LISA18 Speakers and Instructors

An automotive technician, cabinet maker, cellist, bassist, cook, software engineer, systems admin and, most recently, Director of Engineering for platform strategy at the global education publisher Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. Robert leads the team at HMHCo known as the Bedrock Technical Services group. His team is responsible for designing, developing and supporting the systems that serve as the current and future of educational services, a unique platform that allows engineers to focus on the things that matter most to students and educators worldwide.

Steve Anthony is the Systems Administrator for Lehigh University's Research Computing group, which provides High Performance Computing, storage, and related services to the University's faculty and students.

Ivan is a Performance Engineer at Cloudflare. He spends his days finding performance bottlenecks, fixing them and making sure large chunk of internet runs as fast and as efficiently as possible.

Lori joined her first Internet startup as a senior UNIX system administrator. When that company went public, she was hooked, and helping smaller firms prevail against well established rivals has been her passion ever since. She is currently COO at VerticalSysadmin and a chair at the SCaLE and ShellCon conferences in Southern California. In 2017 she developed RaiseMe, a unique career development effort for nonprofits, which has successfully helped people obtain their first engineering roles in the information security industry.

Lori is a mother of five and enjoys the occasional escape to the woods with her husband.

I've been working in the industry for over 18 years as a Systems Administrator, a DBA, and now a SRE. At Uber my team manages our Compute platform through automation.

KC Braunschweig has spent the last 6 years as a production engineer working on Facebook infrastructure. He's currently working on distributed coordination services built on Apache Zookeeper. He's previously worked in areas including logging, stream processing, search infrastructure and configuration management.

Patrick Cable is a Sr. Infrastructure Security Engineer at Threat Stack. He works to ensure the security of the Threat Stack Platform by collaborating with other departments, implementing security tools, and building new technology to make security easier for everyone in the organization. Prior to working at Threat Stack, Patrick was Associate Staff in the Secure and Resilient Systems Group at MIT Lincoln Laboratory where he worked on improving cloud security in research environments.

Oleg Chunikhin is CTO of Kublr. With nearly 20 years of software architecture and development experience, Oleg is responsible for defining the company’s technology strategy and innovative standards, while forging growth plans. To this end, Oleg has championed the standardization of DevOps in all the company does. He is also committed to driving the adoption of automation and AI applications in innovation-driven industries such as genetics, 3D printing, robotics, neural interfaces, mesh technologies, etc. A popular speaker on all things Kubernetes, Oleg’s speaking credentials include Interop ITX (Las Vegas), Cloud Computing Expo (NYC), and the 21st Cloud Expo (Silicon Valley).

Dr. Sarah Lewis Cortes earned her undergraduate degree at Harvard University, studied Forensic Sciences at Boston University Medical School, and holds a PhD in Computer Science, Cybersecurity from Northeastern University, specializing in the Darknet, Privacy and Privacy Law as well as IT Security, topics on which she has published extensively. She conducts training and research with the FBI, the Alameda County Sheriff’s Office Digital Forensics Crime Lab, and other LEAs. Prior to undertaking her PhD, Sarah was SVP for Security, IT Audit and Disaster Recovery at Putnam Investments, an investment management firm with over $1 trillion in assets under management.

Peter Dalbhanjan is a Solutions Architect for AWS based in Herndon, VA. Peter has a keen interest in containers, devops culture and open source. At AWS, Peter helps with designing and architecting variety of customer workloads.

Courtney Eckhardt first got into retrospectives when she signed up for comp.risks as an undergrad (and since then, not as much has changed as we’d like to think). Her perspectives on engineering process improvement are strongly informed by the work of Kathy Sierra and Don Norman (among others).

Gillian has been a database infrastructure engineer at GitHub for two years. Her focus has been on performance troubleshooting and observability. Previous employers include Okta, PalominoDB, Oracle, and Disney. Gillian is based in Vancouver, BC, Canada.

David ("dhendrix") has been involved with open source firmware and tools for many years, first as an intern at Los Alamos National Laboratory and later as a software engineer at Google working on ChromeOS and at Facebook working on Open Compute Project and Telecom Infrastructure Project. He is working to address challenges of development, deployment, maintenance, and security of system firmware at scale.

Matt Horton counsels clients on strategic intellectual property portfolio development, focusing on business-oriented and industry-oriented portfolio strategies. Matt also supports IP litigation and cybersecurity efforts. He has extensive information technology and cybersecurity experience, serving as a systems engineer and cybersecurity engineer on teams responsible for federal network infrastructures. Matt holds an LLM in Intellectual Property from The George Washington University Law School, and a JD from Tulane University. He also has a Masters in Computer & Information Technology from the University of Pennsylvania, and a BS in Information Technology from George Mason University, with a concentration in Networking and Cybersecurity.

After 5.5 years working toward a Ph.D. in astrophysics, I left the field to move into teaching software development at a Seattle-area coding school. Since that move, I've been able to have a hand in training over 100 new software developers. I now work as an application developer at Starbucks on the Emerging Technologies team, helping foster innovation and produce proofs of concept for Starbucks Technology. I'm fiercely interested in good mentorship both as a mentee and a mentor of others, and am always looking for ways to grow personally and professionally.

Duncan Hutty tries to make/find something useful and "Make it Work, Make it Right, Make it Better". Mostly this entails reading and writing code to integrate other people's software and trying to not rant too hard when sharing the vision of code & systems that are reproducible, testable and no more complex than necessary.

Ivan is a Senior CDN Reliability Engineer on the Netflix Open Connect team. He has been designing, deploying, supporting, and optimizing online services on a global scale in various operations roles for the last 17+ years. He is focusing on service reliability, availability, scalability, quality of experience (QoE), service optimizations, investigating and troubleshooting server/client/network/application related issues. Prior to joining Netflix Ivan was Principal Service Engineer at Microsoft working on Windows Update, Microsoft.com and Windows Store.

Michael Jennings has been a UNIX/Linux Systems Administrator and a C/Perl developer for over 20 years and has been author of or contributor to numerous open source software projects including Eterm, Mezzanine, RPM, Warewulf, and TORQUE. Additionally, he co-founded the Caos Foundation, creators of CentOS, and has been lead developer on 3 separate Linux distributions. He currently works as a Scientist at Los Alamos National Laboratory and is the primary author/maintainer for the LBNL Node Health Check (NHC) project. He is also the Vice President of HPCXXL, the extreme-scale HPC users group.

Dorothy Jung is a Software Engineer with multiple years of on-call experience. At Yelp she has served as a “pushmaster”, managing and monitoring company-wide deployments to production; and as a release engineering deputy, helping to set up CI/CD pipelines within the Ads organization. She was previously at DreamWorks Animation R&D, where she worked on upgrading the studio’s build management tools. Dorothy holds a bachelor’s degree in Computer Science and French from the University of California, Berkeley.

Simon is a senior systems researcher passionate in virtualization and Unikernels. He works for NEC Labs since the past 6 years and has expertise in NFV and fast packet frameworks like Intel DPDK and Netmap. He is the maintainer of Unikraft, a Unikernel build framework that got released open source as incubator under the Xen project and Linux Foundation. Simon does currently his Ph.D. at University of Liege and received his Diploma degree in computer science with focus on robotics and operating systems at Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT) in Germany.

I love Python, I grew up in a small town in Chile and one weekend, 16 years ago, I had the flu and could not go out. I decided to learn how to code in Python and that was the beginning of the road that would move us all to Northern California so that I could join the Production Engineering team at Instagram. I also like eating and cooking (in that order).

Tom is the SRE Manager at StackOverflow.com and internationally recognized co-author of books such as the newly updated Volume 1: The Practice of System and Network Administration, 3rd Edition. He is also known for Time Management for Sysadmins and Volume 2: The Practice of Cloud System Administration. He is an internationally recognized author, speaker, system administrator, and DevOps advocate. He’s previously worked at small and large companies including Google, Bell Labs/Lucent, and AT&T. His blog is http://EverythingSysadmin.com and he tweets @YesThatTom.

Sunil is a Sr. AI Solutions Architect focused on Deep Learning in the Machine Learning Lab team at AWS working with customers in various industry verticals. Prior to that, he co-founded the neuroscience and machine learning based image analysis and video thumbnail recommendation company Neon labs. He’s also worked on building large scale low latency systems at Zynga and has an acute passion for Serverless computing. He hold a master’s degree in computer science from Brown University.

At Red Hat, Scott McCarty helps drive the roadmap around container runtimes, tools, and images within the OpenShift Container Platform and Red Hat Enterprise Linux. He also liaises with engineering teams, both at the product and upstream project level, to help drive innovation by using feedback from Red Hat customers and partners as drivers to enhance and tailor container features and capabilities for the real world of enterprise IT.

Tyler McMullen is CTO at Fastly, where he’s responsible for the system architecture and leads the company’s technology vision. As part of the founding team, Tyler built the first versions of Fastly’s Instant Purging system, API, and Real-time Analytics. Before Fastly, Tyler worked on text analysis and recommendations at Scribd. A self-described technology curmudgeon, he has experience in everything from web design to kernel development, and loathes all of it. Especially distributed systems.

Robin is a Developer Advocate at Confluent, as well as an Oracle ACE Director and Developer Champion. His career has always involved data, from the old worlds of COBOL and DB2, through the worlds of Oracle and Hadoop, and into the current world with Kafka. His particular interests are analytics, systems architecture, performance testing and optimization. He blogs at http://cnfl.io/rmoff and http://rmoff.net/ (and previously http://ritt.md/rmoff) and can be found tweeting grumpy geek thoughts as @rmoff. Outside of work he enjoys drinking good beer and eating fried breakfasts, although generally not at the same time.

Sowjanya is a Senior Software Engineer at Heroku. She found her love and passion for Software Design and Engineering only 5 years ago. Prior to that she worked as a hardware engineer building SystemVerilog Components at Intel & Xilinx. For the past 5 years she has worked as a Full-Stack & DevOps Engineer building applications and services using Ruby, Rails, Go, Docker, Terraform. Today she is an Engineer on the Runtime team at Heroku orchestrating dynos using Go & Ruby. In her free time she is a volunteer mentor at Women Who Code San Francisco.

Sarvesh leads the performance team at Bing, Microsoft and is passionate about solving complex data problems with rich visualizations. Sarvesh holds a M.S. in Computer Science from Columbia University, NY.

Laura Nolan’s background is in Site Reliability Engineering, software engineering, distributed systems and computer science. She wrote the 'Managing Critical State' chapter in the O'Reilly ‘Site Reliability Engineering’ book, and is co-chair of SREcon18 Europe/Middle East/Africa. Laura is currently enjoying a well-earned sabbatical (and tinkering with some of her own projects) after 15 years in industry, most recently at Google.

Todd Palino is a Senior Staff Site Reliability Engineer at LinkedIn, tasked with keeping some of the largest Kafka and Zookeeper deployments fed and watered. Previously, he was a Systems Engineer at Verisign, developing service management automation for DNS, networking, hardware and operating systems. In his spare time, Todd is the developer of the open source project Burrow, a Kafka consumer monitoring tool, and can be found sharing his experience on both SRE and Apache Kafka at industry conferences and tech talks. He is also the co-author of Kafka: The Definitive Guide, available from O’Reilly Media.

Currently, an Infrastructure Engineer at Split. I have been at large companies and small ones. I have seen amazing growth (at LinkedIn and NetApp) and a couple completely fall apart. I am passionate about how SRE (and DevOps) can change how online software is developed and managed.

Suchakra is currently a Scientist at ShiftLeft Inc. He completed his PhD in Computer Engineering from École Polytechnique de Montréal where he worked on eBPF and hardware-assisted tracing techniques for advanced systems performance analysis. He has been involved in research on systems performance analysis and has delivered talks at LISA 2017 (San Francisco), Tracing Summit 2015 and 2016 (Seattle and Berlin) where he has demonstrated advanced kernel and userspace tracing tools. He also developed one of the first hardware-trace based VM analysis techniques. More information about him can be found at : https://suchakra.wordpress.com/about

Jeff Smith has been in the technology industry for over 15 years, oscillating between management and individual contributor. Jeff currently serves as the Manager of Production Operations for Centro, a media services and technology company headquartered in Chicago, Illinois. Before that he served as the Manager of Site Reliability Engineering at Grubhub. Jeff is passionate about DevOps transformations in organizations large and small, with a particular interest in the psychological aspects of problems in companies. He lives in Chicago with his wife Stephanie and their two kids Ella and Xander.

Jeffrey Snover is a Technical Fellow at Microsoft and the Chief Architect for Azure Storage and Edge Cloud Group where he focuses on Azure Stack. Snover is the inventor of Windows PowerShell, an object-based distributed automation engine, scripting language, and command line shell. He was also the Chief Architect for Windows Server. Snover joined Microsoft in 1999 as divisional architect for the Management and Services Division, providing technical direction across Microsoft's management technologies and products.

Sandor Szücs builds infrastructure software with Kubernetes, that enable feature teams to be productive. He strongly believes in devops and open source. He likes to code Go and focus on the Ingress part of Kubernetes. Sandor was formerly a System Engineer managing production systems in baremetal datacenters with LXC, Puppet, hardware load balancers and storage systems.

Aleksey Tsalolikhin is a practitioner in operations of information systems. Aleksey strives to improve the lives of fellow practitioners through effective training in excellent technologies. Aleksey is the principal at Vertical Sysadmin, which provides on-site training and consulting in IT Operations and DevOps.

Robin is a Site Reliability Engineer @ ING and PO of the SRE Team, and has years of experience in being on-call for all services offered to our retail customers.

Avleen is a Production Engineer at Facebook, where he helps scale Facebook’s infrastructure. Before joining Facebook he worked at several large tech companies, including EarthLink, Google, and Etsy.

Consulting engineer at Red Hat leading Container Engineering team. Including CRI-O, Buildah, -podman, containers/storage and containers/image. Docker/Moby project contributor. Led the SELinux project, concentrating on the application space and policy development.

Jamie Wilkinson is a Site Reliability Engineer at Google. Contributing author to the "SRE Book", he has presented on contemporary topics at prominent conferences such as linux.conf.au, Monitorama, PuppetConf, Velocity, and SRECon. His interests began in monitoring and automation of small installations, but continues with human factors in automation and systems maintenance on large systems. Despite over 15 years in the industry, he is still trying to automate himself out of a job.