[MTL-2025] First speakers

content/events/2025-montreal/location.md

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 Description = "Location for devopsdays Montreal 2025"
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+Event will be taking place at [Polytechnique Montréal](https://www.polymtl.ca/)
+
+{{< event_map >}}
+
+*2500, chemin de Polytechnique, Montreal H3T 1J4*
+
+# how to get there
+
+We recommend the use of the [STM trip planner](https://www.stm.info/) or [Google Maps](https://maps.app.goo.gl/sYVUC3zWWPM1YdkR9).
+
+**Nearby Parking**<br>
+
+TBA
+
+**Nearby Bus Stations**<br>
+Édouard-Montpetit / Woodbury
+Busses 51, 119, and 368
+
+**Nearby metro station**<br>
+Université-de-Montréal (5 - Blue Line)
+
+
 Watch this space for information about the venue including address, map/direction, parking/transit, and any hotel details.
 
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-<!-- {{< event_map >}} -->
+
 
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content/events/2025-montreal/program.md

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+Title = "Program"
+Type = "program"
+Description = "Program for devopsdays Montreal 2025"
+Icons = "false"
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+
+
+<div>
+<b>Color Keys:</b>
+<div class="col-lg-3 col-md-6 program-element program-workshop">Workshop</div>
+<div class="col-lg-3 col-md-6 program-element" style="background:#bfe3b4;">Keynote</div>
+<div class="col-lg-3 col-md-6 program-element program-talk">Talk</div>
+<div class="col-lg-3 col-md-6 program-element program-open-space">Open Space</div>
+<div class="col-lg-3 col-md-6 program-element program-ignite">Ignite</div>
+<div class="col-lg-3 col-md-6 program-element program-custom">Break or other event</div>
+<br />
+</div>
+
+
+<!-- Original spreadsheet @ https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1QSCkL9AtzW72aszH_3Oo-x6aikQe0zhJWntbLJJQ1Xs/edit?gid=0#gid=0
+  Share by going to File -> Share -> Publish to web
+ -->
+
+<iframe width="100%" height="550" src="https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/e/2PACX-1vQyKLKEz9Os1TZ-G5TE4s3m0JRUn4nuyDMGytE9W8SBB5xu9H3YfyWwWV6jmbp5qTgBmeUNCLyVftx2/pubhtml?widget=true&amp;headers=false"></iframe>
+
+<div class = "row">
+  <div class = "col">
+    <hr />
+    If Open Space is new to you, you may be interested in <a href="/pages/open-space-format">more details about Open Space</a>.
+    <hr />
+  </div>
+</div>

content/events/2025-montreal/program/caleb-schoepp.md

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+Talk_date = ""
+Talk_start_time = ""
+Talk_end_time = ""
+Title = "Truly Portable Code: Serverless WebAssembly in a Distributed World"
+Type = "talk"
+Speakers = ["caleb-schoepp"]
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+
+What if you could build serverless applications that cold-start in under a millisecond, run anywhere—from your laptop to Kubernetes to the edge—and require no changes to move between environments? This session introduces Spin, a CNCF open-source WebAssembly (Wasm) developer toolkit designed for performance, portability, and simplicity. Attendees will learn how to build a Spin app, write polyglot WebAssembly functions with sub-millisecond cold starts, and run them locally using the Spin CLI. The same app will then be deployed to Azure Kubernetes Service with SpinKube, the open-source Spin runtime for Kubernetes, and to Fermyon Wasm Functions, Akamai’s multi-tenant, globally distributed PaaS — all without rewriting or cross-compilation. The session teaches how WebAssembly and Spin enable true portability across the compute continuum, letting developers build once and run anywhere with no vendor lock-in. This tutorial demonstrates how Spin is reshaping what serverless can be.

content/events/2025-montreal/program/flix-lger.md

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+Talk_date = ""
+Talk_start_time = ""
+Talk_end_time = ""
+Title = "Surmonter l'anxiété d'apprentissage"
+Type = "talk"
+Speakers = ["flix-lger"]
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+
+"Avez-vous du mal à apprendre de nouvelles choses? Vous arrive-t-il de vous sentir dépassé? Craignez-vous l'échec? Vous n'êtes pas seul. Même après avoir obtenu un diplôme de deuxième cycle en physique et occupé des emplois en haute technologie, Félix a dû faire face à une grave anxiété d'apprentissage, qui l'a amené à élaborer un système lui permettant de surmonter ses barrière psychologiques et de redécouvrir le plaisir d'apprendre.Dans cette présentation, Félix partage son cheminement personnel, ses constats appris à la dure et sa méthode pratique pour bien intégrer les apprentissages. Vous êtes aux études? Occupez un poste professionnel? Cherchez simplement à élargir vos horizons? Cette présentation se veut un guide pratique qui vous aidera à faire en sorte que l'apprentissage ne soit plus une source d'anxiété, mais bien un projet de vie stimulant."

content/events/2025-montreal/program/ian-crosby.md

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+Talk_date = ""
+Talk_start_time = ""
+Talk_end_time = ""
+Title = "Enshitification of Cloud Providers"
+Type = "talk"
+Speakers = ["ian-crosby"]
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+
+TBD

content/events/2025-montreal/program/imran-haider.md

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+Talk_date = ""
+Talk_start_time = ""
+Talk_end_time = ""
+Title = "How we slashed hosting costs & carbon emissions by 85% for 1 of the UK's biggest charities"
+Type = "talk"
+Speakers = ["imran-haider"]
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+
+"This talk explores how we helped one of the UK’s largest charities, Prostate Cancer UK, rebuild their public-facing website using modern cloud-native tools and practices.We used the rebuild as a chance to rethink their hosting architecture, moving from traditional web app hosting to a container-based setup using Azure Container Apps. This allowed us to align their infrastructure with their goals around performance, cost efficiency and sustainability.By adopting scale-to-zero containers, we delivered:An average 85% reduction in hosting costs and carbon emissionsFaster, cleaner deployments using GitHub Actions with zero downtimeA platform that is cheaper, greener and ready for the future, without compromising on developer experienceThis is a practical, behind-the-scenes look at the decisions, trade-offs and real-world impact of using scalable, container-native infrastructure to power a major public website.Whether you're modernising legacy systems, exploring containerisation or looking to make your web estate faster, leaner and more sustainable, this session shows what is possible when you bring smart engineering and real-world constraints together."

content/events/2025-montreal/program/imran.md

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+Talk_date = ""
+Talk_start_time = ""
+Talk_end_time = ""
+Title = "Scaling Self-Hosted Compute: A lesson in Platform Engineering across an enterprise"
+Type = "talk"
+Speakers = ["imran"]
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+
+The session will cover a 1.5 year journey to finally create the one platform to rule them all! - powered by GitHub and GitHub Actions. The main lessons learned will cover onboarding and compute. How do we scale our self-hosted compute to be as extensible as possible across an org with demands for high-spec'd compute for AI workloads? Enter ARC (actions-runner-controller), GitHub's solution that orchestrates and scales self-hosted runners for GitHub Actions. I will walk everyone through the journey on self-hosting compute at an enterprise level with lessons learned in caching, label definitions, and small tidbits from hosting VMs instead of K8 clusters.

content/events/2025-montreal/program/jessica-david.md

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+Talk_date = ""
+Talk_start_time = ""
+Talk_end_time = ""
+Title = "No, I Cannot 'Just': On Teamwork, Empathy, and Mentorship"
+Type = "talk"
+Speakers = ["jessica-david"]
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+
+Have you ever been stuck on a problem for days, only to have someone tell you to “just” do something to fix it? As if the solution was _so_ obvious that you should be able to figure it out without asking someone for help? This talk will discuss the word “just” and other words that imply simplicity in places it may not exist, but more importantly how it impacts us as developers and engineers, both through the lens of personal experience and a dive into the research. Additionally it will explore the impact of the language when creating productive teams, how to remove “just” from our vocabulary, and why this small change can help us be better mentors to the next generation of software engineers. And, of course, the influence of coding assistants and how they can exacerbate this problem, but how we can remain human in the face of whatever new technology comes our way.

content/events/2025-montreal/program/justine-gehring.md

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+Talk_date = ""
+Talk_start_time = ""
+Talk_end_time = ""
+Title = "Beyond the chatbot, beyond the IDE, where can AI help your CI/CD"
+Type = "talk"
+Speakers = ["justine-gehring", "spencer-handfield"]
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+
+AI’s potential in software development extends far beyond code generation or chatbot-style assistants in the IDE. This talk explores how five families of AI capabilities (Learning & Onboarding, Coding Assistants, Automation & Agents, Planning, and Data Exploration & Synthesis) can transform the entire CI/CD lifecycle. Whether it’s assessing processes, building pipelines, planning large-scale VM migrations, or summarizing an ocean of information, we’ll talk about how to identify high-impact integration points often untapped by chatbot or IDE based AI integrations. Centering AI integration around developers throughout the entire lifecycle of planning, coding, deployment, and monitoring unlocks greater ROI than simply generating more lines of code.

content/events/2025-montreal/program/justine-gehring2.md

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+Talk_date = ""
+Talk_start_time = ""
+Talk_end_time = ""
+Title = "MCP, modèle contexte… perfection?"
+Type = "talk"
+Speakers = ["justine-gehring", "spencer-handfield"]
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+
+Ne laissez pas vos modèles IA rester assis sur une montagne de contextes inutilisés. Dans cet atelier, découvrez comment intégrer vos outils DevOps tels que votre Grafana, Jira, GitHub, Postgres, etc. grâce au Model Context Protocol (MCP) pour fluidifier et optimiser votre cycle de développement. Vous apprendrez à connecter vos tableaux de bord, vos tickets et vos dépôts. Laissez les modèles d’IA devenir de véritables facilitateurs intelligents et explorez les subtilités du protocole MCP, notamment les différences entre les mécanismes de communication, analysées sous l’angle de la sécurité et de la mise à l’échelle. L’atelier vous montrera également comment connecter efficacement vos serveurs MCP à vos clients MCP, pour une orchestration harmonieuse et intégrée de bout en bout.

content/events/2025-montreal/program/kat-gaines.md

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+Talk_date = ""
+Talk_start_time = ""
+Talk_end_time = ""
+Title = "Staying in your lane: incident response for leaders"
+Type = "talk"
+Speakers = ["kat-gaines"]
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+
+During incident response, every second counts. As a leader, you’re expected to have all the answers, and that pressure can make it very tempting to play the hero and take control of the response process. While “I’ll just do it myself” may seem faster on occasion, this instinct can hinder your team’s effectiveness and actually slow down resolution.We’ll explore how you can evolve from a command-and-control manager into a genuinely empowering leader. You’ll learn how to maintain composure under pressure while creating space for your team to shine. We’ll cover essential frameworks, usable by new managers and individual contributors building incident response processes from scratch as well as experienced leaders looking to level up their approach.Key takeaways will include:- How to recognize when you may be over-managing during an incident…and how to empower your team to help you recognize these moments.- Building team confidence and ownership in crisis situations- Clear guidelines for when to step in versus step back- Establishing and maintaining clear communication channelsWhether you’re establishing your first incident response playbook, fine-tuning an existing process, or managing up to help your leaders help you do your best work, you’ll leave equipped to help your team handle incidents more effectively - and help you sleep better at night knowing they’ve got this.

content/events/2025-montreal/program/khalid-elsawaf.md

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+Talk_date = ""
+Talk_start_time = ""
+Talk_end_time = ""
+Title = "Information to Inspiration: Morgan Stanley's Data-Driven Approach to Developer Productivity"
+Type = "talk"
+Speakers = ["khalid-elsawaf", "patrick-ayoup"]
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+
+When Morgan Stanley took on its DevOps transformation, we knew we wanted to use data to drive the adoption of developer best practices. Join us to learn more about how Almanac, our patented warehouse and badge solution pushed information to developers and helped transform their day-to-day activities, promoting both productivity improvements and the paydown of technical debt

content/events/2025-montreal/program/renata-rocha.md

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+Talk_date = ""
+Talk_start_time = ""
+Talk_end_time = ""
+Title = "DevOps Sovereignty  - Take control of your Canadian infrastructure"
+Type = "talk"
+Speakers = ["renata-rocha"]
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+
+The year is 2025 - you built your digital systems on the cloud, or maybe you want to, and to your frustration and surprise, there are so many digital services that are still run by non-Canadian providers. What does this mean for Canadians and what can you do? In this talk, I will share my research on what it takes to build a digital life that is (mostly) Canadian, what is missing and where we can push for a change. I’ll also raise important questions about digital sovereignty and operational resilience: How can we ensure that Canadian businesses remain in control of their systems amid growing global uncertainty?This session invites attendees to consider DevOps beyond deployment pipelines, expanding the conversation to how the infrastructure decisions we make shape the autonomy and future of the Canadian digital economy.Consider the Maple Cloud, and how we can be part of it.

content/events/2025-montreal/program/sedera-randria.md

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+Talk_date = ""
+Talk_start_time = ""
+Talk_end_time = ""
+Title = "Agile, DevOps & robots programmables"
+Type = "talk"
+Speakers = ["magnoudewa-ulrich-koka","sedera-randria","sarah-el-khamsa"]
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+
+"Que vous ayez des connaissances techniques ou non, découvrez la réalité d’équipes de livraison grâce à une activité interactive. Venez vivre les enjeux entre les équipes de développement et d’opérations, stimuler l’amélioration continue de votre équipe, déchiffrer des demandes parfois confuses, gérer des dépendances inter-équipes et tenter de confronter vos connaissances agiles à la réalité.Une expérience à proposer ensuite à vos équipes ?"

content/events/2025-montreal/program/van-kim-nguyen.md

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+Talk_date = ""
+Talk_start_time = ""
+Talk_end_time = ""
+Title = "Agents IA dans la chaîne de valeur DevOps : de l’automatisation triviale à la valeur stratégique"
+Type = "talk"
+Speakers = ["van-kim-nguyen"]
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+
+L’intégration d’agents d’intelligence artificielle (IA) accélère l'exécution de la chaîne de valeur DevOps en automatisant les tâches répétitives à faible valeur et en libérant du temps pour l’innovation. Cette conférence présentera, à travers une démonstration sur une plateforme de Software Engineering Intelligence (SEI), comment des agents intelligents peuvent s’intégrer concrètement dans le cycle DevOps.Une plateforme SEI est un outil connecté qui agrège, analyse et présente des données issues des outils de développement logiciel (par exemple, systèmes de gestion de code, CI/CD, gestion de projet) pour fournir des analyses et recommandations visant à améliorer l’efficacité, la qualité et la gestion des équipes de développement. Elle permet ainsi de prendre des décisions éclairées sur les pratiques et la performance d’ingénierie logicielle.La présentation s’appuiera sur l’exemple concret d’un agent IA intégré au processus de développement afin d’automatiser les fusions de code triviales :- Détection automatique des Pull Requests simples- Fusion autonome par l’agent dans le respect des politiques de sécurité et de qualité- Retour d’expérience chiffré sur la réduction du temps de cycle et l’amélioration de la fiabilité des livraisonsD’autres cas d’usage illustreront la polyvalence de ce type d’agent :- Automatisation des analyses de code et corrections de vulnérabilités- Agents pour la gestion proactive des incidents- Intégration fluide d’agents IA dans les pipelines CI/CD pour accélérer la livraison en continueSeront également abordés : l’articulation entre automatisation et contrôle humain, l’acceptabilité dans la culture DevOps, ainsi que les défis de gouvernance et d’adoption, avec des pistes pour initier vos propres démarches.Ce format court, ponctué par une démo réelle sur une plateforme SEI, vise à offrir une vision pragmatique sur le potentiel des agents IA dans la chaîne de valeur DevOps.Public cible :Professionnels DevOps, architectes, ingénieurs, CTO, équipes MLOps et toute personne souhaitant comprendre la valeur des agents IA grâce à l’intelligence en ingénierie logicielle.

content/events/2025-montreal/program/yamlal-gotame.md

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+Talk_date = ""
+Talk_start_time = ""
+Talk_end_time = ""
+Title = "Sovereign DevSecOps: Building a Secure, Self-Hosted Pipeline with Open Source & ESG in Mind"
+Type = "talk"
+Speakers = ["yamlal-gotame"]
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+
+This is a story about building DevOps differently.At Data Next Step, we set out to create a fully self-hosted DevSecOps stack, secure, privacy-first, and cost-friendly, using only open-source tools and existing on-prem resources.The result? A production-grade pipeline built on Gitea (Git hosting), Drone CI (CI/CD), Keycloak (SSO/IAM), and Element/Matrix (federated chat), all running on a Proxmox VE virtualized environment.We’ll walk through the architecture, integration wins, and the “why” behind each choice, plus security hardening steps, trade-offs, and ESG benefits from reusing hardware to optimizing workloads for energy efficiency.This Montreal-built case study is for teams who want sovereignty over their pipelines while staying lean, green, and secure.

content/events/2025-montreal/speakers.md

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+Title = "Speakers"
+Type = "speakers"
+Description = "Speakers for devopsdays Montreal 2025"
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content/events/2025-montreal/speakers/caleb-schoepp.md

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+Title = "Caleb Schoepp"
+Twitter = ""
+linkedin = ""
+image = "caleb-schoepp.jpg"
+type = "speaker"
+linktitle = "caleb-schoepp"
+
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+

content/events/2025-montreal/speakers/flix-lger.md

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+Title = "Félix Léger"
+Twitter = ""
+linkedin = ""
+image = "felix-leger.png"
+type = "speaker"
+linktitle = "flix-lger"
+
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+
+Félix Léger travaille dans l’industrie technologique depuis 2017, après avoir obtenu une maîtrise en physique. Malgré sa formation technique, il a dû composer avec une anxiété liée à l’apprentissage, un obstacle qui l’a amené à développer les méthodes présentées dans ce livre. Cette expérience déterminante l’a convaincu que bâtir un monde durable passe par la reconnexion des individus avec leur capacité d’apprendre, et ce, à tout âge.
+
+Surmonter l’anxiété d’apprentissage, paru en 2024, est son premier livre, destiné à aider les gens à redécouvrir le plaisir d’apprendre.

content/events/2025-montreal/speakers/ian-crosby.md

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+Title = "Ian Crosby"
+Twitter = ""
+linkedin = ""
+image = "ian-crosby.jpg"
+type = "speaker"
+linktitle = "ian-crosby"
+
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+

content/events/2025-montreal/speakers/imran-haider.md

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+Title = "Imran Haider"
+Twitter = ""
+linkedin = ""
+image = "imran-haider.png"
+type = "speaker"
+linktitle = "imran-haider"
+
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+
+Imran is the Head of Development at Cogworks. With over 12 years of experience as a developer, he's passionate about sustainability, optimization, and staying on top of the latest tech trends to build leaner, more powerful, and efficient applications.

content/events/2025-montreal/speakers/imran.md

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+Title = "Imran Ali"
+Twitter = ""
+linkedin = ""
+image = "imran-ali.jpg"
+type = "speaker"
+linktitle = "imran"
+
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+
+I've been in the industry for about 6 years now, currently contracting for CIBC where I build out the platform to enable teams to deploy their code to production quickly, safely, and efficiently.
+
+Previously, I worked at Container Solutions as a Cloud Engineer, enabling teams to shift to a cloud native mindset along with DevOps best practices. We worked on a variety of cloud + kubernetes solutions.

content/events/2025-montreal/speakers/jessica-david.md

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+Title = "Jessica David"
+Twitter = ""
+linkedin = ""
+image = "jessica-david.png"
+type = "speaker"
+linktitle = "jessica-david"
+
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+
+Jessica David is a Principal Data Engineer I on the Security Intelligence Team at Elastic. With a background in software engineering and data warehousing, she brings her expertise to the security researchers & detection engineers around her by building data pipelines & services for processing first- and third-party threat intelligence.