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DevOps 100: Do ops like a boss. Follow these top pros

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John P. Mello Jr. Freelance writer
 

One way to best ways stay abreast of the latest DevOps developments is to focus on what the leaders in the field are talking about on social media, and there's no better way to do that than to follow TechBeacon's DevOps 100 list.

This year's crop of leaders includes nearly 60 new names, as well as additional information about the folks who also made last year's list. Our list is based on input from IT Revolution and its DevOps Enterprise Summit programming committee.

DevOps 100 is organized into categories, from noted authors and next-generation operations to value-stream mapping, so you can quickly find the experts you most want to follow. Those pros speaking at the annual DevOps Enterprise Summit Las Vegas - Virtual this year, or who spoke at DevOps Enterprise Summit - London earlier this year, are noted with asterisks (**).

Authors

Carmen DeArdo**

Principal flow advisor, Tasktop

Follow on LinkedIn 

DeArdo has experience providing coaching and consulting in flow and value-stream architecture to help teams accelerate their ability to deliver business value. His focus is on working with teams to improve their flow utilizing an integrated delivery pipeline and applying Flow Framework concepts. His experience leading the implementation of agile, lean, and DevOps practices to accelerate delivery at a Fortune 100 company was recognized in 2016 by DevOps.com as the Transformation of the Year. DeArdo is also the co-author of Standing on Shoulders: A Leader's Guide to Digital Transformation.

Jeffery Fredrick**

Managing director, TIM

@Jtf

Fredrick is the co-author of Agile Conversations and an internationally recognized expert in software development, with over 25 years of experience covering both sides of the business and technology divide. An early adopter of XP and agile practices, Fredrick has been a conference speaker in the United States, Europe, India, and Japan. Through his work on the pioneering open-source project CruiseControl, and through his role as co-organizer of the Continuous Integration and Testing Conference (CITCON), he has had a global impact on software development.

Fredrick's Silicon Valley experience includes roles as vice president of product management, vice president of engineering, and chief evangelist. He has also worked as an independent consultant on topics including corporate strategy, product management, marketing, and interaction design. He is based in London and runs the London Organizational Learning Meetup; he is also a CTO mentor through CTO Craft.

 

Jason Hand

Senior cloud advocate, Microsoft

@jasonhand

Author of multiple books and a former DevOps champion and advisor to VictorOps, Hand writes, presents, and coaches on the principles and nuance of DevOps and modern incident management practices. Named DevOps Evangelist of the Year by DevOps.com in 2016, Hand recently wrote a new book on the topic of site reliability engineering. In addition to SRE, he has written books on the subjects of post-incident reviews and ChatOps.

DevOpsDays Rockies organizer and host of the Front-Range Site Reliability Meetup, Hand is dedicated to the latest trends in technology, sharing lessons learned, and helping people continuously improve their IT and software development practices. He is also a co-host on the popular podcast "Community Pulse," a show about building community in tech.

Jack Maher

Digital transformation evangelist

@jack_maher

Maher is a digital leader who has deep experience in leading the transformations in the way teams, technologies, and organizations deliver technology solutions, making them faster, better, and cheaper. He is the co-author of Standing on Shoulders: A Leader's Guide to Digital Transformation.

Courtney Nash

Director of editorial development, Holloway

@courtneynash

Nash is seasoned content, event, and digital experience expert, with 18-plus years in content creation, acquisition, research, strategy, and execution. As someone who used to study the neuroscience behind how people learn, she is now paying close attention to the intersections between computers and humans and their often unexamined consequences. She is a systems thinker who is skilled at weaving narrative with technical content tailored to an organization's strategic goals.

She was previously director of content strategy at Fastly and, before that, director of strategic content for O'Reilly Media, running five international in-person events attracting thousands of attendees. She has also hosted a bi-weekly podcast and managed a multi-disciplinary content team focused on cloud computing, infrastructure, DevOps, and security.

Manuel Pais**

IT organizational consultant

@manupaisable

Pais has made the rounds as a speaker at DevOps and IT conferences around the world. He is co-author of the book Team Guide to Software Releasability and has an extensive background as a Java developer and build manager. He is also the co-author of the new book Team Topologies: Organizing Business and Technology Teams for Fast Flow.

Mark Schwartz**

Enterprise strategist, Amazon Web Services

@schwartz_cio

Schwartz calls himself "an iconoclastic CIO and a playful crafter of ideas, an inveterate purveyor of lucubratory prose." (We had to look that one up.) Schwartz says he advises some of the world's largest companies on the obvious: "Time to move to the cloud, guys." He's done cool, people-oriented things, too, such as using business intelligence and supply chain analytics to place au pairs with the right host families. His books include The Art of Business Value, A Seat at the Table: IT Leadership in the Age of Agility, and War and Peace and IT.

Matthew Skelton**

Head of consulting, Conflux

@matthewpskelton

Skelton has been building, deploying, and operating commercial software systems since 1998, specializing in continuous delivery and operability for software in industries that include manufacturing, e-commerce, and online services that embrace cloud, IoT, and embedded software. He curates the well-known DevOps team topologies patterns at devopstopologies.com and is co-author of Continuous Delivery with Windows and .NET and Team Guide to Software Operability. Skelton also is the co-author of the new book Team Topologies: Organizing Business and Technology Teams for Fast Flow.

Douglas Squirrel**

Director, Squirrel Squared

@douglassquirrel

Co-author of Agile Conversations, Squirrel has been coding for 40 years and has led software teams for 20. He uses the power of conversations to create dramatic productivity gains in technology organizations of all sizes. Squirrel's experience includes growing software teams as a CTO in startups, from fintech to e-commerce; consulting on product improvement at over 60 organizations in the United Kingdom, the United States, and Europe; and coaching a wide variety of leaders in improving their conversations, aligning to business goals, and creating productive conflict. He lives in Frogholt, England, in a timber-framed cottage built in 1450.

Geertjan Wielenga

Senior director of open-source projects, Azul Systems

@GeertjanW

At Azul, Wielenga focuses on open-source technologies, such as NetBeans IDE and Oracle JET. He is an author and speaker at conferences around the world, such as JavaOne and Devoxx. His most recent book is Developer, Advocate! Conversations on Turning a Passion for Talking About Tech into a Career.

Cloud-native

Joe Beda

Principal engineer, VMware

@jbeda

At VMware, Beda helps drive cloud-native technologies (including Kubernetes). He joined VMware via the acquisition of Heptio, a startup he founded with Craig McLuckie. Most recently, Beda helped start the Kubernetes project to manage clusters of compute containers.

Before that, he founded and was lead engineer on the Google Compute Engine project. Previously, he worked on the Google ads system to build tools to help advertisers pick the right keywords and bids, connect Google services to the public telephone network (PSTN), and define and launch Google Talk.

His experience at Microsoft included playing a key role in designing the next-generation graphics system for Windows. Prior to that he was on MSHTML/Trident, the rendering engine for Internet Explorer versions 4, 5, 5.5 and 6, where he worked with core data structures and parsing to drive performance across the product.

Ian Coldwater

Lead platform security engineer, Heroku

@IanColdwater

Coldwater is a former teenage hacker turned lead platform security engineer at Heroku, who specializes in hacking and hardening Kubernetes, containers, and cloud-native infrastructure. In their spare time, Coldwater likes to go on cross-country road trips, participate in Capture the Flag competitions, and eat a lot of pie.

Justin Cormack

Security lead, Docker

@justincormack

Justin Cormack is an engineer at Docker. He got interested in system software while working on operations and trying to stop it from breaking. He became a C programmer by necessity, not design. He has recently been working on building unikernels, improving usability of security, and distributed systems.

Cornelia Davis**

Chief technology officer, Weaveworks

@cdavisafc

A self-proclaimed propeller-head at Weaveworks, the provider of operational, Kubernetes-based solutions, Davis is responsible for the technology strategy of the company. She is hyper-focused on helping customers develop and execute on their cloud platform strategies. Ultimately, her aim is to enable developers and operations teams to fully support the business needs of their organizations.

Lachlan Evenson

Principal program manager, Microsoft

@LachlanEvenson

Evenson works on the open-source team at Azure. As a cloud-native ambassador, Kubernetes steering committee member, emeritus Kubernetes release lead, and Helm charts maintainer, Evenson has deep operational knowledge of many cloud-native projects.

Kelsey Hightower

Staff developer advocate, Google Cloud

@kelseyhightower

Hightower has worn every hat possible throughout his career in tech but most enjoys leadership roles focused on making things happen and shipping software. He is a strong open-source advocate focused on building simple tools that make people smile. When he is not slinging Go code, you can catch him giving technical workshops covering everything from programming and system administration to his favorite Linux distro of the month.

Bridget Kromhout

Principal program manager, Microsoft

@bridgetkromhout

Although her computer science degree emphasized the theoretical over the pragmatic, Kromhout now deals with the concrete (if cloud can be considered tangible). After 15 years as an operations engineer, she traded being on call for being on a plane. A frequent speaker and program committee member for tech conferences, she leads the DevOpsDays organization globally and the DevOps community at home in Minneapolis. She podcasts with Arrested DevOps, blogs at bridgetkromhout.com, and is active in a Twitterverse near you.

Craig McLuckie

Vice president, VMware

@cmcluck

McLuckie works in VMware's cloud-native applications business unit. He is also co-founder of the Kubernetes project, and founder and CEO of Heptio.

Sam Newman

Independent consultant, Sam Newman and Associates

@samnewman

Newman is interested in technology at the intersection of things, from development to ops to security, usability, and organizations. After over a decade at ThoughtWorks, he is now an independent consultant. He is the author of Building Microservices. 

Newman has worked with a variety of companies in multiple domains around the world, often with one foot in the developer world and another in the IT operations space. If you asked him what he does, he'd say, "I work with people to build better software systems." He has written articles, presented at conferences, and sporadically commits to open-source projects. While Java used to be his bread and butter, he also spends time with Ruby, Python, JavaScript, and Clojure, as well as infrastructure automation and cloud systems.

Linda Nichols

Cloud-native specialist, Microsoft

@lynnaloo

Nichols is a leader and technologist with over 20 years of experience in software development. She has a passion for community engagement and open source. She enjoys creating fun projects using new technologies and inspiring other developers and hobbyists to explore their interests, learn new tools, and build something amazing of their own.

She is the organizer and co-founder of Norfolk.js, the JavaScript user group in Norfolk, Virginia. The members meet, have speakers, create events, and do fun community engagement activities such as workshops and NodeBots. Once a year, in July, they organize NodeBots Day—a gathering of hundreds of local families where they learn to build and program robots.

Nichols is also a board member and co-founder of RevolutionVA, a local nonprofit that is responsible for organizing RevolutionConf and HRDevFest and supporting other local events such as NodeBots Day Norfolk. She is also passionate about serverless architecture and cloud-native development.

Developer relations

Jeff Barr

Vice president, Amazon Web Services

@jeffbarr

As chief evangelist for AWS, Barr gets to tell its story to audiences all over the world. He talks, blogs, records videos, and spreads the word via social media. His main work product is the AWS Blog, which he has been writing since the fall of 2004. In this role, he works with the product teams to create interesting, informative, and technically accurate blog posts to highlight the latest and greatest AWS offerings. He has written over 2,500 posts (well over 1 million words) and currently averages one finished post per calendar day.

Scott Davis

Web architect and principal engineer, ThoughtWorks

@scottdavis99

At ThoughtWorks, Davis is a principal engineer focusing on leading-edge, emerging, and nontraditional aspects of web development. He specifically works on serverless web apps, mobile web apps, HTML5-based smart TV apps, conversational UIs (such as Siri and Alexa), and building IoT solutions using web technologies.

His focus on innovative web development has led him to his accessibility advocacy work, which includes educating developers on accessible web design and speaking about the importance of web accessibility for people with disabilities. Most recently Davis spoke at O'Reilly's Fluent Conference, explaining why accessibility should be just as important as a mobile design strategy was 10 years ago. Prior to ThoughtWorks, Davis founded ThirstyHead, a Denver-based training and software development consultancy, in 2006, and co-founded the HTML5 Denver User Group in 2011.

Sally Eaves

Former CEO and CTO

@sallyeaves

A member of the Forbes Technology Council, Eaves is an award-winning international keynote speaker, author, and influencer with globally leading rankings across all advanced technology disciplines, especially blockchain and AI, digital transformation, future of work, fintech, CSR, 5G, and social innovation aligned to the United Nations' sustainable development goals.

She is continually ranked in the top 10 for leadership in digital disruption and across frontier technology and impact subjects by leading bodies such as Onalytica. An authentic key opinion leader, Eaves is a graduate of the CIO Academy at Saïd Business School at Oxford University and the Sustainability Leadership Institute at the Judge Business School, at the University of Cambridge.

Jez Humble**

Developer relations, Google Cloud

@jezhumble

Humble is co-author of several books on software, including Shingo Publication Award winner Accelerate: The Science of Lean Software and Jolt Award winner Continuous Delivery: Reliable Software Releases Through Build, Test, and Deployment Automation. He has spent his career tinkering with code, infrastructure, and product development in companies of varying sizes across three continents.

He teaches at UC-Berkeley and is currently researching IT performance and the factors that impact it, including organizational and environmental factors, with a particular focus on investigating the emerging trend of DevOps, as it has received little attention in academia.

Sam Julien

Senior developer advocate engineer, Auth0

@samjulien

By day, Julien works with C#/.NET and JavaScript, especially Angular. Julien created the comprehensive video course UpgradingAngularJS.com, which is all about migrating legacy AngularJS codebases to Angular 2+. Julien is also a Google Developer Expert for Angular and web technologies.

Jennifer Reif

Developer relations engineer, Neo4

@JMHReif

In addition to her role at Neo4, Reif is a conference speaker, blogger, and avid developer and problem-solver. She holds a master's degree in computer management and information systems and has worked with large enterprises to organize and make sense of widespread data assets and leverage them for maximum business value.

She has worked with a variety of commercial and open-source tools and enjoys learning new technologies, sometimes on a daily basis. Her passion is finding ways to organize chaos and deliver software more effectively.

Matthew Revell

Developer relations consultant, Hoopy Limited

@matthewrevell

Revell works with companies to help them build awareness and adoption for developer-targeted products. With his team at Hoopy, he advises clients around the world on developer relations, marketing, and experience. He also produces developer-targeted content, from blogs to videos. For over a decade, he's been building awareness, adoption, and community for developer-targeted products. At leading open-source companies, he's built international teams and devised strategies to take developer-led products to market.

Sacha Rosenbaum

Product manager, GitHub

@DivineOps

Rosenbaum has been with Azure cloud since its early days and has helped numerous companies deploy applications on the platform. At Microsoft, she helps clients migrate their existing applications to the cloud via lift and shift, and helps modernize them by taking advantage of Azure's broad spectrum of PaaS services. She walks clients through architectural best practices and helps them bridge the gap between infrastructure and development by implementing DevOps procedures.

Ali Spivak

Senior director, developer relations, Coil

@alispivak

At Coil, Spivak provides strategic leadership for developer relations. She is responsible for developer strategy, technical and product advocacy, events, content and engagement, and building strong relationships with the developer community. Before that, she was at Mozilla for nine years, with responsibility for MDN and developer relations and marketing.

Marcy Sutton

Web developer and accessibility specialist

@marcysutton

Sutton's work at Gatsby focused on fast, accessible websites, and web apps while building a strong community. Previously, she worked on the open-source axe-core accessibility testing library. In 2016, O'Reilly gave Sutton a Web Platform Award for her work in accessibility. She co-leads the Accessibility Seattle and NW Tech Women meetups in her local region. When away from the keyboard, Sutton can be found hiking with her dog, riding a bicycle, or snowboarding.

Leadership, culture, and high-performing teams 

John Allspaw**

Co-founder, Adaptive Capacity Labs

@allspaw

An engineering leader and researcher, Allspaw creates and leads teams engaged in software and systems engineering. He is perhaps best known for his tenure as CTO of Etsy and as an engineering manager at Flickr. Allspaw gave a seminal talk about DevOps (just before the term was coined) with Paul Hammond at Velocity 2009, titled "10 Deploys per Day: Dev and Ops Cooperation at Flickr." He's also the co-author of the book Web Operations: Keeping the Data on Time and author of The Art of Capacity Planning: Scaling Web Resources.

Ross Clanton**

Executive consultant

@RossClanton

Clanton leads massive, multi-year modernization programs to improve the speed, quality, and cost structure across a company's entire platform. He is a self-proclaimed customer-centric technology leader with deep expertise in key tech trends across the industry. Prior to his present gig at Verizon, Clanton worked for nearly 20 years in various IT and leadership roles at Target.

Patrick Debois

Director of DevOps relations and advisor, Snyk

@patrickdebois

Debois is an independent IT consultant who is bridging the gap between projects and operations by using agile techniques in development, project management, and system administration.

Nicole Forsgren**

Vice president, research and strategy, GitHub

@nicolefv

Forsgren is an "IT impacts expert" best known for her work with tech professionals and as the lead investigator on the largest DevOps studies to date. She is a consultant, expert, and researcher in knowledge management, IT adoption and impacts, and DevOps. Forsgren says she likes to "rub science on things." Accordingly, she believes in using metrics to make software better.

She's been named a Top 10 Thought Leader in DevOps, a Top 100 Leader, and a Top 20 Most Influential Woman in DevOps. She was also the lead author of Accelerate: The Science of Lean Software and DevOps, with Jez Humble and Gene Kim.

Gene Kim**

Researcher, speaker, DevOps expert

@RealGeneKim

Kim is an author, researcher, speaker, director, and DevOps enthusiast. As an author, he gained considerable attention when his book The Phoenix Project, a fictionalized account of a rescued IT initiative, became a best-seller within the IT industry. Before that, he published The Visible Ops Handbook, and he has since written Beyond the Phoenix Project and co-written The DevOps Handbook. He is now a highly sought-after speaker for DevOps conferences, and has published a new title this fall, The Unicorn Project, as a follow-up to The Phoenix Project.

Courtney Kissler**

Vice president, global technology, Nike

@chawklady

Kissler leads teams accountable for core commerce services (browse, search, checkout, payment, launch, inventory, and fulfillment), user services (login, profile, identity, and notifications), consumer data engineering, content ecosystem (authoring, creation, digital assets, and workflow), member services, and global retail solutions. She is a strong believer in the technological transformations possible through DevOps and is a regular speaker at DevOps conferences.

Christina Maslach**

Professor of psychology, University of California, Berkeley

@CMaslach

Maslach is a distinguished professor of psychology with demonstrated excellence in research, teaching, and administration in higher education. Her expertise on job burnout led the World Health Organization to recognize burnout as an occupational phenomenon in 2019.

Stephen Mayner**

Principal consultant, Scaled Agile

@stevemayner

Mayner is a thought leader, author, speaker, coach, consultant, and trainer, bringing the benefits of agility to large public and private enterprises using the Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe). He is an author and contributor to SAFe and its courseware. He specializes in advancing the adoption of lean-agile and DevOps principles and practices in the federal government and in the professional development of lean-agile leaders.

Jon Smart**

Partner and business agility lead, Deloitte

@jonsmart

Smart is laser-focused on helping organizations across a variety of industries deliver better value sooner. He has held leadership roles at Barclays Bank and Deutsche Bank and has over 25 years of experience in taking an agile approach to change. Smart has spoken at dozens of conferences and was a member of the Best Internal Agile Team, as named at the Agile Awards in 2016.

Steven Spear**

Senior lecturer, Massachusetts Institute of Technology

@StevenJSpear

In addition to his position at MIT's Sloan School of Management, Spear is a senior fellow at the Institute for Healthcare Improvement. His book, The High-Velocity Edge, has won the Philip Crosby Medal from the American Society for Quality in 2011. He is an internationally recognized expert about leadership, innovation, and operational excellence and an authority on how select companies—in high-tech, heavy industry, design and production, manufacturing, and services—generate unmatchable performance by converting improvement and innovation to repeatable broad-based disciplines.

Next-gen ops

Adrian Cockcroft**

Vice president, cloud architecture strategy, Amazon Web Services

@adrianco

Cockcroft has had a long career working at the leading edge of technology. He's always been fascinated by what comes next, and he writes and speaks extensively on a range of subjects. For AWS he's particularly interested in working closely with customers around their use and creation of open-source projects and will continue to engage with developers and executives via conferences and summits around the world.

Before AWS, he advised Battery and its portfolio companies about technology issues and also assisted with deal sourcing and due diligence, becoming well known as a thought leader in cloud, DevOps, and microservices architectures. Prior to joining Battery, Cockcroft helped lead Netflix's migration to a large-scale, highly available public-cloud architecture and the open sourcing of the cloud-native NetflixOSS platform. Before that, he managed a team working on personalization algorithms and service-oriented refactoring.

Cockcroft was a founding member of eBay Research Labs, developing advanced mobile applications and even building his own homebrew phone, years before the introduction of iPhone and Android. As a distinguished engineer at Sun Microsystems, he co-wrote the best-selling Sun Performance and Tuning: Java and the Internet and was chief architect for high performance technical computing.

Jason Cox**

Director, platform and systems reliability engineering, Walt Disney

@jasonacox

Cox majored in computer science and electrical engineering at the University of Tulsa and later worked in civil engineering, helping transition from manual engineering and drafting to CAD. He spent several years using technology to design and build public infrastructure and residential subdivisions. He later co-founded a local Internet service provider and web hosting startup, managing its data centers and business operations.

After relocating to California to work on a master's of divinity degree, he took a job at Disney, where he is currently leading several SRE and platform software engineering teams. Cox is a champion of DevOps practices, collaboration, curiosity, automation, and agile and lean methodologies. He has spoken at several tech conferences and enjoys writing on leadership and DevOps topics. He is the author of iCurlHTTP, an iOS app for those who want to Curl on the go. He currently resides in Los Angeles with his wife and their four children.

Damon Edwards**

Co-founder and chief product officer, Rundeck

@damonedwards

Edwards has spent over 15 years working with both the technology and business ends of IT operations and is noted for being a leader in porting cutting-edge DevOps techniques to large enterprise organizations. He is a frequent conference speaker and writer who focuses on DevOps and operations improvement topics. He is also active in the international DevOps community, including being a co-host of the DevOps Cafe podcast with John Willis, an early core organizer of the DevOpsDays conference series, and a content chair for Gene Kim's DevOps Enterprise Summit.

Bernard Golden

CEO, Navica

@bernardgolden

Named by Wired.com as one of the 10 most influential persons in cloud computing, Golden is considered one of cloud computing's preeminent thought leaders. He serves as the cloud computing advisor for CIO magazine, and his blog has been named to over a dozen "best of cloud computing" lists.

He is a highly regarded speaker and the author or co-author of four books on virtualization and cloud computing. His most recent tome is Amazon Web Services for Dummies. He began his career as a software engineer and rose to serve as vice president of engineering at several startups.

While writing Virtualization for Dummies a decade ago, he learned about a new technology called "cloud computing," and immediately recognized what it represented: an innovation platform that would change information technology forever. He has since consulted on cloud computing and worked with enterprises and service providers throughout the world.

Jayne Groll**

CEO, DevOps Institute

@JayneGroll

At the DevOps Institute—the premier source for DevOps training and certification services for enterprise IT—Groll focuses on establishing a global learning community that's based around emerging DevOps practices and the SKIL framework. She is also president of the ITSM Academy, a training organization, and is the author of the e-book The Agile Service Management Guide (PDF).

David Linthicum

Cloud computing pioneer

@DavidLinthicum

Linthicum was named one of the top nine cloud pioneers by InformationWeek seven years ago, but started his cloud journey back in 1999 when he envisioned leveraging IT services over the open Internet. He was named the No. 1 cloud influencer via a major report by Apollo Research, and is considered by many to be a top 10 cloud influencer, podcaster, and blogger.

Erica Morrison**

Vice president, software engineering, CSG

@ericarmorrison

Erica Morrison leads the delivery of software to CSG's 40-plus development teams. These solutions range from continuous integration frameworks to reusable libraries to telemetry visualization platforms. She is passionate about agile and has experience leading DevOps teams where members own the end-to-end infrastructure and code. She also has software development experience in the defense and aerospace industries, where she worked on projects such as the replacement for the space shuttle. She lives in Omaha, Nebraska, with her husband and their two children.

Corey Quinn**

Cloud economist, Duckbill Group

@QuinnyPig

Quinn specializes in helping companies fix their AWS bills by making them smaller and less horrifying. He also hosts the AWS Morning Brief and Screaming in the Cloud podcasts and curates "Last Week in AWS," a weekly newsletter summarizing the latest in AWS news, blogs, and tools, sprinkled with snark.

Andrew Clay Shafer**

Vice president, transformation, RedHat

@littleidea

Shafer was DevOpsing before DevOps was a word. Shafer is often referenced as a foundational voice in the DevOps movement, with a lot of experience and perspective in contributing to open source, operating services, and building communities.

John Willis**

Senior director global transformation office, Red Hat

@botchagalupe

Willis' IT career spans well over 40 years, including time at a number of open-source-focused DevOps-related companies, including Canonical, Chef, SocketPlane (which he co-founded and which was sold to Docker), and Docker. He is the co-author of The DevOps Handbook and Beyond the Phoenix Project. Willis has likely spoken at more DevOps conferences than anyone and is frequently looked to as one of the preeminent voices on DevOps adoption and the evolution of practices such as DevSecOps.

Open source

Jennifer Davis

Senior cloud advocate, Microsoft

@sigje

Davis knows a lot about design, planning, automation, tool development, and monitoring. Her passion is working with development, quality, release, and production operation engineers to build operable, maintainable, and reliable services. She focuses on education, information sharing, and continuous self-improvement and is a speaker at many DevOps conferences, as well as an organizer for her local DevOpsDays. She has also worked at Yahoo as the team lead for its Sherpa cloud storage service.

Sébastien Goasguen

Co-founder, Triggermesh

@sebgoa

Goasguen built his first compute cluster in the late '90s, when such clusters were still called Beowulf clusters, while working on his PhD. He has been working on making computing a utility since then. From 2013 on, he has focused on containers and container orchestration, creating Kubernetes startup Skippbox, where he created kompose, Cabin, and kubeless.

Currently active in the serverless community, he co-founded TriggerMesh, a serverless management platform that builds on top of Kubernetes and Knative. When not hiking the Jura, he can be found at open-source conferences. He is the author of The Docker Cookbook and co-author of The Kubernetes Cookbook.

Mitchell Hashimoto

Founder and CTO, HashiCorp

@mitchellh

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

Brian Ketelsen

Principal cloud developer advocate, Microsoft

@bketelsen

Ketelsen is probably most widely known for his role in the Go community, where he co-organized GopherCon, co-hosted the GoTime.FM podcast, and co-wrote Go in Action. He's been programming since he was 10, starting on a Texas Instruments TI-99 4A.

Tracy Miranda

Director, open-source community, CloudBees

@tracymiranda

Miranda is a vocal advocate for open-source practices. In addition to being a veteran of the Eclipse open-source community, she is an active blogger and speaker. She served for more than 10 years as a director at Kichwa Coders and is an outspoken voice for increased diversity in the world of open source.

Tapabrata (Topo) Pal**

Senior director and senior distinguished engineer, Capital One

@TopoPal

Pal has held leadership roles in technology at QuadraMed and Home Depot. An expert in DevOps, continuous integration/continuous delivery, natural-language processing, and more, he is a frequent conference speaker and a repeat presenter at the DevOps Enterprise Summit.

Liz Rice

Vice president, open-source engineering, Aqua Security

@lizrice

Rice is focused on containers, cloud-native technologies, security, and distributed systems. She led a team at Aqua Security building open-source security tools for the cloud-native ecosystem, and is currently chair of the Technical Oversight Committee of the Cloud Native Computing Foundation.

She is the author of Container Security, and is a regular keynote and conference speaker in the cloud-native and DevOps communities. She is probably best known for her "... from scratch" conference talks where she live-codes interesting bits of technology—for example, a container or a debugger—in a few lines of Go.

She has a lot of software engineering, people, and product management experience in digital technology sectors, including cloud-native, VOD, music and VoIP. She has worked in both back-end systems software and consumer-facing products, from innovation to product strategy and implementation.

Gareth Rushgrove

Director, product management, Snyk

@garethr

Rushgrove, who has been in his current job since May, was formerly a product manager with Docker. He's worked at Gov.uk and Puppet and is probably best known for his "DevOps Weekly" newsletter, which has been running since 2010. His work on DevOps-enabling companies, along with curating his newsletter, keeps him in tune with all of the latest trends in the DevOps space.

Sid Sidbranji

Co-founder and CEO, GitLab

@sytses

Sidbranji saw his first Ruby code in 2007 and loved it so much that he made programming his profession. Before that, he was engaged in various businesses, from selling programmable infrared receivers to starting a recreational submarine company.

He is always looking to publicly document an answer or to make a process more efficient. He says he was never good at sports but tries to make up for it in quantity by hiking, sailing, skiing, snowboarding, speed skating, dancing Zouk, squashing, and running. He loves participating in conversations on Hacker News and reading Marc Andreessen's tweets.

Ashley Willis (McNamara)

Lead, OSS advocacy and engineer, Microsoft

@ashleymcnamara

McNamara is a contributor in the Linux and Go communities. She worked for Rackspace and Pivotal before landing on Microsoft's Azure team, where she describes her role as "a bridge between third-party developers and Microsoft, driving platform adoption through the developer community and driving change into products based on real world customer/developer feedback."

In her spare time, McNamara mentors at WeWork, General Assembly, AngelHack, and CapitalFactory. She is also on the board of multiple engineering groups, including Redis Austin, Big Data Analytics Club, and Austin All-Girl Hack Night.

Security, risk, and compliance

Ruchi Bhargava

Senior director of engineering, NVIDIA

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Bhargava manages multi-disciplinary teams that are working on a variety of challenges in the autonomous driving stack. Her teams include computer vision researchers, mathematicians, systems software engineers, and cloud engineers, among others.

Joshua Corman**

Senior advisor, Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency

@joshcorman

Corman is co-founder of I Am the Cavalry, a group of professionals that discusses cybersecurity-related public policy. He previously served as CSO for PTC, director of the Cyber Statecraft Initiative for the Atlantic Council, CTO for Sonatype, and director of security intelligence for Akamai.

He co-founded RuggedSoftware and I Am the Cavalry to encourage new security approaches in response to the world's increasing dependence on digital infrastructure. His approach to security, which takes into account the context of human factors, adversary motivations, and social impact, has helped position him as one of the most trusted names in security.

He is part of the adjunct faculty for Carnegie Mellon's Heinz College, a cyber-safety innovation fellow for the Atlantic Council, and was a member of the Congressional Task Force for Healthcare Industry Cybersecurity.

Sam Guckenheimer**

Former product owner, Azure DevOps, Microsoft

@SamGuckenheimer

As owner for Azure DevOps, Guckenheimer acted as the chief customer advocate, responsible for strategy of the next releases of these products, focusing on DevOps, agile, and CI/CD pipelines. He also curated the DevOps website at Microsoft.

He is a regular speaker and has delivered keynote talks at many conferences, including DevOps Enterprise Summit and Agile. He has also written four books. Prior to joining Microsoft in 2003, he was director of product line strategy at Rational Software, now the Rational Division of IBM. Guckenheimer lives in the Seattle area with his wife and their three children in a sustainable house.

Tanya Janca

Founder, security trainer, and coach, We Hack Purple

@shehackspurple

At online learning academy We Hack Purple, Janca specializes in software and cloud security. Her obsession with securing software runs deep, from starting her company to running her own OWASP chapter for four years in Ottawa, Ontario; co-founding a new OWASP chapter in Victoria, British Columbia; and co-founding the OWASP DevSlop open-source and education project.

Janca is also an advocate for diversity and inclusion, co-founding the international women's organization WoSEC, starting the online #MentoringMonday initiative, and personally mentoring, advocating for, and enabling countless other women in her field. As a professional computer geek of 20-plus years, she remains fascinated by the "science" of computer science.

Maya Kaczorowski

Product manager, GitHub

@MayaKaczorowski

Maya Kaczorowski is a product manager in security and privacy at GitHub, focused on container security. Her previous gigs include working on encryption at Google, IT for large enterprises at McKinsey, and completing a master's degree in mathematics, with a focus on cryptography and game theory.

Mike D. Kail

CTO, Everest

@mdkail

Kail is responsible for the fintech cloud platform and engineering teams at Everest. Previously, he served as CIO and senior vice president of infrastructure at Yahoo and as vice president of IT operations at Netflix.

Shannon Lietz**

Leader and director, DevSecOps, Intuit

@devsecops

Lietz is a multi-award-winning leader and security innovation visionary with 20-plus years of experience leading and motivating high-performing teams. She received the Scott Cook Innovation Award in 2014 for developing and cultivating an innovation cloud security program to protect sensitive data in AWS. She has a development, security, and operations background working for Fortune 500 companies, including Intuit, ServiceNow, Sony, Sempra Energy, Savvis, Cable & Wireless, 99 Cents Only, Exodus, and Bank of America.

Caitie McCaffrey

Principal software engineering lead, Azure Sphere Security Services, Microsoft

@caitie

Featured in Dark Reading's July 2018 article "10 More Women in Security You May Not Know but Should," McCaffrey is a sought-after conference speaker who has done many sessions and some keynotes over the past several years. She has also worked as the tech lead for the observability team at Twitter. Having built large-scale services and systems for the entertainment industry at 343 Industries, Microsoft Game Studios, and HBO, she partnered with the eXtreme Computing Group in Microsoft Research to work on Orleans as part of rewriting Microsoft's Halo services.

Mark Miller

Co-founder, DevSecOps Days

@EUSP

Miller speaks and writes extensively about DevOps and security, hosting panel discussions on tools and processes within the DevOps software supply chain. He builds DevOps tracks at security conferences such as the RSA Conference, InfoSec Europe, CD Summit, AppSec USA, and AppSec EU.

James Wickett**

Head of research, Verica

@wickett

Wickett currently works as the head of research at Verica, which is building a continuous verification product that brings together the best parts of chaos engineering and advances the practices of CI/CD. At several companies, he has helped build out complete deployment pipelines, from code commit to production, using a mix of tooling and testing. He believes there is a unique opportunity for security to matter again within organizations, so a lot of his research has been focused on the intersection of traditional information security and DevOps.

Site reliability and chaos engineering

Kolton Andrus

CEO and co-founder, Gremlin

@KoltonAndrus

Andrus is the CEO and co-founder of Gremlin, the world's first "failure-as-a-service" platform, helping companies avoid outages and build more resilient systems. Previously, Andrus was a chaos engineer on Netflix's edge platform team. He designed and built FIT, a failure injection service. Prior to Netflix, he worked in Amazon Retail, where he built Gremlin, Amazon's failure service. In both companies, he has served as a "call leader," managing the resolution of large-scale incidents.

Nora Jones

Co-founder and CEO, Jeli

@nora_js

Jones is a dedicated and driven technology leader and software engineer with a passion for people and reliable software, as well as the intersection between those two worlds. She believes that safety is pivotal to software development today. From this passion, she's pursued a part-time, advanced degree in human factors and systems safety, which provides a unique complement to understanding how complex software systems fail. She's also co-written a book on chaos engineering and how a product's availability can be improved through intentional failure and experimentation.

Tom Limoncelli**

SRE manager, Stack Overflow

@yesthattom

Limoncelli is an internationally recognized author, speaker, system administrator, and DevOps advocate. His latest book is the third edition of The Practice of System and Network Administration, first published in 2016. He also co-wrote Practice of Cloud System Administration and wrote Time Management for System Administrators. In 2005, he received the Usenix LISA Outstanding Achievement Award. Previously he worked at Google, Bell Labs/Lucent, AT&T, and others.

Charity Majors

CTO and co-founder, Honeycomb.io

@mipsytipsy

In her role at Honeycomb, Majors works on a tool for software engineers to explore and understand their code on production systems. Prior to Honeycomb, Majors was a production engineering manager at Facebook, was the first infrastructure engineer on Parse, and spent several years at Linden Lab as an operations and database engineer working on the infrastructure that powers its virtual world, Second Life.

Christina Noren

Strategic product advisor and CPO emeritus, CloudBees

@cfrln

During her 25 years in technology, Noren has held leadership roles in product management, professional services, and sales engineering and has been responsible for building teams in virtually all operating functions. She has expertise in big data, machine data, logging, systems management, enterprise software, complex web services, product management practices, and building companies from the ground up.

Three of the five companies she joined during pre-funding or in stealth mode have issued IPOs. In addition to her work at CloudBees, she's a board member at Honeycomb.io.

Jennifer Petoff

Head of SRE education, Google

@jennski

Petoff is a senior program manager for Google's site reliability engineering team, based in Dublin. She currently leads the global SRE education program and is one of the co-editors of the bestselling book Site Reliability Engineering: How Google Runs Production Systems. Petoff is a regular speaker at DevOps and SRE conferences around the world.

Tracy Ragan

CEO and co-founder, DeployHub

@TracyRagan

Ragan is a recognized evangelist in microservices and the continuous delivery pipeline. She's a blog contributor and board member of the Continuous Delivery Foundation, and speaks at many DevOps events, such as the Cloud Native Computing Foundation's KubeCon and CloudBees' DevOps World. She is also an expert panelist on webinars and is quoted in SD Times articles about DevOps subjects. As a DevOps Institute ambassador, she speaks at AWS Marketplace webinar educational events.

She is the leader of the New Mexico CI/CD Foundation meetups. Prior to her DeployHub gig, Tracy was the COO and co-founder of OpenMake Software, a build acceleration and management tool used by over 400 enterprise development teams.

J. Paul Reed**

Senior applied resilience engineer, Netflix

@jpaulreed

Reed is a consultant with over 15 years' experience in build engineering, release management, software configuration management, and process design. He draws on his experiences in aviation as a private pilot, as well as his studies of other mission-critical disciplines, to implement technical solutions that also address human factors, complex-systems theory, and organizational dynamics. Having worked with teams of all sizes, from three-person startups to release engineering groups supporting thousands of developers, Reed can tailor solutions to specific operational and organizational requirements and help scale them as a company and its products change and grow.

Aaron Rinehart

Co-founder and CTO, Verica

@aaronrinehart

Rinehart is expanding the possibilities of chaos engineering. It's an expansion he began while chief security architect at UnitedHealth Group, the largest private healthcare company in the world. While at UHG, Rinehart released ChaoSlingr, one of the first open-source software releases focused on using chaos engineering in cybersecurity to build more resilient systems. Rinehart recently founded a chaos engineering startup called Verica with Casey Rosenthal from Netflix and is a frequent author, consultant, and speaker in the space.

 

Casey Rosenthal

Co-founder and CEO, Verica

@caseyrosenthal

Rosenthal, formerly the engineering manager of the chaos engineering team at Netflix, has experience with distributed systems, AI, and translating novel algorithms and academia into working models. He says his superpower is transforming misaligned teams into high-performance teams, and his personal mission is to help people see that something different and better is possible. For fun, he models human behavior using personality profiles in Ruby, Erlang, Elixir, and Prolog. He also teamed up with Nora Jones to write Chaos Engineering: System Resiliency in Practice.

Test automation/QA

Nikolay Advolodkin

Senior solutions architect, Sauce Labs

@Nikolay_A00

Advolodkin is a prolific software development engineer in test (SDET). Currently, he is the CEO and software testing instructor at UltimateQA.com. He has been named a TechBeacon test automation leader to follow multiple years in a row. He is also one of the top Selenium WebDriver instructors in the world, as rated by Udemy.com. He is a frequent contributor to SimpleProgrammer.com and TechBeacon and a speaker at multiple automation conferences.

When he isn't immersed in the realm of coding and all-things QA, Advolodkin enjoys self-improvement and aims to hone his vast skill set daily, all while teaching online students how to master automated software testing.

Katrina Clokie

GM engineering, Xero

@katrinaclokie

Clokie, based in New Zealand, is an active contributor to the international testing community, and an accomplished and experienced IT leader. She's also the founder and editor of Testing Trapeze magazine, a co-founder of the WeTest New Zealand conference, and the author of A Practical Guide to Testing in DevOps.

Joe Colantonio

Founder, TestGuild

@joecolantonio

Colantonio is the founder of TestGuild.com, an affordable software engineering education platform, which includes a blog, podcast, and online conference. He has over 20 years of hands-on experience successfully developing and implementing numerous software automation and performance testing solutions. He is committed to using his creative skills to craft and implement numerous successful performance and automation solutions using both commercially available tools and open-source and homegrown solutions for many companies, including Gtech, OneBeacon Insurance, VeriSign, and GE.

Lisa Crispin

Quality owner, OutSystems

@lisacrispin

Crispin is the co-author, with Janet Gregory, of Agile Testing Condensed: A Basic Introduction, More Agile Testing: Learning Journeys for the Whole Team, and Agile Testing: A Practical Guide for Testers and Agile Teams, as well as co-developer of the LiveLessons Agile Testing Essentials video course. She was voted by her peers as the most influential agile testing professional person at Agile Testing Days in 2012. She is a testing advocate working for mabl, helping the testing community learn about DevOps and continuous delivery, and helping the agile and DevOps communities learn about testing. She also curates a community site to help people learn about testing in DevOps, continuous delivery, observability, and related topics.

Kent C. Dodds

Software engineer/educator, Kent C. Dodds Tech

@kentcdodds

Dodds is a world-renowned speaker, teacher, and trainer, and he's actively involved in the open-source community as a maintainer and contributor of hundreds of popular packages for the npm testing library for node.js. He is the creator of an online course called TestingJavaScript.com, and is an instructor on Egghead.io and Frontend Masters. He's also a Google developer expert. Happily married and the father of four kids, he likes his family, code, JavaScript, and React.

Paul Grizzaffi

Principal automation architect, Magenic

@pgrizzaffi

From his position at Magenic, Grizzaffi is following his passion of providing technology solutions to testing and QA organizations, including automation assessments, implementations, and through activities benefiting the broader testing community. An accomplished keynote speaker and writer, he has spoken at both local and national conferences and meetings. He is an advisor to conferences, including Software Test Professionals and STPCon, as well as a member of the Industry Advisory Board of the Advanced Research Center for Software Testing and Quality Assurance at the University of Texas in Dallas, where he is a frequent guest lecturer.

Angie Jones

Senior developer advocate, Applitools

@techgirl1908

Jones specializes in test automation strategies and techniques. She shares her knowledge by speaking and teaching at software conferences all over the world, as well as writing tutorials and blogs. Jones says she loves teaching. In fact, in addition to working as an automation engineer, she has been an adjunct college professor teaching Java programming courses.

As a master inventor, Jones is known for her innovative and out-of-the-box thinking style, which has resulted in more than 25 patented inventions in the United States and China. In an effort to attract more women and minorities to tech, she's a volunteer at Black Girls Code, teaching coding workshops to young girls.

Meaghan Lewis

Senior program manager, Microsoft

@iammeaghanlewis

Lewis currently focuses on creating and delivering learning experiences centered on emerging technology for Microsoft Reactors worldwide. She says she has a superpower in quality engineering, and previously worked in the QA field for nearly a decade. She has a passion for teaching lifelong learners and has spent years speaking at conferences and delivering online courses. She is a California native and currently lives in Oakland with her husband and two dogs.

Jonathan Lipps

Director, learning and education programs, HeadSpin

@jlipps

Lipps is an entrepreneurial software developer, with an academic background in philosophy, linguistics, and theology. He is the project lead for the Appium mobile automation platform, and helps the world use Appium more effectively for mobile test automation. Through his work at HeadSpin, he says he's "taking the world's best test automation training from concept to reality." When he's not doing that, you can find him writing about the philosophy of technology or making music.

Corina Pip

Senior test automation engineer, Sage Intacct

@imalittletester

Pip's consulting work focuses on testing through Java, Selenium, TestNG, Spring, Maven, and other frameworks and tools. Previous endeavors from her 10-plus-year testing career include working on navigation devices and online games. She loves automation and sharing her knowledge with peers. Apart from work, she is a testing blogger, cartoonist, amateur photographer, and GitHub contributor.

Value-stream mapping

Helen Beal**

Chief ambassador, DevOps Institute

@bealhelen

Beal is a consultant, coach, writer, and analyst. In addition to her chief ambassador role with the DevOps Institute, she is an analyst at Accelerated Strategies Group and an editor at InfoQ.

Jon Collins

Vice president of research, GigaOm

@jonno

Collins is a seasoned analyst and technology commentator. With 28 years in the technology industry, he has a deep understanding of global infrastructures, security, and governance, as well as hands-on experience of delivery in a variety of sectors.

Collins is author of a security architect book for the British Computer Society and co-author of The Technology Garden: Cultivating Sustainable IT-Business Alignment, which offers jargon-free advice on sustainable IT delivery. He has written numerous papers and guides about getting the most out of technology and is an accomplished speaker, facilitator, and presenter.

In his varied career he has acted as IT manager and software consultant, project manager, training manager, IT security expert, and industry analyst. In recognition of his insightful yet down-to-earth approach, he was named European analyst of the year by the Institute of Industry Analyst Relations in 2009.

Chris Condo

Principal analyst, Forrester

@ChrisCondo2017

Condo conducts research in application development and delivery, focusing on DevOps and how technologies in this space are influencing software companies in their quest to deliver more features faster to their end users.

Dominica DeGrandis**

Director of digital transformation, Tasktop

@dominicad

DeGrandis is perhaps the IT industry's leading expert in Kanban flow. She focuses on helping IT teams optimize workflows to produce the best results throughout the value stream. She believes that visual cues and transparency across teams and organizations reveal mutually critical information. She is the author of Making Work Visible: Exposing Time Theft to Optimize Work and Flow.

Bryan Finster**

Software engineer, Walmart

@BryanFinster

Finster has been a software developer since 1996 and a Walmart associate since 2001, developing solutions for the complex supply chain at the heart of that mammoth retailer. Recently, he started a dedicated DevOps dojo team at Walmart, the CD Sherpas, which focuses on helping teams with the technical and process skills needed to improve their software supply chains.

In 2017, he supervised implementation of Hygieia, an open-source dashboard program, at Walmart, using gamification to encourage good practices across teams. Also in that year, he presented an experience report at DOES. In the past, he did a stint with Logistics Systems, where he was a member of the core team focused on bringing in the practices required for continuous delivery.

Mik Kersten**

Founder and CEO, Tasktop

@mik_kersten

Kersten spent a decade creating open-source developer tools before realizing that programming was not the bottleneck of large-scale software delivery. Since that time, he has been working on creating a model and tools for connecting the end-to-end software value stream. He has been named a JavaOne Rock Star speaker and one of the IBM DeveloperWorks Java top 10 writers of the decade, was selected as one of the 2012 Business in Vancouver 40 under 40, and has been a World Technology Awards finalist in the IT Software category.

Prior to founding Tasktop, Kersten created the Eclipse Mylyn open-source project as part of his doctoral work in computer science, pioneering the integration of development tools with the delivery pipeline. In 2018, he launched his book, Project to Product, introducing the Flow Framework, with concepts to help drive software at the pace of an organization's business.

Eric Minick

Program director, IBM

@EricMinick

Minick is an internationally recognized authority on continuous delivery. At IBM, he is responsible for leading the product management team overseeing the UrbanCode suite and related offerings. Previously, he was a developer, technical seller, and evangelist at UrbanCode, before its acquisition by IBM.

Steve Pereira

Founder, Visible Value Stream Consulting

@SteveElsewhere

Pereira is the Marie Kondo of value stream. For over 20 years he has been empowering business with tech and humanizing software. He advises some of North America's top startup and enterprise teams to increase their performance, agility, and delivered value.

Eric Robertson

Vice president of strategy, Digital.ai

@e_robertson16

Robertson has successfully held product development, services, and management roles with enterprises and start-ups and has provided consulting services to Fortune 500 companies. Before his stint with Digital.ai, he served as director of services and portfolio management for enterprise solutions at Unisys. He joined Cisco through a company acquisition, where he led product management for the company's cloud automation and SAP ALM extension offerings.

He holds a patent in the area of virtualization and earned a master's degree in electrical and software engineering from the University of Texas in Austin. He continues to further his research in domain-specific languages and intelligent automation.

Simon Wardley

Advisor, Leading Edge Forum

@swardley

At the LEF, Wardley helps companies reimagine their organizations and leadership for a technology-driven future. He is also the lead practitioner for LEF's Wardley Maps advisory service, which helps clients anticipate market and ecosystem developments. Wardley's focus is on the intersection of IT strategy and new technologies, and he is the author of multiple reports. These include "Clash of the Titans—Will China Dethrone Silicon Valley?" where he assesses the high-tech challenge from China and what this means to the future of global technology industry competition.

His previous research covers topics including a workbook for value chain mapping, strategies for an increasingly open economy, and a lifecycle approach to cloud computing.

Want to hear more from the DevOps 100? Many are speaking at this year's DevOps Enterprise Summit Las Vegas—Virtual. The conference runs October 13-15, 2020.

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