Confessions of a serial tinkerer: Homelabs gone wild, secret Raspberry Pi stashes, and more

Brad Fitzpatrick is a pioneering software engineer, entrepreneur, and open-source advocate best known for creating LiveJournal, one of the earliest major social networking platforms, memcached, a widely adopted caching system now integral to countless high-traffic websites, and OpenID. After LiveJournal, Brad went on to work at Google, where he focused on distributed social networking, implemented performance optimizations on the Android Framework team, and later joined the early Go team where h e worked on the Go standard library, Go build system, and internal Google Go libraries. After 12 years at Google, Brad developed an itch to do a start-up again to be able to go all-in on actually using Go, instead of just working on Go. He joined Tailscale in 2020 to make networking fun and simple, and has been learning networking ever since. At Tailscale, he’s worked on just about everything from the data plane to clients to rigged Bingo games but is primarily responsible for the backend. Throughout his career, he has been an active voice in the open-source community, shaping numerous projects with a strong emphasis on scalability and distributed systems. While once a fan of traveling and speaking all over the world and sleeping whenever he wanted, Brad is now instead housebound in Seattle where he attends to his three many children and occasionally finds time to work on his overbuilt homelab.

Ivana Huckova is a Senior Software Engineer on the Data Sources team at Grafana Labs. She works on making Grafana’s data sources more reliable and easier to use. In her free time and during Grafana hack days, she builds fun monitoring setups for things like her sourdough starter, avocado plants, or bird songs. She also enjoys speaking about observability and creative uses of Grafana.

Andrew is a bit of a renaissance man engineer, with a huge variety of interests and hobbies. He’s part of the founding team at Varda Space, where he builds hypersonic reentry spacecraft. Andrew’s past includes large scale robotics and selling his company to GE and his hobbies are notoriously huge and span nearly every aspect of the technology stack, from programming to electrical engineering to manufacturing. He’s had CNC machines in his garage and servers in his living room since he was a kid, and has a huge passion for all things tech.