Devopsdays Chicago

Jason Hand

Jason Hand writes, presents, and coaches on the principles and nuance of DevOps, Site Reliability Engineering, and modern incident management practices. Named “DevOps Evangelist of the Year” by DevOps.com in 2016, Jason recently authored a new book on the topic of Site Reliability Engineering. In addition to SRE, Jason has authored books with O’Reilly Media on the subject of post-incident reviews and Chatops. DevOpsDays Rockies organizer and host of the Front-range Site Reliability Meetup, Jason is dedicated to the latest trends in technology, sharing the lessons learned, and helping people continuously improve their IT and software development practices. Jason is also a co-host on the popular podcast, “Community Pulse” - a show on building community in tech.

J. Paul Reed

J. Paul Reed has over fifteen years experience in the trenches as a build/release engineer, working with such storied companies as VMware, Mozilla, Postbox, Symantec, and Salesforce.

In 2012, he founded Release Engineering Approaches, a consultancy incorporating a host of tools and techniques to help organizations “Simply Ship. Every time.” He’s worked across a number of industries, from financial services to cloud-based infrastructure to health care, with teams ranging from 2 to 2,500 on everything from tooling, operational analysis and improvement, cultural transformation, and business value optimization.

He speaks internationally on release engineering, DevOps, operational complexity, and human factors and is currently a Masters of Science candidate in Human Factors & Systems Safety at Lund University.

Michael Ducy

Michael “The Goat Whisperer” Ducy works for CHEF Software, where he travels all over the world and talks about goats and silos. He has a great family of 3 kids with his wife Nicole in Ohio.

Trevor Hess

Trevor Hess is a Senior Product Manager at Progress Software working on Chef Software. He currently works on the Chef Application Delivery, Compliance and Infrastructure offerings.

Coming from a background in .NET Software Development and consulting, he has worked with several large multinational organizations to help kick start their journey to the cloud and the world of DevOps practices and principals. He is excited to engage in new experiences, and learning opportunities.

Trevor enjoys having hearty discussions about DevOps as well organizational change and transformation.

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.