Speakers 2016

The following speakers presented talks at the BelFOSS 2016 event:

Simon Alcott

Simon is a Principal Solution Architect at Red Hat with over 15 years experience in the platform and infrastructure technology space. Currently focused on helping customers drive innovation within their businesses with Open source technology adoption.

Social: Linkedin

Lorraine Barry

Lorraine Barry is a Geographical Information Scientist with 18 years experience in the field of GIS and spatial analysis. She has worked for over 11 years at Queen’s University Belfast in teaching, training and developing Geographical Information Science for research. She has a strong research interest in FOSS4G (Free and Open Source for Geospatial).
Social: Linkedin, Twitter, Web

Babis Charalambos

Babis is a PhD student at Queen’s University Belfast in the High Performance and Distributed Computing (HPDC) cluster. He’s a FOSS enthusiast, member of FOSS groups in Greece and other open source projects.

Favoured Distributions: Debian, Arch Linux

Social: Twitter, Linkedin

Ann Marie Conwell

Ann Marie has been a UNIX System Administrator with Allstate Northern Ireland since 2009. Currently working in the UNIX Lifecycle team Ann Marie is responsible for patching and maintaining the Allstate Linux Environment.  Since 2012 Ann Marie has been using Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL).  RHEL and Red Hat Satellite are open source products which are derived from the upstream communities Fedora and Spacewalk, Ann Marie also uses Puppet for configuration management.

Conor Graham

Conor Graham is the Geographical Information Systems (GIS) Research Officer at the School of Geography, Archaeology and Palaeoecology, Queen’s University Belfast. He manages a dedicated GIS Research and Teaching lab with colleagues Lorraine Barry and Dr Jennifer McKinley, and has been an active GI educator and researcher for over 15 years. Conor is a STEM Ambassador and professional member of the Society of Chartered Surveyors Ireland and Royal Institution of Chartered Surveyors. He has interests in Geomatics, Geodesy, Digital Survey, Remote Sensing, Web Mapping and spatial data collection utilising UAV/Drone technologies.  When not working with, collecting or playing with Spatial Data, Conor is a keen Mountain biker (with a GPS attached of course)!
Social: Twitter, LinkedIn

TP Honey

TP has worked at Puppet for the last year maintaining their supported modules. This includes working with many OSS projects Apache / MySQL / Postgresql / Tomcat / CentOS / Debian / Ubuntu. Previous to this he worked at IBM in the security space developing IBM QVM, a networked vulnerability scanner.
Social: Linkedin

William Houppy

William is a Linux enthusiast for many years and is a volunteer IT technician for the ‘Tools For Solidarity’ charity in Belfast. He is also a passionate biochemist and works as a laboratory technician at Queen’s University Belfast.

Favoured Distribution: Mostly Ubuntu at the minute.

Social: LinkedIn

Martin Lentle

Martin is UK/Ireland Managing Director with Red Hat.
Social: LinkedIn

Paul Mayne

Paul has been working at Allstate Northern Ireland for over 13 years, his background includes .Net and C# programming and web development.  Until recently Paul worked as a System Analyst and technical lead for Allstate’s ongoing rollout of DevOps tools & infrastructure. But with a strong focus on Open-Source applications used for Continuous Integration & Continuous Delivery pipelines, Paul is now a Software Tools Engineer. Paul’s Slides

Jonathan McDowell

Jonathan is a recovering technologist, currently studying a law degree at Queen’s. He has previously spent more years than he cares to remember developing software for companies such as Cisco, Aviva and HP. Having become a Debian Developer in 2000 while running an ISP extensively using the distribution, he remains an active member of the project.

Favoured Distribution: Debian (obviously)
Social: LinkedIn, Twitter, Blog

Jonny McCullagh

Jonny has worked in Queen’s University Belfast for almost 10 years as a systems engineer, programmer and web developer. He has built many systems while at QUB utilising FOSS technologies. Jonny is a certified Linux Professional with LPIC-1 and LPIC-2 accreditations.

Favoured Distribution: Linux Mint with Cinnamon

Social: LinkedIn, Twitter, Blog

Andrew McGuigan

Andy works for the Cloud BU in Hewlett Packard Enterprise, focusing on automating bare-metal installs of HP’s OpenStack distribution using Ansible. In his spare time he mentors a CodeClub at his local primary school and also a CoderDojo in Ballymena. His ambition is to install OpenStack on a cluster of Raspberry Pi.
Social: Twitter, LinkedIn

Dr Suzanne McLaughlin

Suzanne is the Open Data Programme Manager at Digital Transformation Service in the Department of Finance & Personnel.  She previously worked in Land & Property Services and was responsible for the development of the Spatial NI portal. She is quite passionate about all things data and has a PhD from UUC relating to GI and coastal vulnerability.

Social: Twitter, LinkedIn

Andrew McMullen

Andrew is a UNIX System Administrator at Allstate and has been working here for 8 years.  His main experience is with Solaris OS however in the past few years Andrew has moved to Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) patching and maintaining servers. Andrew also uses Red Hat Satellite and Puppet for configuration drift management.

Shane O’Hanlon

Shane joined Allstate Northern Ireland after graduating in 2007 and has worked in a variety of roles. Having started as a graduate JavaScript developer Shane spent four years working on a web form based Service Catalogue system. Following this Shane moved to a role as a mobile and TIBCO developer coding Android apps and business integration software and then into a technical lead role in the Enterprise Integration and Mobile Frameworks Team. Recently Shane was promoted to the role of Technical Lead for DevOps Tools & Infrastructure; a new team which focuses on delivering open-source Continuous Integration & Continuous Delivery applications for use across the entire Allstate Developer Community.

Jonathan Tripathy

Jonny has worked at Puppet Labs over the past year on the supported modules team. As well as exposure to many OSS projects at Puppet, he has experience with server infrastructure hosting using different virtualisation tools while running his own part-time business. Prior to Puppet, Jonny worked at Asidua, creating embedded software stacks for hardware devices using C.

Bill Quinn

Bill Quinn has been working within the IT industry for over 15 years, 8 of which specific to Open Source and Linux. Since January 2013 Bill’s company has been representing and promoting The Linux Professional Institute (LPI) Certifications. This role combines awareness of the Certifications, Incorporating the Certifications into academia and discussing with employers how to address the Linux / Open Source Skills shortage.

Social: LinkedIn

Phil Weir

Phil has used a wide range of open source software in academia and industry, researching floating structures in the Antarctic and simulating problems in bioengineering. He is a web developer and mathematician, and is particularly focused on international open source contracting.

Favoured Distribution: Ubuntu with Gnome
Social: Twitter | Flax & Teal Website