Steering Group
MEET THE TEAM BEHIND THE EVENT
Blueprint LDN has asked the brightest and best to help steer us as to where the industry is going. Our Steering Committee of experts encompasses fields as diverse as recruitment, product marketing and, of course, events, as well as hands-on practitioners with invaluable experience of the everyday reality of working in the fast-moving world of modern technology architecture.
Chris Baynham-Hughes
EMEA Customer Innovation Advocate, Red Hat
Chris has over 20 years in the game, working across testing, development, BPR, line management, strategy, business development and delivery of transformational change that sticks.
Chris is on a mission to unlock potential within organisations using a culture first approach and deepening collaboration between the lines of business and IT.
Jamie Dobson
CEO, Container Solutions
Jamie Dobson is co-founder and CEO of Container Solutions, a professional services company that specialises in Cloud Native transformation. With clients like Shell, Adidas, and other large enterprises, CS helps organisations navigate not only technology solutions but also adapt their internal culture and set business strategy. Jamie is the co-author of the new book Cloud Native Transformation: Practical Patterns for Innovation, (O’Reilly Media, 2020). A veteran software engineer, he specialises in leadership and organisational strategy, and is a frequent presenter at conferences.
Rob Knight
CTO, Enterprise Cloud Products, Suse
Rob is the CTO, Enterprise Cloud Products at SUSE, and helps guide SUSE’s vision on containers and application platforms.
He’s worked with Kubernetes in Production since 2014 and has helped many companies modernise their infrastructure by embracing Cloud Native technologies. Rob comes from an operational and business background and helps operational teams with unique insights when it comes to architecting and implementing Kubernetes in their environments.
Jason Maude
Chief Technology Advocate, Starling Bank
Jason Maude is a coder, coach, and public speaker. He has over a decade of experience working in the financial sector, primarily in creating and delivering software. He is passionate about explaining complex technical concepts to those who are convinced that they won’t be able to understand them. He currently works at Starling Bank as their Head of Technology Advocacy and host of the Starling podcast.
Gordon Scobie
Director of Cloud and Information Systems, transACT Technology Solutions
As an AWS Advanced Consulting Partner globally, Gordon oversees all Cloud-related projects and focuses on ensuring his teams have a deep in-depth knowledge of public cloud to keep up with the transformation in businesses.
With 20+ years of experience working in IT for blue-chip companies, he has been involved in all phases of the security and infrastructure life cycle, from support and design to final implementation and system testing.
Kenichi Shibata
Cloud Native Architect, Esure
Kenichi is a Cloud Expert with more than 3 years of Kubernetes in production and more than 8 years of Cloud Engineering Experience. He is also a writer for the devops fauncast. https://faun.dev/podcast
He worked across multiple sectors on a global scale including Retail with Uniqlo and Fast Retailing, Conde Nast (Vogue, GQ, Wired, Reddit).
Also worked and designed solutions for highly regulated environments like Finance with Simplex JP, Beacon Platform, ComparetheMarket and Esure.
Ben Stopford
Lead Technologist, Office of the CTO, Confluent
Ben is Lead Technologist in the Office of the CTO at Confluent Inc (a company backing the popular Apache Kafka messaging system). He’s worked on a wide range of projects from implementing the latest version of Kafka’s replication protocol through to assessing and shaping Confluent’s strategy. His earlier career spanned projects at Thoughtworks and UK-based enterprise companies. He is also the author of the book “Designing Event Driven Systems”, O’Reilly, 2018.
Emanuil Tolev
Community Engineer, Elastic
Emanuil is a Community Engineer with Elastic, the company behind the open source Elastic Stack (Elasticsearch, APM, Kibana, Beats, Logstash, etc). He’s based in London. He ran a small open science web dev consultancy with partners for several years. Interested in mentorship, inclusion, small businesses, archery and always curious about how the world works in detail.
Mandi Walls
DevOps Advocate, PagerDuty
Mandi helps organizations increase their effectiveness by modernizing IT practices and improving their response to unplanned incidents. Prior to joining PagerDuty, she worked at Chef in various positions from Professional Services to Community Management. Mandi has a Master’s degree in Computer Science from GWU and an MBA from UNC Kenan-Flagler. She is a regular speaker at technical conferences and is the author of the whitepaper “Building a DevOps Culture”, published by O’Reilly.