Risky Business With Nicole Johnson, Matt Curry, and Anthony Lee

Nicole Johnson

Nicole is the manager of Solutions Architects East team at Chef Software, based in NYC Metro. She has been in the IT industry for over 11 years, with Chef for nearly 2 years, and has spent previous years as a Solutions Architect with Chef, and specializing in server, storage, virtualization and cloud architecture and operations.

Matt Curry

Matt is a passionate technologist and busy dad from Scottsdale, Arizona. He is currently working at Allstate Insurance, helping to drive a cultural transformation which Allstate has labeled CompoZed Labs. At Allstate, Matt leads the Cloud Engineering organization, which is tasked with defining and delivering on Allstate’s Connected Developer Platform. Matt is an Open Source nerd and led the release of Allstate’s first open source software project, Deployadactyl, for multi-cloud management with Cloud Foundry. Matt is a software and hardware geek with a demonstrated history of using software to solve infrastructure challenges. He is a strong believer in maximizing developer efficiency and delight. Prior to Allstate, Matt worked at PayPal for 8 years. There he played a variety of roles from Business Analyst to Capacity and Performance Specialist to Solutions Architect. While at PayPal he worked on projects related to holiday capacity planning, datacenter movement, code release efficiency and self-healing infrastructure.

Anthony Lee

Anthony is a Senior Manager for Platform Engineering at Allstate Insurance Company. He loves problem solving, particularly in the areas of cloud computing, application platforms, and distributed systems. He is considered patient zero of the CompoZed transformation effort that has affected Allstate and stands witness to the amazing journey the organization has gone through. One of his current passions is bringing an extreme programming approach to systems engineering and operations. Outside of work, he plays husband to his brilliant wife, and dad to his two amazing kids somewhere in the suburbs of Chicago.

Bridget Kromhout

Bridget Kromhout is a Principal Program Manager at Microsoft Azure, focusing on the open source cloud native ecosystem. Her CS degree emphasis was in theory, but she now deals with the concrete (if ‘cloud’ can be considered tangible). After years on call for production (from enterprise to research to startups) and a couple of customer-facing adventures, she now herds cats and wrangles docs on the product side of engineering. In the wider tech community, she has done much conference speaking and organizing, and advises the global devopsdays organization after leading it for over five years. Living in Minneapolis, she enjoys snowshoeing in the winter and bicycling in the summer (with winter cycling as a stretch goal).

Matt Stratton (he/him)

Matty Stratton is the Director of Developer Relations at Aiven, a well-known member of the DevOps community, and a global organizer of the DevOpsDays set of conferences.

Matty has over 20 years of experience in IT operations and is a sought-after speaker internationally, presenting at Agile, DevOps, and cloud engineering focused events worldwide. Demonstrating his keen insight into the changing landscape of technology, he recently changed his license plate from DEVOPS to KUBECTL.

He lives in Chicago and has three awesome kids, whom he loves just a little bit more than he loves Diet Coke.