Erick Polsky, Christian Melendez & Jordan Clark

Teaches at cPrime

Erick Polsky's career integrating application development with training delivery started back in 1989 when he developed and introduced the first online multimedia training content system to Harvard University.  Since then he has honed his business, programming, and database skills to provide highly customized software solutions and education.  Mr. Polsky provides stand up training and mentoring for various companies and universities with certifications in SQL Server, .Net Development, and SharePoint.   He is also an experienced consultant who manages a team of developers providing custom business application development.  His current projects interests include the latest developments in Big Data, DevOps, and Cloud Computing.

Erick Polsky owns a training and software consulting company in Cary, NC

Education/Credentials

• Bachelors in Business Administration, Kent State University
• Microsoft Certified Database Administrator, Developer, SharePoint Administrator
• Microsoft Certified Trainer

Primary Expertise:

• DB: SQL, PLSQL (Oracle), TSQL (SQL Server) queries, programming, design, architecture
• Programming: C#, VB.Net, ASP, MVC, JavaScript including JQuery and other libraries
• Technologies: NoSQL, Big Data, DevOps, SharePoint, CSS/HTML5
• Apps: Office suite, Adobe suite

Christian Melendez has been in the industry for almost 15 years. In 2013, Christian made the switch from developing software to managing infrastructure on the cloud. His employer at the time was having too many issues and spending too much money while releasing software, and he was able to use his skills as a developer in a different context: infrastructure.

Christian is now helping customers in their onboard journey to the cloud with the help of agile practices, DevOps culture adoption, and modern tools and technologies like containers, cloud, and serverless. Christian's passion for technology grew even stronger during his time with a previous employer as the Cloud team lead, where his expertise was vital to the company’s successful adoption of the DevOps mindset and operational efficiency of resources in the cloud. He has also been involved in projects to break the monolith into a microservices architecture with Docker containers making it possible to reduce the lead time to five minutes, instead of eight plus hours.

Christian is an active public speaker, speaking at several well-known events, including AWS re:Ivent, All Day DevOps, .NET Conf Online, Global Azure Bootcamps, as well as meetup groups around the world. He also has a passion for sharing written content and has started started writing for several corporate blogs including ASPE, Stackify, Scalyr, enov8, Rollout.io, and more. Christian's passion to share knowledge has always been community-driven, hosting webinars with big audiences and translating the same content to Spanish for folks that could benefit from learning in their own language. Christian is also an InfoQ editor where he shares the latest news on DevOps, Cloud, and Kubernetes.

“In life, the context is what makes the difference between a good or bad solution to a given problem or situation.”

Every time teaches a class or gets to coach a team, he challenges students to ask questions and put their new skills and methods to practice – he doesn't like students to follow a recipe only. When he shares his knowledge, it's always accompanied by personal experiences, either where he was able to solve a problem, or even where things got worse. He always advises students to listen to what others share, but that they also learn better with their own experiences. In life, the context is what makes the difference between a good or a bad solution to a given problem or situation.

Education/Credentials:

• BS in Computer Science Engineering, Universidad Mariano Gálvez
• MBA in Project Management, Universidad Mariano Gálvez
• ICAgile Certified Professional – Foundations of DevOps (ICP-FDO)
• ICAgile Certified Professional – Implementing DevOps (ICP-IDO)
• AWS Certified Solutions Architect - Professional
• AWS Certified DevOps Engineer - Professional
• AWS Certified Developer – Associate
• AWS Certified SysOps Administrator – Associate
• AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Associate
• AZ-300 Microsoft Azure Architect Technologies
• Google Cloud Certified Professional Cloud Architect
• Alibaba Cloud Certified Professional (ACP)
• Microsoft MVP – Azure Technologies

Jordan Clark is a 20 -year veteran as a Unix/Linux System Engineer with a background in networking, cloud computing, orchestration tools and container-based infrastructure. Jordan is certified DevOps practitioner on both process and technical delivery tool-chains.  Jordan is value driven, result-oriented, client facing and highly motivated. He is passionate about sharing knowledge, tools and techniques with students as they not only discover something new but realize the value proposition of the item to their project, team and organization.

Specialties

With experience across the full stack, Jordan has learned from a variety of projects with hardware, networking, storage, data, systems, development and the Internet of Things. He is a DevOps delivery thought leader and open source advocate and focuses on community enablement. Jordan's instruction frequently focuses on the culture and practices of DevOps and SRE methodologies. As a life-long learner, Jordan loves to read about, utilize and understand the reason behind and the value of new technologies, methodologies and techniques in the quickly changing world of cloud-native infrastructure.