The Rich Web Experience - Speakers

As Principal Software Engineer at Red Hat, Dan serves as the JBoss Community liaison, leads the JBoss Testing Initiative and is a member of the Arquillian, ShrinkWrap and JBoss Forge 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.

Peter is an evangelist and hacker for hackNY - a not-for-profit that aims to federate the next generation of hackers for the New York innovation community.

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.

Tim is a full-stack generalist and passionate teacher who loves working with people as much as he loves to code. 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, why professionalized product management is a global suboptimization, and of course everything related to Git. He does not really believe that it is possible to teach, but rather believes that it is his responsibility to create an environment in which people can learn.

He is also a poet, having composed and produced companion videos for Oh, The Methods You'll Compose and The Maven, with another project currently in the works. If you've been in his Git classes, you've seen some famous poems make their way into the world's best version control system.

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, author of the Gradle Liquibase Plugin, the maintainer of the Ratpack web framework, co-presenter of the best-selling O'Reilly Git Master Class, co-author of Building and Testing with Gradle, a member of the O'Reilly Expert Network, and a member of the GigOM Pro Analyst Network. He occasionally blogs at timberglund.com.

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

Simone Bordet is a Jetty Committer, CometD project leader and works as Lead Architect at Webtide, now part of Intalio. Active open source developer, he founded and contributed to various open source projects such as Jetty, CometD, MX4J, Foxtrot, LiveTribe, and others. Simone has been technical speaker at various national and international conferences such as Devoxx, JavaOne, CodeMotion, etc., and is a co-lead of the Java User Group of Torino, Italy. Simone specializes in server-side multi-thread development, J2EE application development, in Comet technologies applied to web development, web network protocols and in high performance JVM tuning.

I am currently working at Netflix as a Lead Architect where I build applications which are deployed in the cloud. I have also worked at eBay as an Application Architect designing applications at scale and at Sun where I helped build a TMN platform used by high-end mobile vendors such as Motorola, Siemens, Qualcomm, etc. My passion is building systems and over my 20+ years in Software development, I have built many systems for many companies both large and small.

I consider myself a pragmatic software architect – someone who finds that adaptive design appears in the friction between ideas and implementation, vision and application, or as the Chinese say – “between the Thunder and the Rain”. There are several types of systems, and each of them requires structural design, model design, and process-design. Consequently I use design patterns, TDD, the cloud and Agile methodologies as the means to design, develop and deploy software.

I believe that building software is as much art as it is science and I find that every good idea creates it's own weather and this is what makes software development a continuous process of discovery and fun.

Dr. Pete Campbell is definitely a full-stack developer, having started his career designing computer chips and now focusing on interactive web applications. While still developing traditional server-based web applications in Ruby, Pete is steadily moving towards solutions that combine JavaScript, HTML5 and CSS to provide more rich, interactive web experiences.

After working on the Power5 microprocessor at IBM, he moved full-time into software development. He was a senior software architect at SheetMusicPlus for nine years and is now a freelance developer in the Washington D.C. area.

He is seriously considering naming his dog 'Node'.

Adrian is an active member of cloud interoperability, REST, and DevOps
circles. He is the founder of two popular open source projects:
jclouds and denominator, both of which are java libraries that help
create portable cloud deployments. His current title is "cloud guy"
at Netflix, focused on programmatic edge infrastructure.

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.

I am a software developer, innovator, father and husband. I didn't invent the web, HTTP, JavaScript or even rounded corners. I haven't written a book (yet) or any draft specifications but I do enjoy the challenge of pushing the limits of technology. I am passionate about spending time with my family, learning everything, messing with technology and evangelizing America's pastime.

I currently work as a Software Architect for the LDS Church where I have been influential in pushing the web as a strong platform for building applications. I am the founder and current manager of the Utah Google Developer Group where I enjoy interacting with other individuals who are passionate about learning technology. I have over a decade of experience as a developer and a B.S in Computer Science from Utah Valley University.

I am grateful to those many who have shared their knowledge, experience and criticism with me along the way. I believe the Web is incredibly successful because it is an open platform and learning should follow in that same spirit. I look forward to sharing what I have learned with you, but most of all I look forward to learning from you.

Connie has been developing websites for over fifteen years and is currently the lead UI developer for Office Depot's websites and mobile apps, where her work on their recently launched mobile website garnered it a perfect score for reliability and speed. Before joining Office Depot's team, she developed websites for Razorfish clients including Coca-Cola and AT&T. Connie has developed enterprise websites in languages as diverse as Arabic and Japanese, and has won numerous awards for her use of innovative techniques.

She is co-founder of the digital agency Pixelslave, Inc. and is a passionate evangelist for performance, user experience and accessibility. She is also the pseudonymous author of six novels in which she explores the dark side of technology.

Judd enjoys working for the LDS Church as a Principle Engineer / Enterprise Architect. He also is the Chief Architect of iGlobalExports. These days you will find him building distributed and scalable apps in the Cloud, as well as working a lot with JavaScript, Node.JS, and of course Java. In addition to software development, he enjoys tinkering with Raspberry Pi, Arduino, and Android based projects. Judd lives near Salt Lake City, Utah with his lovely wife and five kids.

I've spent the last several years swimming (at times sinking) in the Front End waters. Finding JS and CSS/HTML was the best thing that could have happened to me. By day I am a project member on a team that is building a mobile web app for over 50,000 servicemen and servicewomen worldwide. By night I am working with O'Reilly Media and Steve Olson, and we are writing the book 'JS.Next: ES6', which should be out towards the end of 2012. Additionally I work on several small projects for myself, and one with my identical twin brother. Peppered in between working hours, I enjoy being married to a wonderful wife, and being the dad of three amazing monsters. And when the world is white and frozen, you will find me atop the mountain ice fishing.

Raju Gandhi is a Java/Ruby developer and a programming language geek. He has been writing software for the better part of a decade in several industries including education, finance, construction and the manufacturing sector. Raju has a graduate degree in Industrial Engineering from Ohio University. In his spare time you will find Raju reading, or watching movies, or playing with yet another programming language. He is affectionately known as looselytyped on Twitter.

Wesley Hales is a User Interface architect from Atlanta, GA. He has been involved in UI and User Experience roles for over a decade in both startup and enterprise environments. Wesley co-founded several enterprise frameworks during his 4+ years at JBoss by Red Hat (including the JBoss Portlet Bridge and AeroGear projects) and also served as a co-founder of a recently acquired startup.
Wesley enjoys creating world-class user interfaces and experiences that people fall in love with. You can see him speak at the occasional conference, read his posts on wesleyhales.com, or follow him on twitter @wesleyhales.

James is an experienced Java developer and has spent a majority of his career building large-scale online applications at Accenture and at several Web-centric consulting firms. He now specializes in training Java developers to be more productive by using the latest technologies and frameworks. Jim has provided training for Fortune 500 companies and large private and governmental organizations including Knight Ridder Newspapers and the State of Wisconsin. He lectures extensively throughout the United States and Canada. He is also the author of "Dojo: Using the Dojo JavaScript Library to Build Ajax Applications".

James is also the founder and principal contributor to the site AndroidDevTools.com

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 and works as a Senior Solutions Architect at LucidWorks.

Prior to forming Stormpath, Les held senior architectural positions at Bloomberg and Delta Airlines and he was former CTO of a software engineering firm supporting educational and government agencies. Les has been actively involved in Open Source development for more than 10 years, committing or contributing to projects like the Spring Framework, JBoss, and of course Apache Shiro.

Les has a BS in Computer Science from Georgia Tech, currently lives in San Mateo, CA and practices Kendo and studies Japanese when he's not banging out code.

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.

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,

Christopher Judd is the president and primary consultant for Judd Solutions (http://www.juddsolutions.com), an international speaker, an open source evangelist, the Central Ohio Java Users Group (http://www.cojug.org) and Columbus iPhone Developer User Group leader, and the co-author of Beginning Groovy and Grails (Apress, 2008) as well as the author of the children’s book “Bearable Moments”. He has spent 16 years architecting and developing software for Fortune 500 companies in various industries, including insurance, retail, government, manufacturing, service, and transportation. His current focus is on consulting, mentoring, and training with Java, Java EE, Groovy, Grails, Cloud Computing and mobile platforms like iPhone, Android, Java ME and mobile web.

Ken Kousen is the President of Kousen IT, Inc., through which he does technical training, mentoring, and consulting in all areas of Java and XML. He is the author of the O'Reilly screencast "Up and Running Groovy", and the upcoming Manning book about Java/Groovy integration, entitled "Making Java Groovy".

He has been a tech reviewer for several books on software development. Over the past decade he's taught thousands of developers in business and industry. He is also an adjunct professor at the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute site in Hartford, CT. His academic background includes two BS degrees from M.I.T., an MS and a Ph.D. from Princeton, and an MS in Computer Science from R.P.I.

Seth is a web engineer and Chrome Developer Advocate, helping developers of all sizes launch awesome modern web apps with Dart. He produced Aloha on Rails, the Hawaii Ruby on Rails and Web Development Conference, and New Game, the conference for HTML5 game developers. Way back, Seth co-authored the Expert Spring MVC book. More recently, he helped release Angry Birds for the web. Seth is on the board of the Academy of Interactive Arts and Sciences.

I've been involved in the software industry for over 21 years, holding various technical and management positions. Over my time in the industry, much has changed, but one constant is the need for those in the business to grow their skills and keep up with ever-changing technologies and paradigms.

To that end, I've always tried to make time to learn and develop both technical and leadership skills and share them with others. In the early days, I taught community college classes on topics like Lotus and early versions of Windows while working as a software developer by day.

Fast forward quite a few years and more recently, I've been fortunate enough to have a chance to explore and train others in technologies like Git and Jenkins as part of my job managing a group focusing on developer productivity and emerging technologies. Regardless of the topic or technology, there's no substitute for the excitement and sense of potential that come from providing others with the knowledge they need to help them accomplish their goals.

In my spare time, I hang out with my 3 sons, my wonderful wife, 2 dogs, a cat, and a dwarf hamster in Apex, North Carolina and volunteer in local Cub Scout and Boy Scout organizations.

Nancy works at the intersection of technology, community, and people. As a leader and technologist, she creates solutions that further community and business goals by meeting the needs of individuals. Her guiding philosophy is that a human-centered approach to technology is the only way to get results that make a difference. Problem solving is about empowerment: motivated people create good products. Nancy supports clients and teams by fostering a collaborative, idea-driven culture that nurtures creativity and brainpower.

Nancy is President/CEO of Clockwork Active Media, a leading digital agency specializing in designing and developing business solutions for web and mobile. She speaks extensively about work culture, social media, technology, and leadership and has been locally and nationally recognized for her role as owner and CEO of Clockwork. Nancy also serves on the national Board of Directors of The Family Equality Council.

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 VP of Training at 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 (Gradle), distributed version control (Git, GitHub), Continuous Integration (Jenkins, Travis) 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.

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.

Jason Porter is a software engineer currently working in the Java Enterprise Edition Space and Seam at Red Hat. His specialties include JBoss AS, Seam, CDI, JSF, Java EE, Gradle. He has worked with PHP, Ruby (both stand-alone and Rails), Groovy, XSLT, SASS the rest of the web language arena (HTML, CSS, JS, etc). His current position as Senior Software Engineer at Red Hat has him work primarily on jdf, however, he also contributes to JBoss Forge, Arquillian, Apache DeltaSpike, Awestruct and others as time allows. He's very interested in the developer experience and helping to improve it at all aspects.

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".

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.

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. In an effort to rid the world of bad presentations, Nate coauthored the book Presentation Patterns with Neal Ford and Matthew McCullough.

John Simone is an engineer at Heroku. He helped implement and currently leads the maintenance of Heroku's Java language and Enterprise support. John has been creating software for over 12 years and has had the opportunity to act as either an engineer, architect, or consultant for a number of innovators including eBay, Blockbuster, JPMorgan Chase, PBS, Cisco, and Cablevision.

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.

Brian Sletten is a liberal arts-educated software engineer with a focus on forward-leaning technologies. His experience has spanned many industries including retail, banking, online games, defense, finance, hospitality and health care. He has a B.S. in Computer Science from the College of William and Mary and lives in Auburn, CA. He focuses on web architecture, resource-oriented computing, social networking, the Semantic Web, data science, 3D graphics, visualization, scalable systems, security consulting and other technologies of the late 20th and early 21st Centuries. He is also a rabid reader, devoted foodie and has excellent taste in music. If pressed, he might tell you about his International Pop Recording career.

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.

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).

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.

Thomas A. Valletta, Mobile Architect, Open Web Evangelist, 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.

Craig Walls 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, 2 birds and 3 dogs.

Meghan specializes in using strategy, technology, and process to bring people and products together. Her public speaking, writing and outreach guides individuals and businesses to develop smart digital products. Whether she's managing a team or mentoring students, she believes that technology creates endless opportunities to make life easier and to produce meaningful connections. She empowers users to proactively engage with the web by being aware, educated, and attentive and spearheads dialogue that drives evolution within the interactive community.

Meghan is the VP, Managing Director at Clockwork Active Media, a digital agency specializing in designing and developing business solutions for web and mobile. She's a contributing writer at GTDtimes.com, and was named as a "Woman to Watch" by the Minneapolis/St. Paul Business Journal.