Speakers

Craig Walls has been professionally developing software for over 17 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.

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.

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 the CTO of PowWow - a lean startup in NYC. He presents internationally and writes extensively on domain specific languages, agile architecture, NoSQL and requirements and estimating. He helps teams to develop great software quickly by improving the requirements gathering, estimating, project management processes, engineering practices and tools used.

He is on the program committee for Code Generation in Cambridge, England and the Domain Specific Modeling workshop at SPLASH (was ooPSLA). He has presented at a range of conferences including DLD Conference, ooPSLA, Code Generation, Practical Product Lines, the British Computer Society Software Practices Advancement conference, UberConf, the Rich Web Experience and the No Fluff Just Stuff tour. He has been published in IEEE Software, Dr. Dobbs, IBM developerWorks, Information Week, Methods & Tools, NFJS the Magazine, Mashed Code, JSMag and GroovyMag. He is also a regular instructor at General Assembly - a campus for technology, design, and entrepreneurship in New York.

As passionate about ending extreme poverty (the greatest crisis of our generation) as he is about his home state of West Virginia, Billy has spearheaded Nuru International’s Grassroots Movement since the organization’s inception. As Nuru’s lead advocate and storyteller, Billy has been invited to share Nuru’s story at many conferences and events around the country. He is a consummate networker and has been instrumental in building relationships with organizations and movements like the ONE Campaign, One Days Wages, Catalyst Conference and !dea Camp. In spring 2010 he organized a nationwide tour to raise awareness of Nuru’s fight to end extreme poverty that inspired young activists to participate in a national mobilization event called “Be Hope To Her” that has since taken a life of its own. Aside from these roles, Billy has led the charge in Nuru’s social media efforts on Facebook and Twitter and is an avid blogger.

Under Billy’s leadership, Nuru’s Grassroots Movement has grown from a handful of volunteers to literally thousands of fans and supporters who are passionate about seeing the end of extreme poverty, and if you are seated next to him on a plane, at an adjacent table at Starbucks, or trapped with him in an elevator, he’ll be sure to invite you to join the fight against extreme poverty too.

Chris Wensel is the founder of Concurrent, Inc., and the author of the Cascading data processing open-source project, an alternative API to MapReduce for Apache Hadoop.

He also co-founded Scale Unlimited, the first Hadoop and "Big Data" related professional services and training company, where he mentored and trained companies like Sun Microsystems, Apple, and numerous startups in the Bay Area.

Chris bootstrapped his first Internet startup in the early 90's, creating an early Web server-side scripting language used in the real estate and insurance verticals. During the late 90's, Chris focused on distributed-agent based systems where he received several patents on
distributed computing. From there he became Chief Architect for the fastest growing business unit at Thomson Reuters. Just prior to Concurrent, Chris was a Consulting Architect to TeleAtlas geo-content management group in Belgium.

Chris also advises several startups in the "Big Data" and "Big Audience" technology space.

Dr. Jim Webber is Chief Scientist with Neo Technology the company behind the popular open source graph database Neo4j, where he works on graph database server technology and writes open source software. Jim is interested in using big graphs like the Web for building distributed systems, which led him to being a co-author on the book REST in Practice, having previously written Developing Enterprise Web Services - An Architect's Guide. Jim is an active speaker, presenting regularly around the world. His blog is located at http://jimwebber.org and he tweets often @jimwebber.

Bruce Snyder is a veteran of enterprise software development and a recognized leader in open source software. With over a decade of experience, Bruce has worked with a wide range of technologies including Java EE, Enterprise Messaging and Service Oriented Integration. In addition to his role as a senior software engineer at SpringSource, Bruce is also an Apache Member, a co-founder of Apache Geronimo and a developer for Apache ActiveMQ, Apache Camel and Apache ServiceMix. He is the co-author of Professional Apache Geronimo, Beginning Spring Framework 2 both from Wrox Press and is currently co-authoring ActiveMQ In Action for Manning Publications. Bruce also serves as a member of various JCP expert groups and is a recognized international speaker at industry conferences. Bruce lives in beautiful Boulder, Colorado with his family.

John is an experienced consultant and trainer specialising in Enterprise Java, Web Development, and Open Source technologies, currently based in Wellington, New Zealand. Well known in the Java community for his many published articles, and as author of Java Power Tools, John helps organisations around the world to optimize their Java development processes and infrastructures and provides training and mentoring in open source technologies, SDLC tools, and agile development processes.

Stuart Sierra is an actor/writer/coder who lives in New York City. He is a member of the Clojure/core team at Relevance, Inc. Stuart is the co-author of Practical Clojure (Apress, 2010). He received an M.S. in Computer Science from Columbia University and a B.F.A. in Theatre from New York University.

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.

Ian Robinson (@iansrobinson) is Director of Customer Success for Neo Technology, the company behind Neo4j, the world's leading open source graph database. He is a co-author of 'REST in Practice' (O'Reilly) and a contributor to the forthcoming books 'REST: From Research to Practice' (Springer) and 'Service Design Patterns' (Addison-Wesley). He presents at conferences worldwide on the big Web graph of REST, and the awesome graph capabilities of Neo4j, and blogs at http://iansrobinson.com.

Paul Rayner is a Denver-based independent consultant with more than twenty years of software development and consulting experience. His company, Virtual Genius LLC, provides organizations with the tools and practices needed to succeed at agile software development, from portfolio management through to customer delivery. He specializes in helping organizations struggling with their transition to agile software development, or in need of external agile custom development and architectural expertise.

Paul is an active member of the Colorado developer and agile communities, on the Agile Denver leadership team, a certified Domain-Driven Design instructor with Domain Language, a member of the Agile Cooperative, and a regular speaker at user groups and conferences. He writes with an Australian accent about software development at www.virtual-genius.com/blog and can be found on Twitter as @thepaulrayner

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.

Peter Niederwieser is a computer language enthusiast from Linz, Austria. Having used Java since 1997, Peter nowadays prefers to work with more flexible languages - in particular Groovy, Scala, and Clojure. Peter is the creator of Spock and a Groovy committer.

In his day job, Peter is a Principal Software Engineer at Gradleware.

Howard Lewis Ship is the creator and lead developer for the Apache Tapestry project, and is a noted expert on Java framework design and developer productivity. He has over twenty years of full-time software development under his belt, with over ten years of Java. He cut his teeth writing customer support software for Stratus Computer, but eventually traded PL/1 for Objective-C and NeXTSTEP before settling into Java.

Howard is respected in the Java community as an expert on web application development, dependency injection, Java meta-programming, and developer productivity. He is a frequent speaker at JavaOne, NoFluffJustStuff, ApacheCon and other conferences, and the author of "Tapestry in Action" for Manning (covering Tapestry 3.0). Lately, he's been dipping his toes into alternate languages, including Clojure.

Howard is an independent consultant, offering Tapestry training, mentoring and project work as well as training in Clojure. He lives in Portland, Oregon with his wife Suzanne, and his son, Jacob.

Kirk is an industry analyst at Burton Group. For 15 years, he has worked in the trenches on real software projects. He takes a keen interest in design, architecture, application development platforms, agile development, and the IT industry in general, especially as it relates to software development.

In 2002, Kirk wrote the book Java Design: Objects, UML, and Process, published by Addison-Wesley. He has also written numerous whitepapers and articles, including The Agile Developer column for The Agile Journal. Kirk is the founder of Extensible Java, a growing resource of component design pattern heuristics for Java that can easily be applied to most other platforms, including .Net. Kirk has trained thousands of software professionals, teaching courses on UML, Java J2EE technology, object-oriented development, component based development, software architecture, and software process. He enjoys hacking in a variety of languages, including Java, .Net, Ruby, and PHP.

Dave is a consultant helping organizations of all sizes to develop applications more quickly (and have more fun doing it) with Grails. Dave has been involved in enterprise software development for the past 15 years. He has worked as a developer, architect, project manager, mentor and trainer. Dave has presented at user groups and national conferences. He is also the founder of the Capital Java User Group in Madison, Wisconsin, the Gateway Groovy Users in St. Louis, MO, and the author of Grails: A Quick-Start Guide, published by the Pragmatic Programmers. . Dave's Groovy and Grails related thoughts can be found at http://dave-klein.blogspot.com

Frank Kim is the founder and principal consultant with ThinkSec as well as the curriculum lead for application security at the SANS Institute. Frank has over 14 years experience in software development, information technology and security. He has designed and developed applications for large health care, technology, insurance, and consulting companies. Frank currently focuses on developing software security programs and integrating security into the software development life cycle by doing penetration testing, security assessments, architecture reviews, code reviews, and training.

Frank is the author of SANS Developer 541: Secure Coding in Java/JEE and has given security talks at JavaOne, Devoxx, and Jazoon. Recently, Frank was named a JavaOne Rock Star for his talk "Java EE Web Security By Example".

Jez Humble is a Principal Consultant with ThoughtWorks, and author of Continuous Delivery, published in Martin Fowler's Signature Series (Addison Wesley, 2010). He got into IT in 2000, just in time for the dot-com bust. Since then he has worked as a developer, system administrator, trainer, consultant, manager, and speaker. He has worked with a variety of platforms and technologies, consulting for non-profits, telecoms, financial services, and online retail companies.

Since 2004 he has worked for ThoughtWorks and ThoughtWorks Studios in Beijing, Bangalore, London, and San Francisco. His focus is on helping organisations deliver valuable, high-quality software frequently and reliably through implementing effective engineering practices in the field of Agile delivery. He also serves as Product Manager for Go, ThoughtWorks Studios agile release management platform. He holds a BA in Physics.

Software Passion: Helping organizations release useful, high quality software fast through better collaboration and automation. Writing small, useful libraries. Being a loudmouth.

Providing solutions to private, education, and government entities since 1999. He has also been a teacher and speaker since the early 90s, teaching development for 8 years. His business is currently emphasized on Java, Groovy, Grails, EJB3, and the JBoss Seam web framework. Daniel Hinojosa is also co-founder of the Albuquerque Java User's Group and is currently failing overcoming his addiction of NFJS conferences.

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.

Jerry Gulla is an Advisory Engineer at Constant Contact, Massachusetts‘ largest SaaS company. He fell in love with hacking both hardware and software more than 20 years ago after getting his first computer, a TRS-80 Model I. He’s worked at companies large and small, including Sun/Javasoft, as well as several small startups. Jerry is passionate about technology and has developed software for everything from the simulator for the B-2 stealth bomber all the way to HTML5 applications for modern smartphones.

His latest interests brings him into the mobile web as well as the world of alternative languages on the JVM, where he’s leveraging the power of dynamic languages and modern frameworks to rapidly deliver new applications for both mobile devices and the desktop.

Hans Dockter is the founder and project lead of the Gradle build system and the CEO of Gradleware, a company that provides training, support and consulting for Gradle and all forms of enterprise software project automation in general.

Hans has 13 years of experience as a software developer, team leader, architect, trainer, and technical mentor. Hans is a thought leader in the field of project automation and has successfully been in charge of numerous large-scale enterprise builds. He is also an advocate of Domain Driven Design, having taught classes and delivered presentations on this topic together with Eric Evans. In the earlier days, Hans was also a committer for the JBoss project and founded the JBoss-IDE.

Esther works with individuals, teams, and managers to improve their ability to deliver valuable software. Esther is recognized as a leader in the human-side of software development, including management, systems-thinking, organizational change, collaboration, team building, facilitation and retrospectives.

She’s been a programmer, system manager, manager and internal consultant. Since 1997, she’s run her own consulting firm, esther derby associates, inc., in Minneapolis, MN. Her clients include small niche firms, mid-size companies and Fortune 500 companies. She’s worked in financial services, insurance, health care and manufacturing as well as in product and software-as-a-service companies.

Esther is the author of over 100 articles, and co-author of Agile Retrospectives: Making Good Teams Great and Behind Closed Doors: Secrets of Great Management. She’s written widely on the topic of management, leadership, collaboration and change as they relate to companies adopting (or considering) Agile Methods, including Three Pillars of Executive Support for Agile Adoption (Agile Journal), Achieving Agility: Means to an End or End in Itself? (insights), and What’s a Manager to Do? (Better Software Magazine).

Esther is a sought after teacher and speaker. She’s given talks and workshops in the US, Europe, China, India, and New Zealand.

She’s a founder of the AYE Conference, and is serving her second term as a member of the Board of Directors for the Agile Alliance. She also was one of the three original founders of the Scrum Alliance.

Esther has an MA in Organizational Leadership and a certificate in Human System Dynamics.

Esther can be reached at (612) 724-8114, or by email.

Take a look at www.estherderby.com for more of Esther’s writing, or follow her on Twitter @estherderby

Hamlet D'Arcy has been writing software for over a decade, and has spent considerable time coding in C++, Java, and Groovy. He's passionate about learning new languages and different ways to think about problems. Hamlet is the founder of the Basel-based Hackergarten open source coding group, and regularly participates and speaks at local and international user groups and conferences. Hamlet is a committer on the Groovy and CodeNarc projects, and is a contributor on a few other open source projects (including JConch and the IDEA Groovy Plugin). He blogs regularly at http://hamletdarcy.blogspot.com and can be found on Twitter as HamletDRC (http://twitter.com/hamletdrc).

James is a contractor in the St.Louis area that shares a passion for software craftsmanship and has enjoyed software development since he wrote his first program in Basic on the Tandy Color Computer 3 way back in 1988.

In addition to a passion for technology, he also has a keen interest in improving teamwork and collaboration through interactive activities to get people thinking creatively and develop stronger, richer communication channels with their stakeholders.

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.

Alex has joined Orbitz in 2004 and is responsible for providing technical leadership and guidance in the development of foundational technologies, core libraries and APIs for the enterprise-wide use, as well as establishing and maintaining common design principles and standards used within the company and integration of new software development practices within the development community.

Previously Alex was a Senior Engineer on the same team responsible for web application frameworks and developing common practices and additional functionality on top of Spring MVC & Webflow.

Alex is a graduate of Loyola University of Chicago, with a B.S. in Computer Science and M.S. in Computer Science specializing in Software Architecture. He currently resides in Evanston, IL and when not coding, Alex enjoys playing tennis, hiking, skiing, and traveling.

Andres is a Java/Groovy developer and Java Champion, with more than 11 years of experience in software design and development. He has been involved in web and desktop application developments since the early days of Java. He has also been teacher of computer science courses in the most prestigious education institute in Mexico. His current interests include Groovy and Swing. He is a true believer of open source and has participated in popular projects like Groovy, Griffon, JMatter and DbUnit, as well as starting his own projects (Json-lib, EZMorph, GraphicsBuilder, JideBuilder). Founding member and current project lead of the Griffon framework. He blogs periodically at http://jroller.com/aalmiray. You can find him on twitter too as @aalmiray. He likes to spend time with his beloved wife, Ixchel, when not hacking around.

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.