Velocity 2009 Keynotes

John Adams (Twitter Operations) has worked in web security, operations, and systems engineering for over 15 years. Prior to Twitter, he has worked at Apple, Inktomi, c|net, and a major video-on-demand site, improving security, performance, and reliability at large scale.

Dion Almaer is the founder of a brand new company named Set Direction where he has the pleasure of working with Ben Galbraith. The pair co-founded Ajaxian.com together and they are now focused on helping developers deliver fantastic experiences and working to set the direction of the software industry as a whole.

Dion has been a technologist and a developer writing Web applications since it took over from Gopher. He has been fortunate enough to speak around the world, has published many articles, a book, and of course covers life the universe and everything on his blog at almaer.com/blog.

He has been called a human aggregator, and you can see that in full force if you follow him on Twitter @dalmaer.

Jeremy Bingham is the CTO and man-behind-the-curtain for DailyKos.com, a progressive Democratic weblog that is one of the largest sites in the political blogosphere. He considers himself lucky that a gig with the State of Washington fell through a while back, because otherwise he wouldn’t be doing this.

Jake Brutlag is a data analyst with 10 years of industry experience, first at Microsoft, then at Google. He has published papers on distinct value estimation, email classification, aberrant behavior detection for network time series, and search engine latency.

Dr. John Busch is a co-founder of Schooner Information Technology. Prior to Schooner, Dr. Busch was Research Director of Computer System Architecture and Analysis at Sun Microsystems laboratories from 1999 through 2006. In this role, he led research explorations in chip-multi-processing, advanced multi-tier clustered systems for deployment of internet based services, and advanced HPC systems. Dr. Busch received the top President’s Award for Innovation at Sun, and oversaw many division technology transfers. Prior to Sun, Dr. Busch was VP of Engineering and Business Partnerships with Diba Inc, and was general manager of the Diba Division after Sun acquired Diba in 1997. From 1989 to 1994, Dr. Busch was co-founder and CTO/VP of Engineering of Clarity Software, and led creation of advanced multi-media composition... Read More.

Mr. Chaudhary is responsible for leading Keynote’s product management team and has extended the company into new markets via 15 acquisitions. He has spent over 20 years in chief executive, marketing and engineering positions in Silicon Valley, previously having served as VP Marketing and Corporate Development at Keynote, CEO of a cloud startup Bizmetric, and has held leadership roles at public software companies Gupta Technologies and Oracle Corporation. Mr. Chaudhary is a frequent speaker at industry events on Internet software, cloud computing, and business development, and has been featured in the New York Times and on the ABC News Nightline program. Mr. Chaudhary holds a B.S. in Computer Science and Engineering from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Phil Dixon is the VP of Engineering for Shopzilla.com one of the largest and most comprehensive shopping networks on the planet. Each day millions of consumers shop for virtually anything via our websites Shopzilla.com, Bizrate.com and Beso.com and our publisher network.

Prior to Shopzilla, Phil was co-founder, director and CTO of Project.net — a premier provider of Enterprise Project Management software. From its inception in 1999 to over 200,000 seats deployed worldwide, Phil was a driving force behind the company’s launch, its technology innovation, its sales success and its eventual sale.

A serial entrepreneur, Phil also founded or had senior leadership roles with numerous other high-technology companies including NetProfit Investment Technologies, Rockwell Semiconductor systems, Sourcefinder where he served as Chief Technology Officer; and Internet... Read More.

Ben Galbraith, together with his long-time friend Dion Almaer, forms one-half of the dynamic “Ben and Dion” duo that founded Ajaxian.com, headed Developer Tools at Mozilla, ran Developer Relations at Palm and is now running mobile architecture and engineering at Walmart.com after being acquired along with their start-up team in early 2011. Ben’s been writing code since he was six and starting businesses since he was ten; he’s written books, given hundreds of award-winning presentations world-wide, produced a few technical conferences, sold three companies, and has held CEO, CIO, CTO, and Software Architect positions in the medical, publishing, media, consumer electronics, advertising, software and internet industries. He lives in Palo Alto with his wife and six children.

Umang Gupta has served since 1997 as chairman and chief executive officer of Keynote Systems (NASDAQ: KEYN), the global leader in test and measurement solutions that improve mobile communications and online business performance. A well-known technology visionary and Silicon Valley entrepreneur, Umang began his career in 1973 with IBM. Umang joined Oracle Corporation in 1981 where he wrote the first business plan for the company, and served as Vice President and General Manager of the Microcomputer Products Division through 1984. He left Oracle to become Founder, Chairman, and Chief Executive Officer of Gupta Corporation, which he took public in 1993 (NASDAQ: GPTA). Gupta Corporation was responsible for ushering in the era of enterprise client/server computing by introducing many seminal innovations, including the... Read More.

Jonathan Heiliger is the Vice President of Technical Operations at Facebook, where he oversees global infrastructure, site architecture and IT. Prior to Facebook, he was a technology advisor to several early-stage companies in connection with Index Ventures and Sequoia Capital. He formerly led the engineering team at Walmart.com, where he was responsible for infrastructure and building scalable systems. Jonathan also spent several years at Loudcloud (which became Opsware and was later acquired by HP) as the Chief Operating Officer. Earlier in his career, Jonathan was the CTO of Frontier GlobalCenter, and later founded Global Crossing’s corporate venture capital group.

Small company veteran Justin started his career doing building embedded systems ranging from imaging sonar to home automation. Then, he jumped head first into web operations by building the backend infrastructure for Picnik.com. He is currently a Software Engineer in Google’s Seattle office.

Marissa leads Google’s efforts on search products – web search, images, news, books, products, maps, – and other consumer-facing initiatives such as iGoogle, Google Earth, Google Chrome, and more. Her contributions have included designing and developing Google’s search interface, internationalizing the site to over 100 languages, and launching more than 100 features and products on Google.com. Several patents have been filed on her work in artificial intelligence and interface design. Google’s first female engineer, Marissa joined in 1999 and led the user interface and web server teams at that time.

Concurrently with her full-time work at Google, Marissa has taught introductory computer programming classes at Stanford University, where she earned both her B.S. in Symbolic Systems and her M.S. in Computer Science. Stanford has recognized... Read More.

During Bryan’s time at Google, he has contributed to various projects that make the web faster, including Shared Dictionary Compression over HTTP, optimizing web servers to better utilize HTTP, and most recently, the Page Speed web performance tool. Prior to working on web performance, Bryan was the first full time engineer on the Google TV Ads team, where he helped to build some of Google’s TV ad auction and video management systems.

Richard Rabbat is a product manager at Google. He recently released Page Speed, a Firefox add-on that analyzes web pages and gives suggestions on how to improve them in addition to doing some of the optimizations itself. He works on projects that power Google’s infrastructure including latency measurements for Google apps. Previously, Richard worked on data center technologies.

Richard was VP of Entrepreneurship at the MIT Club of Northern California where he helped incubate the green energy and clean technologies program.

Richard is a Senior Member of IEEE and holds a Ph.D. degree from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a Masters degree in Computer and Communications Engineering from the American University of Beirut.

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... Read More.

Ed Robinson has a long history in development tools and web performance. He was CEO and co-founder of Aptimize – the New Zealand-based pioneer in automated website performance tuning. After Riverbed Technology acquired Aptimize in July 2011, Ed moved to San Francisco to be general manager of web content optimization for Riverbed. Prior to all of this, Ed worked in program management for Microsoft in Visual Studio, Content Management Server, and SharePoint.

Eric Schurman has been working with the web since the early versions of NCSA Mosaic. He’s currently at Amazon.com as a Principal Engineer working on latency. Prior to that he worked at Microsoft on projects ranging from Bing.com’s search to the Microsoft.com home page and Download Center. His experiences writing books on web development, working with disabled users, and teaching classes in computer use have given him a passion for doing the right thing for the customer.

Steve works at Google on web performance and open source initiatives. He previously served as Chief Performance Yahoo!. Steve is the author of High Performance Web Sites and Even Faster Web Sites. He is the creator of YSlow, one of the top 25 of 2 billion Firefox add-ons. He’s created many other performance tools and services including Cuzillion, Jdrop, ControlJS, and Browserscope. He serves as co-chair of Velocity, the web performance and operations conference from O’Reilly, and is co-founder of the Firebug Working Group. He taught CS193H: High Performance Web Sites at Stanford University.

Matt Tanase has always had the entrepreneurial spirit. Immediately following college, Matt started Qaddisin, a company focused on network security services and application development. After working on software consulting projects and being disappointed with the state of webhosting, he took matters into his own hands and co-founded Slicehost, with college friend Jason Seats, in the summer of 2006. Known for its passionate customer service, the company currently has over 11,000 customers and 15,000 virtual servers located in downtown St. Louis. Along with his various entrepreneurial successes, Matt has received several recognitions. He was a regular security columnist for Security Focus, the Product Picks monthly columnist for Linux Magazine, and in 2002 he won the 30 under 30 Award for the St. Louis Business Journal. Matt... Read More.