Featured Speakers

Alvin Salehi

The White House

Alvin Salehi is a senior technology advisor in the White House Office of the Federal CIO. Alvin led the development of the country’s federal source code policy and Code.gov platform, both of which improve nationwide access to the federal government’s custom-developed software. Prior to joining the White House in 2015, Alvin helped lead the State Department’s efforts to expand Internet access to Africa and improve global market access for US technology companies. He also served at the Advanced Research Projects Agency, which invests in transformative, cutting-edge technologies on behalf of the federal government. Before flying out to DC, Alvin was general counsel to a data analytics company in California—and a frequent patron of In-N-Out Burger.

Edward Thomson

Microsoft

Edward Thomson is a senior program manager at Microsoft, where he focuses on Git and the version control tools in Visual Studio Team Services and ensures that customers are successful while using them. Previously, he was a software engineer building version control tools at Microsoft, GitHub, and SourceGear. He remains the maintainer of the libgit2 project. Edward is the author of the Git for Visual Studio training course from O’Reilly and a contributor to Professional Team Foundation Server 2013.

Elisa Heymann

University of Wisconsin-Madison

Elisa Heymann is a senior scientist within the NSF Cybersecurity Center of Excellence at the University of Wisconsin and an associate professor at the Autonomous University of Barcelona, where she codirects the MIST software vulnerability assessment. Elisa was also in charge of the Grid/Cloud security group at the UAB and participated in two major European grid projects: EGI-InSPIRE and the European Middleware Initiative (EMI). Elisa’s research interests include security and resource management for grid and cloud environments. Her research is supported by the NSF, the Spanish government, the European Commission, and NATO.

Kelsey Hightower

Google

Kelsey Hightower has worn every hat possible throughout his career in tech but most enjoys leadership roles focused on making things happen and shipping software. Kelsey is a strong open source advocate focused on building simple tools that make people smile. When he is not slinging Go code, you can catch him giving technical workshops covering everything from programming and system administration, to his favorite Linux distro of the month.

Rachel Roumeliotis

O'Reilly Media

Rachel Roumeliotis is a strategic content director at O’Reilly Media, where she leads an editorial team that covers a wide variety of programming topics ranging from full stack to open source in the enterprise to emerging programming languages. Rachel is a programming chair of OSCON and O’Reilly’s Software Architecture Conference. She has been working in technical publishing for 10 years, acquiring content in many areas including mobile programming, UX, computer security, and AI.