GitKon is a unique virtual tech conference hosted by GitKraken, the world’s leader in developing high-quality Git tools. 

This event is back for its 2nd year, but with some changes. This year, the tech conference will span across three days on October 11-13, with 12 15-minute sessions each day. In addition to GitKon keynote, Dries Buytaert, co-founder of Drupal and CTO and co-founder of Acquia, we have an incredible speaker lineup from companies like GitHub, GitLab, Atlassian, Microsoft, Visual Studio Code, Secure Code Warrior, Sourcegraph, and more. 

The best part? The Git conference is completely free and open to all. 

Matias Madou: Secure Code Warrior

Matias Madou, Ph.D., is the CTO and co-founder of Secure Code Warrior, a company he helped create after realizing that it was far too easy to introduce security problems into code if you never teach the developers how to write secure code in the first place. 

His GitKon 2022 session: Knowledge vs. Behavior: Insights into Security Upskilling for Developers, is inspired by the foundational concept that helped to inspire Secure Code Warrior. A recent survey by Evans Data concluded that 67% of developers knowingly ship vulnerable code, and just 14% consider security as their top priority when writing software. 

“We already know that developers are wrestling with competing priorities, impossible deadlines, and increased responsibilities,” says Matias. “In today’s world of disastrous data breaches, we need to break bad habits and eradicate poor coding patterns.” 

Attendees can expect to leave with the tools they need to analyze their behavior as a developer, or the behavior of your team as an engineering lead, and provide the right resources to enable better security outcomes.

Demetris Cheatham: GitHub

Demetris Cheatham is the senior director for diversity, inclusion and belonging strategy at GitHub where she leads a diversity and inclusion strategy focused on four key pillars: people/HR, platform, philanthropy and policy. In 2021, she launched the GitHub All In open source community, organizing a wide-reaching listening tour with contributors, maintainers, and leaders throughout the open source community with the aim of better understanding the experiences, challenges and opportunities ahead for developers.

In her GitKon 2022 session: Let’s Open Source Diversity and Inclusion!, Demetris will talk about some of the challenges related to diversity and inclusion faced by the open source community. 

“In spite of significant resources and financial investment, many related efforts are fragmented, not openly shared, only address part of the challenges, and lack true community collaboration,” says Demetris.  “We have to start approaching diversity in open source differently to ensure we yield different results.” 

Attendees will learn how to utilize relevant data to build on existing research and initiatives related to diversity and inclusion in open source. 

Brigit Murtaugh: Visual Studio Code

Brigit Murtaugh is a product manager on the Visual Studio Code team where she focuses on remote development. She’s been working on developer tools at Microsoft since graduating from the University of Central Florida in 2019 with a Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science. 

In her GitKon 2022 session: Dev Containers: A Consistent Environment Anywhere You Work, Brigit will talk about how a development container can provide a full-featured environment to ensure your project has the tools and software it needs. 

“While containers have historically been used to standardize apps when they’re deployed, containers can be used to support a lot of different development scenarios,” explains Brigit. “I’m excited to show people the possibilities that come with dev containers and specifications.” 

Brigit will show attendees the Development Containers Specification, which empowers anyone using any tool to configure a consistent dev environment. This tool enriches existing formats with common development specific settings, tools, and configurations while still providing a simplified, un-orchestrated, single container option, so they can be used as coding environments or for continuous integration and testing. 

By the end of this session, Brigit will teach attendees how to get started with dev containers and specifications.

Beyang Liu: Sourcegraph

Beyang Liu is the CTO and co-founder of Sourcegraph, which he describes as “kind of like Google + Netscape for your codebase and dependency graph.” Beyang studied computer science at Stanford where he conducted research in the Stanford AI and HCI labs to learn what a compiler is. Prior to joining Sourcegraph, Beyang worked at Palantir where he helped some of the biggest financial services organizations solve problems related to Big Code. 

In his GitKon 2022 session: A Dev’s Thoughts on Developer Productivity, Beyang will talk about why we should be focusing on direct developer experience instead of listening to self-described “experts” peddling productivity tools. 

“Most developer productivity models and experts fail to look at how devs actually work, missing key components of a dev’s daily flow,” says Beyang. “I’m looking forward to sharing my thoughts on productivity with the other devs at GitKon and actually connecting those models to our own experiences.”

Attendees will watch as Beyang talks about how we can start using direct developer experience and our own mental models of how we work to draw pictures and diagrams that actually approximate the world in which we live.  

Ruth Vela: Nextiva

Ruth Vela is the director of technology experience at Nextiva, a software company that helps sales, service, and marketing teams achieve higher productivity and improve customer engagement. At Nextiva, Ruth is responsible for the Technology Experience program, working to ensure a consistently positive experience and highly-engaged workforce for the company’s global team of technologists. Ruth also leads end-to-end operations for Nextiva Mexico, where a significant amount of the company’s R&D is conducted. 

In  her GitKon 2022 session: TechEX: The Human Side of Building and Enabling Remote Engineering Teams, Ruth will talk about the programs and frameworks that engineering leaders can build to enable successful collaboration for their global remote teams, and why as an engineer, it matters to choose a company that understands and values a positive remote experience. 

“The Technology Experience program at Nextiva is a great example of an organization that is being proactive in their approach to remote employee experience,” says Ruth. “I’m really excited to share what we’ve learned so that others can adopt better practices that lead to happier engineers.” 

Attendees will take away tips for improving remote processes for interviewing, team management, selecting the right equipment, improving employee experience, creating a brand for recruiting talent, and building a technical community.    

Brendan O’Leary: GitLab

Brendan O’Leary is a staff developer evangelist at GitLab, the DevOps platform, and a governing board member at the Cloud Native Computing Foundation and advisor to various startups. He has a passion for software development and iterating processes just as quickly as we iterate on code. Working with customers to deliver value drives Brendan’s passion for DevOps and smooth CI/CD implementation. 

In his GitKon 2022 session: The Era of Platforms, Brendan will discuss the evolution of platforms. For years, operations teams have tried to build elastic compute platforms for developers to deploy to, while at the same time, developers were stitching together tools to ensure code was integrated, built, tested, and secure. At the same time, we’ve seen the DevOps industry move towards the era of DevOps platforms, consolidating and expanding capabilities that allow developers to spend more time on code and less on tools. 

“In the end, the platforms aren’t what we’re building,” explains Brendan. “To paraphrase Halt and Catch Fire: ‘Platforms aren’t the thing. They are the thing that gets you to the thing.’” 

Attendees can expect to learn how to successfully leverage Kubernetes and the DevOps platform to adapt and ship code faster. 

Andrew Pankevicius: Atlassian

Andrew Pankevicius is an experienced product leader who has been fortunate to run large cross-functional teams, been involved in raising capital multiple times, and built SaaS products across Australia, San Francisco, and Southeast Asia. As a senior product manager for Jira DevOps at Atlassian, Andrew is responsible for bringing Jira Software’s new DevSecOps & release management solutions to market.

In his GitKon 2022 session: DevOps at Scale: What it Really Looks Like to Scale Your Product Org from 1 to 100 People, Andrew will guide attendees through critical milestones of growth, from DevSecOps as a foundational concept on day one, to cross-functional release orchestration and DevOps toolchain management, all while scaling your development team. 

“As organizations scale, teams quickly learn that it’s not just about hiring,” says Andrew. “It’s more about how your team’s tools and dev practices pivot, scale, and meet the increasing needs of your org.” 

Attendees will leave with more confidence to scale their development teams while maintaining DevOps best practices and principles.

Eric Amodio: GitKraken

Eric Amodio is the CTO of GitKraken and the creator of GitLens, the most popular Git extension for VS Code. He is an entrepreneur, innovator, leader, architect, and full-stack developer, and his passion lies in dreaming up new ideas and bringing them to life through code.  Eric thrives on challenges and solving complex problems, while also ensuring that the challenges accepted and solutions devised are always made with an eye on the bigger picture — the user experience. He prides himself with the ability to be able to see the forest for the trees, as well as being able to dive deeply into the details. He takes great care in the experience, architecture, and code of the products that he builds.

Eric is also an open-source enthusiast and maintainer. He open-source; both building and contributing, loving the collaboration and the sharing of knowledge-driven in the open-source movement. Eric’s favorite editor is Visual Studio Code and his favorite technologies currently are TypeScript, Node.js, and .NET Core.

Information for Eric’s special GitKon 2022 session will be coming soon – in the meantime, check out his talk from GitKon 2021: Building GitLens for VS Code.

Register for GitKon 2022 Today

If this speaker lineup didn’t entice you, we have even more experts lined up to share their expertise on Git, team collaboration, DevOps, and more, all completely FREE. Registration is open on gitkon.com. 

Stay tuned for more updates on speakers from Amazon, Yahoo!, New Relic, GitHub, GitKraken, and more.