Stuart Davidson is a Director of Engineering at Skyscanner, where he works on the messy, fascinating challenge of scaling real-time travel pricing for a global audience. He cares about two things: building resilient distributed systems and building engineering organisations that don’t burn people out in the process.

Based in Edinburgh and collaborating across Europe and Asia, Stuart spends his time thinking about architecture, leadership, and how to make complex systems simpler — technically and organisationally.

Co-founder of Tollens.ai, an AI quality tooling startup building frameworks for reliable agentic coding. Her career spans over a decade working on high-performance distributed systems and software quality, from networking protocols and 5G core platforms to edge infrastructure at Microsoft Azure. As well as high quality software, she is passionate about psychological safety, neurodiversity inclusion, and developing her people. She co-founded Tollens after spending a wonderful year with her new baby daughter. 

Sara Bergman, Anne Currie, and Sarah Hsu

Co-authors of Building Green Software & mainstays of the Hallway Track, where the three of them first met.

Sara improves software and systems efficiency at Microsoft and Sarah is a hands-on expert in all things ops and SRE

A backend engineer at Microsoft, specializing in optimizing hardware utilization across hundreds of cloud software teams. Her work focuses on reducing the need and waste in core computation, and increased utilization. She is an advocate for green software practices at Microsoft and externally, she co-authored Building Green Software, and was a finalist in the "Developer of the Year" category at the Nordic Women in Tech Awards 2023.

A senior Software Engineer currently on the Platform team at Grafana Labs where she helps developers and business partners monitor and reduce costs in the agentic era of cloud computing. Her technical expertise is in cloud sustainability and operational efficiency in Kubernetes and cloud environments. She is a leader in open source software as a CNCF Ambassador, a Green Software Foundation Champion, and an organizer of the Cloud Native Barcelona meetup. She has presented many talks on these topics, including a keynote at KubeCon + CloudNativeCon, and chaired the conference’s Platform Engineering track. She also collaborated with IBM and Red Hat to donate Kepler, a Prometheus exporter for energy monitoring in Kubernetes, to the CNCF.

Another stalwart of our Hallway Track, a highly experienced engineering leader who has built, grown, and led organisations of hundreds of engineers that delivered world class, mission critical systems used across the globe. He achieved this by driving continuous training and education for his teams.

His career in technology has spanned every scale, from helping grow a tech company to capital exit to holding a senior role at Microsoft, where his engineering organisation launched Azure's first 5G offering. 

Over 30 years building systems where failure costs millions — from Microsoft NetMeeting (the grandparent of Teams/Zoom) to Windows Terminal Server to a voicemail platform serving 100 million AT&T subscribers. That background in carrier-grade reliability is why he's suspicious of anyone who thinks AI means we can stop caring about engineering quality.

He now spends his time proving that AI-assisted development isn't just faster; it also opens the door to quality levels that were previously impractical. Comprehensive test suites, agent swarms running overnight, rapid integration of new tools and techniques. He's documented the journey through over 100 articles at 0x4D44.substack.com, which is either admirable dedication or a cry for help.

Jamie is the co-founder and first chief executive of Container Solutions. 

A first encounter with a BBC computer and BASIC at the age of nine launched his lifelong passion for programming and software development. Nowadays he focuses on helping executive teams to succeed with the cloud and cloud native, helping them to avoid classic mistakes. 

He is the author of Visionaries, Rebels and Machines and the co-author of O'Reilly's Cloud Native Transformation and (with Anne Currie) The Cloud Native Attitude.

CTO at Container Solutions, helping businesses migrate to modern technologies and ways of working

Author of 'Docker in Practice' et al, and teaches courses for O’Reilly.

[ed: Has a very short bio] 

Working in the IT industry for over 25 years, Paula is passionate about community, diversity, equity and inclusion. In her day job, she is co-founder and Chief Operating Office of Syntasso, developing cloud-native and open-source technologies. 

Paula is part of the organising committee for Kubernetes Community Days UK and Fast Flow Conf, and is also a regular conference speaker and meetup organiser. Based in Hampshire, Paula enjoys walking her dog and attempting to run half-marathons.