DevOpsDays Halifax 2026

Alexandre-Xavier Labonté-Lamoureux is a passionate IT professional and DevSecOps advocate based in Montreal, with over eight years of experience spanning DevOps, system administration, and cybersecurity. At Arctiq, he helps organizations build secure, efficient software by advancing Application Security (AppSec), Developer Experience (DevEx), and Internal Developer Platforms. A long-time open-source advocate, he dedicated over six years to volunteering in technology and science clubs at his university, fostering a culture of curiosity and collaboration among like-minded students.

Deeply engaged in the cybersecurity community, Alexandre-Xavier has designed challenges for UnitedCTF, presented at Montréhack, and mentored Canadian student teams at international competitions including the European Cyber Security Challenge (ECSC) and the International Cybersecurity Challenge (ICC). His accolades include the Cybertalent award from École de Cybersécurité, wins at NorthSec and HackQc, and an OCTAS award for leading an innovative domotics project. A lifelong learner currently pursuing a Master's in Software Engineering at ÉTS with a focus on Internal Developer Platforms, Alexandre-Xavier holds knowledge sharing and developer experience at the core of everything he does.

Charl Cilliers is a technology executive at Foci Solutions. He works in enterprise .NET and platform security, with a long-running interest in the layer where software meets hardware. Outside of work he's a maker and electronics tinkerer: 3D printers, CNC, SDR and a steady stream of microcontroller projects, usually with one of his kids nearby. He has a low tolerance for tools that generate work without reducing it, in roughly equal measure at the office and in the garage.

Bio: Dr. Israat Haque is a Professor in the Faculty of Computer Science at Dalhousie University and the Director of the Programmable and Intelligent Networking (PINet) Lab. Her work applies network programmability, system-level monitoring, and data-driven techniques to strengthen the security, sustainability, and performance of IoT, 6G, and AI systems, particularly in complex and dynamic environments. Dr. Haque has been recognized for both technical leadership and impact. She was named an ACM/IEEE N2Women Rising Star (2021) and received Digital Nova Scotia’s Thinking Forward Award (2022) for developing highly skilled technology and security talent. In 2024, she received the Alumni Award from the University of Alberta. Dr. Haque has also been named among the 100 Brilliant and Inspiring Women in 6G 2026. She is an active contributor to the IEEE and ACM research communities and has served as an editor for IEEE Transactions on Vehicular Technology and IEEE Communications Magazine.

Eric Johnson is a Principal Developer Advocate at AWS specializing in serverless and event-driven architectures. With 35+ years in technology and a passion for making the complex understandable, Eric has presented and keynoted at hundreds of tech conferences worldwide. He brings humor, energy, and hard-won production experience to every talk, and has been an early adopter of AWS durable functions for agent orchestration since their launch.

Jennifer Chadwick, CPACC is an award-winning senior digital accessibility strategist and coach. She works in Canada, UK, Europe and US. Jennifer works closely with organizations understand the needs of users with disabilities and translates this into tasks that result in inclusive, delightful user experiences. She develops action plans for product design, customer service, marketing, HR and procurement.

Jennifer has spoken at CSUN, AccessU, University of Toronto and the United Nations COSP11 and COSP15. She co-chairs the W3C Accessibility Roles and Responsibilities Mapping (ARRM) Community Group and contributed to the standards WCAG Silver 3.0 and the Accessibility Conformance Testing Rules (ACT 1.0).

Kat spent years leading technical support teams on the front lines of incident response before moving to the stage to talk about it. As Senior Manager of Developer Relations at PagerDuty, she leverages over 12 years of experience in the field to help teams communicate clearly when everything is on fire. She speaks and writes on the topics of sustainable incident management practices, cross-functional collaboration, and career development. When she's not wrangling incidents, she's wrangling two rabbits (Lupin and Ginny), a dog named Violet, and an ambitious collection of houseplants.

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.

Ruckus Voxi is a Sr. Developer Advocate for Akamai Cloud. As a passionate open source evangelist, they enable engineers to build and implement portable/cloud-agnostic workloads at scale. In other words, Ruckus is just having fun! They are also a longtime Arch Linux user and vegan, and never knows which to tell people first! Outside of work they dabble with graphic design, film, and Techno music production.

Scott Hebert is a Senior Principal Software Engineer at Red Hat with over 15 years of experience in cloud-native infrastructure, container security, and DevSecOps. He served as an architect on Konflux, Red Hat's open source software supply chain security platform, and currently works on Red Hat Hardened Images and Project Hummingbird — a next-generation initiative to deliver ultra-minimalist, distroless container images that dramatically reduce CVE exposure in production environments.

Scott is passionate about making supply chain security practical and accessible for development teams, and brings a builder's perspective to the intersection of AI infrastructure and software integrity.

Vagmi Mudumbai is a technical leader, DevOps architect, and platform engineer with over 24 years of experience. He builds efficient distributed systems and platforms for software delivery.

Vagmi specializes in providing the architectural clarity and technical guardrails that allow companies to scale without breaking. He is a hands-on practitioner with deep mastery across a diverse stack including Rust, Go, Ruby on Rails, and TypeScript paired with the infrastructure expertise (Kubernetes, Terraform) across multiple clouds required to build resilient, production-ready environments.

He is currently the CTO at Urai. At Urai, he designed and built microVM and V8 isolate sandboxes for AI code execution engines.