Operations Roundtable

Artur Bergman, hacker and technologist at-large, is the VP of Engineering and Operations at Wikia. He provides the technical backbone necessary for Wikia’s mission to compile and index the world’s knowledge. He is also an enthusiastic apologist for federated identity and a board member of the OpenID Foundation. In past lives, he’s built high volume financial trading systems, re-implemented Perl 5’s threading system, wrote djabberd, managed LiveJournal’s engineering team, and served as operations architect at Six Apart. His current interests extend to encompass semantic search, large scale infrastructure, open source development, federated instant messaging, neurotransmitters, and the future of cyborgs.

A twelve year system operations veteran, Adam is the CTO of Opscode, whose mission is to bring “Infrastructure Automation to the Masses”. He is the primary author of Chef.

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John has worked in systems operations for over fourteen years in biotech, government and online media. He started out tuning parallel clusters running vehicle crash simulations for the U.S. government, and then moved on to the Internet in 1997. He built the backing infrastructures at Salon, InfoWorld, Friendster, and Flickr. He is now VP of Tech Operations at Etsy, and is the author of The Art of Capacity Planning published by O’Reilly.

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Jesse Robbins is Cofounder & Chief Community Officer of Opscode, the leader in Cloud Infrastructure Automation, and served as the company’s founding CEO. Robbins is a widely recognized expert in Infrastructure, Web Operations, and Emergency Management.

Opscode makes Chef , the powerful open source tool used by tens of thousands of developers & systems administrators to automate, manage and scale infrastructure of any size and complexity.

Robbins served as founding chair of the Velocity Web Performance & Operations Conference and contributes to the O’Reilly Radar . Prior to co-founding Opscode, he worked at Amazon.com with a title of “Master of Disaster” where he was responsible for Website Availability for every property bearing the Amazon brand.

Robbins is a volunteer Firefighter/EMT and Emergency Manager, and led a task force deployed in Operation Hurricane Katrina. His experiences in the fire service profoundly influence his efforts in technology, and he strives to distill his knowledge from these two worlds and apply it in service of both.

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Mandi Walls has been administering Linux systems of various sizes and scopes for more than 10 years. After a number of years running large web sites for AOL, she recently joined Admeld in New York City.

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