Speakers

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.

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.

Richard D. Worth is a UI developer in the Washington, DC area. He is one of the lead developers of jQuery UI, a component framework built on top of jQuery, designed to make Rich Internet Applications as simple as jQuery has made Ajax. Richard is also a co-author of the upcoming book 'jQuery Cookbook'.

Mike Wilcox is a software engineer for of one of the top AJAX companies in the United States, SitePen Inc., which is comprised of the original contributors of the Dojo Toolkit and other open source technologies. As co-founder of the JavaScript user group in Dallas, Club AJAX, Mike is a regular speaker with presentations that include "The JavaScript Programming Primer" and "'That's not Flash?' Native Browser Vector Graphics".

Mike is a key developer for the new Deft project in Dojo that implements most of the Flash-based components used in DojoX, like the File Uploader and the Video and Audio controls. He is also a primary contributor of the Dojo extensions for Adobe AIR. His latest project is a vector-based drawing library, which he hopes can be used to push the boundaries of browser user interfaces.

For more information, read Mike's blog at http://www.sitepen.com/blog/author/mwilcox/ and visit http://clubajax.org/

Shashank Tiwari is a Managing Partner & CTO at Treasury of Ideas(http://www.treasuryofideas.com), a technology driven innovation and value optimization company. As an experienced software developer and architect, he is adept in a multitude of technologies. He is an internationally recognized speaker, author and mentor. As an expert group member on a number of JCP (Java Community Process) specifications he has been actively participating in shaping the future of Java. He is also an Adobe Flex Champion and a common voice in the RIA community. Currently, he passionately builds rich high performance scalable applications and advises many on RIA and SOA adoption. His clients range from large financial service corporations to brilliant startups, whom he helps translate cutting edge ideas into reality. He is also actively engaged in training and mentoring developers and architects in leading edge technology. He is the author of a number of books and articles, including Advanced Flex 3 (Apress, 2008) and Professional BlazeDS (Wiley, 2009). He lives with his wife and two sons in New York. More information about him can be accessed at his website(http://www.shanky.org).

Bill Scott is the Director of User Interface Engineering at Netflix, the world's largest online movie rental service. At Netflix Bill is guiding the UI Engineering team's efforts to continue Netflix's excellence in user experience, improve client performance and refactor the presentation tier to use the latest best practices for both the DHTML layer as well as the Java tier.

Bill is the co-author of the O'Reilly book Designing Web Interfaces: Principles and Patterns for Rich Interaction. The book covers 75+ interaction design patterns, several anti-Patterns organized into six design principles for designing rich interfaces.

In addition, Bill is a frequent speaker at conferences and workshops around the world discussing the nuances of good design and the challenges of great engineering.

Previously, Bill led engineering for Yahoo! Teachers, a web 2.0 community allowing teachers to gather, organize & share web resources and lesson planning. In addition, as an Ajax Evangelist at Yahoo! he focused on spreading the goodness of "rich and sane" Ajax design & development. At Yahoo! Bill was also the Design Pattern curator where he launched the public version of the Yahoo! Design Pattern Library (http://developer.yahoo.com/ypatterns).

Before Yahoo! Bill led User Experience at Sabre Airline Solutions and co-founded Rico (an open source Ajax framework, openrico.org.) For 20 years Bill has bounced back and forth between design and engineering projects, creating products in areas as diverse as video games, widget libraries, war gaming, IDE tools, airline management and Web consumer sites. His musings can be found at http://looksgoodworkswell.com.

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.

Tom is a founder and developer at 280 North, a company dedicated to advancing the state-of-the-art of rich web applications. He's one of the creators of the Cappuccino framework and Objective-J language, as well as the Narwhal server-side JavaScript project.

As Director of User Experience and the first employee of SitePen, Torrey oversees all UI and visual design and has been at the core of SitePen's success since the beginning. Self-taught, Torrey has a keen understanding of both development and interaction design. His ability to assess and design for technical limitations makes him an invaluable asset to the SitePen team. Torrey's previous stints include work with Renkoo, ActiveGrid and Loomia.

Matt Raible has been building web applications for most of his adult life. He started tinkering with the web before Netscape 1.0 was even released. For the last 13 years, Matt has helped companies adopt open source technologies (Spring, Hibernate, Apache, Struts, Tapestry, Grails) and use them effectively. Matt has been a speaker at many conferences worldwide, including ApacheCon, JavaZone, Colorado Software Summit, No Fluff Just Stuff, and a host of others.

Matt is an author (Spring Live and Pro JSP), and an active "kick-ass technology" evangelist on raibledesigns.com. He is the founder of AppFuse, a project which allows you to get started quickly with Java open source frameworks, as well as a committer on the Apache Roller and Apache Struts projects.

Matt has had quite a ride in the past few years, serving as the Lead UI Architect for LinkedIn, the UI Architect for Evite.com and the Chief Architect of Web Development at Time Warner Cable. Currently, he enjoys Utah's fluffy powder while consulting at Overstock.com.

Aaron Newton is a product manager, developer, interface designer, and writer. He is a contributor to the MooTools Javascript framework - where he writes code, the documentation, free online tutorials and the first Mootools book published by Apress. His experience includes founding music startup, Epitonic.com, launching CNET's Download.com Music, and several years product managing application development for various projects at CNET Networks. He is currently the lead User Experience at Cloudera in San Francisco, CA.

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!

David Geary is the president of Clarity Training, Inc. (corewebdevelopment.com), where he teaches developers to implement web applications using JavaServer Faces (JSF) and the Google Web Toolkit (GWT).

A prominent author, speaker, and consultant, David holds a unique qualification as a Java expert: He wrote the best-selling books on both Java component frameworks: Swing and JavaServer Faces. David's Graphic Java Swing was the best-selling Swing book, and is one of the best-selling Java books of all-time, and Core JSF, which David wrote with Cay Horstman, is the best-selling book on JavaServer Faces.

David was one of a handful of experts on the JSF 1.0 Expert Group (EG) that actively defined the standard Java-based web application framework, and David is currently on the JSF 2 Expert Group, helping to vastly improve JSF in version 2.

Besides serving on the JSF and JSTL Expert Groups, David has contributed to open-source projects and he has written questions for two of Sun's Certification Exams: Web Developer Certification and JavaServer Faces Certification. He invented the Struts Template library which was the precursor to Tiles, a popular framework for composing web pages from JSP fragments, was the 2nd Struts committer and contributed to the Apache Shale project.

David has spoken at more than 100 NFJS symposiums since 2003, and he also speaks at other conferences such as TheServerSide Java Symposium, JavaOne, JavaPolis, and JAOO. David has taught at Java University for the past three years, and is a three-time JavaOne rock star.

Keith Donald is a principal and founding partner at SpringSource, the company behind Spring and a division of VMware. At SpringSource, Keith is a full-time member of the Spring development team focusing on web application development productivity. He is also the architect behind SpringSource's state-of-the-art training curriculum, which has provided practical Spring training to over 10,000 students worldwide.

Over his career, Keith, an experienced enterprise software developer and mentor, has built business applications for customers spanning a diverse set of industries including banking, network management, information assurance, education, retail, and healthcare. He is particularly skilled at translating business requirements into technical solutions.

Scott Davis is the founder of ThirstyHead.com, a training company that specializes in Groovy and Grails training.

Scott published one of the first public websites implemented in Grails in 2006 and has been actively working with the technology ever since. Author of the book Groovy Recipes: Greasing the Wheels of Java and two ongoing IBM developerWorks article series (Mastering Grails and in 2009, Practically Groovy), Scott writes extensively about how Groovy and Grails are the future of Java development.

Bob Byron works for NeXplore Corporation, a corporation dedicated to radically improve the online experience. He has been using AJAX technology in development of NeXplore's innovative social search engine. A veteran of client and server side development, Bob has an extensive background in the various techniques involved in bringing an application through the entire life cycle to get it to market.

Bob is a current contributer to the Dojo Toolkit. He has been coding in Java since soon after its release in the mid 1990's. In 2006, Bob was the President of the Java Metroplex Users Group in Dallas, preceding that by two years as Vice President. He ran the Java Developer's Group for 5 years bringing bringing the latest techniques and expertise to attendees.