Velocity 2010 Keynote Speakers

John Adams (Twitter Operations) has worked in computer security, operations, and systems engineering for over 16 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.

As Senior Vice President of Global Service Engineering at Yahoo!, Cheryl is leading teams to develop groundbreaking hardware and software infrastructure that supports all Yahoo! products worldwide, managing over 800 employees and influencing over 6,000 engineers in the Product organization. Cheryl actively focuses on creating a global Service Engineering organization that provides scalable, technologically-sound solutions that are cost effective and maintain a positive end user experience. Within a short time through focusing on metric creation and analysis, improved processes and solutions, Cheryl has improved the user experience by significantly reducing the number of Service Engineering incidents.

During her six years at Yahoo!, Cheryl Ainoa has directed the technology and infrastructure backbone for Yahoo! global products and services, while simultaneously demonstrating tremendous leadership and a passion for innovation. She is a big picture technologist who successfully maintains existing products, while focusing on a vision for the future. During her tenure as Vice President of Global Media Engineering, she developed the next generation media products for the world’s largest audiences. Her teams managed technology for Yahoo!’s industry-leading Finance, Games, News, Music, Sports, Movies, Video, and over 20 property sites, reaching over 70 million people monthly.

Vik Chaudhary serves as vice president of product management and corporate development. He is responsible for leading Keynote’s product strategy, sales enablement, and executing on the company’s acquisitions and partnerships. Mr. Chaudhary has spent 19 years in chief executive, marketing, and engineering positions at blue-chip and start-up technology companies. At Keynote, he previously served as vice president of marketing and corporate development, extending the company into new markets via ten acquisitions. Before joining Keynote, he was CEO of on-demand analytics company Bizmetric, ran product management at database pioneer Gupta Technologies, and led core software engineering teams at Oracle. Mr. Chaudhary is a frequent speaker at industry events on software strategy and M&A, 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.

Eric Goldsmith, Operations Architect at AOL, has more than 20 years of experience providing technical leadership in the areas of product development, engineering and operations. At AOL he has led efforts to deliver the highest levels of performance and availability for top Web sites, including: AOL.com; AIM.com; and AOL Video; among others.

His areas of expertise include Performance Analysis, Capacity Planning, Network Engineering, and Software Development. Prior to AOL, Eric worked for companies such as UUNet, WorldCom and CompuServe, as well as telecom and Internet startups. He holds a BS in Computer Science from The Ohio State University.

Andreas Grabner has 10 years experience as an architect and developer in the Java and .NET space. In his current role, Andi works as a Technology Strategist for dynaTrace Software in the Methods and Technology team. In his role he influences the dynaTrace product strategy and works closely with customers in implementing performance management solutions across the entire application lifecycle. He is a frequent speaker at technology conferences on performance and architecture related topics and regularly publishes articles blogs on blog.dynatrace.com

James is VP and Distinguished Engineer at Amazon Web Services where he focuses on infrastructure efficiency, reliability, and scaling. Prior to AWS, James was architect on the Microsoft Data Center Futures team and, over the years, has held leadership roles on several high-scale services and products, including Exchange Hosted Services, Microsoft SQL Server, and IBM DB2. James loves all things server related and is interested in optimizing all components from data center power and cooling infrastructure, through server design, and to the distributed software systems they host. He maintains a high scale services blog at http://perspectives.mvdirona.com.

Urs Hölzle served as the company’s first vice president of engineering and led the development of Google’s technical infrastructure. His current responsibilities include the design and operation of the servers, networks and datacenters that power Google. He is also renowned for both his red socks and his free-range Leonberger, Yoshka (Google’s top dog). Urs joined Google from the University of California, Santa Barbara where he was an associate professor of computer science. He received a master’s degree in computer science from ETH Zurich in 1988 and was awarded a Fulbright scholarship that same year. In 1994, he earned a Ph.D. from Stanford University, where his research focused on programming languages and their efficient implementation.

As one of the pioneers of dynamic compilation, also known as “just-in-time compilation,” Urs invented fundamental techniques used in most of today’s leading Java compilers. Before joining Google, Urs was a co-founder of Animorphic Systems, which developed compilers for Smalltalk and Java. After Sun Microsystems acquired Animorphic Systems in 1997, he helped build Javasoft’s high-performance Hotspot Java compiler.

In 1996, Urs received a CAREER award from the National Science Foundation for his work on high-performance implementations of object-oriented languages. He was also a leading contributor to DARPA’s National Compiler Infrastructure project. Urs has served on program committees for major conferences in the field of programming language implementation, and is the author of numerous scientific papers and U.S. patents.

John J. Barton is the manager of Interaction Science, an IBM Almaden Research group specializing in fundamentals of human-computer interaction (HCI) technologies, especially multi-device interaction. Interaction Science studies users, invents new techniques and technology, then validates progress by scientific tests with real users. Current projects in my group include text input on handheld devices, integration of information across devices via instant messaging, adapting web pages for mobile devices, and extending web debugging to support more dynamic applications and environments.

John has 21 years of experience in industrial research with over 60 publications in the diverse fields of ubiquitious and mobile computing, compiler technology and programming languages, physics of electron scattering, and chemistry on surfaces. After early work in quantum chemistry at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Lab in Pasadena CA, he got his MS in Applied Physics at Caltech and moved to Berkeley. There he worked at the Lawrence Berkeley Lab and got his PhD at UC Berkeley. John joined the Physics department at IBM Watson to work on Photoelectron Holography, moving to Computer Science in 1991 to work on C++ compilers and co-author a book, “Advanced C++”, with Lee Nackman. John managed the Jikes Java Research Virtual Machine team until 1998 when he moved to HP Labs Palo Alto where he was part of the Cooltown web-based ubiquitious computing project. When he isn’t playing computer games with his sons or working on his deck, he contributes to the Firebug open-source Javascript debugger.

Robert Johnson is Director of Engineering at Facebook, where he leads the software development efforts to cost-effectively scale Facebook’s infrastructure and optimize performance for its many millions of users. During his time with the company, the number of users has expanded by more than fifty-fold and Facebook now handles billions of page views a day.

Robert was previously at ActiveVideo Networks where he led the distributed systems and set-top software development teams. He has worked in a wide variety of engineering roles from robotics to embedded systems to web software. He received a B.S. In Engineering and Applied Science from Caltech.

Eric Lawrence is a Program Manager on the Internet Explorer team, author of the IEInternals blog, and developer of the Fiddler Web Debugger.

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.

Tim Morrow is the lead Architect at Shopzilla, Inc., responsible for the design, implementation, and performance of the company’s portfolio of consumer-facing sites, which include 8 websites in 4 countries. As the Senior Architect at the company, Tim instills in his team of engineers his obsession with performance through his methodical approach to building software: define performance targets, architect, design, implement and measure, measure, measure.

Tim has over 10 years of experience leading teams to design and build websites and enterprise systems using Java and related technologies, focusing on performance, scalability and availability. Prior to joining the world of online shopping at Shopzilla, Tim developed software to support the provisioning of mobile devices and delivery of applications to mobile devices in the Wireless Business Division at Qualcomm. Tim also thrived in the entrepreneurial environment during years 2000-2004 of startup, Project.net . As a key contributor to the startup team, Tim designed and built hosted web applications for the fledgling company.

Born and raised in Northern Ireland, Tim obtained his BEng degree in Computer Science from Queens University in Belfast. He currently resides in Chula Vista, California with his wife and two kids. In his free time, Tim can often be found reading, snowboarding or training for his first triathlon.

Tim O’Reilly is the founder and CEO of O’Reilly Media, Inc., thought by many to be the best computer book publisher in the world. O’Reilly Media also hosts conferences on technology topics, including the O’Reilly Open Source Convention, the Web 2.0 Summit, Strata: The Business of Data, and many others. O’Reilly’s Make: magazine and Maker Faire has been compared to the West Coast Computer Faire, which launched the personal computer revolution. Tim’s blog, O’Reilly Radar, “watches the alpha geeks” to determine emerging technology trends, and serves as a platform for advocacy about issues of importance to the technical community. Tim is also a partner at O’Reilly AlphaTech Ventures, O’Reilly’s early stage venture firm, and is on the board of Safari Books Online.

Simon Perkins is the CEO and Founder of Simtec Limited

Stoyan Stefanov (phpied.com, @stoyanstefanov) is a front-end engineer at Yahoo! Search. Creator of the smush.it online image optimization tool and architect of YSlow 2.0. Book author (Object-Oriented JavaScript) and contributor (Even Faster Web Sites, High-Performance JavaScript) and speaker (Velocity, Ajax Experience, JSConf).

Jaime Yap is a Software Engineer on the Google Speed Tracer team. He is a contributor to the Google Web Toolkit project and loves pushing the boundaries for what can be accomplished in the browser.

Jaime earned his Masters degree in Computer Science from the Georgia Institute of Technology in 2007, and has been with Google since 2008. He currently resides in Atlanta and enjoys long walks on the beach