / Blogger
🎹 Pianist
🦺 First Responder
🧶 Fiber Art
♟️ Chess Player

Nate Sanders, Senior Manager of Security Engineering & Operations, has spent over 20 years in IT, with more than a decade in Information Security, specializing in infrastructure and application security, as well as vulnerability management. Known in the hacker world as "mauvehed," he’s been gleefully breaking things since the late 1980s, from disassembling his sister’s electronics to uncovering hidden features in software. A self-proclaimed shenanigator and proudly neurodivergent (AuDHD) thinker, Nate blends technical expertise with playful curiosity, proving that breaking things is just another way of learning how they work while pushing boundaries, sharing lessons, and leading with a mischievous streak.

Noe Lorona is a signal officer currently serving as a platform engineer for the Army Software Factory where he plans, develops and deploys cloud architecture to support Agile application development. He later transitioned to to become a platform product manager where he leads his team through tactical platform product development. Noe holds a Doctor of Management from Colorado Technical University, and a Master of Science in management and a Bachelor of Science in information technology, both from National American University. He began giving back to the academic community by teaching online courses and publishing articles about software development and general technology topics in several professional magazines. Noe holds several IT, UX, and Project Management certifications.

Olivia has been building machine learning and natural language processing models since before it was cool. She's spent several years at IBM working on opening up Watson tech, around the country and around the world.

Professional Software Consultant with Lean Techniques. Loves his family and the great outdoors.

Paul Czarkowski is a seasoned DevOps practitioner, open-source advocate, and cloud automation expert with over 20 years of experience in infrastructure, Kubernetes, and cloud-native technologies. A long-time DevOpsDays organizer and speaker, Paul has worked with industry leaders like Red Hat, VMware, IBM, and Electronic Arts.

In his talk, he explores the cutting edge of private, self-hosted Generative AI—leveraging open-source models, containerization, and automation to build AI-powered assistants that run entirely at home, on your own hardware, with full privacy and control.

When he's not automating infrastructure or hacking on AI, you’ll find him championing DevOps culture, contributing to open-source projects, or smoking some delicious texas style barbecue.

Ross started his tech career as an assistant SysAdmin at an engineering firm in High School, where he was introduced to 2003 vintage monitoring tools like sar, perl, and the crontab. He was an early employee at CopperEgg -- a server/cloud monitoring SaaS company from 2011-2014 -- where he learned that "DevOps" is not just a way of life, but also a verb and job title. He currently DevOps at Logicmonitor -- yet another server/cloud monitoring SaaS company -- as a Senior DevOps Engineer where he complains about databases in his expensive time. In between the monitoring firms, he used several other monitoring technologies, all of which technically functioned I guess. In his free time he's Commander Shepard and this is his favorite talk at the conference.

Sasha is a founder of 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, at companies including Microsoft and Red Hat, Sasha brings a unique perspective to optimizing the organizational flow of work, bridging gaps with empathy and insight.

I'm an Austin native who successfully transitioned from a former body modification artist and stay at home dad to Sr Engineer at a global tech company. Learning to navigate the corporate world was a huge challenge for me and I would like to share some of the practices that helped me to succeed.

Sylvain Kalache leads Developer Relations and Rootly’s AI Lab. A former Senior SRE at LinkedIn, he co-designed a patented self-healing infrastructure. He later co-founded Holberton, training software engineers worldwide. He also writes about AI, automation, and DevOps for TechCrunch, Forbes, and The New Stack.