Developer Advocates at Dell
Dell developer advocates write educational content on a variety of topics, present at conferences all around the world, and are active in their respective open source communities as helpers and leaders. Get to know them and find out how they can help you!
Ryan Wallner
Lead Developer Advocate at Dell Technologies and host of the Kubernetes Bytes podcast. Ryan is a cloud native and Kubernetes enthusiast, husband, and dad of fearless daughter. Ryan enjoys adventure moto riding, hiking, mountain biking.
Laura Santamaria
As a Lead Developer Advocate at Dell Technologies, Laura Santamaria loves to learn and explain how things work to bridge the gaps in engineering disciplines. She was the curator for A Minute on the Mic, a cohost for The Hallway Track podcast, and the host of Quick Bites of Cloud Engineering. In the past, she’s worked in many roles, including as a software developer, an ops specialist building and running platforms, a CTO, a technical writer, an editor, a science educator, and a literacy and education researcher. In all of these roles, she spent time building, maintaining, and observing communities of practice. That experience with communities, coupled with both a love of science and data from her degree work in earth and atmospheric sciences and a love of education, led her to developer advocacy.
As a community member, she co-hosts multiple meetups in the Austin, Texas, area, including Cloud Austin. For many years, she taught Python for the Women Who Code Austin meetup, as well. She is an organizer for DevOpsDays Austin, DevOpsDays Texas, and PyTexas, all community-run conferences. For the past few years, she has been a returning program committee member for Open Source Summit’s Cloud Open track that explores cloud infrastructure and cloud apps. Outside of tech, Laura runs (slowly), reads (a lot), takes pictures of cars, plays with her dogs, and watches clouds—the real kind.
Tim Banks
Tim’s tech career spans over 25 years through various sectors. Tim’s initial journey into tech started in avionics in the US Marine Corps and then into various government contracting roles. After moving to the private sector, Tim worked both in large corporate environments and in small startups, honing his skills in systems administration, automation, architecture, and operations for large cloud-based datastores.
Today, Tim leverages his years in operations, DevOps, and Site Reliability Engineering to advise and consult with the open source and cloud computing communities in his current role. Tim is also a competitive Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu practitioner. He is the 2-time American National and is the 5-time Pan American Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu champion in his division.
Kat Cosgrove
In her role as a Lead Developer Advocate at Dell, Kat focuses on the growth and nurturing of open source through authentic contribution. In particular, her specialties are approachable 101-level content and deep dives on the history of technology, with a particular focus on DevOps and cloud native. She has served on the Kubernetes release team since v1.22.
When she’s not at a conference, she spends her time playing video games, watching horror movies, or reading science fiction, but her current hyperfixation is film photography. She lives in Scotland with her cat, Espresso, who is the real brains behind the operation and actually ghostwriting all of her tweets.
Barton George
Barton has been involved with Linux and open source for over 15 years. For the last 10+ years he has been at Dell Technologies where, beyond Linux and open source, he has focused on cloud native computing and devops. Currently Barton is a member of Dell’s developer relations team and serves as Dell’s community manager. In addition to his day job, Barton is the founder and lead of Project Sputnik, a line of Ubuntu-powered developer laptops and workstations. Prior to Dell, Barton was a member of Sun Microsystem’s Open Source program office where he managed Sun’s relationship with the Linux community. Born and raised in Honolulu, Hawaii, Barton is a single father of three teenagers. He and his children happily reside just outside Austin, Texas.