devopsdays Minneapolis - Contact

Target

Many years ago, Samantha took a break from the science laboratory to check out the field of networking and never returned. Her volunteer efforts are focused on increasing interest in the STEM fields, especially among women and minorities.

 

SPS Commerce

Nate is currently an Engineering Manager at SPS Commerce. Nate is passionate about helping teams build, monitor and deploy highly reliable and scalable systems in the cloud. When not at work, you can usually find him outside exploring Minnesota by bike or visiting a new brewery. He also enjoys space, photography and anything sci-fi.

 

Joe Laha works in event technology, which is a fancy way of saying he’s a professional flipchart jockey. He lives in Minneapolis’ North Loop neighborhood with his partner Bridget Kromhout, their cats Nimoy & Ripley, too many guitars, and way too much cycling-themed art. Aside from cycling, Joe enjoys cooking, heavy metal guitar, and arguing about sci-fi TV of the 1990s.

 

OpenTrons Pandemic Response Lab

Jenn is a developer and accessibility advocate who is passionate about mentoring, learning, accessibility, and GIFs. She has been coding and making websites since the mid 1990s. She can easily be spotted at conferences by her bright lipstick, dangly earrings, and various code dresses and t-shirts.

 

LaunchDarkly

Heidi Waterhouse is a Transformation Advocate for LaunchDarkly. She specializes in asking questions about things you think you already understand, and looking sympathetic about the real constraints you have. When she is not building a very tiny media empire in her basement, she sews her own clothes to have pockets for her microphone packs.

 

Percona

SVP, Product at Percona. Before joining Percona, Donnie was VP of Products at Docker, an executive in residence at Scale Venture Partners, and VP of IT Service Delivery at CWT leading the DevOps transformation. Data-driven, business-focused tech strategist & leader with a deep background in open source & research. Advised startups to Fortune 50 enterprises. Led >250 developers, among 15+ years of software experience. Cited for expertise in Wired, The Register, CIO.com & The New Stack.

 

Particle

Debbie Gillespie is an Engineering Manager at Particle where she automates all the things and is responsible for the overall performance and reliability of Particle’s services. Previous to Particle, she spent 15 years at the University of Minnesota developing software and cultivating communities of practice. Debbie possesses a bachelor’s degree in computer science and a master’s degree in software engineering from the University of Minnesota. In her free time, she likes to spend as much time as she can outdoors with her husband and kids.

 

Microsoft

Bridget Kromhout is a Principal Program Manager at Microsoft Azure, focusing on the open source cloud native ecosystem. Her CS degree emphasis was in theory, but she now deals with the concrete (if ‘cloud’ can be considered tangible). After years on call for production (from enterprise to research to startups) and a couple of customer-facing adventures, she now herds cats and wrangles docs on the product side of engineering. In the wider tech community, she has done much conference speaking and organizing, and advises the global devopsdays organization after leading it for over five years. Living in Minneapolis, she enjoys snowshoeing in the winter and bicycling in the summer (with winter cycling as a stretch goal).

 

Total Expert

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 the Director of Platform Technology at Total Expert where he’s focused on building and stewarding their developer experience and cloud infrastructure platform. Andy enjoys music, football, sushi, oxford commas, and laughing at all the things millennials are ruining.