DevOpsDays Halifax 2025

Aamiruddin Syed is a Senior Security Architect with over decade in years of experience in the industry. He specializes in DevSecOps, Shift-Left Security, cloud security, and internal penetration testing. He has extensive expertise in automating security into CI/CD pipelines, developing security automation, and building security into infrastructure as code. He has worked on securing cloud platforms by applying security best practices to infrastructure provisioning and configuration. Leveraging his penetration testing skills, he routinely conducts targeted internal assessments of critical applications and systems to proactively identify risks. He excels at bridging the gap between security and engineering teams to enable building security directly into products.
Aamiruddin Syed holds Dual Master’s degree in Cybersecurity from Northeastern University and Jadavpur University. A recognized security advocate, he frequently speaks and has chair sessions at industry conferences including Defcon , Blackhat. He is an active contributor to open-source security tools that aim to make security seamless for developers. When he is not researching the latest application security techniques, he enjoys traveling and photography.

Jacquelyn Miccolis is the Founder and Executive Director of the Creative Community Impact Association, a federally incorporated non-profit focused on empowering creatives and community builders through inclusive programming, collaboration, and advocacy. She works at the intersection of creativity, accessibility, and community, creating spaces where diverse teams can connect, grow, and build meaningful outcomes together.

With education and formal training in psychology, community development, technology, and inclusive design, Jacquelyn brings a multidisciplinary approach that informs her leadership style and commitment to fostering empathy, equity, and trust, values essential in both creative and agile team environments.
A lifelong social entrepreneur, Jacquelyn previously founded and operated Sparkles n’ Sawdust Studio, a brick-and-mortar business in downtown Halifax, and later launched Supernova Events, a social enterprise supporting community and inclusion on a regional scale.

Jacquelyn leverages her expertise in web design and development, combining design principles with custom code to create digital solutions that support her community and creative initiatives.

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

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

I am a Master's student in Applied Computer Science at Dalhousie University and I love finding hidden patterns around me. I have always been near ocean throughout my life and hence I love utilizing my knowledge of various technologies to explore the unexplored portion of ocean and it's ecosystem.

My name is Vishvesh Patel, and I am currently pursuing my Master’s in Applied Computer Science at Dalhousie University in Halifax, Canada. I bring over two years of professional experience as a DevOps Engineer, where I worked on cloud infrastructure, automation, and deployment pipelines for enterprise-grade applications. Alongside that, I’ve also been actively working as a freelance full-stack developer, building scalable and user-centric web applications for clients across various industries.

My technical expertise includes a wide range of DevOps and development tools and technologies such as AWS, GCP, Terraform, Chef, Docker, Kubernetes, GitLab CI/CD, Jenkins, and monitoring stacks like Grafana. I'm also skilled in Python, JavaScript, React, Node.js, Shell scripting, Java, SonarQube and SQL/NoSQL databases. I've developed solutions for infrastructure automation, cloud cost optimization, vulnerability management, and cross-platform development.

I am passionate about leveraging modern technologies to solve real-world problems, whether it’s optimizing software delivery pipelines or developing intuitive digital experiences. I am always eager to learn and explore innovations in cloud computing, AI/ML integration, and scalable system design.

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.