Kamal Nasser is a software engineer at DigitalOcean who discusses static sites, traditional server-based applications, microservices, and various programming languages and frameworks like Ruby, PHP, Python, Node.js, and frameworks like Ruby on Rails, React, and Vue.js. He demonstrates why using an application platform provides benefits like CDN, HTTPS, DDoS protection, easy scaling, and high availability. The live demo shows a Laravel application connected to a PostgreSQL database, Redis database, and using Horizon and a Spaces CDN.