EmpowerUs at KubeCon North America 2021

Heather Joslyn is features editor of The New Stack, with a special interest in management and careers issues that are relevant to software developers and engineers. She previously worked as editor-in-chief of Container Solutions, a Cloud Native consulting company, and as an editor/reporter at The Chronicle of Philanthropy and the Baltimore City Paper.

Aparna Dhinakaran is Chief Product Officer at Arize AI, a startup focused on ML Observability. She was previously an ML engineer at Uber, Apple, and Tubemogul (acquired by Adobe). During her time at Uber, she built a number of core ML Infrastructure platforms including Michaelangelo. She has a bachelor’s from Berkeley’s Electrical Engineering and Computer Science program where she published research with Berkeley’s AI Research group. She is on a leave of absence from the Computer Vision Ph.D. program at Cornell University.

Elenore Bastian is an engineering manager at Chronosphere for the Platform team. The Platform team focuses on outcomes around how users interact with the product, and Elenore focuses on people, process, and culture – always optimizing for dev happiness and productivity. She chose to join the Chronosphere team because of the learning opportunities and the people (she liked it so much she even got her sister to join too :)). She currently lives in Seattle with her cat Owen, who knows tricks, including “rollover” and “hug”.

Sophia Vargas is a Research Analyst in Google’s Open Source Programs Office, supporting multiple research efforts that span project health, contributor experience, and open source economics. Sophia also works with the CHAOSS project, refining metrics for project risk and viability. Prior to Google, Sophia was an analyst at Forrester, covering data center infrastructure and cloud strategy. Sophia holds a B.A. in Mathematics from Williams College.