Tim Hinrichs is the PTL of OpenStack Congress and the CTO and co-founder of Styra, Inc.  Before that he spent 2 years as a software engineer at VMware, and in 2008 he received his Ph.D. in declarative programming languages from Stanford University.  He spent the last 14 years designing and implementing policy-aware systems in different domains, such as networking, (what at the time was called) utility computing, configuration management, web security, game-playing, and access-control.