Track Overview

Speaker AMAs (Ask Me Anything)

QCon has 18 technical and 4 sponsored tracks across the three conference days.

Each of the technical tracks represents a vertical conference focused on a technology or trend in software. Often times, important concentrations develop at the conference outside of those tracks. The AMAs are a way to address these microtracks or just to get your questions answered with popular speakers. The idea with the AMAs is to create a space for general Q&A around these topics and speakers.

AMAs are an informal gathering for Q&A. Bring your questions for in depth conversations with QCon speakers.


From this track

SESSION + Live Q&A

Connecting the Dots: Applying Microservices When You Get Back to Work

We all leave QCon energized to try new things, explore alternative solutions to persistent problems, and share what we’ve learned with our teams.  It can be difficult to connect the dots between the compelling stories we hear about technological transformation with new technology and the...

Ben Sigelman

Co-Founder @LightStepHQ & Co-Creator Dapper & @OpenTracing API Standard

Randy Shoup

VP Engineering @WeWork

Colin Breck

Sr. Staff Software Engineer @Tesla

Liz Fong-Jones

Site Reliability Engineer

SESSION + Live Q&A

Mini-Workshop: Power of Coaching

In the Agile community, the term “coaching” gets bandied around almost as much as “Agile”. What do we mean by “coaching”, what are the core skills of an effective coach, what does good look like and how does it feel to coach and be coached?  Back for a second time by popular...

Portia Tung

Author of "The Dream Team Nightmare"

AMA + Live Q&A

Kubernetes AMA w/ Petazzoni & Hoban

Presentation details to follow. 

Jérôme Petazzoni

Staff Container & Infrastructure Engineer @enixsas

Luke Hoban

CTO @PulumiCorp & TypeScript Co-Creator

AMA + Live Q&A Developer Experience

Developer Experience AMA w/ Stuart Davidson & Mike McGarr

Presentation details to follow.

Stuart Davidson

Tribe Lead of Production Platform @Skyscanner

Mike McGarr

Engineering Leader, Frontend Infrastructure @Slack

AMA + Live Q&A

Node.js AMA w/ Matteo Collina & Jamund Ferguson

Presentation details to follow.

Jamund Ferguson

Web Platform Team Lead @PayPal

Matteo Collina

Principal Architect @NearForm


Speakers from this track

Ben Sigelman

Co-Founder @LightStepHQ & Co-Creator Dapper & @OpenTracing API Standard

Ben Sigelman is the CEO and co-founder of LightStep, co-creator of Dapper (Google’s distributed tracing tool that helps developers make sense of their large-scale distributed systems), and co-creator of the open-source OpenTracing API standard (a project within the CNCF).

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Randy Shoup

VP Engineering @WeWork

Randy is a 25-year veteran of Silicon Valley, and has worked as a senior technology leader and executive at companies ranging from small startups, to mid-sized places, to eBay and Google. Randy is currently VP Engineering at WeWork in San Francisco. He is particularly passionate about the nexus...

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Colin Breck

Sr. Staff Software Engineer @Tesla

Colin Breck has experience developing software infrastructures for the near real-time monitoring and control of industrial applications. At Tesla, he works on distributed systems for the monitoring, aggregation, optimization, and control of distributed-energy assets, including solar generation,...

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Liz Fong-Jones

Site Reliability Engineer

Liz is a developer advocate, labor and ethics organizer, and Site Reliability Engineer (SRE) with 15+ years of experience. She is an advocate at Honeycomb.io for the SRE and Observability communities, and previously was an SRE working on products ranging from the Google Cloud Load Balancer to...

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Portia Tung

Author of "The Dream Team Nightmare"

I’m an Executive Agile Coach, Executive & Personal Coach and Play Researcher who combines business strategies with play to bring about positive organisational change. I’m an international speaker, and the creator of concepts such as Playmaking and Enterprise Gardening. I specialise in...

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Jérôme Petazzoni

Staff Container & Infrastructure Engineer @enixsas

Jérôme was part of the team that built, scaled, and operated the dotCloud PAAS, before that company became Docker. He worked seven years at the container startup, where he wore countless hats and ran containers in production before it was cool. He loves to share what he knows, which led him to...

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Luke Hoban

CTO @PulumiCorp & TypeScript Co-Creator

Luke Hoban is the CTO at Pulumi where he is re-imagining how developers program the cloud. Prior to Pulumi, Luke held product and engineering roles at AWS and Microsoft. At AWS, Luke led product definition and business planning for EC2 instance families including GPU, FPGA and T2 compute...

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Stuart Davidson

Tribe Lead of Production Platform @Skyscanner

I'm the Tribe Lead of Production Platform within Skyscanner where we provide a modern and scalable platform for Skyscanner to run across the globe - kinda what it says on the tin actually. Plenty of exciting challenges at serious scale - how do you operate a site for 100m unique users a month...

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Mike McGarr

Engineering Leader, Frontend Infrastructure @Slack

Mike McGarr is an engineering leader who resides in the heart of Silicon Valley. Mike currently leads Slack’s Frontend Infrastructure team, focused on building a great JavaScript client. Prior to Slack, Mike lead Netflix’s Developer Productivity team, who was focused on building tools and...

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Jamund Ferguson

Web Platform Team Lead @PayPal

Jamund Ferguson is a JavaScript architect at PayPal. He loves to look at how following patterns consistently can prevent bugs in applications. He’s previously contributed to the ESLint and StandardJS open-source projects and has as of late become a fan of FlowType and TypeScript. He is married...

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Matteo Collina

Principal Architect @NearForm

Matteo is a code pirate and mad scientist. He spends most of his days programming in Node.js, but in the past he worked with Ruby, Java and Objective-C. In 2014, he defended his Ph.D. thesis titled "Application Platforms for the Internet of Things". Now he is a Principal Architect at nearForm,...

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Track Host

Wes Reisz

Technical Principal @thoughtworks & Creator/Co-host of #TheInfoQPodcast, previously Platform Architect @VMware

Wes is a Technical Principal with Thoughtworks where his focus is on working with customers on app modernization, with a particular focus on the cloud native ecosystem. Prior to Thoughtworks, he was one of the Platform Architects at VMware focused on Tanzu. Wes also chairs the San Francisco...

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