Speaker Biographies
Julien Pivotto
Julien Pivotto is a young Open-Source consultant at Inuits where he is helping organisations with the deployment of long-term solutions based on Open-Source infrastructure.
He is a strong believer in the devops movement and has technical focus towards infrastructure automation, continuous integration, monitoring and high availability.
Stephen Quinney
Stephen Quinney is a member of the FLOSS UK council. He works as 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 4000 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.
Dr. Gianni Ciolli
Dr. Gianni Ciolli is a Postgres expert and also has specialist skills in PostGIS (geo-spatial extension to PostgreSQL). He is a Principal Consultant with 2ndQuadrant and a partner in 2ndQuadrant Italia. He resides in London and is a fluent English speaker.
Gianni has been working with Free and Open Source Software for more than 16 years. He was the co-founder of the PLUG - Prato Linux User Group and from 2001 to 2004 the group’s elected President. He has organised many of the Italian PostgreSQL User Group (ITPUG) annual conferences, and in 2013 was elected to the board of ITPUG.
He has worked at 2ndQuadrant since 2008, as a developer, consultant and trainer, and is both an active and popular speaker at PostgreSQL conferences in Europe and many other major countries. For example he is a guest speaker at the forthcoming SCaLE X13 event, in San Francisco - a major US open source event.
His IT skills include also functional languages and symbolic computing. Gianni has a PhD in Mathematics and is the author of published research on Algebraic Geometry, Theoretical Physics and Formal Proof Theory. He has worked at the University of Florence as a researcher and teacher.
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 insome open source projects and communities.
Kenneth MacDonald
Bernd Erk
Bernd Erk is co-founder and project organiser of the Icinga project that has been busy improving the forked Nagios code base since 2009.
In his day job as Managing Director of NETWAYS he overseas success and smooth operation of all customer projects and business processes. His 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 monitoring, virtualization, databases and performance tuning among others. Bernd was previously Operating Systems Specialist at Karstadt Quelle, where he worked heavily with Solaris, HPUX and Oracle databases. After which, Bernd spent 8 years as Business Unit Manager at ISE GmbH where he dealt with Oracle databases and service oriented architectures.
Mark Cairney
Stu Teasdale
Peter Tribble
Peter Tribble is a Systems Administrator who has been using assorted flavours of Unix since the 1980s. He extensively beta tested Solaris, helped Sun launch OpenSolaris, served on the OpenSolaris Governing Board, and now spends his spare time learning more about operating systems by building his own illumos-based distribution.
Richard Melville
Richard Melville started the company, Cellularity Limited, ten years ago, to build small, silent, battery-powered servers running GNU/Linux. He was inspired to create a better work environment, having become disenchanted by the surrounding noisy towers running Microsoft Windows. After joining the Linux from Scratch community, building a custom operating system, as well as the hardware, became feasible. Richard has a highly varied background in engineering, unusually combined with a degree in Sociology and Social Psychology.
Pieter Baele
Wim Godden
Mark Keating
Nick Moriarty
Nick Moriarty is a Linux Systems Administrator and Developer at the University of York. As a member of the Systems team, he manages infrastructure systems underpinning the University's Linux IT systems.
His day-to-day work includes the maintenance and development of Puppet infrastructure, as well as operating system deployment, version control, and authentication systems supporting both servers and desktops.