Paul Brebner is an Open Source Technology Evangelist at NetApp Instaclustr, specializing in Apache Kafka and streaming and integration use cases. Over the past eight years, he has authored 140+ technical articles and presented at numerous international industry and community conferences (including keynotes), addressing complex open source challenges with over 30 different technologies. Paul brings extensive R&D, consulting and speaking experience in distributed systems, software architecture and engineering, performance and scalability, grid and cloud computing, data analytics, and machine learning.

Paul previously worked for Waikato University (NZ), the University of New South Wales (Sydney, Australia), several startups (including founder/CTO), the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO, Australia), University College London (UCL, UK), and National ICT Australia (NICTA, Australia’s ICT Research Centre of Excellence). Paul was a member of the Standard Performance Evaluation Corporation (SPEC), and has spoken at and served on the Programme Committees of numerous academic conferences. He is the recipient of several awards including an Australian Innovation Patent, ACT iAwards (New Product Category), Australian Computer Society (ACS) Innovation Award, NICTA Impact Award (A. Richard Newton Excellence in Wealth Creation),

NICTA Software and Systems Research Group Impact Award, and Australian Academy of Science/French Embassy Award.

Since learning to programme on a VAX 11/780 a long time ago, he has used many programming languages and tools from Prolog to Java, and still uses the Eclipse IDE. He holds a BSc (double majors in Computer Science and Philosophy) and an MSc with first-class honours in Machine Learning from Waikato University, New Zealand.

Paul is the founder of the Performance Engineering track at the Community over Code conference and is a proud member of the Apache Software Foundation. In his spare time, he enjoys model railroads, travelling, photography, kayaking and cycling.