DevOpsDays Kansas City 2018

Monica Hart

Going from retail cashier to software engineer, she is now a Technology Associate with VMLY&R in Kansas City. She enjoys reading historical fiction and watching Jenkins pipeline scripts build without errors.

Jessica DeVita

Jessica DeVita is a recovering sysadmin who has been doing IT operations for about 17 years, 7 years in corporate IT and almost 10 in private consulting. Now as a technical evangelist at Microsoft, she’s helping operations people uplevel their technical and soft skills for devops and cloud computing. Jessica is a fan of building communities, meetups and supporting nonprofits that teach tech to women, girls and underserved communities and is a frequent speaker at conferences on topics such collaboration/workflow systems, CRM and DevOps culture and systems thinking.

Ben Clayton

Throughout a 20 year career in technology, I have done everything from phone support to cloud architecture. In my personal time, I am an active volunteer with a number of local charities, as well as our Rotary Club. I live in Overland Park, Kansas, with my two young children and wife of seventeen years, Stephanie.

Dan Barker

Dan spent 12 years in the military as a fighter jet mechanic before transitioning to a career in technology as a Software/DevOps Engineer/Manager. He’s now the Chief Architect at the National Association of Insurance Commissioners. He’s leading the technical and cultural transformation for the NAIC, a non-profit focused on consumer protection in the insurance industry. Dan is also an organizer of the DevOps KC Meetup and the DevOpsDays KC conference.

Ana Medina

Ana is currently working as a Chaos Engineer at Gremlin, helping companies avoid outages by running proactive chaos engineering experiments. She last worked at Uber where she was an engineer on the SRE and Infrastructure teams specifically focusing on chaos engineering and cloud computing. Catch her tweeting at @Ana_M_Medina mostly about traveling, diversity in tech, and mental health.

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.