devopsdays Minneapolis - Contact

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.

Total Expert

Andy Fleener is a technologist with over a decade of experience developing and operating highly available SAAS software for the web. He’s a Humanist, a Systems Thinker, a self proclaimed Safety Nerd, and a Contributor to the O’Reilly Chaos Engineering Book. 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.

Jenn works in the cheerleading industry as a coach and judge. She also serves on the Minnesota Cheerleading Coaches Association Board of Directors organizing yearly events for coaches, teams, and athletes. In her free time, she enjoys traveling and music.

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.

Google

Bob is a Program Manager at the Google Open Source Programs Office with a focus on Cloud Native computing. He serves the Kubernetes project as a Steering Committee member and is a recently retired chair of the Contributor Experience Special Interest Group. Bob comes from an academic background, spending 15 years at the University of Michigan with a later focus on computational research. As a Cloud Native Computing Foundation Ambassador, Bob has worked towards improving High Performance Computing, Machine Learning, and other research initiatives by integrating them with Cloud Native practices and tooling. He is passionate about Academic Outreach, and is an outspoken advocate of Open Source, Open Science and pets of the furry 4 legged variety.

Microsoft

Bridget Kromhout is a Principal Product 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).

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.

CNCF

Jeffrey is Head of Projects at the CNCF, with a focus on improving community and project automation. Before that, he worked at Red Hat and the University of Michigan focusing on Cloud Native technologies and CICD patterns. Jeffrey has been a contributor to upstream Kubernetes, helping in SIG-Contribex, SIG-Release, and SIG-UI. He passionately advocates for open source development and recognizing and alleviating burnout.

Heidi is an advocate for progressive delivery, organizational transformation, technical communication, and marketing you hate slightly less. She is a nerd about industrial psychology and patterns of progress. One of her favorite hobbies is talking to developers about things they already knew but had never thought of that way before. She sews all her conference dresses so that she’s sure there is a pocket for the mic.