Manik Surtani
Positioned in the Office of the CTO at Block (formerly Square), Manik Surtani is the Open Source lead and is responsible for Block’s open source strategy and culture, and Block’s Open Source Programs Office (OSPO).
His long tenure at Block has seen him wear many hats, including VP of Platform Engineering for CashApp (one of Block’s business units), leading strategic initiatives such as monolith decomposition, and as a staff IC responsible for highly fault tolerant distributed payments infrastructure. Prior to Block, Manik was a staff IC at Red Hat, was the creator and lead engineer of Infinispan.org (which is today a multi-billion dollar product line for Red Hat). He was also an early engineer on JBoss (an open source Java EE application server) which later got acquired by Red Hat.
He has a background in distributed and fault tolerant systems, data grids, networking and load balancing, and performance tuning of JVMs, and is a strong proponent of open source development methodologies, ethos, and collaborative processes. He has been involved in open source since his first forays into computing, ever since compiling Slackware Linux in the early 1990s, with contributions to Linux, MySQL, PHP, OpenJDK, and many popular Java libraries you probably still use today.
In addition to leading open source, Manik spends a lot of time thinking about the intersection between AI and open source, and how open source can create the right balance between transparency, safety, and velocity for the explosive growth of AI, particularly with Goose, Block’s new open source agent framework.
Events
| Title | Day | Room | Track | Start | End |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Infusing Open Source Culture into Company DNA: A Conversation with Jack Dorsey and Manik Surtani, Block's head of Open Source |
Sunday | Janson | Keynotes | 12:00 | 12:30 |