AJ is a Specialist in the field of DevOps/SRE with over 20 years of empirical operational experience. He not only architects and designs, but also implements and maintains the infrastructure thereafter, the whole nine yards, soup to nuts. He ventures out to learn unfamiliar things, digging in to finding the root cause and coming up with tangible solutions.

Asaf Blubshtein is a Solution Architect at env0, helping DevOps teams optimize and scale their Infrastructure as Code operations. In previous roles he helped various customers adopt and integrate native cloud solutions. He is passionate about technology, technical design, and continuous learning and development.

Benjamin Shead is a freshman in high school.

Budha is a Developer Advocate at Tyk responsible for product education, community engagement, and open-source ecosystem expansion. He is the instructor of the API platform engineering fundamentals programme, host of the All About APIs podcast as well as 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.

Carl is a senior principal engineer at Oracle. Most of his career has been focused on evolving and scaling the service infrastructure for Oracle Health's core electronic medical record platform called Millennium. He is passionate about growing a positive engineering culture and contributes as an organizer of hackathons, meetups, and giving technical talks. In his spare time, he enjoys blogging about engineering-related topics and sharing his poorly made illustrations at https://che55er.io.

Christina Aldan is a brand strategy consultant, keynote speaker, trainer, and mentor. She offers businesses brand consulting and creative content for everyday media. With over 18 years of experience in the digital realm, Christina is highly regarded for her approach to business, partnering with clients to find unique strategies that ensure their goals are met. Christina builds connections through her keynote addresses, training workshops, and technological education. She uses these tools to help individuals and businesses cultivate value in everyday media. Christina has delivered talks on all 7 continents, presenting training workshops for the Las Vegas Raiders, the Microsoft MVP community, international corporations, and conferences worldwide. Christina uses her charisma and expertise to inspire others by mentoring women in business like herself. She also has sat on state and local boards supporting women in tech, entrepreneurship, mental health, and children with learning disabilities.

She is the recipient of the Las Vegas Women in Tech Community Service Award, the Distinguished Woman of the Year Award in STEM. Learn more at: Luckygirliegirl.com.

When Curtis is not out enjoying the finest BBQ that Kansas City has to offer, he is mentoring others to help them grow into whatever butterfly or moth they want to be.

Du’An is an Air Force veteran and Sr. Developer Advocate at AWS. He has 10+ years of designing, implementing, and supporting enterprise infrastructures. At AWS he uses his experience and knowledge to help customers learn and build on AWS.

Eric Lee has been on the Board of Directors at Mental Health Hackers for two years and volunteering since 2020. He's been speaking on mental health in IT since 2018 and has been working in IT for 30 years. He's currently a Solutions Architect at a hyperscaler.

Erin Mikail Staples is a developer experience engineer, stand-up comedian and dog mom living in Brooklyn, NYC🗽 by way of Reno, NV 🤠.

In her 9-5, she works as a ✨ a Developer Experience Engineer✨ at LaunchDarkly. Her work includes contributions to technical demos and content, faciliating relationships with developer communities, among other fun shenanigans. After hours, Erin hosts the DevRel(ish) podcast, and performs and produces comedy in NYC.

Erin's various shenanigans have taken her to speaking at events like PyData Berlin, and PyCon, garnered Jeff Staple's attention, appeared in The New York Times, broadcasted across the sound waves on the Practical AI podcast, or in USA Today's Storytellers Project, exist in the archive of the Museum of Alternate History and her mom's dogs's Instagram account.

JJ works as a Developer Advocate representing IBM worldwide. He engages in the IBM’s watsonx service, the Open Source AI ecosystem, and Kubernetes ecosystem with a focus on Red Hat’s OpenShift. He attempts to teach enterprises and users succesful skills to onboard to the AI and Cloud Native ecosystem though he learned his trade in the DevOps ecosystem. If he isn’t building high level automation to streamline his work, he’s building the groundwork to prepare for that need. He’s been an avid homelaber and self-hoster of open source software for years and gives back to that community as much as possible.

He lives and grew up in Austin, Texas. A father and husband, trying to learn to balance his natural nerdiness with family life. He enjoys a good strong dark ale, hoppy IPA, some team building Artemis, and epic Gloomhaven campaigning.

He has dove headfirst into Fedora since IBM buying Redhat, but still secretly wants FreeBSD everywhere. He’s always trying to become a better web technology developer, though normally just uses bash and python to get the job done.

JT is a member of the Tanzu Value Advisory team at VMware, which works with the company’s most strategic customers to help accelerate their digital transformation initiatives. An experienced executive leading both technical and business transformation of healthcare broadly and ancillary insurance companies. As VP of Business Transformation and CIO of Premera Blue Cross, JT was a leader in the launch of Premera’s provider practice, moved Premera systems and development to a cloud-based data platform, and led Premera’s initial Covid response.

Previous to his role at Premera, JT led the technology integration of the Sun Life US and Assurant Employee Benefits merger. As senior executive for Disability RMS, JT transformed the technology organization and launched a new line of business focusing ancillary insurance administration. With Assurant Employee Benefits, JT led the development of the Assurant Cloud Strategy and Assurant Technology Optimization efforts.

JT has spent ten years as mentor, volunteer, and, now, board member of FIRST robotics in Washington. Using robots to build excitement in children and young adults around STEM.

He champions a philosophy that every successful transformation starts with engaged people armed with the right tools.

As a Lead Developer Advocate at Dell Technologies, Laura Santamaria loves to learn and explain how things work to bridge the gaps in engineering disciplines. She is a cohost for the the Cloud Native Compass podcast and was the curator for A Minute on the Mic, a cohost for The Hallway Track podcast, and the host of Quick Bites of Cloud Engineering. As a community member, she co-hosts multiple meetups in the Austin, Texas, area, including Cloud Austin. For many years, she taught Python for the Women Who Code Austin meetup, as well. She is an organizer for DevOpsDays Austin, DevOpsDays Texas, and PyTexas, all community-run conferences. For the past few years, she has been a returning program committee member for Open Source Summit’s Cloud Open track that explores cloud infrastructure and cloud apps. Outside of tech, Laura runs, reads, and watches clouds—the real kind.

Mark Shead has worked as a system administrator, network administrator, IT director, and software engineer in a variety of industries. Currently, he works with startups and on startup style projects within larger organizations. His focus is on getting better business results by improving software engineering processes–paying particular attention to the human element. This includes helping teams follow Agile principles, using DevOps to drive the delivery of business value, and engineering process improvements. He hosts the online weekly lunch and learns at https://www.agilelnl.com.

Natalie has worked with Shipyard since 2021, and joined the team as a full-time engineer in July 2023. She is the primary author behind EphemeralEnvironments.io. Natalie has been an avid programmer since age 13 and enjoys learning new technologies and breaking them down into simplest terms.

Nathen Harvey, Developer Relations Engineer, leads the DORA team at Google Cloud. DORA enables teams and organizations to thrive by delivering industry-shaping, accessible, and actionable research. Nathen has learned and shared lessons from some incredible organizations, teams, and open source communities. He is a co-author of multiple DORA reports on software delivery performance and was a contributor and editor for 97 Things Every Cloud Engineer Should Know, published by O'Reilly in 2020.

Kansas City. Lead Dev. She/Her. Physicist. Mentor. Mom. A Manager of Mischief. Dangerous in the front; deadly in the back. Enabler of repeatable, scalable success.

Rhia Dixon is a technical architect and lead software developer for VML, a global brand and customer experience powerhouse agency headquartered in Kansas City, Missouri. She provides logical, analytical, technical, and strategic direction to help internal and external development teams deliver high-quality web-based experiences.

As a Principal Developer Advocate with AWS, Seth helps builders to architect and implement resilient, scalable systems in the cloud. He draws on over 12 years of experience in multiple engineering roles across Amazon. Previously he was Reliability Lead for AWS Well-Architected. Before that, as Principal Solutions Architect he worked hands-on with amazon.com engineers to optimize how they use AWS for the services that power the massive scale systems behind amazon.com. Prior to that, he was Principal Engineer for Amazon Fresh and International Technologies. Seth joined Amazon in 2005 where soon after, he helped develop the technology that would become Prime Video. You can follow Seth on twitter @setheliot, or on LinkedIn at https://www.linkedin.com/in/setheliot/.

Thomas is presently serving as a Master Software Engineer. He leads a team of testers, ops engineers, and production support analysts in the adoption of DevOps practices. Previously, he led the enterprise automation support of 73 applications at Huntington National Bank that encompassed testing, metrics & reporting, and data management. Thomas has a background in Physics & Biophysics, with over a decade spent in research science studying fluorescence spectroscopy and microscopy before joining IT.