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Our local team
Richard is a Senior Solutions Architect for Amazon Web Services in Austin, TX. As a part of the Well-Architected Team, he works with AWS Partners to optimize Workloads according to the Well-Architected Framework. In his spare time he loves organizing technology conferences and Meetups and is always looking for something new to learn from others.
Dan is the founder of DevOpsDays Houston, and a U of H graduate with over 20 years of experience in software and systems development. In the Microsoft-heavy world of Houston IT, he specializes in non-Microsoft technologies with an emphasis on lean methodology and automated software pipelines. Dan is a recovering, former advocate of embedded IT, a blockchain gadfly and has been leading the Houston DevOps Meetup since June 2017. The future is decentralized, distributed, renewable, sustainable and powered by Houston Texas.
Gokul Sridharan is a Master’s Degree holder in IT, an entrepreneur by nature and a successful presales management professional at CA Technologies. He has worked there for the past 3 years and successfully managing a business of $10m+ from a technical sales standpoint. Prior to joining CA and pursuing his master’s degree, Gokul started off his career at Accenture as a software developer.
During that time frame, he also started his own restaurant venture called ‘The Snack Shack’ in India. He loves DevOps concepts and likes to be a part of local meetups. He is also part of the organizing committee in DevOpsDays Dallas, and on in his spare time likes to work on new and innovative ideas.
John-Paul Herold is an engineering manager for Southwest Airlines focused on improving their cloud platform, scaling to global operations, and delivering value to happy customers. Previously John-Paul was a Java developer, and transitioned to various ‘DevOps’ roles as interest in resiliency, observability, and global scale architectures grew.
His path with DevOpsDays started in 2015 when he attended both Dallas and Austin, and has continued every year since. He volunteered for Dallas the first time in 2019, and was involved as an organzier for 2020…pre-covid.
John-Paul is based in Dallas and has a CSE degree from Southern Methodist University. In his off time he enjoys playing soccer, listening to music, running a homelab, reading tech books, and working on projects in/around his home.
As LogDNA’s Developer Advocate, Laura Santamaria loves to learn and explain how things work. She bridges the gap between external developers and SREs and internal engineering teams. In addition, she is the curator for A Minute on the Mic. Apart from work, she co-hosts Austin DevOps, taught Python for Women Who Code Austin for many years, and volunteers with DevOpsDays Austin. Outside of tech, Laura runs, plays with her dogs, throws discs, and watches clouds—the real kind.
Karl Katzke is the DevOps team lead at VoiceThread. He has been in the tech industry for 20 years across many roles as both Dev and Ops. While he keeps claiming he’ll stop giving culture talks and that he’s not good at soft skills, he’s usually showing how the DevOps community can borrow things other industries have learned about handling critical moments and designing processes to avoid disaster.
Paul Czarkowski is a long time practitioner of the dark arts of Devops. Hailing from Australia he moved to Austin Texas to help build and run one of the largest and most successful online games. Now at VMware, Paul works to improve the Operator experience by taking Cloud Native software development concepts and applying them to Operations to create platforms that reduce toil and improve software delivery.
Reggie is SRE for Schlumberger who has a passion for cloud-native application development through the use of tools like Kubernetes and Golang, as well as, improving the culture of technology by creating highly collaborative environments. Co-host of ‘Coolest Nerds in the Room’ podcast and co-founder of the meetup group, ‘Tech for the Culture’