Speakers

Al Shalloway is the founder and CEO of Net Objectives. With over 40 years of experience, Al is an industry thought leader in Lean, Kanban, product portfolio management, Scrum and agile design. He helps companies transition to Lean and Agile methods enterprise-wide as well teaches courses in these areas. Al is a SAFe Program Consultant as well as a certified Kanban instructor by the Lean Kanban University. Al has developed training and coaching methods for Lean-Agile that have helped Net Objectives' clients achieve long-term, sustainable productivity gains. He is a popular speaker at prestigious conferences worldwide. He is the primary author of Design Patterns Explained: A New Perspective on Object-Oriented Design, Lean-Agile Pocket Guide for Scrum Teams, Lean-Agile Software Development: Achieving Enterprise Agility and Essential Skills for the Agile Developer. Al has worked in literally dozens of industries over his career. He is a co-founder and board member for the Lean Software and Systems Consortium. He has a Masters in Computer Science from M.I.T. as well as a Masters in Mathematics from Emory University.

I started my career as a programmer, and over the years I’ve worn many hats, including business owner, internal consultant and manager. From all these perspectives, one thing became clear: our level of individual, team and company success was deeply impacted by our work environment and organizational dynamics. As a result, I have spent the last twenty-five years helping companies design their environment, culture, and human dynamics for optimum success.

I’ve written over 100 articles, and co-authored two books–Agile Retrospectives: Making Good Teams Great and Behind Closed Doors: Secrets of Great Management. I write about management, leadership, collaboration, organizations and change (or another topic I’m currently exploring).

Follow me on Twitter @estherderby

Dr Heinz Kabutz is best known for his creation of The Java Specialists' Newsletter, read in 130 countries by 70000 Java experts. In his newsletter, he examines advanced aspects of Java that have helped Java developers around the world to produce better code. As someone remarked on the Sun website: "Heinz Kabutz is a hero in the Java Developer Community. His newsletters have saved companies millions by helping burgeoning and experienced programmers deliver high quality products."

Heinz writes Java code on contract and runs seminars. His latest creation, the Concurrency Specialist Course, is a detailed study of how Java concurrency works.

Cliff Click is the CTO and Co-Founder of 0xdata, a firm dedicated to creating a new way to think about web-scale data storage and real-time analytics. Cliff wrote his first compiler when he was 15 (Pascal to TRS Z-80!), although my most famous compiler is the HotSpot Server Compiler (the Sea of Nodes IR). I helped Azul Systems build an 864 core pure-Java mainframe that keeps GC pauses on 500Gb heaps to under 10ms, and worked on all aspects of that JVM. Before that Cliff worked on HotSpot at Sun Microsystems, and am at least partially responsible for bringing Java into the mainstream.

Cliff is invited to speak regularly at industry and academic conferences and has published many papers about HotSpot technology. He holds a PhD in Computer Science from Rice University and about 15 patents.

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.

Emad Benjamin has been in the IT industry for the past twenty years. He graduated with a Bachelor of Electrical Engineering from the University of Wollongong. Earlier in his career, he was a C++ software engineer, then in 1997, he switched to programming with Java, and has been focusing on Java ever since. For the past seven years, his focus has been Java on VMware vSphere, vFabric GemFire and SQLFire. Emad has been at VMware since 2005, and is the author of the Enterprise Java Applications Architecture on VMware book. Emad has previously presented at VMworld, SpringOne, and Open World on the subject of Java virtualization.

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.

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.

Jeremy Deane has over 18 years of software engineering experience in leadership positions. His expertise includes Enterprise Integration Architecture, Web Application Architecture, and Software Process Improvement. In addition, he is an accomplished speaker and technical author.

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.

Neal is Director, 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.

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.

Jerry Gulla is the Architect for SaveLocal.com from 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.

Stuart Halloway is the CEO of Relevance, Inc. (www.thinkrelevance.com). With co-founder Justin Gehtland, Stuart helps companies adopt agile, as well as innovative technologies such as Clojure and Ruby on Rails. Stuart is the author of Programming Clojure, Rails for Java Developers, and Component Development for the Java Platform. Prior to founding Relevance, Stuart was the Chief Architect at Near-Time, and the Chief Technical Officer at DevelopMentor.

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

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.

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.

Frank Kim is the curriculum lead for software security at the SANS Institute as well as the founder of ThinkSec. Frank has over fifteen years of experience in software development, information technology, and security. He has designed and developed applications for large healthcare, technology, insurance, and consulting companies. Frank currently focuses on security strategy and application security program development with a special interest in integrating security into the software development life cycle. Frank is the author of the SANS Institute's Secure Coding in Java course. He has spoken internationally at events like JavaOne, Devoxx, Jazoon, and UberConf and was twice named a JavaOne Rock Star.

Kirk is software developer with a passion for building great software. 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. His recent book, Java Application Architecture was published in 2012, and presents 18 patterns that help you design modular software.

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.

Andy Painter is the CTO of Davisbase Consulting. Davisbase Consulting uses a combination of training, coaching, and mentoring to develop individuals, teams, and organizations that create great software.

Andy has over 20 years of software development experience as a developer, architect, tester, manager and executive. Over the last decade, Andy has coupled deep technology experience with Agile practices to create teams and environments that are hyper-productive. This unique combination has provided real-world experience on how best to establish and enable successful software organizations and teams. This enablement process allows organizations, teams, and individuals to achieve a hyper-productive state by delivering continuous streams of value through the creation of quality software. In conjunction with establishing a successful Agile processes, Andy focuses heavily on helping teams develop strong Agile engineering practices and disciplines such as Test-Driven Development, Refactoring, Continuous Integration, and Continuous Delivery.

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.

Prasanna has been programming since 1994. He was involved in such adventures as creating India's first search engine and an on-line music and video store before getting a real job.

Prasanna's development skillz went up a notch when he learned about TDD in the early 2000s. In fact, TDD (along with pair programming, CI and other XP practices) is a major reason why he still writes code. In 2006, he joined ThoughtWorks.

His coding adventures took him around the US to places such as Chicago (IL), Atlanta (GA), Albany (NY), Warren (NJ), Malvern (PA), San Francisco (CA) as well as around the world to Krakow (Poland), Bangalore (India), Tokyo (Japan), Beijing (China), Pune (India), Hong Kong (China) and Johannesburg (South Africa)!

Prasanna plays any of many roles including developer, tech lead, software architect, agile coach, QA, project lead, enterprise architect, technical principal, infrastructure automation and build monkey. He has programmed professionally in JavaScript, Ruby, C#, Java, Perl, PHP, Tcl/Tk, C, C++, Bash and PowerShell.

Besides coding, he enjoys eating different types of food and photography.

Paul is a seasoned design coach and leadership mentor, helping teams ignite their design skills via DDD and BDD. He gets teams unstuck through intensive coaching workshops and hands-on pair programming, combined with focused one-on-one leadership mentoring. His company Virtual Genius is a software solutions provider, specializing in custom Ruby applications. Paul actively serves the community: co-authoring the upcoming Addison Wesley book, BDD with Cucumber, teaching classes in BDD and DDD, contributing to OSS, and co-leading the DDD Denver Meetup group.

Look for him speaking at user groups, on the No Fluff Just Stuff conference tour in the United States, and at local and international conferences. Paul is from Perth, Australia, but chooses to live, work and play with his amazing wife and two children in Denver. He tweets with an Australian accent at @ThePaulRayner and blogs at thepaulrayner.com

Johanna Rothman, known as the “Pragmatic Manager,” helps organizational leaders see problems and risks in their product development. She helps them recognize potential “gotchas,” seize opportunities, and remove impediments.

Johanna was the Agile 2009 conference chair. She is the current agileconnection.com technical editor. Johanna is the author of these books:

- Manage Your Job Search
- Hiring Geeks That Fit
- Manage Your Project Portfolio: Increase Your Capacity and Finish More Projects.
- 2008 Jolt Productivity award winning Manage It! Your Guide to Modern, Pragmatic Project Management
- Behind Closed Doors: Secrets of Great Management (with Esther Derby)

She is working on a book about agile program management. Find more of Johanna's articles and her blogs at www.jrothman.com and at www.createadaptablelife.com

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.

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 a Community Engineer with Cloud Foundry (http://cloudfoundry.com) by Pivotal (http://goPivotal.com). He is a twelve year veteran of the enterprise software and web development industries, with experience spanning the healthcare, biomedical research, e-commerce, retail store and insurance domains.

Matt is obsessed with the idea that enterprise IT “doesn’t have to suck,” and spends much of his time thinking about lean/agile software development methodologies, DevOps, architectural principles/patterns/practices, and programming paradigms in an attempt to find the perfect storm of techniques that will allow corporate IT departments to not only function like startup companies, but also create software that delights users while maintaining a high degree of conceptual integrity.

Matt has spoken at conferences ranging from JavaOne to CodeMash and serves as Technical Editor of NFJS the Magazine (https://www.nofluffjuststuff.com/home/magazine_subscribe). Matt is also the founder of the Memphis/Mid-South Java User Group.

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).

Vaughn Vernon is the author of the book Implementing Domain-Driven Design, published by Addison-Wesley. Vaughn is a veteran software craftsman with more than 25 years of experience in software design, development, and architecture. Vaughn is a thought leader in simplifying software design and implementation using innovative methods. Vaughn has been programming with object-oriented languages since the 1980s and applying the tenets of Domain-Driven Design since his Smalltalk domain modeling days in the early 1990s. His experience spans a wide range of business domains. He has also succeeded in technical endeavors creating reusable frameworks, libraries, and implementation acceleration tools.

Vaughn consults and speaks internationally, and has taught his Implementing Domain-Driven Design Workshop on multiple continents. He teaches both public and private classes and workshops, and has presented at conferences such as: SpringOne 2gx; PulsoConf in Bogota, Colombia; QCon; UberConf; IASA ITARC. As an author, Vaughn has contributed to industry literature and software patterns and is a founder of the DDD Denver Meetup group.

His IDDD Tour commences in Europe in April 2013: idddtour.com You can read more about his latest efforts at VaughnVernon.co and follow him on Twitter here: @VaughnVernon

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.

Arun Gupta is a Java EE & GlassFish Evangelist working at Oracle. Arun has over 14 years of experience in the software industry working in various technologies, Java(TM) platform, and several web-related technologies. In his current role, he works very closely to create and foster the community around Java EE & GlassFish. He has participated in several standard bodies and worked amicably with members from other companies. He has been with the Java EE team since it’s inception. And since then he has contibuted to all Java EE releases.

He is a prolific blogger at http://blogs.sun.com/arungupta with over 1000 blog entries and frequent visitors from all over the world reaching up to 25,000 hits/day.

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.

Leonid Igolnik is self proclaimed a unix bigot and a java evangelist. In his current role as a Vice President of Product Development with Oracle he is responsible for product development of several SaaS applications. He has spent his entire professional career building on-line applications starting at one of the earliest internet service providers in Israel. Leonid first started building large scale applications in Java in 2002 while working for the 2nd largest domain registrar at the time at Tucows/OpenSRS where he led the platform team. Subsequently to that he held several technology leadership roles with companies in Canada and US. Most recently Leonid has been responsible for engineering teams at Taleo (acquired by Oracle) building applications that help millions of people find jobs that have propelled the company to a position of one of the 4 largest SaaS companies in the world.

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".

Oleg is a Principal Architect with Hortonworks responsible for architecting scalable BigData solutions using various OpenSource technologies available within and outside the Hadoop ecosystem. Before Hortonworls Oleg was part of the SpringSource/VMWare where he was a core engineer working on Spring Integration framework, leading Spring Integration Scala DSL and contributing to other projects in Spring portfolio. He has 17+ years of experience in software engineering across multiple disciplines including software architecture and design, consulting, business analysis and application development. Oleg has been focusing on professional Java development since 1999. Since 2004 he has been heavily involved in using several open source technologies and platforms across a number of projects around the world and spanning industries such as Teleco, Banking, Law Enforcement, US DOD and others.
As a speaker Oleg presented seminars at dozens of conferences worldwide (i.e.SpringOne, JavaOne, Java Zone, Jazoon, Java2Days, Scala Days, Uberconf, and others).