Speakers
Biography for all the speakers giving Talks is below:
Dr Alistair Forbes
Alistair is the General Manager of the GFI MAX Business Unit, which delivers a range of SaaS-based solutions to small and medium-sized companies and their service providers. This includes the Monitis cloud-based all-in-one monitoring solution that delivers a comprehensive service targeting the performance and availability of web-based applications upon which organisations depend. Monitis offers a free community edition and a premium service to cater for more demanding requirements, with both services supporting a wide range of existing and emerging technologies.
Alistair has been involved in the development and delivery of web-based services and solutions for more than ten years and has made extensive use of open source tools throughout that time.
http://uk.linkedin.com/in/alistairforbes @alistairforbes
John Leach
John Leach is co-founder of Brightbox, a UK-based Infrastructure-as-a-Service provider. He's been a professional systems engineer for about 12 years and has most recently been nerding out with lots of replicated storage systems. He's tall, has a big nose and speaks too much.
http://johnleach.co.uk http://brightbox.com
Simon Riggs
Simon Riggs is a Database Architect and CTO of 2ndQuadrant. Simon has designed and built databases of many kinds over 25 years, including experience with non-relational, relational and document databases. Simon has spent the last 8 years contributing to the PostgreSQL project, is one of the few project committers and the UK project representative.
Simon Phipps
Simon Phipps is a Director at the Open Source Initiative (OSI), the non-profit organisation responsible for stewardship of the Open Source Definition and the canonical list of open source licenses. Currently an independent consultant on open source policy and practice, he was previously head of free and open source software at Sun Microsystems (where he also helped pioneer Sun’s employee blogging, social media and community engagement programmes), CSO of startup Forgerock and a founder of IBM’s Java business unit in 1995. Apart from his pro bono participation at OSI, he also serves on the board of the Open Rights Group and with The Document Foundation. He has been widely involved in standardisation activities, including as one of the Sun executives sponsoring the donation of resources to OASIS to create Open Document Format (ODF). He is a Fellow of the British Computer Society as well as an Open Forum Fellow and likes in the UK. More details can be found on his personal website
Matthew Bloch
Matthew Bloch is the Managing Director of York-based Bytemark Hosting and the original implementor of many of its products, often to the regret of the company's current programmers. He co-founded Bytemark Hosting in 2002 which now serves thousands of customers and turned over £2m in 2010-11. Matthew learned his trade during 1990s writing ARM code on Acorn computers, including major additions to PCPro, the emulator which ran DOS & Windows software of the day.
Richard Moore
Richard J Moore is a senior Engineer at IBM. He was part of the team that developed zVM 6.2 and in particular was responsible for the design of the algorithms that managed the guest VM architecture manipulations. Over Richard's 27 years with IBM he has worked on OS/2 kernel and RAS tools also co-authoring the OS/2 Debugging Handbooks; undertaken various roles within IBM's Linux Technology Centre, in particular was maintainer for dprobes and development team lead for kprobes. Latterly he has worked on the Linux software developer kit of for POWER. He is now working in Z Processor Development on millicode performance.
Herry Herry
Herry is a PhD research student from School of Informatics, University of Edinburgh. His research is focusing on exploring the application of Automated Planning technique to solve problems of System Configuration for managing Cloud infrastructure. He is also interested on applying an autonomic and distributed system for addressing some problems in centralized architecture.
Tariq Rashid
Tariq Rashid is an IT architect at the Home Office, with special responsibility for open source, open standards and information management. He works closely with the Cabinet Office to support wider Government progress in these domains.
He has worked with open source since 1995 in a range of sectors including energy, banking, media and high tech start-ups. His first taste of open source was of FORTRAN compilers and document preparation systems. Since then he has journeyed through open source VPN network stack development, search engines, enterprise support systems, numerical computing and now cloud platforms.
He is convinced that open computing is the only way to encourage innovation, enable reuse, drive competition, and empower the customer.
Matt S Trout
Matt S Trout was thrust into Perl at the tender age of seventeen by a backup accident. Two weeks later he realised that he was in love with the language and has been happily using it for systems automation, network, web and database development ever since.
He is co-maintainer of the Catalyst web framework (and co-author of The Definitive Guide to Catalyst), the creator of the DBIx::Class ORM, and a core team member for the Moose metaprotocol and object system, as well as contributing to assorted other CPAN projects.
Matt spends his days leading the technical team at Shadowcat Systems Limited, an open source consultancy specialising in Catalyst, Perl applications deployment and systems architecture. Shadowcat sponsors web, source repository and mailing list hosting for Catalyst, DBIx::Class and a large number of associated projects, and creates and releases open source code both internally and on behalf of its clients.
Smylers
Smylers has been working with Linux, Unix, Perl and associated technologies — and giving talks on them — for over a decade. After several years as Perl Hacker for Webfusion (who also run 123-reg), they invented the title of Hosting Analyst for him, a position so vague and mysterious he pretty much gets to make it up as he goes along.
He combines this with freelance work — generally Perl and JavaScript development, and looking after systems. He's a member of the working groups developing the next version of HTML. Somewhat randomly he's also a question setter for TV programme Only Connect, the high-brow lateral thinking quiz on BBC4 — a curious twist in his career path that rather took him by surprise.
Previously he taught Perl, PHP, Apache, CSS, and Linux for GBdirect, to clients including Yahoo!, Microsoft, Sony, and the Nationwide building society, and was the lead developer for top UK IT news website The Register.
Smylers lives in Leeds with his wife, Rachel, and attends Moortown Baptist Church. He can be found on Twitter as @Smylers2.
Iustin Pop
Iustin Pop is a Systems Engineer at Google Switzerland. Since he joined Google in 2006, he has worked in the virtualization group for internal infrastructure, where he is responsible for the design and development of the Ganeti Open Source virtualization manager.
Brad Knowles
Brad has been a professional Unix & Linux system administrator for over twenty years, but nothing prepared him for the learning curve that would be associated with the industry shift to DevOps and The Cloud. He is still learning how to reinvent himself for the 21st century, and hopes that he can help others by sharing with them some of the lessons he has learned so far.
Simon Wilkinson
Simon has presented at a number of UKUUG conferences, in particular on Kerberos, OpenAFS, and identity management issues. He designed, and implemented OpenAFS's new development infrastructure, including performing their conversion from CVS to git, and developed the integration tools that tie their environment together. He was responsible for the Kerberos integration in a number of pieces of open source software, including OpenSSH, Thunderbird and pidgin. Having worked for many years as a systems administrator, he now concentrates on filesystem and security development.
Stuart Teasdale
Stuart is Head of Network Operations at we7.com, an Oxford-based music streaming website and has been looking after Linux and Unix systems for the last decade or so. He's also a Debian Developer and general F/OSS tinkerer.
Matthew Richardson
Matthew Richardson is a linux system administrator in the School of Engineering at the University of Edinburgh. His work revolves around virtualisation and configuration management, with current projects covering both server-side and desktop virtualisation solutions within a research and teaching environment.
Kenneth MacDonald
Kenneth MacDonald is a Senior Computing Officer at the University of Edinburgh. He has spent fifteen years developing and deploying managed desktop solutions across various operating systems and user bases, but has preferred Linux since it arrived on two 5.25" floppies in 1992. Cycling across the wilderness seeking out micro breweries and real ale pubs makes a pleasant change from work and family duties.
Jonathan Clarke
Jonathan Clarke is the CTO of Normation, a software company he co-founded in Paris in 2009. He has been working on Open Source infrastructures for six years, since his beginnings as a system administrator. His work is now focused around configuration management tools, in particular Rudder. He is also a contributor to several open source projects including CFEngine, LSC and OpenLDAP. In his spare time, he enjoys cocktails, good food, cinema and cycling around Paris.
Tim Colles
Tim Colles works for the School of Informatics in the University of Edinburgh. He has been the principle architect in the design and development of local database systems and front ends for the School's administrative users for over two decades, starting with dBaseIV, then Ingres and currently PostgreSQL.
Dr. Gerald Pfeifer
Dr. Gerald Pfeifer is the Director of Product Management at SUSE, responsible for the SUSE Linux Enterprise product family, SUSE Studio, SUSE Manager, the build, management and cloud architectures around these, as well as openSUSE.
Robert Waldie
Robert has spent the last 10 years in various roles around embedded Linux systems development, and is currently with Opengear developing firmware for and working with their management appliances. Off the clock he likes to make beer.
Toshaan Bharvani
Toshaan Bharvani is a IT consultant, currently self-employed at VanTosh, with a interest in Open Source Software and IT Hardware. He started his IT interest at the age of 5, when his father gave him his first own PC components. Ever since he has been interested in IT hardware and IT software. In business, he tends to combine higher level applications with lower level systems. Toshaan has been involved for some time now in some open source projects and communities.
Bernd Erk
Bernd Erk, Head of Operations, has overseen the Managed Services, Consulting and Development business areas at NETWAYS since 2007. Ensuring the success and smooth operation of all customer projects and business processes, Bernd's technical expertise stretches across Systems Management, Managed Services and Software Development. A contributor to Linux Magazine and Linux Technical Review in Germany, Bernd regularly publishes articles and presents on open source topics ranging across Nagios monitoring, XEN virtualization, MySQL database monitoring and performance tuning among others. Bernd was previously Operating Systems Specialist at Quelle Schickedanz AG & Co., where he worked heavily with Solaris, HPUX and Oracle databases. After which, Bernd spent 8 years as Business Unit Manager at Ise-Informatik where he dealt with Oracle databases and service oriented architectures.
Dag Wieers
Dag is a freelance system engineer and system architect with a focus on Linux and Open Source software. With more than 16 years of experience he is one of the Linux pioneers in Belgium and well-known within the specific Red Hat Linux and Enterprise Linux communities. He has worked for various technology companies and financial institutes, incl. IBM, EMC², Euroclear, AXA and is now currently working for Hewlett-Packard.
From dusk until dawn he transforms into an eager developer, exchanging sleep for programming in a desperate attempt to automate and control stuff so he can sleep more, which is yet to happen. His favorite pastime is spent with his girlfriend and toddler, who both mockingly accept him as-is.
Howard Chu
Howard Chu is the Chief Architect of OpenLDAP and CTO of Symas Corporation. Prior to founding Symas Corporation, Howard worked at the U. Michigan, JPL, Locus Computing, and platinum Technology in software development roles. Howard is a prolific contributor to the Open Source software community.
Faye Gibbins
Faye Gibbins is a Computer Officer at the School of GeoSciences at the University of Edinburgh, specialising in Linux. She was for many years the secretary of the Edinburgh Linux Users Group. She's also the Uni's beekeeper.
Stephen Quinney
Stephen Quinney is a Senior Computing Officer working for the School of Informatics in the University of Edinburgh. His primary role involves supporting the LCFG configuration management system which is used within the School and the University to manage approximately 3700 Linux and MacOSX based desktops and servers. In his spare time he's more likely to be found half-way up a mountain and/or drinking nice whisky.
Kris Buytaert
Kris Buytaert is a long time Linux and Open Source Consultant doing Linux and Open Source projects in Belgium , Europe and the rest of the universe. He is currently working for Inuits.
Kris is the Co-Author of Virtualization with Xen, used to be the maintainer of the openMosix HOWTO and author of different technical publications. He is a frequent speaker at different international conferences.