Speakers

Dr. Venkat Subramaniam, founder of Agile Developer, Inc., has trained and mentored thousands of software developers in the US, Canada, Europe, and Asia. Venkat helps his clients effectively apply and succeed with agile practices on their software projects, and speaks frequently at international conferences and user groups. Venkat is also an adjunct faculty and teaches CS courses remotely at the University of Houston. He is author of ".NET Gotchas," coauthor of 2007 Jolt Productivity Award winning "Practices of an Agile Developer," author of "Programming Groovy: Dynamic Productivity for the Java Developer" and "Programming Scala: Tackle Multi-Core Complexity on the Java Virtual Machine" (Pragmatic Bookshelf).

Matt Stine is an Enterprise Java/Cloud consultant based in Memphis, TN. He is a twelve year veteran of the enterprise software and web development industries, with experience spanning the healthcare, biomedical research, e-commerce, and retail store domains.

Matt has spoken at conferences ranging from JavaOne to CodeMash and has published several articles for Agile Zone, GroovyMag and NFJS the Magazine, as well as the Selenium 2.0 DZone Refcard. Matt is also the founder of the Memphis/Mid-South Java User Group.

His current areas of interest include lean/agile software development, software architecture, mobile application development and functional languages.

Brian Sletten is a liberal arts-educated software engineer with a focus on using and evangelizing forward-leaning technologies. He has a background as a system architect, a developer, a security consultant, a mentor, a team lead, an author and a trainer and operates in all of those roles as needed. His experience has spanned the online game, defense, finance, academic, hospitality, retail and commercial domains. He has worked with a wide variety of technologies such as network matrix switch controls, 3D simulation/visualization, Grid Computing, P2P and Semantic Web-based systems. He has a B.S. in Computer Science from the College of William and Mary. He is President of Bosatsu Consulting, Inc. and lives in Los Angeles, CA.

He focuses on web architecture, resource-oriented computing, social networking, the Semantic Web, scalable systems, security consulting and other technologies of the late 20th and early 21st Centuries.

Ken has been a practitioner and instructor of RUP since the late 1990s, and an extreme programmer and coach since the middle 2000s. Ken has worked with Fortune 500 companies to small startups in the roles of developer, designer, application architect and enterprise architect. Ken's current focus is on enterprise system automation and continuous delivery systems.

Ken is an international speaker on the subject of software engineering speaking at conferences such as JavaOne, JavaZone, Jax-India, and The Strange Loop. He is a regular speaker with NFJS where he is best known for his architecture and security hacking talks. In 2009, Ken was honored by being awarded the JavaOne Rockstar Award at JavaOne in SF, California and the JavaZone Rockstar Award at JavaZone in Oslo, Norway as the top ranked speaker.

Nathaniel T. Schutta is a senior software engineer focussed on making usable applications. A proponent of polyglot programming, Nate has written two books on Ajax and speaks regularly at various worldwide conferences, No Fluff Just Stuff symposia, universities, and Java user groups. In addition to his day job, Nate is an adjunct professor at the University of Minnesota where he teaches students to embrace dynamic languages.

Pratik Patel is the CTO of Atlanta based TripLingo (http://www.triplingo.com/). He wrote the first book on 'enterprise Java' in 1996, "Java Database Programming with JDBC." He has also spoken at various conferences and participates in several local tech groups and startup groups. He's in the startup world now and hacks iOS, Android, HTML5, CSS3, JavaScript, Rails, and ..... well everything except Perl.
Pratik's specialty is in large-scale applications for mission-critical and mobile applications use. He has designed and built applications in the retail, health care, financial services, and telecoms sectors. Pratik holds a master's in Biomedical Engineering from UNC, has worked in places such as New York, London, and Hong Kong, and currently lives in Atlanta, GA.

Ted Neward is an Architectural Consultant with Neudesic, LLC as well as the Principal with Neward & Associates. He speaks on the conference circuit discussing Java, .NET and XML service technologies, focusing on Java-.NET interoperability, programming languages, and virtual machine technologies. He has written several widely-recognized books in both the Java and .NET space, including the recently- released "Professional F#" and widely-acclaimed "Effective Enterprise Java". He lives in the Pacific Northwest.

Matthew McCullough is an energetic 15 year veteran of enterprise software development, open source education, and co-founder of Ambient Ideas, LLC, a Denver consultancy. Matthew currently is a trainer for GitHub.com, author of the Git Master Class series for O'Reilly, speaker at over 30 national and international conferences, author of three of the top 10 DZone RefCards, and President of the Denver Open Source Users Group. His current topics of research center around project automation: build tools (Maven, Leiningen, Gradle), distributed version control (Git), Continuous Integration (Hudson) and Quality Metrics (Sonar). Matthew resides in Denver, Colorado with his beautiful wife and two young daughters, who are active in nearly every outdoor activity Colorado has to offer.

Neal is Software Architect and Meme Wrangler at ThoughtWorks, a global IT consultancy with an exclusive focus on end-to-end software development and delivery.
Before joining ThoughtWorks, Neal was the Chief Technology Officer at The DSW Group, Ltd., a nationally recognized training and development firm. Neal has a degree in Computer Science from Georgia State University specializing in languages and compilers and a minor in mathematics specializing in statistical analysis.
He is also the designer and developer of applications, instructional materials, magazine articles, video presentations, and author of 6 books, including the most recent The Productive Programmer. His language proficiencies include Java, C#/.NET, Ruby, Groovy, functional languages, Scheme, Object Pascal, C++, and C. His primary consulting focus is the design and construction of large-scale enterprise applications. Neal has taught on-site classes nationally and internationally to all phases of the military and to many Fortune 500 companies. He is also an internationally acclaimed speaker, having spoken at over 100 developer conferences worldwide, delivering more than 600 talks. If you have an insatiable curiosity about Neal, visit his web site at http://www.nealford.com. He welcomes feedback and can be reached at nford@thoughtworks.com.

Tim is a full-stack generalist and passionate teacher who loves coding, presenting, and working with people. He believes the best developer is one who is well-informed of specifics and can also make deep connections between software development and the broader world. He has recently been exploring non-relational data stores, continuous deployment, and how software architecture should resemble an ant colony.

His firm, the August Technology Group, helps clients with product development, technology consulting, and technology upgrade projects atop the JVM. The August Group's technology preferences reflect the generalist sensibilities of its founder, and its development practices are always lightweight, self-improving, and humanizing by design.

Tim is a speaker internationally and on the No Fluff Just Stuff tour in the United States, and is co-president of the Denver Open Source User Group in the Denver area, co-author of the DZone Clojure RefCard, co-presenter of the best-selling O'Reilly Git Master Class, co-author of Building and Testing with Gradle, and a member of the O'Reilly Expert Network.

He lives in Littleton, CO with the wife of his youth and their three children.

Peter is Senior VP Engineering and Senior Fellow at General Assembly, a campus for technology, design, and entrepreneurship. He is responsible for hiring and managing an engineering team and is involved in the development and teaching of the technology curriculum.

Peter is a regular presenter at national and international conferences on ruby, nodejs, NoSQL (especially MongoDB and neo4j), cloud computing, software craftsmanship, java, groovy, javascript, and requirements and estimating. He is on the program committee for Code Generation in Cambridge, England and the Domain Specific Modeling workshop at SPLASH (was ooPSLA) and reviews and shepherds proposals for the BCS SPA conference.

He has presented at a range of conferences including DLD conference, ooPSLA, RubyNation, SpringOne2GX, Code Generation, Practical Product Lines, the British Computer Society Software Practices Advancement conference, DevNexus, cf.Objective(), CF United, Scotch on the Rocks, WebDU, WebManiacs, UberConf, the Rich Web Experience and the No Fluff Just Stuff Enterprise Java tour.

He has been published in IEEE Software, Dr. Dobbs, IBM developerWorks, Information Week, Methods & Tools, Mashed Code, NFJS the Magazine and GroovyMag. He's currently writing a book on managing software development for Pearson.

He is an organizer of the CTO School http://www.ctoschool.org - an organization in NYC devoted to creating the next generation of technical leaders. He also organizes the node.js meetup in New York and co-organizes the Domain Driven Design and Grails meetups.

He is a regular instructor at General Assembly in New York. His presentations cover managing software development, NoSQL, mobile development, Javascript development, Twitter Bootstrap and Javascript frameworks.

He tweets regularly as @peterbell.

Craig Walls has been professionally developing software for almost 18 years (and longer than that for the pure geekiness of it). He is a senior engineer with SpringSource as the Spring Social project lead and is the author of Spring in Action and XDoclet in Action (both published by Manning) and Modular Java (published by Pragmatic Bookshelf). He's a zealous promoter of the Spring Framework, speaking frequently at local user groups and conferences and writing about Spring and OSGi on his blog. When he's not slinging code, Craig spends as much time as he can with his wife, two daughters, 4 birds and 3 dogs.

Estelle Weyl started her professional life in architecture, then managed teen health programs. In 2000, she took the natural step of becoming a web standardista. She has consulted for Kodakgallery, Yahoo! and Apple, among others. Estelle shares esoteric tidbits learned while programming CSS, JavaScript and XHTML in her blog at http://evotech.net/blog and provides tutorials and detailed grids of CSS3 and HTML5 browser support in her blog at http://www.standardista.com. She is the author of HTML5, CSS3, and JavaScript for Mobile (O'Reilly, October 2011) and HTML5 and CSS3 for the Real World (Sitepoint, May 2011). While not coding, she works in construction, de-hippifying her 1960’s throwback abode.

Johnny is a principal engineer at Time Warner Cable in the Web Services group with over fifteen years of web application development. He is a generalist with experience in all layers of an application from the database to the UI. Currently, the projects he works on see traffic in the millions on a monthly basis, and the work has extended out to other client platforms including the popular Time Warner Cable iPad live video streaming application which recently won a engineering award from the Academy of Television Arts and Sciences.

Eric writes high-performance web applications with a variety of platforms like Grails, HBase, Node.js and LIFT. He also maintains some interesting Javascript applications like mapping customer downloads, installations and registrations in real-time with Google Maps and a tool that helps debug Javascript in all web browsers (stacktracejs.org).

He often speaks at user groups about Javascript, Hadoop, and other miscellany.

He actively develops and maintains several OSS projects like (CSS Lint) a couple Gradle plugins, Javascript tools on GitHub, and a blog with 1500+ subscribers (eriwen.com).

Eric lives in Westminster, CO, with his wife, Erika and two insane mutts. He tends to interact with other community members via Twitter (@eriwen)

Thomas A. Valletta, Open Web Evangelist, Enterprise Architect, and hack has been developing for the web for fourteen years. His clients range across industries including defence, healthcare, technology, e-commerce, human resources and religion. He has professionally developed native applications for Android, iPhone, WebOS, Blackberry, and Windows. He has engineered solutions using Java, .Net, PHP, JavaScript, Objective C, VBScript and Commodore Basic (I am pretty sure that those last two don't count). He lives outside of Salt Lake City, Utah with his wife and four children.

Dr. Johannes Ullrich is Dean of Faculty, Chief Research Officer and a faculty member of SANS Technology Institute. Johannes also serves on the following SANS Technology Institute committees: Faculty and Administration, Curriculum and Long Range Planning. As chief research officer for the SANS Institute, Johannes is currently responsible for the SANS Internet Storm Center (ISC) and the GIAC Gold program. He founded DShield.org in 2000, which is now the data collection engine behind the ISC. His work with the ISC has been widely recognized, and in 2004, Network World named him one of the 50 most powerful people in the networking industry. Prior to working for SANS, Johannes worked as a lead support engineer for a Web development company and as a research physicist. Johannes holds a PhD in Physics from SUNY Albany and is located in Jacksonville, Florida.

Dylan Schiemann is CEO of SitePen and co-founder of the Dojo Toolkit, an open source JavaScript toolkit for rapidly building web sites and applications, and is an expert in the technologies and opportunities of the Open Web. Under his guidance, SitePen has grown from a small development firm to a leading provider of inventive tools, skilled software engineers, knowledgeable consulting services, and top-notch training and advice. Dylan is a contributing author to the O'Reilly book "Even Fast Web Sites". Dylan's commitment to R&D has enabled SitePen to be a major contributor to or creator of pioneering open source web
development toolkits and frameworks like Dojo, cometD, DWR, and Persevere. Prior to SitePen, Dylan developed web applications for companies like Renkoo, Informatica, Security FrameWorks and Vizional Technologies. He is a co-founder of Comet Daily, LLC, a board member at Dojo Foundation and a member of the Advisory Board at Aptana. Dylan
earned his Masters in Physical Chemistry from UCLA and his B.A. in Mathematics from Whittier College.

Brian Sam-Bodden is an author, instructor, speaker and hacker that has spent over fifteen years crafting software systems. He holds dual bachelor degrees from Ohio Wesleyan University in computer science and physics and heads Integrallis http://www.integrallis.com. He is a frequent speaker at user groups and conferences nationally and abroad. Brian is the author of "Beginning POJOs: Spring, Hibernate, JBoss and Tapestry", co-author of the "Enterprise Java Development on a Budget: Leveraging Java Open Source Technologies" and a contributor to O'reilly's "97 Things Every Project Manager Should Know".

Terry Ryan is a Worldwide Developer Evangelist for Adobe. The job basically entails helping developers using Adobe technologies to be successful. His focus is on web and mobile technologies including expertise in both Flash and HTML. Previous to that, he spent a decade working in various technical roles at the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania.

Terry is also the author of Driving Technical Change, a Pragmatic Bookshelf title. It's about convincing reluctant co-workers to adopt new tools and ideas.

He blogs at http://terrenceryan.com/blog and is tpryan on Twitter.

Tim Kadlec is web developer living and working in northern Wisconsin with a propensity for efficient, standards-based front-end development. His diverse background working with small companies to large publishers and industrial corporations has allowed him to see how these standards can be effectively utilized for businesses of all sizes.

His current interests include creating cross-platform sites and applications using the open web stack and improving the state of performance optimization on the web.

He sporadically writes about a variety of topics at timkadlec.com. You can also find him sharing his thoughts in a briefer format on @tkadlec. Tim also curates Breaking Development, one of the first conferences dedicated to design and development for mobile devices using web technologies.

Denise R. Jacobs is a writer, speaker, designer, and educator on many things web. She is author of The CSS Detective Guide, and is a co-author for InterAct with Web Standards: A Holistic Approach to Web Design. She is a Web Solutions Consultant based in Miami, Florida,

Earlier in life, Molly avoided a regular job including those silly start-up ventures and chose instead to write a lot of books and articles and stuff on Web standards, and talk a lot about them, too. She now avoids the former, while the latter is an ongoing inevitability.

To learn more about Molly and her work, you can check out her blog at http://molly.com/ or interact with her on Twitter @mollydotcom. Better yet, come have a chat F2F at RWX Fort Lauderdale 2011!

Mike Heath is a principal software engineer for the LDS Church working in the core technology group. He has contributed to multiple open source projects including Apache MINA, Apache JAMES, and JBoss Netty. He has a B.S. in computer science from Utah Valley University and a M.S. in computer science from Brigham Young University.

Erik Hatcher is the co-author of "Lucene in Action" as well as co-author of "Java Development with Ant". Erik has been an active member of the Lucene community - a leading Lucene and Solr committer, member of the Lucene Project Management Committee, member of the Apache Software Foundation as well as a frequent invited speaker at various industry events. Erik co-founded Lucid Imagination, and is a member of its technical staff.

Szczepan Faber is a software craftsman professionally involved in IT since early 2000. He worked for Thoughtworks UK helping companies to build enterprise software using XP methods. He was a team leader and an agile coach for Sabre Holdings where he relentlessly pushed teams for more agility, effective processes and state-of-art development environment. Szczepan specializes in an enterprise project automation, developer tools and agile engineering practices. His passion for agile testing and TDD led him to author or contribute to numerous open source tools in programming languages ranging from Groovy, Java, JavaScript to Flex or Python.

Szczepan is a founder of Mockito framework, a popular mocking library that augments Test Driven Development. Szczepan has been speaking at international conferences and delivered various trainings on agile programming techniques and project automation.

Gabriel Dayley is a senior software developer for the LDS Church where he has been influential in developing rich web applications using GWT. He is the founder and manager of the "Utah Google Technology User Group" and enjoys interacting with others about technology. He has been developing in Java for over 10 years and has served on the board for the Utah Java User Group. He has B.S in Computer Science from Utah Valley University and currently resides in Lehi, Utah.

Luke Daley is a member of the Gradleware engineering team. At Gradleware Luke works on Gradle (A JVM based build automation tool) and helps teams reach new levels of project automation and quality.

Luke is the lead of the Geb project (a productivity focussed Groovy browser automation/web testing tool) project which he created in 2010. You'll also find Luke contributing to other Open Source projects such as Grails (a Groovy web development framework), Spock (a next generation testing framework for the JVM) and anything else that catches his attention. With a “results over rhetoric” ethos, Luke's focus is on tools that empower software professionals to deliver and innovate, not try to save them from themselves.

Originally from Australia, Luke now resides in London where he spreads his time among work, software crafstmanship, musicianship and cursing the local weather.

David Chandler works with the Google Developer Tools Team in Atlanta. An electrical engineer by training, Chandler got hooked on developing database Web applications in the days of NCSA Mosaic and has since written Web applications professionally in a variety of languages, including C, perl, ksh, ColdFusion, Java, JSF, GWT, and Dart. Prior to joining Google, Chandler worked on Internet banking applications with Intuit and launched a non-profit startup built with GWT and AppEngine. Chandler holds a patent on a method of organizing hierarchical data in a relational database and blogs about Java Web development at turbomanage.wordpress.com.

David Bock is a Principal Consultant at CodeSherpas, a company he founded in 2007. Mr. Bock is also the President of the Northern Virginia Java Users Group, the Editor of O'Reilly's OnJava.com website, and a frequent speaker on technology in venues such as the No Fluff Just Stuff Software Symposiums.

In January 2006, Mr. Bock was honored by being awarded the title of Java Champion by a panel of esteemed leaders in the Java Community in a program sponsored by Sun. There are approximately 100 active Java Champions worldwide.

David has also served on several JCP panels, including the Specification of the Java 6 Platform and the upcoming Java Module System.

In addition to his public speaking and training activities, Mr. Bock actively consults as a software engineer, project manager, and team mentor for commercial and government clients.

As Principal Software Engineer at JBoss, by Red Hat, Dan serves as the JBoss Community liaison, leads the JBoss Testing Initiative and is a member of the Seam, Weld, Arquillian and ShrinkWrap projects. He authored Seam in Action (Manning), served as a representative for Red Hat on the JSR-314 Expert Group (JSF 2.0), writes for IBM developerWorks and NFJS magazine and is an internationally recognized speaker. He's appeared at major industry conferences including JavaOne, Devoxx, NFJS, JAX and Jazoon and has received recognition as a JavaOne Rock Star, a JBossWorld Top Presenter and a JAX Hall of Fame speaker.

To colleagues, Dan's known for his hard work and passion for Open Source technologies. His technical expertise includes Java frameworks (Seam, CDI, Weld, JSF, EJB 3, JPA, Hibernate, Spring), testing frameworks (Arquillian, JUnit, TestNG, Selenium), build tools (Maven 2, Gradle, Ant) and web development (Ajax, JavaScript, CSS) and more.

You can keep up with Dan's discoveries by reading his blogs at http://mojavelinux.com and http://community.jboss.org/people/dan.j.allen/blog or tracking what he's currently up to by following him on Twitter at http://twitter.com/mojavelinux.