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Q&A: Alex Curtis and Jonathan Regehr

So close to the opening keynote of Cloud Foundry Summit 2015 you can almost taste it. Next up in our speaker Q&A series is the dynamic duo of Alex Curtis and Jonathan Regehr from Garmin. They are speaking on Monday afternoon and have a great talk lined up:

We will take you on our journey as we have lived it. Our mistakes laid bare, our achievements held high, we will show you how we designed, architected and delivered Cloud Foundry to our production developers in under 2 weeks.

Tell us a little bit about yourself and your career history

Alex: 17 years in IT with several companies – most notable are Sprint, UMB Bank and now Garmin. Most of my career has centered around Production Management and Systems Administration, however, in the past 7 years I’ve been focusing more on Middleware and how it interacts within Production Management. I am an active pilot, photographer, kayaker and family man.

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Jonathan: In the IT industry since 1996, worked for small and large companies in telecom, manufacturing, and technology. I’ve developed in at least 10 different languages but always come back home to Java. I am a husband, father of three boys, cyclist, and a nerd.

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How did you get involved in Cloud Foundry?

Alex: I attended one of the Cloud Foundry Road Shows last summer but did not become actively involved until Garmin started seriously looking at the product. I am now my department’s lead on our Cloud Foundry implementation from a production management and deployment perspective.

Jonathan: I got involved in Cloud Foundry at one of Garmin’s hackathons in 2013. One of our architects saw Cloud Foundry at Spring.io and was eager to learn more about it.

What you are speaking about at Cloud Foundry Summit?

Alex: Telling the Garmin/Cloud Foundry story. We’ll be talking about why we went with Cloud Foundry, how we’ve implemented it so far and some of the pitfalls that we’ve encountered along the way. We still have a long way to go but we’ve also come a long way.

Jonathan: We’ll be speaking about Garmin’s journey to adopt Cloud Foundry. We’ll include how we got here, what we are doing now, and what where we’re heading.

Why do you think what your talk is about is important?

Alex: To let others see how we did it so they could learn from our experience and mistakes.

Jonathan: I think our story is could be a fairly common one – however most companies haven’t yet started the journey. Our story is meant to show people what is possible and encourage them to start the journey.

What do you hope people learn?

Alex: I’m really looking forward to sharing information and, more specifically, see how others have implemented their deployment and integration processes. I have several ideas how we will do it at Garmin, however, I am interested in seeing other perspectives as well.

Jonathan: Cloud Foundry is an amazing platform. It takes a lot work to change code and culture to adopt Cloud Foundry but the benefits are worth it.

Register today for Cloud Foundry Summit 2015.

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