As a Lead Developer Advocate at Dell Technologies, Laura Santamaria loves to learn and explain how things work to bridge the gaps in engineering disciplines. She was the curator for A Minute on the Mic, a cohost for The Hallway Track podcast, and the host of Quick Bites of Cloud Engineering. In the past, she’s worked in many roles, including as a software developer, an ops specialist building and running platforms, a part-time CTO, a technical writer, an editor, a science educator, and a literacy and education researcher. In all of these roles, she spent time building, maintaining, and observing communities of practice. That experience with communities, coupled with both a love of science and data from her degree work in earth and atmospheric sciences and a love of education, led her to developer advocacy.

As a community member, she co-hosts multiple meetups in the Austin, Texas, area, including Cloud Austin. For many years, she taught Python for the Women Who Code Austin meetup and co-hosted Austin DevOps, as well. She is an organizer for DevOpsDays Austin, DevOpsDays Texas, and PyTexas, all community-run conferences. For the past few years, she has been a returning program committee member for Open Source Summit’s Cloud Open track that explores cloud infrastructure and cloud apps. Outside of tech, Laura runs (slowly), reads (a lot), takes pictures of cars, plays with her dogs, and watches clouds—the real kind.