Robert Curth is an engineer at gutefrage gruppe. In his current project, HELPSTER, Chef is used to automate the server setup. When Robert is not programming, he organizes company events and talks about how to live a good life on his blog at http://rocu.de.
Kristian Hoffmann is the sort of twisted individual who likes hacking code (in Perl, if possible) and cars (the smaller and faster, the better) and solving problems that would lead other people to throw their hands up in despair. After some early experimentation with Linux (circa Slackware 3.0), his tech career started as a lowly tech at a local ISP. He went on to complete his bachelor's in computer science, marry a fellow technophile, and rise to the ranks of the president/CTO in his adolescent ISP hacking grounds. He now enjoys the most significant challenge of raising two hopelessly tech-bound children.
Max Manders is a recovering PHP developer and former sysadmin, who currently works as a systems developer and ops engineer helping to run the Operations Centre for Cloudreach, an Amazon Web Services Premier Consulting Partner. Max has put his past experiences and skills to good use to evangelize all things DevOps, working to master Ruby and advocating infrastructure-as-code as a Chef practitioner.
Max is a cofounder and organizer of Whisky Web, a Scottish conference for the web development and ops community. When he's not writing code or tinkering with the latest and greatest monitoring and operations tools, Max enjoys the odd whisky and playing jazz and funk trombone. He lives in Edinburgh with his wife, Jo, and their cats, Ziggy and Maggie.
Greg Swallow has been wrangling with all sorts of computers in the Indianapolis area for 20 years now, for folks like IN.gov, Expedient Data Centers, Salesforce, and Indigo BioAutomation. When he's not playing digital plumber, you can catch him on the roads and trails of Indiana, either on his bike or in his running shoes.
He has also reviewed VMware vSphere 5.x Datacenter Design Cookbook by Hersey Cartwright, Packt Publishing.
Earl Waud is a Virtualization Development Professional with more than 9 years of focused industry experience creating innovative solutions for hypervisor provisioning, management, and automation. He is an expert in aligning engineering strategy with organizational vision and goals and delivering highly scalable and user-friendly virtualization environments.
With more than 20 years of experience developing customer-facing and corporate IT software solutions, Earl has a proven track record of delivering high-caliber and on-time technology solutions that significantly impact business results.
Earl lives in San Diego, California. He is blessed with a beautiful wife, Patti, and three amazing daughters, Madison, Daniella, and Alexis.
Currently, Earl is a senior systems engineer with Intuit Inc., a company that creates business and financial management solutions that simplify the business of life for small businesses, consumers, and accounting professionals.
Earl can be reached online at http://sandiegoearl.com.