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Additional Speakers

Aaron Erickson, ThoughtWorks,

Aaron Erickson is the author of The Nomadic Developer, a "field-guide" to the occupation of technology consultant. Aaron is a veteran technology consultant, writer, and Lead Consultant with ThoughtWorks, Inc. His life's work helping organizations better leverage technology, by contributing to solutions that have substantial positive economic impact for his clients. He is an enthusiast of agile techniques for delivery of software, and has special interest in helping companies understand the corrosive effects of technical debt. He is also an "armchair economist" and an enthusiast of Rock Band and Guitar Hero video games.

Talk: "Using F# To Solve Real World Problems"

Adrian Cole, Opscode,

Adrian founded the open source project jclouds last year, which aims to end cloud vendor lockin. Adrian's been in systems management for half his life, including education, medical, hosting, and financial services contexts. He's recently worked as a cloud ecosystem architect at VMware, helping make vCloud Express relevant to developers and ISVs. Adrian currently works at Opscode as a Senior Technical Evangelist, and spends a lot of time on Java-Chef-cloud integration.

Talk: "Java Provisioning In The Cloud"

Bob Lee, Square,

Bob Lee is the Android lead for Square. Before that, he was the Android core library lead at Google. Bob created Google Guice and led JSR-330 Dependency Injection for Java. Bob Lee was a keynote speaker at Strange Loop 2009.

Talk: "Android Squared"

Borislav Iordanov, Kobrix,

A Math & Computer Science graduate of McGill University, Montreal, Borislav Iordanov has been programming professionally for the past 14 years in a wide range of domains such as language design and compiler development, embedded systems, web development, bioinformatics, financial software and natural language processing. His company Kobrix Software, Inc., founded in 2001, developed and launched a web application framework (TICL) as its first product, and sold it to several Fortune 500 companies. Kobrix is also the recipient of the 2009 Best Fit Integrator E-Government Award. Borislav is currently focusing on software architecture consulting in eGovernment projects and working on innovative open-source products. In his spare time, Borislav runs an Olympic Fencing Academy for children and adults.

Talk: "HyperGraphDB - Data Management for Complex Systems"

Brian Marick,

Brian Marick was a Lisp and C programmer in the 80's, a testing consultant in the 90's, and an Agile consultant in the 00's. He's unsure what he'll be this decade, but he hopes it will have something to do with Ruby and Clojure. He was one of the authors of the Manifesto for Agile Software Development and is the author of three books (, , and Programming Cocoa with Ruby).

Talk: "Outside-in TDD in Clojure"

Brian Sletten, Bosatsu Consulting,

Brian Sletten is a liberal arts-educated software engineer with a focus on forward-leaning technologies. He has a background as a system architect, a developer, a mentor and a trainer. His experience has spanned the online games, defense, finance and commercial domains with security consulting, 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.

Talk: "The Semantic Web : Hot or Not?"

Bruce Tate, RapidRed,

Bruce Tate is a mountain biker, kayaker, and father of two from Austin, Texas. The international author and speaker is the president and founder of , a consultancy focusing on rapid web development using lightweight technologies, especially Ruby. He has delivered production Rails applications since the pre-Rails 1.0 release. As the chief architect and CTO of WellGood, LLC, he served as CTO, handling leadership and primary development responsibilities for ChangingThePresent.org and . He is the author of eleven books, including Deploying Rails Applications, From Java to Ruby, Beyond Java, and Rails, Up and Running. Today, he is leading development for sites such as , the social gardening site that formally launched in the Spring of 2010 and BuyerLens, a buying service expected to launch in later 2010.

Bruce's current writing project is Seven Languages in Seven Weeks, a book about learning programming languages. It covers four programming paradigms and seven languages.

Talk: "Mary Poppins Meets the Matrix"

Bryan Weber, Near Infinity,

Bryan Weber is a Senior Software Developer at Near Infinity in Reston, Virginia. He is a self proclaimed programming language weenie and a regular speaker at the National Capital Area Clojure Users Group. He has consulted to numerous federal agencies and commercial companies. He currently is working on a project to help make the internet backbone a safer place.

Talk: "Clojure for Ninjas"

Chris Biow, Mark Logic

Chris Biow has worked in Search, Database, and Knowledge Management applications for over twenty years: in the US Navy with the Naval Research Laboratory; as Principal Architect with Verity and Autonomy; and with Mark Logic as Federal CTO. He is a 1983 graduate of the US Naval Academy and served for eight years on active duty as a Radar Intercept Officer, flying the aircraft-carrier-based F-14 Tomcat. Mr. Biow completed a career in the Reserves with the Naval Research Laboratory, working with Space Systems and Sensors. His civilian career has included KM architecture for major projects with the US Intelligence Community, Bloomberg News, and technical publishers. Current projects include large-scale government message handling and massively scaled analytic systems for billions of documents and records.

Talk: "Unifying the Search Engine and NoSQL DBMS with a Universal Index"

Chris Houser, Sentry Data Systems,

Chris Houser is a co-author of "The Joy of Clojure", and a primary contributor to Clojure itself. He is a senior software developer at Sentry Data Systems, where he's using Clojure to develop a distributed application platform. His lifelong passion for programming began when he was a child and drives him to continue learning and exploring new languages today.

Talk: "Clojure's Solutions to the Expression Problem"

Daniel Spiewak, Novell,

Daniel Spiewak is a software developer based out of Wisconsin, USA. Over the years, he has worked with Java, Scala, Ruby, C/C++, ML, Clojure and several experimental languages. He currently spends most of his free time researching parser theory and methodologies, particularly areas where the field intersects with functional language design, domain-specific languages and type theory.

Talk: "High Wizardry in the Land of Scala"

Dean Wampler, DRW Holdings,

Dean is a software developer at DRW Holdings, a Chicago-based trading company. He is the co-author, with Alex Payne, of Programming Scala (O’Reilly - see programmingscala.com). Dean is a frequent conference speaker on Scala, “Polyglot and Multiparadigm Programming”, and other topics. Dean is a guest editor for the Sept./Oct. special issue of IEEE Software on “Multiparadigm Programming”.

Talk: "Scalable Concurrent Applications with Akka and Scala"

Talk: "The Seductions of Scala"

Derek Sigler

Derek works in the Business Intelligence group for a large photography company. As a hobbyist, he enjoys microcontroller projects for home automation, robots, teaching children, and overall awesomeness. He is a founding member of the St. Louis Arch Reactor hackerspace.

Eben Hewitt, Choice Hotels International,

Eben Hewitt is the author of the upcoming book Cassandra: The Definitive Guide, published by O’Reilly. Hewitt is Director of Application Architecture at Choice Hotels International, where his focus is on architecture strategy and the design of mission-critical large-scale distributed systems. Hewitt has spoken to thousands of developers around the world on SOA, REST, and general architecture topics, has several certifications in Java and TOGAF. He is the author of Java SOA Cookbook (O’Reilly) and a contributor to 97 Things Every Software Architect Should Know.

Talk: "Adopting Apache Cassandra"

Edward Yavno, Lab49,

Edward Yavno is a senior Developer and Architect with over 10 years of experience designing and building high performance, low latency distributed systems for companies ranging from startups to top tier financial institutions. He is currently Senior Associate Consultant at Lab49, a technology consulting firm that builds advanced solutions for the financial services industry.

Talk: "Open Source EDA"

Eleanor McHugh,

London-based hacker Eleanor originally trained as a physicist before turning her talents to writing innovative high-performance systems for the aviation and broadcast video industries. A lifelong language geek and longstanding Ruby developer, Ellie is currently working on RubyGoLightly, a Ruby runtime for concurrent and embedded applications.

Talk: "GoLightly: Building VM-based Language Runtimes In Go"

Eric Burke, Square,

Eric Burke is Square’s Android UI guru. He was formerly a Principal SE for Object Computing, Inc. He has written books for O’Reilly about XSLT, Extreme Programming and Ant.

James Carr,

Talk: "Full Stack BDD With Scala"

Jeff Brown, SpringSource,

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 10 years, he currently teaches a number of Java and object oriented training courses in addition to doing consulting and mentoring work for industries including Aerospace, Financial, and Medical. Jeff's areas of expertise include Java, agile web development with Groovy & Grails, distributing computing, object database systems, object oriented analysis and design and agile development.

Talk: "Building Twitter with Grails in 40 Minutes"

Jim Duey,

20+ years professional programmer Founded Intensive Systems Consulting, Inc. for Clojure consulting, embedded/industrial software consulting and developer mentoring. Written several tutorials on Clojure programming: http://intensivesystems.net/tutorials.html

Talk: "Conduit: A Library for Distributed Applications in Clojure"

Joshua Bennett, CME Group,

Joshua Bennett is a technical architect for CME Group. His days are spent designing and developing highly scalable and concurrent systems which need to handle the rigors of the high throughput low latency world of the futures and options trading industry. When he isn't working, he spends his time preparing for the inevitable zombie apocalypse by learning to operate various motorized vehicles.

Talk: "Immutable Object versus Unsynchronized State"

Joshua Bloch, Google,

Joshua Bloch is Chief Java Architect at Google and author of the Jolt Award winning Effective Java (Addison-Wesley, 2001, 2008). He was previously a Distinguished Engineer at Sun Microsystems and a Senior Systems Designer at Transarc Corporation. Bloch led the design and implementation of numerous Java platform features, including JDK 5.0 language enhancements and the award-winning Java Collections Framework. He coauthored Java Puzzlers (Addison-Wesley, 2005) and Java Concurrency in Practice (Addison-Wesley, 2006). Bloch holds a B.S. from Columbia and a Ph.D. from Carnegie-Mellon.

Talk: "Java Puzzlers—Scraping the Bottom of the Barrel" (with Bob Lee)

Justin Love,

Justin Love's creed is, in part "To tease order from disorder. To make right what is wrong and make a visible difference in the lives of people I care about." Justin left a steady job in embedded software and IT support for the wild blue yonder. He is an analytical artist and martial artist who presents regularly at ChicagoRuby and JS.chi user groups.

Ken Sipe, Perficient,

Ken Sipe is a Technology Director with Perficient, Inc. (PRFT), IBM's largest service partner, where he leads multiple teams in the development of solutions in the SOA, Web 2.0 and portal domains, on both the Java and .Net platforms.

Ken was the founder of CodeMentor, where he was the Chief Architect and Mentor, leading clients in the execution of RUP and Agile methodologies in the delivery of software solutions. Ken has a deep need to be highly diversified. Ken often works with IT executives on high-level strategic roadmaps, currently geared around service oriented architectures (SOA). Ken also likes to keep his hands "dirty" in the code, which has him on a regular basis, pairing or otherwise producing code. Ken is regularly requested by clients that know him to "rescue" projects, either through the streamlining of processes or the rapid production of code.

Talk: "Gradle - The Polyglot Build System"

Kevin Weil, Twitter,

Kevin Weil leads the analytics team at , building distributed infrastructure and leveraging data analysis at a massive scale to help grow the popular micro-blogging service. With hundreds of millions of monthly site visitors and many more interacting through API-based third party applications, Twitter has one of the world's most varied and interesting datasets. Prior to joining Twitter, Kevin led the analytics team at the Kleiner Perkins-backed web media startup Cooliris. Kevin earned his bachelor's degree in Mathematics and Physics from Harvard University, and has a master's degree in Physics from Stanford University.

Talk: "NoSQL At Twitter"

Kirk Pepperdine

Kirk Pepperdine works as an independent consultant offering Java performance-related services. Prior to focusing on Java, Kirk developed and tuned systems written in C/C++, Smalltalk, and a variety of other languages. Kirk has written many articles and spoken at several conferences on the subject of performance tuning. He helped evolve http://www.javaperformancetuning.com as a resource for performance tuning tips and information.

Talk: "Performance Tuning With Cheap Drink and Poor Tools"

Kyle Cordes, Oasis Digital,

Kyle Cordes is a software development professional and entrepreneur with experience in myriad technologies, including Java, Delphi, Ruby, C++, .NET, XML, assembly language, database systems, PHP, J2EE, and more. His recent projects include wireless data access, mobile and PDA applications, and high volume enterprise applications, as well as development methodology assistance and software project leadership. Kyle has used Java since 1995, .NET since 2001, and is a “Sun Certified Java Developer for the Java 2 Platform”.

Talk: "Lua, Tiny Embeddable Scripting that Doesn’t Suck"

Kyle Simpson, Getify Solutions,

Kyle Simpson is a UI architect from Austin, TX. He is passionate about user experience, specifically optimizing the UI to be as responsive, efficient, secure, and scalable as possible. He considers JavaScript the ultimate language and is constantly tinkering with how to push it further. If something can't be done in JavaScript or web technology, he's bored by it. He has a number of open-source projects, including LABjs, HandlebarJS/BikechainJS, and flXHR, and he also is a core contributor to SWFObject.

Talk: "Dude, That's some Strange UI Architecture"

Luigi Montanez, Sunlight Labs,

Luigi is a Ruby developer with the Sunlight Labs: a non-profit organization focused on opening up government data, and then creating tools and apps around that data.

Talk: "Civic Hacking"

Mark Volkmann, OCI,

Mark is a partner at Object Computing, Inc. in St. Louis where he provides consulting and training in Java, XML, Ruby and jQuery. He has also written many articles on software engineering topics that can be found at http://ociweb.com/mark/.

Talk: "jQuery - RIA Miracle!"

Matt Follett, The Genome Center at Washington University

Matt Follett is a developer in the Informatics team at The Genome Center at Washington University School of Medicine, where he works on high-throughput DNA sequencing projects. Matt is also a recent contributor to the Using Perl 6 book.

Talk: "Perl 6 - The Apocalypse"

Michael Galpin, eBay,

Michael Galpin is an architect at eBay where his work includes the eBay Mobile iPhone application. He is a frequent writer for IBM developerWorks, and has spoken at technical conferences including JavaOne, EclipseCon, and AjaxWorld.

Talk: "Mobile HTML 5.0"

Talk: "That’s My App - Running in Your Background - Draining Your Battery"

Mike Malone, SimpleGeo,

Mike Malone is an infrastructure engineer at SimpleGeo where he works on building and integrating scalable systems that power the company’s location platform. Since joining SimpleGeo, Mike has been working to ensure operational continuity in the face of rapid growth, partial system failures, and traffic bursts. Recently, he's been working on building an efficient multi-dimensional complex query overlay on top of an eventually consistent distributed hash table. Before joining SimpleGeo, Mike helped build the microblogging web site Pownce, where he learned a lot about the technical and social difficulties of scaling an online community. After Pownce’s acquisition by Six Apart in 2008, Mike worked on the TypePad platform team, where he gained a great deal of experience building RESTful web services. In his spare time Mike enjoys tinkering with new technologies. When he’s not on the computer, you can probably find him hanging out with his girlfriend, Katie, and their friends at a good bar.

Talk: "Working with Dimensional Data in a Distributed Hash Table"

Mikhail Panchenko, Flickr

Mike works at Flickr. He attended Washington University in St. Louis before starting at Yahoo! in 2008. While there, he worked on company-wide infrastructure automation projects, including DNS and hardware configuration. Since joining the Flickr team in 2009, he has been involved in a variety of features and infrastructure projects, including a complete refactor of the offline tasks system. Working at an old-school LAMP shop, Mike is always on the lookout for new technologies to add to the stack and is tirelessly working on modernizing the Flickr architecture. He recently spoke at the 2010 Web 2.0 Conference in San Francisco.

Talk: "The Evolution of the Flickr Architecture, or I Love LAMP, 2010 Edition"

Nathan Marz, BackType,

Nathan Marz is the tech lead at where he builds analytics tools for social media. BackType collects many terabytes of data from Twitter, Facebook, social news sites, millions of blogs, and provides analytics on this data in real-time. Nathan does most of his hacking in Clojure and enjoys the abstraction and scalability advantages of NoSQL technologies like Hadoop, Cascading, and Cassandra. When not hacking, Nathan maintains a blog at http://nathanmarz.com/blog where he writes about software, startups, and technology.

Talk: "Querying Big Data Rapidly and Robustly With Cascalog"

Patrycja Wegrzynowicz, Yon Labs,

Patrycja Wegrzynowicz is Founder and CTO at Yon Labs and Yon Consulting. There, she shapes the future direction of technological research in software as well as acts as a chief architect and consultant on the projects from the field of automated software engineering, domain names, and Internet security. She is a regular speaker at top academic (e.g., OOPSLA, ASE) as well as technical conferences (e.g., JavaOne, Devoxx, JavaZone). Patrycja holds a master degree in Computer Science and is currently finalizing her PhD at Warsaw University. Her academic interests are focused on architectural and design patterns along with automated software engineering, particularly static and dynamic analysis techniques to support program verification, comprehension, and optimization.

Talk: "Best Bugs, Best Practices, and Best Tools for Hibernate"

Paul King, ASERT,

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.

Talk: "Groovy and Concurrency"

Talk: "Writing Domain Specific Languages (DSLs) using Groovy"

Richard Crowley, DevStructure,

Richard is an alumnus of Washington University in Saint Louis, Flickr, and OpenDNS. He loves and obsesses over engineering tools and practice. He’s educated as a hardware designer but hasn’t let that stop him dabbling professionally in web applications, XULRunner desktop applications, big data, and UNIX internals. Richard lives for the terminal and thinks vi is a better religion than emacs. In 2010, he founded DevStructure to build configuration management tools for solo developers, small teams, and anyone without an army of operators.

Talk: "Securing and Extending Puppet for World Domination"

Roger Bodamer, 10gen

Roger Bodamer has over 20 years of experience of building and delivering great and innovative products to market and has deep expertise and knowledge of database architectures and internals. Roger holds several patents for database and middleware technology. His experience leading product development and engineering teams includes 12 years with Oracle’s Database and Application Server development organization where he pioneered products that delivered heterogeneous interoperability, as well as several years as SVP of product operations and engineering at Apple’s PowerSchool division. Roger also held leadership positions at OuterBay and Efficient Frontier. He earned a Bachelor's degree in computer science from the HogeSchool Enschede.

Talk: "Scaling with MongoDB"

Rusty Klophaus, Basho Technologies,

is a Senior Software Engineer at Basho Technologies. Rusty is on the core team of , a dynamo-inspired key/value store; and Basho Search, a solution for distributed indexing and queries. Over the past two years, Rusty has become a recognized face in the Erlang community for his work with Basho and as the author of the Nitrogen Web Framework, a full-stack Erlang framework for interactive web applications.

Talk: "Riak: From Small to Large"

Ryan Dahl, Joyent,

Ryan is an American programmer working at Joyent. His work invariably involves interruptible parsers, event loops, and response time histograms. He is the creator of several open source projects including the Ebb web server and the "EY" load balancer module for Nginx.

Talk: "Parallel Programming with Node.js"

Ryan Senior, Revelytix,

Ryan Senior is a Senior Engineer at Revelytix Inc writing Semantic Web software in Clojure. Previously he worked as a Software Architect in the Emerging Solutions department of BJC Healthcare. He has worked in many other industries including insurance, finance and manufacturing. His main interests are software design, programming languages and the semantic web.

Talk: "Triplestore Testing in the Cloud with Clojure"

Scott Bale, BJC Healthcare,

Scott Bale is a software developer with BJC HealthCare who is interested in languages and the web as a platform.

Talk: "JavaScript Functions: The Good Parts - Idioms for Encapsulation and Inheritance"

Scott Davis, ThirstyHead,

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

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

Scott teaches public and private classes on Groovy and Grails for start-ups and Fortune 100 companies. He is the co-founder of the Groovy/Grails Experience conference and is a regular presenter on the international technical conference circuit (including No Fluff Just Stuff, JavaOne, OSCON, TheServerSide, and QCON). In 2008, Scott was voted the top Rock Star at JavaOne for his talk "Groovy, the Red Pill: How to blow the mind of a buttoned-down Java developer". In 2009, he won a second Rock Star award for his talk "Resource-Oriented Architecture (ROA) and REST".

Talk: "Tomorrow's Tech Today: HTML 5"

Talk: "Hidden Web Services: Microformats and the Semantic Web"

Steve Harris, Terracotta,

Steve has been instrumental in developing Terracotta’s technologies from the ground up. He started his career at Terracotta as the Chief Architect of the Terracotta platform and quickly progressed from there to lead the Engineering organization. Under his stewardship Terracotta has built a widely adopted and highly acclaimed product family and has gained industry recognition for the quality of its engineering team. One of his most recent accomplishments has been the highly successful integration of the Terracotta platform with Ehcache.

Steve is a seasoned veteran of infrastructure software. Prior to his work at Terracotta Steve spent 12 years at organizations such as Kenemea, JP Morgan and Florida Power and Light leading teams and developing infrastructure software focused on helping developers achieve simple scale for their applications.

Talk: "A Little Bit About Terracotta BigMemory"

Steve Smith, Ordered List,

Steve is a recognized authority on front-end development and interface design. He is an entrepreneur, founding Ordered List, and co-founding Sidebar Creative, both of which are outlets for his professional work. And as an author, public speaker, and University of Notre Dame professor, he is passionate about sharing his knowledge with others.

Talk: "Real World Modeling with MongoDB"

Ted Neward, Neward & Associates,

Ted Neward is the Principal with Neward & Associates, where he specializes in high-scale enterprise systems, working with clients ranging in size from Fortune 500 corporations to small 20-person shops. He speaks on the conference circuit, including the No Fluff Just Stuff Symposium tour, 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 "Effective Enterprise Java", and the forthcoming "Professional F#". He lives in the Pacific Northwest.

Than Som,

Talk: "Full Stack BDD With Scala"

Tim Berglund, August Technology Group,

Tim Berglund runs a consulting firm called the , which provides training and development services to customers building web applications with open-source tools running on the JVM. He likes it best when these include Groovy and Grails.

His technology interests span web applications, business integration, data architecture, and software architecture, but his greatest passion is to help developers improve in their craft. He is a speaker internationally and at user groups in the United States, and helps lead and the . He is currently writing the book, Deploying Grails (to be published by O'Reilly), due out in 2010.

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

Talk: "Gaelyk: Lightweight Groovy on the Google App Engine"

Talk: "Complexity Theory and Software Development"

Trotter Cashion, Mashion,

During the day, Trotter Cashion is co-founder of , a best-practices focused Ruby and Javascript consulting company in Philadelphia. At night, he can usually be found hacking on various open source projects, writing books (he's contributed chapters to The Rails Way and Service-Oriented Design with Ruby and Rails), or drinking a beer and talking about ideas. In the past, he's worked on streamlining financial communications with Algorithmics, streaming personal videos over the internet for Motionbox, developing a CMS for the New York Jets, and writing an open source OpenID server for VeriSign.

Talk: "Automate or Die"

Yehuda Katz, Engine Yard,

Yehuda Katz is currently employed by Engine Yard, and works full time as a Core Team Member on the Rails project. He is the co-author of and the upcoming , and is a contributor to . He spends most of his time hacking on Rails, but also on other Ruby community projects, like Rubinius and Datamapper. And when the solution doesn't yet exist, he'll try his hand at creating one - as such, he's also created projects like Thor and DO.rb.