DevOps Midwest Speaker Bio Page 2025

Speaker Profiles

Kyle Wilhoit

KEYNOTE SPEAKER

Threat Researcher's Guide to the Threat Landscape

In today's hyper-connected world, the digital landscape is constantly evolving, presenting both opportunities and challenges. The Threat Researcher's Guide to the Threat Landscape delves into the realm of cybersecurity threats, providing a comprehensive overview of the latest developments, trends, and insights in the field of threat research related to cybercrime, nation-state backed attacks and generative AI.

In this talk, Kyle will be exploring the evolving threat landscape and its impact on individuals, businesses and society as a whole. With cyberattacks becoming increasingly sophisticated and persistent, understanding the latest threat vectors and attack techniques is crucial for effective defense and mitigation strategies.

Kyle is a Director of Threat Research with over a decade of experience helping research teams deliver threat intelligence. Kyle leads teams that analyzes technical intelligence related to APT and cybercrime. Kyle has served on the Black Hat US Review Board since 2017, and is a co-author of two books.

John Krewson

Master of Ceremonies

Founder and President of Sketch Development, John is on a mission to revolutionize how teams collaborate and create.

Leveraging his past experience as a software leader and professional actor, John helps organizations establish more effective and enjoyable product development processes, by breaking through corporate barriers and restrictive mindsets. As a result, companies achieve healthier work cultures, better products, and higher client satisfaction.

His unique approach took shape after spending years immersed in sketch comedy. He came to the realization that

"The way sketch comedy is made directly resembles how software is developed. Putting a team in a room with nothing more than a whiteboard and their brains, and hoping for a product to emerge."

John’s blend of humor, ingenuity, and expertise offers a refreshing take on building teams, developing products, and transforming corporate culture. He brings real-world insights to every product, training session, and keynote, cutting through the fluff to focus on what truly works.

Dewan Ahmed

Securing Git Repositories: Preventing Accidental Secret Commits with Gitleaks

Accidentally committing secrets to a Git repository can compromise sensitive data and lead to serious security risks. This talk will focus on addressing this common issue by using Gitleaks, an open-source tool for detecting secrets in code, and demonstrate how developers can seamlessly integrate it into their workflows. This is an interactive, hands-on session.

Dewan Ahmed is a Principal Developer Advocate at Harness, a company that aims to enable every software engineering team in the world to deliver code reliably, efficiently and quickly to their users. Before joining Harness, he worked at IBM, Red Hat, and Aiven as a developer, QA lead, consultant, and developer advocate.

Michael Allen

From Chaos to Clarity: Revolutionizing Deployments in a Highly Regulated World

Embark on an enlightening journey through the complex landscape of deployment optimization in heavily regulated environments. Discover how we transformed our process, dramatically reducing thousands of deployment jobs to a set of robust, standardized templates. By leveraging cutting-edge infrastructure-as-code principles and containerization, we achieved a remarkable shift from sprawling inconsistency to streamlined efficiency. This presentation offers more than just insights—it's a comprehensive masterclass in deployment strategies that will inspire and equip you with practical knowledge.

Michael has spent the past decade building (and breaking) software on many platforms. Whether it's RESTful web services in the cloud, batch jobs on yesterdays machines, or PLC code on analog controllers Michael enjoys deconstructing complex problems and re-assembling clean, durable solutions.

Jeff Barczewski

It just works!" - The Rust Programmer's Rally Cry

Uncover the flexibility, safety guarantees, and security of Rust for your mission critical applications. Has your organization wasted hours of productivity on security vulnerabilities, memory leaks, race conditions, or null pointers? Learn why major companies turn to Rust to squash these problems.

Jeff is a Senior Software Engineer with 35 years of experience and strives to build scalable, resilient applications. He’s happily married with a daughter, who is a TV anchor/multi-skilled journalist. He is active in Catholic ministry for his parish. He enjoys trips out to the mountains for some soul lifting snow skiing, but also loves simply hanging out with friends and family having good conversations and the occasional board game.

Lee Barnes

AI Augmented Software Quality and Testing in the Delivery Pipeline

There’s a lot of wild claims being made about AI replacing QA/testing expertise in software delivery organizations. This talk focuses on where AI can provide value AND where it can’t. If you want to understand how you can use AI to elevate your testing RIGHT NOW, this is the talk for you!

Lee has over 30 years of experience in the Software Quality Assurance and Testing field. He has been involved in the implementation of test automation and performance testing solutions in hundreds of environments across a wide array of industries.

Paul Chin Jr.

Data Gone in 60 Seconds: A Serverless ETL Heist

Have you ever seen Gone in 60 Seconds starring Nicolas Cage? Experience the same adrenaline rush in data processing! We’ll use the iconic movie to create our own “heist” and build a serverless ETL pipeline using AWS Lambda, S3, Athena & SQS, transform it in a flash, and deliver blockbuster insights.

Paul is curious and passionate about exploring technology, art, and business. He advocates for making technology accessible and growing communities to help one another. He has created new markets, guided start-up validations, and architected enterprise platforms.

Naomi Dennis

Rapid Infrastructure Pitfalls & Positives

Building infrastructure from scratch with minimal cost and time? No service is one size fits all; this talk serves as a guide through the rapid deployment of infrastructure with various cloud services while keeping in mind tradeoffs to cost, time, extensibility and development onboarding.

Naomi went to NYU to study computer science. In working at 8th Light for the last 6 years, she's worked on enterprise platforms for companies like cars.com and LegalZoom. In her personal life, she's a bit of a coffee connoisseur who also enjoys archery, running 5Ks and growing herbs & vegetables for her kitchen.

Travis Frisinger

DevOps to LLMOps: Taming Probabilistic Systems

Traditional DevOps is built on predictability—infrastructure as code, CI/CD, and system reliability. But LLMs are probabilistic, generating responses based on probabilities rather than strict logic. How do we apply DevOps principles to inherently unpredictable AI systems? This talk explores how DevOps practices can be extended to support LLMOps, ensuring AI-driven applications remain observable, testable, and reliable in production.

Travis Frisinger is a Principal Crafter at 8th Light, where his passion for innovation drives excellence in the DevOps domain. With a career marked by a passion for solving complex problems and fostering technological advancements, Travis has cultivated a reputation for advancing technology through a meticulous approach to software craftsmanship. His dedication to creating clean, maintainable code and promoting efficient development practices underscores his philosophy that great software is the foundation of modern technological success.

Shawn Horvatic

Embrace Systems Design and CLI

Most DevOps engineers have faced a system so complex that writing yet another script or YAML file will cause more issues. He will provide guidance on untangling and writing testable / maintainable DevOps systems. He will also have code / live system examples and techniques to achieve this state.

Shawn is a seasoned Delivery Lead at 8th Light and brings a wealth of expertise in software development. Over his tenure, Shawn has spearheaded the development of robust organizational practices for DevSecOps, specializing in secret management, code analysis, and security practices implementation.

Randy Pagels

Mission Copilot Autofix: Securing the World’s Software with GitHub Advanced Security

Developers are the first line of defense in app security! Discover how GitHub Advanced Security and Azure DevOps empower proactive, AI-driven protection. Learn to identify vulnerabilities early, streamline fixes, and integrate security seamlessly—fortifying your code without slowing development!

As a DevOps Architect, Randy led customers in designing and delivering solutions that adhere to industry standards and DevOps best practices. He focuses on GitHub, DevOps, Infrastructure as Code automation, and CI/CD pipeline management. While serving as a technical evangelist and thought leader, he also connected with customers to help them understand options on how to improve their application development practices on Azure.

Mathias Palmersheim

Better Together: Leveraging Your Observability Tools as a SIEM

-Unlock the power of your existing observability tools by integrating them into a unified SIEM solution. This talk explores how this approach streamlines incident response, enhances collaboration, and improves security outcomes.

-Mathias is a seasoned Solution Engineer at VictoriaMetrics, where he plays a pivotal role in driving the adoption and successful implementation of both enterprise and open-source products. His passion for technology, combined with a deep understanding of monitoring and performance metrics, positions him as a thought leader eager to share insights and practical knowledge.

Joel Tosi

Modernizing Legacy Code - While Not Bringing Down Prod

Joel is Owner and Co-Founder of Dojo & Co. For the past 12 years, Joel has been coaching organizations like Target, Northwest Mutual, Nielsen, RR Donnelly, Thomson Reuters, Disney, Pearson, and Verizon in developing new product delivery practices. He has been a dojo coach for more than 6 years. In this session, you will learn real world techniques to help you with modernization. Including realigning product, architecture, and teams with strategic DDD, finding seams in your existing product, questioning product assumptions, making boring changes to get quick learning natural code expansion and contraction as well as how to decide if you are better of modernizing than migrating.

Olha Vovk

The Art of Subtle Automation: Getting It Done Without Scope Creep

Test automation is often sidelined when delivery timelines are tight, and time to market is the business priority. But as we know that skipping automation can lead to mounting technical debt and quality risks. So how do you implement automation without disrupting the project scope or inflating estimates? In this talk, we will share battle-tested strategies for seamlessly integrating test automation into development workflows without requiring a parallel automation project team. Drawing from her experience on multiple timeline driven projects, she'll discuss practical methods to embed automation into daily development and testing activities.

Olha (Olga) was born and raised in Ukraine and moved to Kansas City sixteen years ago. She is a self-taught web developer who had switched to test automation career in 2015 and fell in love with DevOps concept and all things automated. She is the organizer of Software Testing KC meetup, co-founder of QA Learning Center, and a passionate supporter of Women in Tech groups. In her free time, Olga likes to study neuroscience and modern philosophies, and bakes cakes with experimental fillings.