Aaron Aldrich

@crayzeigh

Having some personal struggles with identity and mental wellness I recognize how important it is to reinforce the message that “Your Story Matters” as often and as broadly as possible. The DevOps message that we all have a story to share has resonated loudly with me and encouraged me to continue to share my own. My career path has always been hurdled towards technology, but my heart has always been with the people. No matter where I’ve been, the people are always the thing that I love above the labor. But nevertheless, the labor has consistently caused extra stress and burnout. Over 10 years I’ve worked in four different companies and dealt with 4 different types of on-call responsibility and 4 different types of burnout. It’s time to stop the burn and start healing the industry. Besides work and DevOps, I have a wife and 4 kids at home. I’m a musician and I love games of all types because of their unique power to bring diverse people together to a single purpose. Nothing breaks down barriers faster than collaborative creative efforts or a game of Mario Kart.

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Alison Stanton

@alison985

As Chief Problem Solver at Stanton Ventures Alison focuses on business intelligence reporting, product measurement, process improvement through automation, and technical training. She makes data accessible, discoverable, and actionable for Operations teams, Product Managers, and clients. Currently, her main languages are SQL, Python, and LookML. She loves knitting and using technology to empower audacious ideas.

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Andy Fleener

@andyfleener

Andy Fleener is a Humanist, and a New View Safety Nerd who believes software is as much about the people building and running it as it is the people using it. He is a Senior Software Engineer at SportsEngine where he’s been doing a mix of development and operations for the last 5 years. Andy enjoys music, football, sushi, oxford commas, and laughing at all the things millennials are ruining.

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Bridget Kromhout

@bridgetkromhout

Bridget Kromhout is a Principal Technologist for Cloud Foundry at Pivotal. Her CS degree emphasis was in theory, but she now deals with the concrete (if ‘cloud’ can be considered tangible). After years as an operations engineer (most recently at DramaFever), she traded in oncall for more travel. A frequent speaker at tech conferences, she helps organize tech meetups at home in Minneapolis, serves on the program committee for Velocity, and acts as a global core organizer for devopsdays. She podcasts at Arrested DevOps, occasionally blogs at bridgetkromhout.com, and is active in a Twitterverse near you.

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Cea Stapleton

@ceaess

Cea fights fire and makes infrastructure from python code at healthfinch. She transitioned relatively recently from full-stack dev to ops engineer, and has been loving every minute of her new role.

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Christian Weber

Christian Weber is a Problem Solver at GitHub. Previously spending the last 6 years in various flavors of Finance and I.T., Christian focuses on Developer Enablement and applying Open Source methodology in the Enterprise world.

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Dakota dux

@ddux

Dakota Dux is an engineer at Nextpoint, a Chicago and Madison based company that provides an online document management platform for litigators. Dakota is passionate about building flexible systems and not deploying on Fridays. With 10+ years of writing ruby, he’s seen a few things. When he’s not slinging code, he moonlights as the head coach for the University of Wisconsin Alpine Ski Team. He likes to describe his coaching philosophy as Extreme Fundamentals. If you see him around ask him to tell you the penguin joke.

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Emily Dowdle

@editingemily

Emily is a full-stack engineer at Wazee Digital. She specializes in DevOps, back-end architecture and team management. Emily is a competitive powerlifter and can deadlift 265 lbs. She’s active in the Denver tech community, is a frequent speaker and blogs at emilydowdle.com.

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James Jones

@velocity303

James Jones is a Technical Solutions Engineer at Puppet. He joined Puppet in 2014 after working at Oracle as an Operations Engineer for several years. Focusing on environments that are both dynamic and include different operating systems and technologies he looks to bring his experience to customers getting started with building out automation solutions with Puppet Enterprise.

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Jeff Smith

@DarkAndNerdy

Jeff Smith has been working in the Technology field for almost 15 years. He has a love for Open Source software and workflow management. Jeff currently serves as the Manager for the Site Reliability Engineering group at GrubHub.

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Joe Laha

@joelaha

Joe Laha is an organizer of devopsdays Minneapolis He lives in Minneapolis’ North Loop neighborhood with his partner, Bridget Kromhout, their cats Iria & Nimoy, and way too much cycling-themed art. Aside from cycling, Joe enjoys homebrew, heavy metal guitar, and arguing about sci-fi TV of the 1990s.

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Joe Nuspl

@JoeNuspl

I am a senior operations engineer at Workday. One of the DevOpsDays Portland 2016 organizers. Author of the zap cookbook for Chef. Aspiring culinary chef. http://nvwls.github.io/ https://github.com/nvwls https://boardgamegeek.com/collection/user/nvwls

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Kevin Babcock

Kevin Babcock is Principal Security Engineer at PagerDuty, the enterprise incident resolution service. He has over 15 years of experience in the information security field, including application security, authentication, encryption, Web security, anti-spam, and network security. He has worked with organizations such as Symantec, SafeWeb, and Box. Babcock is a native of Sun Prairie, holds a B.S. in Engineering and Applied Science from the California Institute of Technology, and is a Certified Information Systems Security Professional (CISSP).

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Michael Lanyon

@lanyonm

Hi. I’m Mike. I’m a VP of Engineering at Critical Mass. In my role at CM I lead teams that work on the systems and data that power customer experiences. I started as our first application developer in the United States, and after my first “worked fine in dev” experience, have been trying to make delivering value to our clients’ customers as routine and predictable as possible. Automation, measurement, and team building are my passions. Outside of work I’m a competitive cyclist and a DevOpsDays Chicago organizer. I was first introduced to DevOps back in 2011 and had my mind blown by a few luminaries of the DevOps movement. I find the passion and enthusiasm for iterative improvement in technology absolutely irresistible.

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Michael Stahnke

@stahnma

Michael Stahnke is Director of Engineering at Puppet Labs. He’s had a few roles at Puppet, and been a part of the company growing from 35 to 440+ employees. He’s been heavily involved with release engineering and community throughout his tenure. He came to Puppet Labs from Caterpillar, Inc. where he was an infrastructure architect, system administration team lead, and open source evangelist. Michael also helped get the Extra Packages for Enterprise Linux (EPEL) repository off the ground in 2005, is the author of Pro OpenSSH (Apress, 2005), and rants continuously about technology and computers, while striving to learn more about them.

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Rhea Ghosh

Rhea is a DevOps Engineer at HERE (formerly known as NAVTEQ) in Chicago in their Highly Automated Driving division, working on automating infrastructure in AWS. Prior to becoming a DevOps Engineer, Rhea started her career as a high school math teacher before transitioning to technology consulting. A consultant for 7 years, Rhea made the decision to follow her gut to be a DBA at Spot Trading, which is where her interest in DevOps started. When she’s not devopsing, she lives at the wood shop, creating furniture and turning functional and decorative “art” with occasional breaks to see her cats and dog.

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Suzie Prince

@pm_suzie

Suzie Prince is Head of Product for ThoughtWorks product division building pioneering tools for software development teams. She has over ten years experience as a product manager designing and delivering software that is valuable, usable, feasible, and desirable. She likes pushing buttons to deploy, feature toggles and pager duty. She also likes burritos, beer and hiking.

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