Velocity Europe 2012 Keynotes

John has worked in systems operations for over fourteen years in biotech, government and online media. He started out tuning parallel clusters running vehicle crash simulations for the U.S. government, and then moved on to the Internet in 1997. He built the backing infrastructures at Salon, InfoWorld, Friendster, and Flickr. He is now VP of Tech Operations at Etsy, and is the author of The Art of Capacity Planning published by O’Reilly.

Dion Almaer is a technologist who loves to code and build. He and his long time partner-in-crime Ben Galbraith recently brought their team to Walmart to power the mobile engineering efforts. He enjoys sharing his passion for software production across various communities, including a new property called FunctionSource.com.

Dion has been 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.

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

Arnaud joined ip-label in 2006 as a technical account manager, dealing with implementation and customer care for its end-user monitoring solutions. After 2 years of technical engineering, he moved to a business development role working as a presales engineer for direct and indirect customers supporting ip-label’s european network of partners. Since 2010, Arnaud took over the product management of Datametrie, the SaaS end-user monitoring solution developed by ip-label. In 2011, Arnaud spoke about exhaustive end-user experience based on real customer cases at Velocity Berlin. In 2012, he contributed to the development of Datametrie Global Experience, merging active and real-user monitoring methodologies into a single and exhaustive offer.

Christopher Brown is VP of Engineering at Opscode and previously of Microsoft, where he was a director of engineering for the Edge Computing Network within Global Foundation Services. Prior to Microsoft, Christopher was a founding member, architect, and lead developer for Amazon.com’s Elastic Compute Cloud (“EC2”). He holds several patents in the areas of internet routing, VM/runtime hosting, content delivery and cloud computing.

Robert Castley is the Lead Solutions Consultant for EMEA at Keynote. Prior to working at Keynote, Robert worked as a Professional Services Consultant at a document management company, Macro 4, where he worked on developing custom web interfaces. . Robert is passionate about web performance and optimisation and has over 10 years of web development experience. One of his proudest achievements is developing one of the world’s most popular Open Source Content Management Systems to the masses – Mambo, which now lives on as Joomla!

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.

Ilya Grigorik is a developer advocate and web performance engineer at Google. He spends his days and nights working on making the web faster and building and driving adoption of performance best practices.

Prior to focusing on web performance Ilya was the founder and CTO of PostRank, a social analytics company which was acquired by Google and became the core of social analytics reporting within Google Analytics. Whenever not thinking web performance, or analytics, Ilya can be found contributing to open-source projects, reading, or building fun projects like VimGolf, GitHub Archive and others.

Andrew Hutchings (aka LinuxJedi) is a Master Software Engineer for Hewlett-Packard’s Cloud Services division working on the continuous integration and infrastructure for Openstack. He is physically based in the middle of nowhere in the United Kingdom but manages and works with a global development team.

Before joining HP he was a Senior Sustaining Engineer for SkySQL, Software Developer on the Drizzle project at Rackspace and a Senior MySQL Support Engineer for Sun Microsystems / Oracle Corporation specialising in MySQL Cluster and C/C++ APIs. He is also co-author of the book MySQL 5.1 Plugins Development.

Christian is CTO of Mobile and Co-Founder of runtastic, a leading platform for sport and fitness users around the globe. Christian received his Master’s degree in Mobile Computing at the University of Applied Sciences in Hagenberg (Austria). Shortly after completing his Masters, he founded runtastic with three of his classmates in October 2009. In addition, he taught C++ and Windows Phone development at the University of Applied Sciences in Hagenberg. At runtastic Christian is responsible for the development of the runtastic Apps which have been downloaded more than 12 million times.

Jeff Kim is COO for CDNetworks US/EMEA and is responsible for the end-to-end customer experience. Jeff’s responsibilities include leading sales, service, marketing, product management and customer support. Jeff has championed the development of CDNetworks’ Web Performance Suite, and in positioning CDNetworks as the trusted global advisor to enterprise companies with mission critical applications.

Patrick Meenan created WebPagetest while at AOL and now works at Google with a team that is working to make the web faster. He has been working on optimizing low-level networking performance for various applications (among other responsibilities) over the last 15 years.

Tim Morrow is Head of Site Technology at Betfair, responsible for the delivery of Betfair’s next-generation web site platform, focusing on performance, availability and the capability to continuous deliver business value at a rapid pace.

Tim has over 11 years of experience leading teams to design and build websites and systems using Java and related technologies. Prior to joining Betfair, Tim worked as an Architect at Shopzilla delivering their consumer facing website platform. In addition, Tim has also worked at Qualcomm developing software to support the provisioning of mobile devices and delivery of applications to mobile devices in the Wireless Business Division. Tim also thrived in the entrepreneurial environment during years 2000-2004 of startup, Project.net . As a key contributor to the startup team, Tim... Read More.

Girish has been with Facebook since early 2008 working the on Technical Operations and Infrastructure teams. Having been the only release tools engineer for over two years where the site grew over 10x, Girish has had to use every trick in the book to keep up with the growth of infrastructure as well as number of developers. Today, Girish works out of Facebook’s London engineering office and leads the tools team.

Alois Reitbauer works as a technology strategist and evangelist for Compuware’s APM Division. He specializes in architecture and performance related topics in the Java and AJAX space. As part of the product management team he drives the future of the dynaTrace product line and works closely with technology companies on implementing performance management solutions. He is a frequent speaker at technology conferences on performance and architecture related topics and regularly publishes articles blogs on blog.dynatrace.com

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.

Gavin Towey is a DBA at Box.com working on database operations, performance, and writing tools to make managing databases easier. He has worked with MySQL since 3.23 as a developer first, and has been a dedicated DBA for the past 5 years, and has managed mysql installations with hundreds of instances.