Speaking
The 'cloud bard' on your stage
Book nowForrest Brazeal and his signature grand piano have "key"-noted some of the biggest stages in tech, from Google Cloud Next in San Francisco to IT Revolution in Amsterdam and Las Vegas.
At every stop, Forrest weaves technical insight with live music and original cartoons to deliver a keynote talk your attendees won't stop talking about.
With a deep background in startups and enterprise technology on both the engineering and GTM sides, Forrest often speaks (and sings) on:
- Cloud and DevOps transformation
- Generative AI
- The woes and joys of software engineering
- How marketers can earn the attention of technical people
- And who knows what else (just ask!)
Not pictured: boredom.
Press kit
Speaker bio (short)
Forrest Brazeal is an author, tech educator, cartoonist, and Pwnie Award-winning songwriter. He left Google in 2024 to found the technical media company Good Tech Things. His community initiative, the Cloud Resume Challenge, has helped thousands of nontraditional learners take their first steps toward a career in tech.
Speaker bio (medium)
Forrest Brazeal is an author, tech educator, cartoonist, and Pwnie Award-winning songwriter. Before leaving Google in 2024 to found the technical media company Good Tech Things, he was Google Cloud's Head of Developer Media and held marketing and software engineering leadership positions at A Cloud Guru, Trek10, and Infor.
Known for making complex technical topics accessible through original songs and cartoons, Forrest was one of the original AWS Serverless Heroes and twice co-chaired ServerlessConf. He has been named one of the world's top 7 AWS experts (Jefferson Frank, 2019) and one of the top 50 global voices in cloud (Onalytica, 2023).
His community initiative, the Cloud Resume Challenge, has helped thousands of nontraditional learners take their first steps toward a career in tech. Forrest also wrote "The Read Aloud Cloud" (Wiley, 2020), a colorful introduction to cloud computing for general audiences.
Speaker bio (long)
Forrest Brazeal is an author, tech educator, cartoonist, and Pwnie Award-winning songwriter. Before leaving Google in 2024 to found the technical media company Good Tech Things, he was Google Cloud's Head of Developer Media and held marketing and software engineering leadership positions at A Cloud Guru / Pluralsight, Trek10, and Infor.
Before joining Google Cloud, Forrest was one of the original AWS Serverless Heroes and twice co-chaired ServerlessConf. He has been named one of the world's top 7 AWS experts (Jefferson Frank, 2019) and one of the top 50 global voices in cloud (Onalytica, 2023). He holds a master's degree in computer science from Georgia Tech.
Forrest is known for making complex technical topics delightfully accessible - often through original music and cartoons. He wrote "The Read Aloud Cloud" (Wiley, 2020), a colorful introduction to cloud computing for general audiences, and received a Pwnie Award at the Black Hat security conference in 2021 for "The Ransomware Song." His songs and cartoons have reached millions of developers around the world.
Forrest's community initiative, the Cloud Resume Challenge, was launched during the pandemic and has since helped thousands of nontraditional learners take their first steps toward a career in tech. You can learn more at cloudresumechallenge.dev and subscribe to his newsletter at goodtechthings.com.
Forrest lives in Davidson, North Carolina with his wife and three children. In his spare time he enjoys advising startups and writing science fiction.