We are just beginning to announce speakers for 2026. We will be adding speakers weekly. For the latest news, follow us on Linkedin.
Jon Haddad (Redondo Beach)
Jon Haddad is one of the top performance goto guys on the planet for all things Cassandra. As an Apache Cassandra PMC member and committer, Jon has over a decade of experience working with some of the world's largest Cassandra deployments, including Netflix and Apple. Previously at The Last Pickle, Jon worked with over a hundred customers across finance, streaming media, cloud providers, and other mission-critical systems, developing deep expertise in performance analysis, observability, and data modeling. As founder of RustyRazorblade Consulting, Jon specializes in performance tuning and optimization for distributed systems. Jon created and maintains several open-source tools including easy-cass-lab and easy-cass-stress, which are widely used by the Cassandra community for testing and benchmarking. He is recognized for his contributions to pushing the boundaries of what's possible with Cassandra and provides training through his "Operator Excellence" program for engineers seeking to master Cassandra operations.
Jenna Jordan (Ashville)
Data Librarian turned Data Engineer, Jenna Jordan (Linkedin) learned to code while earning her Master of Science in Library and Information Science at the University of Illinois. No surprise that her data engineering practice is informed by and grounded in information science principles. As a senior analytics engineer with Ratio PBC, Jenna helps build data systems that support public health & human services organizations, as well as advises clients on dbt best practices.
During her time as a senior consultant at Analytics8, Jenna developed particular expertise in dbt Mesh architecture and the governance strategies that accompany it. Her experience working with dbt Mesh led to a peer exchange session at Coalesce 2024, where she helped attendees explore governance challenges through a role-playing simulation game. Jenna spearheaded the adoption of dbt at the City of Boston Analytics Team, where she architected and built the project and from scratch, and reorganized the data warehouse.
An occasional blogger on topics like analytical data warehouses and data engineering best practices, Jenna is also a passionate community builder and founder of the City Analytics Exchange, a network for data analytics practitioners in local government. When not transforming data, she's a knitter, board gamer, and dog mom.
Weimo Liu (Sunnyvale)
Weimo Liu is the CEO and co-founder of PuppyGraph, bringing his expertise in databases and query engines from his time at Google, where he worked on the F1 team developing the unified SQL analytic engine that supports most data formats/sources and serves billions of queries per day. Before his tenure at Google, he excelled as a research scientist at TigerGraph, creating a query language for parallel distributed graph databases and a compiler to translate queries into executable C++ code. With a PhD in Computer Science from George Washington University and a role as a program committee member and reviewer for top conferences and journals in the database area (r.g., TKDE, KDD, and SIGSPATIAL), Weimo is recognized as a distinguished expert in his field.
Weimo will be hosting a PuppyGraph: Ask me Anything session.
Ontology Keynote
Jessica Talisman (Santa Cruz) @jtalisman
Jessica Talisman is a taxonomist, information architect, and professional data wrangler. Over her 25 years of experience in the information & data architecture world, Jessica has worked as an academic librarian and for The US Department of Justice, Overstock.com, Pluralsight and Amazon. She currently works as a Senior Information Architect for Adobe. Jessica holds a Master of Library and Information Science and a Masters in Teaching. Check out Jessica’s recent interviews on the Monday Morning Data Chat, Discovering Data, Knowledge Graph Insights, Blueprints for Success, Catalog and Cocktails, Data Dialogues, Data Democracy, The AI Digest, and How AI is Built
Jessica will be presenting on the Ontology Pipeline.
Apache Iceberg Keynote
Tim Berglund (Mountain View) @tlberglund
Tim Berglund is a teacher, author, and technology leader with Confluent, where he serves as the Vice President of Developer Relations. For almost two decades, Time has been a first-call speaker at conferences around the world, You can find time all over YouTube, where he has a reputation for explaining complex technology topics in an accessible way. He tweets as @tlberglund, blogs every few years at timberglund.com, and lives in Mountain View, California. He has three grown children and two grandchildren, a fact about which he is rather excited. Check out Tim's latest interview on The Joe Reis Show
Jonathan Ellis (Austin) @spyced
Jonathan Ellis became involved with Apache Cassandra in 2008 when Rackspace hired him to build their next-generation database infrastructure. As the first Cassandra PMC chair, and later as co-founder of DataStax, Jonathan was largely responsible for leading Cassandra through its first decade of development. More recently, Jonathan was working on Vector Search to facilitate its integration with Cassandra for the next generation of AI applications.
Seeing the promise of coding with AI while building JVector, and experiencing the frustration of seeing the same tools completely fail with Cassandra (a 10x larger codebase), Jonathan was motivated to create Brokk - a tool to tame large codebases for AI.
Jenna Jordan ( Asheville )
Data Librarian turned Data Engineer, Jenna Jordan (Linkedin) advises clients on dbt best practices with particular expertise in dbt Mesh architecture and the governance strategies that accompany it. Her experiences working with dbt Mesh inspired her innovative peer exchange simulation at Coalesce 2024, exploring governance challenges through role-playing scenarios. Getdbt Before joining Analytics8, Jenna spearheaded the adoption of dbt at the City of Boston Analytics Team, where she built the project and architecture from scratch, reorganized the data warehouse, and presented on this migration at Coalesce 2023. Jenna learned to code during her MSLIS (Master of Science in Library and Information Science) program and grounds her data engineering work in information science principles. A frequent blogger on topics like analytical data warehouses and data engineering best practices, Jenna is also a passionate community builder who started the City Analytics Exchange, a network for data analytics practitioners in local government. When not transforming data, she's a knitter, board gamer, sci-fi/fantasy enthusiast, and dog mom.
MF Joe Reis (Salt Lake city) @joereis
MF Joe Reis (Linkedin) is a “recovering data scientist,” and a business-minded data nerd who’s worked in the data industry for 20 years. His responsibilities have ranged from statistical modeling, forecasting, machine learning, data engineering, data architecture, and everything else in between. Joe was co-host of the popular Monday Morning Data Chat (Spotify / Apple) and currently the host of the Joe Reis Show (Apple / Spotify). Joe is also co-author of the bestselling O'Reilly book: Fundamentals of Data Engineering. Joe also teaches at the University of Utah as well as runs several meetups, including The Utah Data Engineering Meetup and SLC Python. When he’s not busy running a company, teaching, or creating content, Joe often finds himself DJing/making music, rock climbing, or trail running in the mountains around Salt Lake City, Utah.
Lisa Cao (San Francisco) @lisancao
Lisa Cao (LinkedIn) is is a former data analyst, now data engineer and software engineer interested in open data infrastructure, observability, validation, and reliability in open source data systems. Lisa was originally exposed to the R programming language while studying neuroscience and biological psychiatry at Simon Fraser University. While in British Columbia, Lisa also founded the Vancouver Datajam, Currently, Lisa makes her home in the San Francisco Bay Area where she leads project management at DataStrato . In addition, Lisa is the DataOps Lead & Ambassador at the Continuous Delivery Foundation, Developer Experience Working Group (DXWG) Lead at OPEA, and Founder / Lead Organizer of the the hottest independent meetup group in the Bay area : Data For AI.
Bill Inmon (Castle Rock, Colorado)
Bill Inmon (Wikipedia / LinkedIn) is an American computer scientist, recognized by many as the father of the data warehouse. Inmon wrote the first book, held the first conference, wrote the first column in a magazine and was the first to offer classes in data warehousing. Inmon created the accepted definition of what a data warehouse is - a subject oriented, nonvolatile, integrated, time variant collection of data in support of management's decisions. Bill is among the most prolific and well-known authors in the big data analysis, data warehousing and business intelligence arena. In addition to authoring more than 50 books and 650 articles, Bill has been a monthly columnist with the Business Intelligence Network, EIM Institute and Data Management Review. In 2007, Bill was named by Computerworld as one of the “Ten IT People Who Mattered in the Last 40 Years” of the computer profession.
Dr. Juan Sequeda is the Principal Scientist and Head of the AI Lab at data.world. He holds a PhD in Computer Science from The University of Texas at Austin. Juan’s research and industry work has been on the intersection of data and AI, with the goal to reliably create knowledge from inscrutable data, specifically designing and building Knowledge Graph for enterprise data and metadata management. Juan is the co-author of the book “Designing and Building Enterprise Knowledge Graph” and the co-host of Catalog and Cocktails, an honest, no-bs, non-salesy data podcast.
Juan has researched and developed technology on semantic data virtualization, graph data modeling, schema mapping and data integration methodologies. He pioneered technology to construct knowledge graphs from relational databases, resulting in W3C standards, research awards, patents, software and his startup Capsenta acquired by data.world in 2019. Juan strives to build bridges between academia and industry as former co-chair of the LDBC Property Graph Schema Working Group, member of the LDCB Graph Query Languages task force, standards editor at the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). Juan continues to be an active member of the scientific community through academic research partnerships, advising students, and member of data and AI scientific conference committees.
Alex Merced (Winter Park, FL) @alexmerced
Alex Merced (Linkedin) has a history of creating content to enable developers of all types through his personal projects like DevNursery.com, The Web Dev 101 Podcast, and the DataNation podcast. Currently Head of DevRel at Dremio, Alex has held positions with companies like Crossfield Digital, CampusGuard, GenEd Systems and others along with being an Instructor for General Assembly Bootcamps. Alex is co-author of Apache Iceberg: The Definitive Guide and the upcoming Apache Polaris: The Definitive Guide, both from O'Reilly.
#oreilly-showcase
Matthew Housley (Salt Lake city)
Matthew Housley,“Recovering Data Scientist”, is Co-Founder / CTO of Ternary Data. Also a “Reformed Academic,” Matthew holds a PhD in Math and dual Masters degrees in both Math and Physics. It was only natural that he began his career in Academia as a Professor of Mathematics, before joining one of the largest e-commerce companies as a data scientist. Matt's STEM background in combination with his knack for teaching makes him a mastermind at overhauling processes, improving teamwork, and incorporating engineering best practices so that real value is delivered to companies. While making the journey from data scientist to data engineer, Matt began to focus more on data & cloud engineering, working extensively with Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud Platform, Containers, Apache Airflow and GPUs, among other technologies. Matt (or should we say, “Dr. Housley”) is an adjunct faculty member in the David Eccles School of Business at The University of Utah. Joe is co-host of the popular Monday Morning Data Chat (Spotify / Apple) and co-author of the bestselling O'Reilly book: Fundamentals of Data Engineering.
