Keila Banks

Programmer

Keila Banks is a 15 year old programmer, web designer, entrepreneur and international speaker. She started programming at 9 and has been traveling the world speaking on being a young girl in tech. At age 12 she won the Young Entreprenuer of the year award beating out people much older than her. Since then, she’s been recognized by the mayor of Los Angeles, Long Beach California and presented in 2016 at the White House as an example of great things our youth are doing in technology. Coming from a tech family, she loves and embraces many forms of technology without letting it get in the way of just having fun being a kid.

Linus Torvalds

Linux Creator

Linus was born on December 28, 1969 in Helsinki, Finland. He enrolled at the University of Helsinki in 1988, graduating with a master's degree in computer science. His M.Sc. thesis was titled “Linux: A Portable Operating System” and was the genesis for what would become the most important collaborative software project in history.In August 1991, Linus announced that he was developing the Linux kernel, proclaiming, “it won’t be big and professional.” Never in the history of technology has someone been so wrong. In spite of his humble proclamation, Linux has become the world’s most pervasive operating system. Today the Linux kernel forms the basis of the Linux operating system and powers billions of Android devices, powers ChromeOS, and has permeated almost every industry and form factor. Smartphones, TVs, appliances, cars, nuclear submarines, air traffic control, stock exchanges, and scientific research all run Linux. Linux also provides the underpinnings of the internet and the cloud computing industry.In 2005, citing a lack of free and open source version control tools that met his needs for performance and scale, Linus famously created Git in only 10 days. Today Git is widely used in software development and for other version-control tasks such as configuration management, and has become popular as an integral part of the DevOps culture.In 2000, Linus was listed by Time Magazine as Number 17 in the Time 100: Most Important People of the Century. Again, in 2004, Time Magazine named him one of the Most Influential People in the world. He was honored in 2008 with the Millennium Technology Prize by the Technology Academy Finland, “in recognition of his creation of a new open source operating system for computers leading to the widely used Linux kernel.” He is also the recipient of the 2014 IEEE Computer Society Computer Pioneer Award. A true tech titan, he was admitted to the Computer History Museum Hall of Fellows, joining the ranks of the tech elite including Rear Admiral Grace Murray Hopper, Tim Berners-Lee, Gordon Moore, Ken Thompson, Dennis Ritchie, Steve Wozniak, and others.Torvalds remains the ultimate authority on what new code is incorporated into the standard Linux kernel.

Mitchell Hashimoto

HashiCorp

Mitchell Hashimoto is a passionate engineer, professional speaker, and entrepreneur. Mitchell has been creating and contributing to open source software for almost a decade. He has spoken at dozens of conferences about his work, such as VelocityConf, OSCON, FOSDEM, and more. Mitchell is the founder of HashiCorp, a company whose goal is to make the best DevOps tools in the world, including Vagrant. Prior to HashiCorp, Mitchell spent five years as a web developer and another four as an operations engineer.

Neha Narkhede

Confluent

Neha Narkhede is co-founder and CTO at Confluent, the company behind the popular Apache Kafka streaming platform. Prior to founding Confluent, Neha led streams infrastructure at LinkedIn, where she was responsible for LinkedIn’s streaming infrastructure built on top of Apache Kafka and Apache Samza. She is one of the initial authors of Apache Kafka and a committer and PMC member on the project.

Reuben Paul

Reuben is a 11 year old from Pflugerville, TX. When asked by his 1st grade teacher to illustrate his future career, he drew on a sheet that he wanted to become a Cyber Spy. But, Reuben is not just another computer geek. He lives a life on the edge, between his school, as a straight ‘A’ student and all of his other passions. When he is not playing video games or on the computer, he likes to read, and takes classes to play inline hockey, swim, do gymnastics, Shaolin Do KungFu, play piano, drums and do art. Reuben is an invited speaker, delivering awareness talks and keynotes on the importance of teaching CyberSecurity to kids and adults. He has been featured at several industry leading Information Security conferences. His keynote talks on “Creating a Safe and Secure Cyber World for Kids (by a kid)”, “Developing r00t-kidz: The Future of Cybersecurity”, “InfoSec from the mouth of babes (or an 8 year old)”, and "Mutually symb-IoT-ic Security" have been quoted and referenced by several information security sources and news agencies that call him a “Child Hacker". They have become a source of inspiration to kids and adults alike to start teaching CyberSecurity to kids.

Sarah Novotny

Google

Sarah Novotny is head of Open Source Strategy group for Google Cloud Platform. She has long been an Open Source community champion in communities such as Kubernetes, NGINX and MySQL and ran large scale technology infrastructures before web-scale had a name. She co-founded Blue Gecko and launched a free-to-play game platform supporting HAWKEN. She is a program chair emeritus for O’Reilly Media’s OSCON. Novotny talks obsessively about people, technology infrastructure and geek lifestyle.