DevOpsDays Halifax 2025

Clay brings more than 20 years of leadership in government digital service delivery and development, with a strong commitment to creating user-focused, accessible government services. His division, Digital Practices and Technology, is responsible for providing secure and reliable technology infrastructure to support government and healthcare's digital operations. The division champions and enables Internet-era ways of working through product management, human-centred service design and development, cloud computing and DevSecOps.

Eyram Amedzor is currently pursuing a Master's degree in Computer Science at Dalhousie University, where he also serves as a Shiftkey ambassador in the Faculty of Computer Science. In this role, he acts as a bridge between students, faculty, and the tech industry—leading career-focused events, mentoring students, and fostering connections with industry partners. Before Dalhousie, Eyram co-founded a number of tech startups where he played key roles in Software Engineering, DevOps and business growth. Eyram also volunteers with organizations such as Cycling Guide and March of Dimes where he contributes his tech knowledge to solve problems and make lives better.

Jennifer LaPlante joined the Government of Nova Scotia after working more than two decades in digital transformation, data governance and artificial intelligence. Much of her work has focused on the intersection of technology, innovation, and public impact.

She is passionate about harnessing technology to drive meaningful changes, especially in data-driven decision-making and secure and scalable solutions.

Jennifer holds an MBA and an MSc in Computing and Data Analytics. Prior to joining government, she served as the Chief Growth and Investment Officer for Canada’s Ocean Supercluster, where she helped companies innovate and make forward-thinking investments in their technology strategies. She also served as Executive Director of DeepSense, where she worked with hundreds of companies to increase their understanding of AI and unlock its full potential to drive growth and innovation, helping to boost economic development in Canada’s ocean sector.

Jennifer’s contributions to AI and innovation earned her recognition as one of DataIQ’s Top 100 Influential People in AI for 2021.

Josh is a Senior Integration Advisor at Harness Software, where he helps customers implement and scale software for controlled deployments and experimentation. He has 15 years of experience as an Integration Engineer and Solutions Architect. He holds a Bachelor of Science degree from Penn State.

Justin Reock is the Deputy CTO of DX (getdx.com), and is an engineer, speaker, writer, and software practice evangelist with over 20 years of experience working in various software roles. He is an outspoken thought leader, delivering enterprise solutions, technical leadership, various publications and community education on developer productivity.

Kyle is a member of the ecosystem team at Dagger, helping shape the future of CI/CD. With a background in DevOps across companies of all sizes, he enjoys sharing insights from both his successes and failures.

Mandi Walls is a DevOps Advocate at PagerDuty. For PagerDuty, she helps technology organizations increase their effectiveness with modern IT practices and unplanned incidents. She is a regular speaker at technical conferences when she isn’t podcasting, streaming, or writing about PagerDuty. She is interested in the emergence of new tools and workflows to make the task of operating large complex computing systems more approachable.

I've worked as a software engineer for more than 20 years, mostly in the field of compilers, managed runtimes and performance optimization. Most recently I'm working on low level application instrumentation with eBPF at Grafana Labs, building an OSS tool Beyla

I'm a third-year Computer Science student who just wrapped up a FinTech internship at Morgan Stanley, where I got my first real exposure to how modern DevOps culture works at scale. As part of Gen Z, I want to share an inside look at what my generation values in DevOps teams, from trust and transparency to psychological safety and learning culture, and why gaps between these expectations and reality can quietly push new hires out the door. The talk covers what surprised me the most when stepping into production for the first time, what actually helped me stay engaged and productive, and practical ways senior engineers and teams can build a culture that keeps the next waves of developers thriving and sticking around.

Security focused Software Engineer and Developer Advocate from a DevOps background with over a decade of experience spanning multiple sectors. Idea incubator, big picture thinker and security innovator. Builder of OSS tools to empower developers to be secure by default. On a mission to lower developer’s barriers to entry for security, remove passwords from workloads, and enable the next generation of engineers to further advance the security industry.

Robin Yeman has spent twenty-six years working at Lockheed Martin as a senior technical fellow building large systems including everything from submarines to satellites. Robin lead the Agile community of practice supporting a workforce of 120,000 people. Her initial experience with Lean practices began in the late 90’s. In 2002 shen had the opportunity to lead her first Agile program with multiple scrum teams. After she had a couple months of experience, she was hooked and never turned back. She both led and supported Agile Transformations for intelligence, federal, department of defense organizations over the next two decades and each one was more exciting and challenging than the last. In 2012 she had the opportunity to extend our Agile practices into DevOps which added extensive automation and tightened our feedback loops providing even larger results. Currently she is consulting for a range of Fortune 500 companies in highly regulated environments enabling them to achieve the same results we experienced at Lockheed Martin. She engages in everything from automotive, pharmaceuticals, and energy reimagining legacy to modern solutions using all of the tools in my toolbox including Agile, DevOps, Lean, Digital Engineering, Systems Theory, Design Thinking and more. Her goal is to make a positive impact for those around her. Robin is a continuous learner. Her education includes a Bachelor's Degree from Syracuse Univision in Computer Information Systems, a Master's degree from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Software Engineering, and she is currently pursuing a PhD in Systems Engineering at Colorado State University, where she is working on my contribution to demonstrate empirical data of the benefits of implementing Agile and DevOps for safety critical cyber-physical systems.

Check out her latest book: https://www.amazon.ca/Industrial-DevOps-Better-Systems-Faster/dp/195050879X

Shrey Monka is a Master's student in Applied Computer Science at Dalhousie University and Data Engineering Intern at Nova Scotia Health Authority. Shrey loves finding hidden patterns around him and he has always been near ocean throughout his life and hence he loves utilizing his knowledge of various technologies to explore the unexplored portion of ocean and it's ecosystem with the help of cloud technologies.

Xe iaso (lower case i) is the Senior Cloud Whisperer at Tigris Data. Xe has written hundreds of articles on their blog and has worked in site reliability, backend programming, devops, systems administration, and developer relations. Xe wants to help create more people with the senior title so that everyone can benefit from the lessons they've learned.