MacAD.UK 2024 Speakers
We’re currently finalising the 2024 agenda and have some exciting speakers to announce in the coming weeks. To give you an idea of what to expect at the 2024 event, take a look at our 2023 line-up below.
Our 2023 line-up
CTO, bootstrappers.mn
Speaker Bio
Charles Edge is the CTO of bootstrappers.mn. He holds 35 years of experience as a developer, administrator, network architect, product manager, entrepreneur, and CTO. He is the author of 20 books and more than 6,000 blog posts on technology, and has served as an editor and author for many publications. Charles also serves on the board of directors for a number of companies and non-profits, and frequently speaks at conferences including DefCon, BlackHat, LinuxWorld, the Apple Worldwide Developers Conference, and a number of Apple-focused conferences. Charles is also the author of krypted.com and a cofounder/host of the MacAdmins Podcast and The History Of Computing podcast.
The Past, Present, and Future of Extension Management
Precursor Systems
Speaker Bio
Allan Hancock of Watchman Monitoring has referred to Alex Narvey as “the original Mac MSP”.
Alex started Precursor Systems in 1994 to provide Annual Support Plans for businesses focused on Apple technology and now works with over 30 clients across six Canadian Provinces. Alex has previously presented at ACES, MacTech Conference L.A., and MacDevOps YVR.
Getting to Know Munkireport 6
Sysadmin, Reaktor
Speaker Bio
More information coming soon
Wireless Engineer, Natilik
Speaker Bio
My Top Tools for Troubleshooting Wi-Fi
Director of Enterprise & Education Product Management, Apple Inc.
Head of Device Identity, JumpCloud
Speaker Bio
Joel was a speaker on the MacAD.UK 2022 panel, he is the Head of Device Identity at JumpCloud residing in the greater Minneapolis, MN area. He focuses primarily on the intersection of identity, users and the devices that they use. While Joel has spent most of his professional career focused on Apple products, at JumpCloud he leads a team focused on device identity across all vendors.Prior to JumpCloud Joel was a director at Jamf helping to make Jamf Connect and other authentication products.
In 2018 Jamf acquired Joel’s startup, Orchard & Grove, which is where Joel developed the widely-used open source software NoMAD. Installed on over one million Macs across the globe, NoMAD allows macOS users to get all the benefits of Active Directory without having to be bound to them. Joel also developed other open source software at Orchard & Grove such as DEPNotify and NoMAD Login.
Over the years Joel has been a frequent speaker at a number of conferences including WWDC, MacSysAdmin, MacADUK, Penn State MacAdmins Conference, Objective by the Sea, FIDO Authenticate and others in addition to user groups everywhere.
Joel spent over a decade working at Apple in Enterprise Sales and started the website afp548.com which was the mainstay of Apple system administrator education during the early years of macOS X.
Joel is a classically trained journalist and plied his trade as a paparazzi chasing Monica Lewinsky before rising to become the Director of Photography for United Press International in Washington DC. If you’re lucky he’ll even tell you some of his Monica stories, as the stories are better than the photos…
Modern Identity Management and macOS
IT Analyst, City of Glasgow College
Speaker Bio
Users, Updates and Compliance (Oh My!)
Senior Tech Lead Manager, Airbnb
Speaker Bio
A serial releaser of open source macOS administration tools, Graham is the author of Sal, a modular reporting tool for endpoints, Crypt, a FileVault 2 key escrow solution and MDMDirector, an opinionated MDM orchestration tool.
Graham writes at grahamgilbert.com on the subjects of macOS in the enterprise, devops, automation and the intersection of the three. He is currently focused on building out the Mac Admins Foundation mentorship program and establishing the Mac Admins Open Source non-profit.
In his day job, Graham leads the Client Engineering team at Airbnb. He has a slight obsession with automating all of the things.
Gone Phishing: Airbnb’s journey to phishing resistant MFA
It seems like with every passing day there is another data breach in the news. With password lists being readily available on the dark web, it is often only your Multi-factor Authentication tool that is standing in between a bad actor and your data. Unfortunately, many MFA methods are trivial to phish.
This is the story of how Airbnb transitioned from traditional MFA methods to modern, phishing resistant security keys for all of our employees, contractors and external partners. We will look at our motivations, what the considerations were when planning the migration for our various types of users, and most importantly how we got buy-in from the entire company, from executive level down.
Senior Apple Engineer, ETH Zürich
Speaker Bio
Graham has worked as a Senior Apple Client Engineer at ETH Zürich, Switzerland for 6 years, with another 6 years before that spent supporting Macs at the University of Bristol in the UK.
He has become a specialist of all things Jamf, particularly the Jamf Pro APIs. He maintained the AutoPkg processor JSSImporter, and has developed a successful replacement project, JamfUploader.
He also maintains an active blog about Mac management. Away from the keyboard, Graham is a keen runner, hiker and Eurovision nerd.
Erase-install - the Swiss Army Knife of Upgrading and Reinstalling macOS
March 26, 2018: the release of macOS 13.4 introduced a new resource in the macOS installer apps that allowed us to erase and reinstall the system using a single terminal command. I published a convenience wrapper script for that command to git the same day, naming it erase-install.sh, which was a poor choice as it turned out. Little did I know back then, that a continual saga of problems with Apple’s software update mechanism would prompt such a large number of desperate Mac admins to turn to erase-install to solve their macOS updating woes.
This presentation will chart the evolution and unlikely success of the erase-install project, give an overview of its ever-increasing feature set, what problems it is currently solving for hundreds of Mac admins, and finally, look at other mechanisms for updating macOS we may be able to rely on in the future, which will hopefully render erase-install well-and-truly sherlocked.
CTO, MacStadium
Speaker Bio
Chris is a patent holder with over 20 years of experience in software development. His role at MacStadium is to software-define Mac infrastructure and create cloud solutions for companies to better leverage and manage Mac in their organisations. Chris knows that operations and development are tightly integrated in today's marketplace and that expertise in both disciplines is necessary to provide solid DevOps solutions. Chris’ ability to view Iaas from a developer’s perspective provides unique value. Prior to MacStadium, Chris has held CTO positions at multiple companies in the technology sector.
Unlocking Mac Virtualization for your Organization
With the advent of Apple Silicon Apple has rapidly evolved their virtualization tools and technology. These new tools have opened a whole new world of possibilities for mac admins and developers alike. Harnessing these tools can provide a new dynamic way for teams to build, test, train, deploy, and control environments. And coupling this technology with MDM and CI/CD can lead to a new level of agility and scalability for your business.
MacStadium has been a leader in mac infrastructure for more than a decade. We have evolved into being THE mac cloud. Our flagship product Orka leverages virtualization to create a scalable CI/CD platform for development teams across the globe. And now we have a new product designed for IT Admins, Developers and distributed teams everywhere called Orka Workspace. Orka Workspace leverages Apple Silicon virtualization to provide high quality, on-demand environments for anywhere access to your mac desktop.
Join us in hearing about the ins and outs of mac virtualization, the problems with managing mac resources in a hybrid world, and how mac cloud technologies can add to your toolkit. We’ll discuss what it can and can’t be used for, the advantages of adopting this technology, and the challenges you manage as you integrate these capabilities. Learn how Orka Workspace provides the transformative capability to help organizations reimagine training, testing, developing, deploying, and accessing an Apple work environment.
Principal Product Manager, JumpCloud
Speaker Bio
Modern Identity Management and macOS
Global Head of Professional Services & Training, FileWave
Speaker Bio
Conscious IT
Patching & Deployment with JumpCloud
Joshua Levitsky is the Global Head of Professional Services and Training at FileWave, a leading provider of unified endpoint management solutions.
He has over 30 years of experience in technology engineering and information security, and he leads an international team that delivers exceptional services and training to FileWave customers. He has experience in deploying FileWave for both computer and mobile device environments, and he is always exploring and integrating new tools and methods to optimize processes. He is also a volunteer firefighter and EMR, which demonstrates his passion for helping others and his ability to work under pressure. Joshua Levitsky is a lifelong learner and a natural problem-solver who takes pride in sharing his knowledge and driving organizational success.
Senior IT Systems Engineer, 10x Banking
Speaker Bio
Darren Wallace (aka Daz) will speak at MacAD.UK in ’23 for the second time. Starting as a hardware tech on iBook G3s, Daz joined an MSP team and became a highly valued Technical Consultant. Following over 12 years as a Lead Consultant and Lead Systems Engineer for various MSPs, designing complex customer technical solutions, he’s now turned his hand to an in-house IT role, working as a Senior IT Systems Engineer in the Fintech sector.
Daz is also one of the London Apple Admin organisers, helping to run meet-ups through the year for Apple Administrators in and around London.
Re-homing your Mac Admin
Director of Workplace Technology, Railsr
Speaker Bio
Railsr - Tales from the Front Line
A journey through the strategy, technology choices, and automations we applied to reinvent the Workplace Technology experience at Railsr.
Technical Lead for Workplace Solutions, Jigsaw24
Speaker Bio
After starting his career in a large secondary school in the West Midlands, Liam has spent the last eight years working for Jigsaw24, an Apple Enterprise & Education reseller in the UK. Working in several different roles – Site Engineer, Professional Services Engineer, Pre-Sales Consultant and now Technical Lead for Workplace Solutions – he’s picked up a wealth of experience and knowledge along the way.
In the past couple of years, Liam has been a Jamf integrator, training Mac admins how to use Jamf and manage Macs within their environments, and a Solution Consultant, designing solutions for organisations of all sizes to help them best manage and secure Apple devices in the workplace.
His new role, as Technical Lead for workplace solutions, means he’s responsible for Jigsaw24’s end user compute portfolio, managing vendor relationships and evangelising DevSecOps, and is very often present at events and technical workshops.
ELA ELA ELA, a a a
Liam and Bob are presenting a propriety tool around device analytics and management, which helps collect data from macOS devices typically missing from Mobile Device Management solutions and action specific controlled responses.
It specifically gathers information on CIS Benchmarks, CPU usage, memory usage, and other hardware/software metrics. In their presentation, they will demonstrate how this solution works and the value it can offer multiple teams within a business by generating automatic reports and providing insights via a central dashboard. These reports and insights can be used to identify trends and issues, monitor system performance, and make informed decisions about hardware and software upgrades. Additionally, the solution can help organisations to meet compliance requirements and adhere to industry best practices.
Along with a demonstration, Liam and Bob will go through how this solution was created and developed for macOS Devices and what it means to go beyond typical Mobile Device Management.
DevSecOps Lead Architect, Jigsaw24
Speaker Bio
Liam and Bob are presenting a propriety tool around device analytics and management, which helps collect data from macOS devices typically missing from Mobile Device Management solutions and action specific controlled responses. It specifically gathers information on CIS Benchmarks, CPU usage, memory usage, and other hardware/software metrics. In their presentation, they will demonstrate how this solution works and the value it can offer multiple teams within a business by generating automatic reports and providing insights via a central dashboard. These reports and insights can be used to identify trends and issues, monitor system performance, and make informed decisions about hardware and software upgrades. Additionally, the solution can help organisations to meet compliance requirements and adhere to industry best practices. Along with a demonstration, Liam and Bob will go through how this solution was created and developed for macOS Devices and what it means to go beyond typical Mobile Device Management.
Liam and Bob are presenting a propriety tool around device analytics and management, which helps collect data from macOS devices typically missing from Mobile Device Management solutions and action specific controlled responses.
It specifically gathers information on CIS Benchmarks, CPU usage, memory usage, and other hardware/software metrics. In their presentation, they will demonstrate how this solution works and the value it can offer multiple teams within a business by generating automatic reports and providing insights via a central dashboard. These reports and insights can be used to identify trends and issues, monitor system performance, and make informed decisions about hardware and software upgrades. Additionally, the solution can help organisations to meet compliance requirements and adhere to industry best practices.
Along with a demonstration, Liam and Bob will go through how this solution was created and developed for macOS Devices and what it means to go beyond typical Mobile Device Management.
Head of Innovation and Platform, dataJAR
Speaker Bio
Ben joined dataJAR in 2015, initially as a Systems Engineer and was subsequently promoted to Technical Director in 2017, before moving into the position of Head of Innovation and Platform in 2020.
He has been tinkering with Macs for more than 15 years, from OS 9 in music studios through to administering enterprise Mac and mobile environments.
Throughout his career, Ben has leveraged the brain trust that is the Apple Admin community, whilst he also co-founded London Apple Admins and given back via his blog (macmule.com).
For his contributions to the JAMF Nation community, Ben has been awarded a Deanship at the JAMF Nation User Conference (JNUC) and is a Jamf Hall of Fame inductee. He is an admin for macadmins.org on Slack and has released a number open source projects that help Mac admins around the world.
What’s new in macOS Ventura for Mac admins
Lead UI/UX Engineer, Addigy
Speaker Bio
Maximise Device Security and the Apple Experience
Device security, compliance, and Conditional Access are crucial in today’s modern workplace, but they can get in the way of your employees enjoying the rich and seamless Apple experience they expect.
In this session, discover how to combine compliance with Conditional Access to ensure all your devices are running on the latest, most secure Apple OS — without making your end users hate you. We’ll also dive into how to stay on top of your device security posture and always know the state of any device. We’ll include using NIST, CIS, and most importantly, how you can adjust these standards based on device location, and what is best suited for your organization!
Product Manager, Addigy
Speaker Bio
Maximise Device Security and the Apple Experience
Device security, compliance, and Conditional Access are crucial in today’s modern workplace, but they can get in the way of your employees enjoying the rich and seamless Apple experience they expect.
In this session, discover how to combine compliance with Conditional Access to ensure all your devices are running on the latest, most secure Apple OS — without making your end users hate you. We’ll also dive into how to stay on top of your device security posture and always know the state of any device. We’ll include using NIST, CIS, and most importantly, how you can adjust these standards based on device location, and what is best suited for your organization!
Senior Systems Admin, Filewave
Speaker Bio
More inf
Remote work is here to stay! Admins should expect to send new devices directly to end users and configure them in the field without ever laying hands on them. Keeping these devices up to date is challenging but necessary work.
At JumpCloud, our patch management solution is meant for exactly this kind of solution. JumpCloud can help reduce the industry-average 43-day patching windows, report out who needs updates for encouragement, and do it all without losing any work.
Zero-Touch deployment is all about reliable experiences that are pleasant for the end user. Remote onboarding can be challenging for any organization, but JumpCloud is here to help make this a positive experience for end users and admins alike. Automating the tasks performed by admins is a critical path to Zero-Touch success.
SVP of Product Strategy, Kandji
Speaker Bio
Weldon Dodd started his career running the Mac lab and the NeXT lab at the University of California Santa Barbara, and then spent time in KPMG’s telecom vertical where he led the product management practice and developed the partnerships with Cisco on directory-enabled networks, and Microsoft on Active Directory integration.
After a break from IT to teach high school and coach a Colorado state champion soccer program, Weldon spent 10 years in professional services automating large Apple deployments and running the Apple Training Center in Colorado. Weldon joined Kandji in 2020 where he built the sales engineering and solutions engineering teams, and now leads the product management team.
Security for Mac Admins
Compliance, PUP detection, visibility, CVEs, NVD, NIST, STIG…. Many Mac admins have ignored these terms and acronyms. Sometimes because we trust the inherent security built into Apple platforms, in other cases, we leave the jargon to security teams to decipher.
With the rapid growth of Apple in the enterprise, understanding Apple security is more critical now than ever. Join Kandji as we decode the security lingo and discuss why it matters to your Mac fleet.
Staff Systems Engineer, Walt Disney Animation Studios
Speaker Bio
Greg Neagle has been deploying and managing macOS machines for over two decades at Walt Disney Animation Studios, a studio with a long history of family entertainment reaching back to “Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs” and forward to our latest film, “Strange World”.
Several Mac management tools developed by Greg have been released as open source by Disney Animation. Among those are Munki, a software deployment framework, and Reposado, a platform-agnostic replacement for Apple’s Software Update service. He is also a maintainer of the popular AutoPkg tool. Greg has presented on various aspects of macOS management at conferences in Europe and North America. Greg is excited to return to MacAD.UK!
The Past, Present, and Future of Munki
Munki is a very popular open-source tool for managing software installs on macOS. Munki is nearly 15 years old! Greg will talk about the early development of Munki, how it progressed, and how a global community came together to help build not only Munki, but many other related tools. Greg will also review where we are today, talk about some present challenges, and reveal some plans and directions for the future — directions you may be able to participate in!
Product Manager, MacPaw
Speaker Bio
For the last six years, Pavlo has been a Product Manager at MacPaw, a software company that develops and distributes software for macOS and iOS, founded in 2008 in Kyiv, Ukraine. You might have heard of some projects he worked with: CleanMyMac, SpyBuster, Setapp (SAAS), and Gemini. He also helped launch valuable initiatives for professional communities, including an internal podcast project and the development of macOS, iOS, and Chrome Extensions. Pavlo started his career as an engineer and, in 2022, became one of the first team members in the newly formed Technological R&D department at MacPaw.
Pavlo started his career as an engineer and, in 2022, became one of the first team members in the newly formed Technological R&D department at MacPaw.
Keeping Your Users Satisfied with Security Changes: Backlog Prioritization in Times of Crisis
How to implement new services and systems yet keep your users satisfied? Though security changes are essential, accepting them takes time (especially for those not in the security department). If you get more constructive than positive feedback, if you have to handle performance during emergencies and crises (whether it’s a heat wave aftereffects or blackouts) – then you’re the right one for this session.
Mac Wrangler at Thoughtworks
Speaker Bio
macOS contains a built-in screen reader called VoiceOver...
… shift your mindset on accessibility and inclusion.
As Mac admins we build software, design user experiences, and even write documentation for our end users. But when we do that, how inclusive are we being?
It can be hard to get started, or even to know where to start in building more inclusive digital experiences…
Join me to learn more about where Thoughtworks are on that journey, and for actionable insights on how to remove barriers that you can apply right away. You don’t need to be an accessibility expert to start making a difference in this space!
Principal PM Manager, Microsoft
Speaker Bio
This is my seventeenth year at Microsoft working over various roles and technologies. For the last seven years I have been in Intune Engineering focusing on our macOS capabilities. My role is to work with our strategic customers to understand where our products are working well and, more importantly where they are not. I then work with my colleagues in feature development to set the direction for future development.
I am an operating system nerd at heart and macOS has been my daily driver for the last fifteen or so years.
More information coming soon
Consulting Engineer, Jamf
Speaker Bio
Luke Allen is a Consulting Engineer for Apple Technologies at Jamf and has been supporting customers to deploy Apple devices at scale in education and enterprise for over ten years. As a former Senior Systems Engineer at Apple, Luke is keen to support and contribute to the growth of our Apple admins community.
Luke also has an active interest in app development and spent a year out of the industry during the pandemic to work on independent computer games development.
Offboarding: The Security Blindspot
Currently, two of the most-discussed topics in the Mac Admin community are security and automation. Both should be set up to provide admins and end users a truly seamless user experience with security at its core. Onboarding and the day-to-day use of devices are often go-to areas that admins aim to perfect, but what about offboarding?
Whether a user is leaving the business suddenly or over a period of weeks, or months, it is important to provide an experience that is clear, well-documented and easy to implement.
Employees may have personal content, or sensitive corporate data on their device at risk of leaving the company perimeter. For a full understanding of secure offboarding and what it takes, this session will cover:
– What companies’ risk with improper offboarding processes
– Guidance on how to work with your broader organisation to form company-approved methods for data retrieval
– Tips, tools, and workflows you need for peace of mind whenever an employee leaves.
T/Inspector (Cyber Griffin), City of London Police