Quintessence Anx is the Executive Director of Nivenly Foundation. She took a circuitous path through the tech industry, acquiring a variety of skills and perspectives. Most recently she served as a Developer Advocate at Logz.io, AppDynamics, and PagerDuty. This experience honed her ability to communicate to large numbers of people, learn business strategies, and understand how to bridge the needs of users, community, and a source entity (be it a company or a large project with contributors).
Kris Nóva was the President of the Nivenly Foundation. She was an author,
engineer, public speaker and technologist best known for her work
on Aurae, Linux, and Kubernetes.
She specialized in compute runtime, kernel security, distributed systems,
cloud infrastructure, and open source software engineering. In 2022 she authored
“Hacking Capitalism”, an independently published book about modeling the
tech industry as a system. In 2017 she co-authored “Cloud Native Infrastructure”
with Justin Garrison, published by O’Reilly Media.
Nóva is well known for her open source work. She has created many successful
open source projects and has contributed to projects like Linux, Kubernetes, Rust, Go, etc.
She worked as a principal engineer at GitHub and sadly
passed away in August 2023.
Dominic Hamon is the interim President of Nivenly Foundation. Dominic’s 20+ years of experience have
taken him from Theoretical Physics and Maths research, through AAA video game development with the
likes of EA and Lucasarts, to large-scale distributed system development for Twitter and Google. He
currently works as a senior engineering manager on the Google Play Console team, and has also
worked on YouTube, Chrome, and Apache Mesos.
His history of contributions to open source outside of Apache Mesos and Chrome includes Linux, LLVM,
Perl, creation of a Dart port of the Box2D library, technical leadership for M-Lab, and long-term
maintenance of the Google Benchmark library.
Preston Doster is the Secretary of the Nivenly Foundation. Preston is also actively involved in Hachyderm.io’s infrastructure team, keeping its services online and scaled ahead of the community’s growth. Outside of Hachyderm, he works for Twilio, Inc. as an Architect in its Platform Engineering group, responsible for building and maintaining a modern, reliable cloud platform Twilio’s customers can depend on. Previously, he was Principal Architect at Toyota Connected, Inc., focusing on designing an in-car telematics platform connecting Toyota’s drivers to life-critical and convenience services. Prior to that, he spent many years consulting with Slalom Consulting and Sungard Consulting Services, which saw him through many industries and engagements.
Mekka Okereke is an Engineering Director at Google. He leads the Growth Engineering organization for Google Play, one of the largest digital marketplaces on earth. At Google, Mekka also serves as an Operations Lead for Google’s Civil Rights Coalition, and as an executive sponsor of Tech Exchange, a program connecting HBCUs and Silicon Valley. Prior to Google, Mekka was at Amazon, where he built and led the team that created the Amazon Appstore, and built Amazon's In-App Payments and Subscriptions products. Mekka has served on the board of several non-profits, including Hack the Hood and Prodigy Mentors. He currently serves on the Advisory Board of the Historical Basketball League (HBL), and on the Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, and Sensitivity board of the Voting Rights Association. Mekka is a frequent speaker, consultant, and mentor, sharing his expertise with leaders on inclusivity in the workplace, diversity in tech, and successful team building.
Molly Monroy is currently Vice President at Constantia.io, a tech community company that manages independent communities, and provides marketing and community services to data, cloud, and open source organizations. She has 15+ years of communications experience in technology and open source, and a passion for building and empowering community voices. She started her career doing publicity for early-stage open source startups and has been hooked on the space ever since. In her time at Microsoft, Molly served as the first open source communications lead, building a team determined to tell the stories of the people and communities who are passionately building a new era for Microsoft.