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 a Technical Architect at AutoZone in Memphis, TN. He is an eleven year veteran of the enterprise software and web development industries, with experience spanning the healthcare, biomedical research, e-commerce, and now retail store domains. His current focus is the development and support of an enterprise Java platform supporting 4600+ AutoZone stores. Matt appears frequently on the No Fluff Just Stuff symposium series tour, as well as at other conferences such as JavaOne, SpringOne/2GX, The Rich Web Experience, and The Project Automation Experience. He has served as Agile Zone Leader for DZone, and his articles also appear in GroovyMag and NFJS the Magazine. Matt is also author of the Selenium 2.0 DZone Refcard. When he’s not on the road, Matt also enjoys his role as President of the Memphis/Mid-South Java User Group. His current areas of interest include lean/agile software development, modular software architecture, object-oriented design, functional programming, automated testing of modern web applications, and NoSQL datastores.

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.

Mark Richards is a Director and Senior Architect at Collaborative Consulting, LLC, a Boston-based Business and Architecture Consulting Firm, where he is involved in the architecture, design, and implementation of SOA, EDA, messaging, and other architectures, primarily in the Java platform. Prior to joining Collaborative Mark was an Executive IT Architect with IBM, where he worked as an SOA and enterprise architect in the financial services area. He has been involved in the software industry since 1984 and has many battle scars to show for it. Mark served as the President of the Boston Java User Group in 1997 and 1998, and the President of the New England Java Users Group from 1999 thru 2003. Mark is the author of the book Java Message Service (2nd edition) from O'Reilly. He is also the author of Java Transaction Design Strategies, contributing author of the book 97 Things Every Software Architect Should Know from O'Reilly, contributing author of NFJS Anthology Volume 1, and contributing author of NFJS Anthology Volume 2. Mark has many architect and developer certifications, including those from IBM, Sun, The Open Group, and Oracle. He is a regular conference speaker at the No Fluff Just Stuff Symposium Series and speaks at other conferences and user groups around the world. When he is not working Mark can usually be found hiking with his wife and two daughters in the White Mountains or along the Appalachian Trail.

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.

Core member of the Grails development team, Jeff Brown, is a Senior Software Engineer with SpringSource. Jeff has been involved in designing and building object oriented systems for over 15 years. Jeff's areas of expertise include web development with Groovy & Grails, Java and agile development.

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.

Oleg is an Sr. Software Engineer with SpringSource/VMWare and has 14+ years of experience in software engineering across multiple disciplines including software architecture and design, consulting, business analysis and application development. He currently focuses on delivering simple but powerful Spring based solutions to the North American market.

After starting his career in the world of COBOL & CICS, Oleg has been focusing on professional Java and Java EE development since 1999. Since 2004 he has been heavily involved in using several open source technologies and platforms with Spring Framework at the forefront, while working on a number of projects around the world and spanning industries such as Telecommunication, Banking, Law Enforcement, US DOD and others.

Oleg’s current passions include Event Driven Architecture (EDA), Grid Computing, Test Driven development and Aspect Oriented Programming while his Spring passions are aligned with Spring Integration framework (http://www.springsource.org/spring-integration) where Oleg is a core committer.

You can regularly spot Oleg on the Spring Forums contributing to a number of topics.

A resident of the Philadelphia area, Oleg enjoys windsurfing, scuba diving, snowboarding, hockey and traveling when he can find some spare time.

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.

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

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.

Vaughn Vernon is a veteran software developer with more than 25 years of experience in system, application, and toolkit architecture, design, and development. Vaughn brings a unique mix of business and technology talent to every project. Vaughn's experience spans architecture, domain-driven design, and construction of COTS and custom component-based frameworks and business applications across a wide variety of industries. Vaughn founded a software product and consulting organization in the 1980s that served over 5,000 customers. He has consulted with General Dynamics in the aerospace industry, for Fresenius Medical Care and Gambro Healthcare in the acute renal care field. He has consulted with national clients such as AT&T and Compaq (HP), as well as internationally with Emirates Airlines in the UAE and ProActivity in Israel. Vaughn lead software development efforts for an insurance-services startup that became part of WebMD.

John Steven is the Senior Director, Advanced Technology Consulting at Cigital, Inc. His experience includes research in static code analysis and hands-on architecture and implementation of high-performance, scalable Java EE systems. John has provided security consulting services to a broad variety of commercial clients including two of the largest trading platforms in the world and has advised America’s largest internet provider in the Midwest on security and forensics.

John led the development of Cigital’s architectural analysis methodology and its approach to deploying enterprise software security frameworks. He has demonstrated success in building Cigital’s intellectual property for providing cutting-edge security. He brings this experience and a track record of effective strategic innovation to clients seeking to change, whether to adopt more cutting-edge approaches, or to solidify ROI. John has served on numerous conference panels regarding software security, wireless security and Java EE system development. He holds a B.S. in Computer Engineering and an M.S. in Computer Science from Case Western Reserve University.

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.

Roshan is immersed in Cloud Computing. He is currently employed at Appistry where he advises organizations stepping into the Cloud Computing arena. He is also the founder of Plexibus LLC, a St. Louis based consultancy firm.

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.

Johanna Rothman helps managers and leaders solve problems and seize opportunities.

She consults, speaks, and writes on managing high-technology product development. She enables managers, teams, and organizations to become more effective by applying her pragmatic approaches to the issues of project management, risk management, and people management.

Johanna writes two blogs: Managing Product Development and Hiring Technical People. She is the author of:

- 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)
- Hiring the Best Knowledge Workers, Techies & Nerds: The Secrets and Science of Hiring Technical People

Find more of Johanna's articles and her blogs at www.jrothman.com.

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

Nilanjan Raychaudhuri currently works for Livingsocial. Previously, Nilanjan worked for Pillar technology and Thoughtworks. He has managed and developed software solutions for more than 12 years and specializes in integrated multi-tiered web and server applications.

Nilanjan believes in high-discipline agile methodologies, customer focus, simple tools applied elegantly, and continuous improvement. Since he enjoys creating things and solving problems, Nilanjan also write software on my pastime. Currently he is working on scala-webmachine (restful resource framework). In past Nilanjan worked on other open source projects like Panopticode, scala-inline, autotest4j and many open source libraries. Currently, Nilanjan is writing a book on Scala programming language called “Scala in Action” for Manning publication.

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.

Fascinated by the “craft” of software development, Eric Pugh has been heavily involved in the open source world as a developer, committer, and user for the past 5 years. He is an emeritus member of the Apache Software Foundation and lately has been mulling over how we move from the read/write web to the read/write/share web.

In biotech, financial services and defense IT, he has helped European and American companies develop coherent strategies for embracing open source software. As a speaker he has advocated the advantages of Agile practices in software development.

Eric became involved in Solr when he submitted the patch SOLR-284 for Parsing Rich Document types such as PDF and MS Office formats that became the single most popular patch as measured by votes! The patch was subsequently cleaned up and enhanced by three other individuals, demonstrating the power of the Free/Open Source Model to build great code collaboratively. SOLR-284 was eventually refactored into Solr Cell as part of Solr version 1.4.

Eric co-authored "Solr 1.4 Enterprise Search Server", the first book on Solr.

He blogs at http://www.opensourceconnections.com/blog/.

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.

Andrew Lombardi is one of a new breed of businessmen: the enlightened entrepreneur. He has been writing code since he was a 5-year old, sitting at his dad’s knee at their Apple II computer. Having such a deep affinity for the computer model, it is no surprise that at the age of 17 he began to delve deeply into the inner workings of the human mind. He became a student of Neuro Linguistic Programming and other mind technologies, and then went on to study metaphysics. He is certified as an NLP Trainer, Master Hypnotherapist and Time Line Therapy practitioner.

Using all of his accumulated skills, at the age of 24, Andrew began his consulting business, Mystic Coders, LLC. Since the inception of Mystic in 2000, Andrew has been building the business and studying finance and economics as he stays on the cutting edge of computer technology.

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.

Tiffany Lentz, a Principal Consultant and Program Manager, is proudly employed at ThoughtWorks, a global IT services firm focused on end-to-end software delivery. She has worked extensively for large clients in the US, Canada, and China, delivering solutions for both disparate system delivery projects and agile enablement and organizational transformation efforts to incorporate and enhance efficiency and delivery processes. She is an author, mentor, coach and trainer of agile methodologies, processes, and practices. Tiffany is the author of Iteration Management Chapter in the ThoughtWorks anthology book and believes that the Iteration Manager's job is to build a well-oil delivery machine.

Scott is Chief Architect at Near Infinity Corporation, an enterprise software development and consulting services company based in Reston, Virginia. He has been developing enterprise and web applications for 14 years professionally, and has developed applications using Java, Ruby, Groovy, and even an iPhone application with Objective-C. His main areas of interest include alternative persistence technologies, object-oriented design, system architecture, testing, and frameworks like Spring, Hibernate, and Ruby on Rails. In addition, Scott enjoys learning new languages to make himself a better and more well-rounded developer a la The Pragmatic Programmers' advice to "learn one language per year."

Scott holds a B.S. in Engineering Science and Mechanics from Virginia Tech, and an M. Eng. in Systems Engineering from the University of Maryland. Scott speaks at the No Fluff Just Stuff Symposiums and various other conferences. In his (sparse) spare time, Scott enjoys spending time with his wife, three children, and cat. He also tries to find time to play soccer, go snowboarding, and mountain bike whenever he can.

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.

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

Paul King leads ASERT, an organization based in Brisbane, Australia which provides software development, training and mentoring services to customers wanting to embrace new technologies, harness best practices and innovate. He has been contributing to open source projects for nearly 20 years and is an active committer on numerous projects including Groovy. Paul speaks at international conferences, publishes in software magazines and journals, and is a co-author of Manning's best-seller: Groovy in Action.

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".

Heath Kesler is an open source software evangelist, developer and architect; he has created Java architectures for large scalable, high transaction load systems for such companies as Health Language, LeapFrog Enterprises, AT&T, Timera, and IBM.

Heath has been a team lead in many project recovery implementations, helping to rescue systems on the verge of collapse. He was recently involved with the implementation of the customer account creation and third-party integration on mission-critical systems for the largest educational products provider in the United States. Heath enjoys pushing the envelop by finding new ways to implement solutions using cutting edge technologies for old problems.

Heath has spoken at conferences all over the world and enjoys any opportunity to discuss the latest technologies with those who share in his passion.

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.

David teaches and coaches the adoption and improvement of agility as a delivery tool. His work includes helping companies of all sizes all over the world. Sometimes he is pairing with developers and testers, while other times he is helping to invent, evolve and plan the delivery of all types of products and projects. David also spends a great deal of time helping leaders at all levels find ways to pragmatically use agility to foster innovation.

Prior to working as a full time coach, David spent years building software in a variety of domains: digital audio, digital biometrics, medical, financial, retail, and education to name a few. David now leads DevJam, a company composed of agile collaborators. As mentors and practitioners, DevJam focuses on agility as a tool to help people and companies improve their software production skills. DevJam provides seasoned leaders that strive to pragmatically match technology, people, and processes to create better and cooler products in competitive cycles.

Along with teaching and coaching, David participates in conferences around the world. He is the recipient of the Agile Alliance, 2009 Gordon Pask Award. David continuously contributes to books and various publications.

For coaching information, presentations, and more, visit www.devjam.com

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.

James is an experienced 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".

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.

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.

Jeff Genender is a Java Champion, Apache Member, and Java Open Source consultant specializing in SOA and enterprise service implementation. Jeff has over 23 years of software architecture, team lead, and development experience in multiple industries. He is a frequent speaker at such events as TheServerSide Symposium, JavaZone, Java In Action, JavaOne, JFokus, and numerous Java User Groups on topics pertaining to Enterprise Service Bus (ESBs), Service Oriented Architectures (SOA), and application servers.

Jeff is an active committer and Project Management Committee (PMC) member for Apache ServiceMix, CXF, Geronimo, a comitter on OpenEJB and Mina, and author of several very popular Mojo (Maven plugins). He is the author of Enterprise Java Servlets (Addison Wesley Longman, 2001), co – author of Professional Apache Geronimo (2006, Wiley), and co-author of Professional Apache Tomcat (2007, Wiley). Jeff also serves as a member of the Java Community Process (JCP) expert group for JSR-342 (Java Platform, Enterprise Edition 7 (Java EE 7) Specification) as a representative of the Apache Software Foundation.

Jeff is an open source evangelist and has successfully brought open source development efforts, initiatives, and success stories into a number of Global 2000 companies, saving these organizations millions in licensing costs.

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

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

Ben Ellingson is a software engineer, web developer, and consultant. He is the creator of nofluffjuststuff.com, uberconf.com, and related NFJS websites. He has 13 years of development experience, is an active member of the Boulder Java Users Group and the No Fluff Just Stuff community. He spent his early career at EDS and IBM; then developed a content management system for nCube, a pioneer in the Video On Demand space. He is a multi-talented developer; proficient coding on the server-side, front-end, and mobile applications. His latest creation is the iPad app for Über Conf. Ben lives in Boulder, Colorado. He is an avid runner, who has nearly completed his goal to run the world's 5 major marathons. You can keep up with Ben's work at benellingson.blogspot.com.

Johan Edstrom is an open source software evangelist, Apache developer and seasoned architect; he has created Java architectures for large scalable, high transaction monitoring, financial and open source systems.

Johan has worked as development lead, infrastructure manager, IT lead, programmer and guided several large companies to success in the use of open source software components.

Lately he has been helping some of the worlds largest networking companies and medical startups achieve high availability, scalability and dynamically adapting SOA systems.

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).

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

Jeremy Deane has over 15 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.

Luke Daley is a Principal Engineer with Gradleware. At Gradleware Luke works to make Gradle an even better way to build and helps teams reach new levels of project automation and quality. When he's not working on Gradle, you'll find Luke hacking on other projects in the Groovy ecosystem like Grails (a Groovy web development framework), Spock (a next generation testing framework for the JVM) and Geb (a productivity focussed Groovy browser automation tool).

With a solid background in Enterprise Automation, Luke believes strongly that tools can and should empower software professionals to achieve and innovate, which puts him right at home at Gradleware.

Taking a break from the kangaroos and koalas of Australia, Luke is currently living the expat in London life and you'll often find him talking about Gradle and other topics at conferences and user groups throughout Europe and the World.

Adrian founded the open source project jclouds in March 2009, and is actively engaged in cloud interoperability and devops circles. Recent efforts include vCloud ecosystem engineering at VMware, Java integration at Opscode, and cloud portability efforts at Cloudsoft. Adrian's currently consulting under Cloud Conscious LLC.

With more than twenty-five years experience developing compilers, Cliff serves as Azul Systems' Chief JVM Architect. Cliff joined Azul in 2002 from Sun Microsystems where he was the architect and lead developer of the HotSpot Server Compiler, a technology that has delivered dramatic improvements in Java performance since its inception.

Previously he was with Motorola where he helped deliver industry leading SpecInt2000 scores on PowerPC chips, and before that he researched compiler technology at HP Labs. Cliff has been writing optimizing compilers and JITs for over 20 years. He is invited to speak regularly at industry and academic conferences including JavaOne, ECOOP, JVM and VEE; serves on the Program Committee of many conferences (including PLDI and OOPSLA); and has published many papers about HotSpot technology and more than a dozen related patents. Cliff holds a PhD in Computer Science from Rice University.

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.

Ola Bini works as a language geek for ThoughtWorks in Chicago. He is from Sweden but don't hold that against him. He is one of the JRuby core developers and have been involved in JRuby development since 2006. At one point in time, Ola got tired of all existing programming languages and decided to create his own, called Ioke. He has written a book called Practical JRuby on Rails Projects for APress, talked at numerous conferences, and contributed to a large number of open source projects.

His main passion lies in implementation languages, working on regular expression engines, trying to figure out how to create good YAML parsers.

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.