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 is the curator for A Minute on the Mic, a cohost for The Hallway Track podcast, and the ex-host of Quick Bites of Cloud Engineering on YouTube. 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 (someone even said that they “didn’t know they made jobs tailored to people like you”).
Due to working on platforms, she knows that ops work isn’t all rainbows and unicorns. In fact, she’s worked on projects that should long since have been retired. As a result, she’s very good at breaking things and then explaining what happened in the inevitable post-incident reports. Coincidentally, they typically don’t let her near prod very often any longer.
As a community member, she co-hosts multiple meetups in the Austin, Texas, area, including Austin DevOps and Cloud Austin. For many years, she taught Python for Women Who Code Austin. She is an organizer for DevOpsDays Austin and DevOpsDays Texas, two community conferences, and is a member of the PyTexas Foundation, the organization that runs PyTexas and local Texas Python events. 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.
She enjoys mucking around with open hardware and has a particular affinity for projects that have blinky lights. Her favorite programming language is Python, though she’s dangerous with multiple languages from C to Groovy to JavaScript to Ruby. She kind of remembers lolspeak and still remembers the days of ceiling cat and basement cat. She also enjoys attempting new languages like Rockstar and LOLCODE.
Outside of tech, Laura runs (slowly), plays with her dogs, throws discs (badly), and solves lots of puzzles. She enjoys comics like Girl Genius (who doesn’t enjoy warping the laws of physics?), photography, camping, and cars. Don’t ask her about the weather unless you have a lot of time on your hands, and she loves to watch clouds—the real kind.
