Cloud Native Rejekts NA (Los Angeles + Hybrid) 2021

Arsh is an open source engineer from India, who is currently interning as a Member Of Technical Staff at VMware. Before this, he has worked as a Google Summer Of Code Student Developer with CNCF where he contributed to the "cert-manager" project. Previously he has also been a part of the Linux Foundation Mentorship Program where he contributed to upstream Kubernetes. He has also interned as a software engineer with Nirmata earlier where he worked on another CNCF project, Kyverno. He has been actively involved in the Kubernetes community and has also conducted workshops and sessions for new contributors to help them get started with open source.

As Ambassador Labs Community Manager, I try to give each of our users personal attention and connect them with whatever resources they're looking for. Often this involves securing technical support or providing context around a particular use case. But it also means helping them connect with each other and we're fortunate to have a high level of engagement in our community across all levels of expertise and experience. In my free time I enjoy hiking and boating so on weekends am often somewhere along the Columbia River near Vancouver, WA.

Senior Engineering Manager, Developer Relations at Equinix Metal

Joaquim is a software engineering manager at Azure after Kinvolk's acquisition by Microsoft. He has been active in the Open Source community for over 10 years as a developer and/or author, from desktop software (he is a member of the GNOME Foundation), to museum installations, to high-scale storage projects at CERN. He has also been a speaker at several international Open Source events, like FOSDEM, GUADEC and Kubecon.

Joe Thompson's experience with Kubernetes began in early 2015 with a single-node lab install in a Red Hat training class. Since then he's delivered training, contributed to Helm, spoken at KubeCon and Cloud Native Rejekts several times, and given talks at local meetup groups -- all while delivering Kubernetes solutions in the real world for a variety of end users and vendors including CoreOS, Capital One and D2iQ. Now at HashiCorp, Joe continues working with Kubernetes both personally as a practitioner and community participant, and professionally as a HashiCorp solutions engineer advising customers and prospects on (among other things) using the HashiCorp stack with Kubernetes.

Madhuri is a systems engineer with 19 years experience in database server technologies (Oracle), virtualization (VMware), and container technologies (ClusterHQ) before founding Elotl. Madhuri received her Masters in Computer Science from Indiana University Bloomington, and Bachelors in Computer Science from Indian Institute of Technology Kharagpur.

Nick has been working to prevent the entropic downfall of systems for 20 years, across Windows and Linux, datacenters and clouds, networking, storage and compute. Currently he's a Staff Engineer at VMWare, and the tech lead on the CNCF Incubating Contour project, where in addition to his primary task of always having Simpsons quotes available, he works on improving the Ingress experience. He was a co-chair of the now-completed Kubernetes LTS working group. In his spare time, he spends time with his young family, then with whatever's left he works on maintaining his jack-of-all-geeks card. Random fact: he took notes at university in the Tengwar, Tolkien's elvish script.

Nico Meisenzahl works as Senior Cloud & DevOps Consultant at white duck. As an elected Microsoft MVP, Docker Community Leader and GitLab Hero, his current passion is for topics around Cloud-Native and Kubernetes. Nico is a frequent speaker at conferences, user group events and Meetups in Europe and the United States.

Scott Reu is a Site Reliability Engineer at Cisco Meraki. He has a background in historical linguistics and network engineering, and he's on an eternal quest to automate infrastructure. In his spare time, he keeps his nose either in a science fiction book or in some recreational Computational Linguistics research. His thoughts, technological and otherwise, can be found on his blog and on popular microblogging website twitter dot com.

Stefano Chierici is a security researcher in Sysdig where his research focuses on defending containerized environments and cloud environments from attacks ranging from web to kernel. Stefano is one of the Falco contributors, an incubation level CNCF project. He studied cyber security in Italyand, before joining Sysdig, he was a pentester and obtained the OSCP Certification in 2019. He was a security engineer and a red team member.

Taylor Thomas is an Engineering Director working on WebAssembly platforms at Cosmonic. He is a core maintainer on Krustlet, Bindle, and Wagi, and contributes to many open source projects. He is a regular speaker at various open source conferences and meetups, including various KubeCons and local meetup groups. He has worked on various containers and Kubernetes platforms at Intel, Nike, and Microsoft. He currently lives in the Utah area and enjoys hiking and camping.

Łukasz works as Kubernetes Platform Architect at www.giantswarm.io, in a team responsible for preparing and deploying cloud-native applications to hundreds of kubernetes clusters. He previously worked for 3 years as Kubernetes Architect at www.aurea.com.
He has over 10 years of experience in building and managing backend IT systems. He also completed a Ph.D. thesis about client-centric replication.
His speaking experience includes DockerCon 17 EU (https://dockr.ly/2SJnaLl), local and scientific conferences and 10 years of teaching at the university.
To find out more about projects he’s involved with, please check https://github.com/piontec.