Billy Thompson

Billy Thompson is a Cloud Engineering Manager for Akamai Cloud Computing Services, helping customers design portable architectures and deploy them at scale. Billy holds an InfoSec degree and has a special interest in DevOps, Cloud-native and open source technologies, as well as Python, Rust, and GO programming languages. He is a longtime Arch Linux user and Vegan, and never knows which to tell people first. Outside of work he volunteers his home for fostering and acclimating rescue dogs.

  • Unwind: Breaking the Psychology of Cloud Vendor Lock-in
Budhaditya Bhattacharya

I am a Developer Advocate at Tyk responsible for product education, community engagement, and open-source ecosystem expansion. I am the course instructor of the API Platform engineering fundamentals programme, creator of the API platform maturity model, organiser and host of LEAP 2024 - the API observability conference, host of the All About APIs and the API hangout where he engages with developers and business leaders on all things APIs including product management, platform engineering, API security, open source and open standards.
Additionally, I am the chair of the OpenAPI Initiative's Governance Board driving initiatives for the education and adoption of the OpenAPI Specification.

  • Bad API observability: 7 anti-patterns you must avoid
Carmen Huidobro

Carmen Huidobro is a developer advocate and dev education enthusiast. She thrives on lifting others up in their tech careers and loves a good CSS challenge. Always excited to talk about teaching tech, especialmente en Español, oder auf Deutsch.

  • Versatility as a DevOps Practitioner
Frank Boucher

With many years of experience in the IT industry, François (Frank) Boucher is a trusted Microsoft Azure professional whose expertise and bilingual service are relied upon in large Canadian markets (Ottawa and Montreal) as well as internationally.

Among his many accolades, Francois has been awarded four times Microsoft Azure MVP status, named a Microsoft Azure Advisor, and Microsoft Azure P-Seller.

Frank created the “Cloud 5 minutes” show. Where every second week, a new episode that answers a different technical question, is published both in French and English (cloud5mins.com).

  • Don't let AI or tools do all work for you
Hart Ripley

Hart Ripley of MOBIA's Office of the CTO (OCTO) leads the National Automation initiatives for clients across Canada, finding creative solutions and ways to automate and improve efficiencies. Hart has almost 20 years of experience in technology, from networking, to infrastructure, and more recently in the DevOps and automation space. Join Hart to learn more about self-service automation in the enterprise!

  • Unlocking Efficiency with Self-Service Automation
Ian Crosby

Ian's tech career has spanned many roles: developer, architect, cloud engineer, CTO, and more. He enjoys solving difficult problems with interesting technology and people. As Field CTO at Aptum, he focuses on understanding and identifying the latest trends in cloud.

  • A Cloud of Lies
Jamie Li

Jamie is a Staff Software Engineer at Harness, where he specializes in test intelligence within the Continuous Integration (CI) team. He develops and optimizes features aimed at significantly reducing CI build times, enhancing overall efficiency.

  • Build Smarter, Develop Faster - Enhancing Developer Productivity in the CI/CD Era
Jan de Vries

Jan de Vries is a senior trainer, business IT consultant, coach, researcher and public speaker in the fields of Agile, DevOps, Business Information Management, Service Management, Antifragility and Strategy Development.

He (co-)founded:
- BlueOceanRecon.com to facilitate the development of Blue Oceans and Lean Startups.
- Antifragility.works to conduct research on the practical application of antifragility in organisations.
- GRCinAgile.com to explore common ground between Agile/DevOps teams and Governance, Risk & Compliance.

  • What does a future proof organisation look like?
Jeet Jani

I am a Master's student at Dalhousie University studying Applied Computer Science with a keen interest in Cloud Computing and DevOps. I would like to take this opportunity to hone my public speaking skills.

  • Zero to Hero - The Power of Serverless Computing
Joe Zhou

Joe is an enthusiastic advocate for cloud-native technologies.

Having served as the CTO of a dynamic start-up company, Joe excels at directing and inspiring team members to deliver exceptional results.

Currently, Joe proudly serves as a Developer Advocate at DragonflyDB, a modern multi-threaded Redis-compatible in-memory data store system. In this role, he is dedicated to promoting this innovative solution and empowering developers to leverage its capabilities for optimal performance and efficiency.

  • Optimizing Database Management in Kubernetes
Ken De Souza

Ken De Souza has been in software development for over 20 years. He is a software developer, currently specializing in building tools and culture related to helping developers securely deploy and monitor the code they create, with a passion for delivering high quality software at a rapid pace.

He has spoken at software development conferences over the last 10 years. He currently resides in Waterloo, Ontario, Canada.

  • On-call doesn’t need to suck; ways to help make your on-call better
Kunal Nawale

Kunal Nawale is a Founder/CEO of SigLens. Previously he worked as Observability Architect at Salesforce responsible for providing monitoring solutions to 10,000+ salesforce engineers. Kunal has spent 20+ years in software development. He has been mentoring young engineers for the past 12+ years. Kunal did his Bachelors from University of Pune, and M.S. from UMass Lowell, USA

  • Nightmares to Insights: Translating 30 Developer Questions into Actionable Observability Queries
Mayursinh Sarvaiya

I'm currently pursuing a Master's in Applied Computer Science at Dalhousie University. I've made contributions to open-source projects like Spotify, Elastic, and Argo. Alongside my studies, I work part-time as a Software Engineer at Akuity, a cloud-native company. This role has familiarized me with standard practices for orchestrating containers on Kubernetes.

  • Skip traditional pipelines for Kubernetes management; choose GitOps with ArgoCD
Pramod Rana

Pramod Rana is author of below open source projects:
1. Omniscient - LetsMapYourNetwork: a graph-based asset management framework
2. sec-depend-aider - Dependabot pull request monitoring automation platform
3. CICDGuard - Orchestrating visibility and security of CICD ecosystem
4. vPrioritizer - Art of Risk Prioritization: a risk prioritization framework

He has presented at BlackHat, Defcon, nullcon, OWASPGlobalAppSec, HackMiami, HackInParis and Insomnihack before.

He is leading the application security team in Netskope with primary focus on integrating security controls in the development process and providing security-testing-as-a-service to engineering teams.

  • Doing more with less - DevSecOps with limited budget
Rishab Kumar

Rishab is a Staff Developer Evangelist at Twilio, part-time cloud professor at St. Lawrence College, co-author of Learn to Cloud, AWS Community Builder, and a Microsoft MVP. He is passionate about helping people get into cloud and sharing his learnings from his time in cloud, DevOps and now DevRel.

  • Build a Serverless Resume API: A Hands-On Guide
Sid Palas

Sid Palas is a technology enthusiast, engineer, athlete, beard aficionado, and advocate for tiny living. As the founder of DevOps Directive, Sid’s mission is to provide engaging and informative content to help engineers level up their skills in DevOps and Cloud Infrastructure.

Through video tutorials, open-source projects, interviews, screencasts, internet office hours, and maybe even a bit of song and dance, Sid covers a range of topics including Infrastructure as Code, Kubernetes, databases, networking, security, testing, CI/CD, monitoring, cloud providers, and career advancement.

Sid’s talent for diving into documentation, asking the right questions, and sharing his discoveries makes him a valuable resource for anyone navigating the complexities of modern technology.

  • Crossing the DevOps Chasm
Syed Usman Ahmad

Usman is a Senior Developer Advocate at Grafana Labs from Nuremberg, Germany. He works with the Open Source community on the community forum, GitHub and Slack.

He has over 15 years of experience in IT and over 10 years in Cloud Support where he served multiple customers all over Europe, US, Japan, etc.

He is an active international public speaker participating in multiple conferences and events.

In his free time, Usman likes to spend time with his family, go out on occasional traveling and play games or read comics.

  • Efficient Cloud Application Monitoring with Grafana API Integration
  • The complete Observability stack for your Web applications
Tim Ludikar

Tim is an engineering leader who thrives on the challenge of building well-oiled development teams. Fueled by a love of Kubernetes, a deep commitment to developer productivity, and perhaps a slight caffeine addiction, Tim brings a tenacious focus on streamlining software delivery that provides customer value.

  • Leverage Kubernetes to Supercharge Your Container Builds
Zainuddin Saiyed

I am a passionate data and technology enthusiast currently pursuing Masters in Applied Computer Science at Dalhousie University, set to graduate in around three months. My primary interests are in the field of AI/ML and cloud computing. Over the years working in industry, I have gained experience working in computer vision, data analysis, visualization, and database management. From computer vision to now Generative AI, I have found that learning and building features using LLMs is not only more impactful but also more useful.

I believe in practical hands-on learning experiences while also learning the best practices. So, by my role as a teaching assistant at Dalhousie, I guide students in cloud computing, software development, and databases. Also, I enjoy developing working demos and projects to further enhance my skills and build usable applications.

  • LLMOps: Deploying Large Language Models