Speaker - Andrew Cowie

Andrew Cowie was cursed as a child by a Unix sysadmin who doomed him to fix other people's build systems for the rest of his days. He has since gathered an extensive background of software development, systems operations, production infrastructure, and engineering leadership experience—but somewhat unusually started his career as an infantry officer in the Canadian army, having graduated from Royal Military College with a degree in engineering physics. He later ran operations for a new media company in Manhattan and was a part of recovering the firm after the Sept 11 attacks. Since then he has consulted on crisis resolution, change management, robust architectures, and (more interestingly) leveraging Open Source to achieve these ends. Andrew has been working in and around systems engineering and functional programming for many years; his most recent work has been to re-engineer observability into analytics pipelines and deployment machinery.