GUIDED DESIGN - Key Persons

Andrew Clay Shafer

Job Titles:
  • Member of the ALM Forum Conference Committee
  • Member of the Conference Committee
  • Senior Director of Technology at Pivotal
Andrew is Senior Director of Technology at Pivotal where he is focused on fostering a vibrant technical community and aligning Pivotal's products with the transformational opportunities of cloud computing, open source, agile, devops and data. Andrew is a ‘start up person' who spent most of the last decade working on venture funded projects, most recently as a co-founder of Puppet Labs where he made seminal contributions to the tools and processes of the devops movement that help IT organizations. Andrew is deeply concerned with how people interact with technology and each other, and is a frequent speaker on devops and cloud management at industry conferences.

Chris Kinsman

Job Titles:
  • Member of the ALM Forum Conference Committee
  • Member of the Conference Committee
  • Chief Architect at PushSpring
Chris Kinsman is Chief Architect at PushSpring. Prior to that he joined Vertafore as VP and Chief Architect in 2006, and then served as VP Development. Prior to Vertafore, Kinsman worked for AMS Services, a business unit of Vertafore, as a consultant to the development team and as a lead architect. During his tenure at Vertafore Kinsman moved his teams to a more agile development model and has driven the adoption of a number of ALM practices. Prior to joining AMS Services, served as vice president of technology for DevX.com.

James Newkirk

Job Titles:
  • Member of the ALM Forum Conference Committee
  • Member of the Conference Committee
James Newkirk has been working in the software industry since the mid-1980s. He currently is the VP of Engineering for CenturyLink Cloud, where he oversees the development of their cloud management platform. Prior to CenturyLink Cloud, James held senior engineering roles at Microsoft, Caradigm (GE/Microsoft Joint Venture) and ThoughtWorks. Earlier in his career he co-founded Object Mentor Inc with Robert C. Martin, a consulting firm that specialized in training and mentoring their clients in C++, Java, Object-Oriented Programming, and Agile Methodologies. In addition to his work at CenturyLink Cloud he serves on the Agile Alliance Board.

Keith Pleas

Job Titles:
  • Member of the ALM Forum Conference Committee
  • Member of the Conference Committee
  • Software Architect
Keith Pleas is a software architect and one of the founders of Guided Design and has worked with the patterns & practices team for several years where he was the architect and subject matter expert for "Design for Operations". Prior to that he worked for more than two years on the team developing the .NET Framework and Visual Studio .NET. Keith is an internationally known writer and speaker and past Editorial Chair for the VSLive conferences. He was also a founding Contributing Editor to "Visual Studio Magazine", and a Contributing Editor to numerous other publications. Keith has developed several Microsoft Professional Certification Exams. Keith was a founding board member of INETA where he also created the INETA Speakers Bureau.

Mark Peterson

Job Titles:
  • Member of the ALM Forum Conference Committee
  • Member of the Conference Committee
  • Senior Director, Infrastructure & Operations at Nordstrom
Mark Peterson is Senior Director, Infrastructure & Operations at Nordstrom. Mark has worked in systems engineering and operations for 22 years in the retail and high tech fields. He is truly passionate about people leadership and organizational change management. Mark's Senior Director role at Nordstrom allows him to focus on this passion through the challenge of evolving the technology teams, coupled with current trends in the large enterprise, including cloud, automation, and DevOps.

Roy Rapoport

Job Titles:
  • Member of the ALM Forum Conference Committee
  • Member of the Conference Committee
Roy Rapoport manages the Insight Engineering group at Netflix, responsible for building Netflix's Operational Insight platforms, including cloud telemetry, alerting, and real-time analytics. He originally joined Netflix as part of its datacenter-based IT/Ops group, and prior to transferring over to Product Engineering, was managing Service Delivery for IT/Ops. He provided input into the forming of the Cloud Operations and Reliability Engineering (CORE) group at Netflix, and continues to play an advisory role to the group and its members. He also built the majority of the python infrastructure libraries to allow developers at Netflix access cloud systems. Roy has been in tech for about 20 years with positions in IT engineering and operations, software development, and software quality engineering, but his passion remains with operations and automation.

Thomas Murphy

Job Titles:
  • Member of the ALM Forum Conference Committee
  • Member of the Conference Committee
  • Research Director With Gartner
Thomas Murphy is a research director with Gartner, where he is part of the Application Strategies and Governance group. Mr. Murphy has more than 25 years of experience in IT, spending time as a developer, product manager, technical editor and industry analyst. Prior to rejoining Gartner, he worked at Microsoft in the Visual Studio Team System group. Previously, he was an analyst with Meta Group and Gartner. He has served on the board of directors for the OMG and led product strategies at ObjectShare. Early in his career, he served as a technical editor at Software Development and AI Expert magazines and built custom tools for scientific research and embedded systems. His development experience includes embedded systems, Smalltalk, Java, and model-based environments and agile techniques. Mr. Murphy has degrees in Computer Engineering and Mathematics at the Ohio State University and University of Utah.