The speaker, Tom Sofau from Red Hat, gave a talk titled "Effective Management of Kubernetes Resources: The GitOps Way". He talked about the challenges of managing Kubernetes resources and how they can be solved using YAML files and GitOps principles. He introduced a pattern that they have developed for organizing and structuring YAML manifests, which includes using customization overlays and components. He also discussed the benefits and limitations of using this pattern and shared the experiences of four organizations that have adopted it. The talk emphasized the importance of managing cloud resources in a way that is easy to understand, audit, and review, and encouraged the audience to explore and learn from their approach.