Speakers

Andrew is the founder of the easyb BDD framework and the co-author of Addison Wesley's "Continuous Integration", Manning's "Groovy in Action" and "Java Testing Patterns". He is an author for multiple online publications including IBM's developerWorks and Oreilly's ONJava and ONLamp portals. He actively blogs about software at thediscoblog.com.

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 nineteen 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. Lately, he's been dipping his toes into alternate languages, including Clojure.

Howard is the author of Tapestry in Action for Manning Publications (which covers Tapestry 3.0). He lives in Portland, Oregon with his wife Suzanne, a novelist.

Howard is an independent consultant, offering Tapestry training, mentoring and project work.

Jared Richardson, co-author of Ship It! A Practical Guide to Successful
Software Projects, is a speaker, consultant, and mentor with NFJS One. Jared has been in the industry for more than fifteen years as a consultant, developer, tester, and manager.

Jared can be found online at Agile Artisans.

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.

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.

Mark Fisher is an engineer within the SpringSource division of VMware and lead of the Spring Integration project. He is also a committer on the core Spring Framework and the Spring BlazeDS Integration project. Mark has provided consulting services for clients across numerous industries, and he has trained hundreds of developers how to use the Spring Framework and related projects effectively. Mark speaks regularly at conferences and user groups in America and Europe.

Michael strives to raise the bar and ease the pain for developers across the country. He shares his passion and energy for improvement with everyone he meets, sometimes even with their permission. Michael has spent the better part of 20 years learning what it means to be a professional programmer who cares about art, quality, and craft. He's always ready to spend time with other developers who are fully engaged and devoted to their work--the "wide awake" developers. On the flip side, he cannot abide apathy or wasted potential.

Michael has been a professional programmer and architect for nearly 20 years. During that time, he has delivered running systems to the U. S. Government, the military, banking, finance, agriculture, and retail industries. More often than not, Michael has lived with the systems he built. This experience with the real world of operations changed his views about software architecture and development forever.

He worked through the birth and infancy of a Tier 1 retail site and has often served as "roving troubleshooter" for other online businesses. These experiences give him a unique perspective on building software for high performance and high reliability in the face of an actively hostile environment.

Most recently, Michael wrote "Release It! Design and Deploy Production-Ready Software", a book that realizes many of his thoughts about building software that does more than just pass QA, it survives the real world. Michael previously wrote numerous articles and editorials, spoke at Comdex, and co-authored one of the early Java books.

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 No Fluff Just Stuff symposia, universities, and Java user groups. In addition to his day job, Nate is an adjunct professor at the University of Minnesota where he teaches students to embrace dynamic languages.

Neal is Software Architect and Meme Wrangler at ThoughtWorks, a global IT consultancy with an exclusive focus on end-to-end software development and delivery.
Before joining ThoughtWorks, Neal was the Chief Technology Officer at The DSW Group, Ltd., a nationally recognized training and development firm. Neal has a degree in Computer Science from Georgia State University specializing in languages and compilers and a minor in mathematics specializing in statistical analysis.
He is also the designer and developer of applications, instructional materials, magazine articles, video presentations, and author of 6 books, including the most recent The Productive Programmer. His language proficiencies include Java, C#/.NET, Ruby, Groovy, functional languages, Scheme, Object Pascal, C++, and C. His primary consulting focus is the design and construction of large-scale enterprise applications. Neal has taught on-site classes nationally and internationally to all phases of the military and to many Fortune 500 companies. He is also an internationally acclaimed speaker, having spoken at over 100 developer conferences worldwide, delivering more than 600 talks. If you have an insatiable curiosity about Neal, visit his web site at http://www.nealford.com. He welcomes feedback and can be reached at nford@thoughtworks.com.

Pratik Patel wrote the first book on 'enterprise Java' in 1996, "Java Database Programming with JDBC." He has also spoken at various conferences such as the Net Database Summit, WWW7 and the Atlanta Java User's Group (AJUG).

Pratik's specialty is in large-scale Java applications for mission-critical use. He has designed and built enterprise 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.

Richard Monson-Haefel is the author of 97 Things Every Software Architect Should know (O'Reilly), Enterprise JavaBeans (O'Reilly), Java Message Service (O'Reilly), J2EE Web Services (Addison-Wesley), and one of the world's leading experts and book authors on enterprise computing. He was the lead architect of OpenEJB, an open source EJB container used in Apache Geronimo, a member of the JCP Executive Committee, member of JCP EJB expert groups, and an industry analyst for Burton Group researching enterprise computing, open source, and Rich Internet Application (RIA) development. Today, Richard is an independent software developer. You can learn more about Richard at his web site http://www.monson-haefel.com

Roman is a Principal Software Security Consultant at Foundstone, a small division of McAfee that provides security assessment, training, and software design services to corporate and government organizations around the world. After spending most of his life building software, now he figures out ways to break it through penetration testing, threat modeling, and code review. On the proactive side, he leads software design sessions, teaches Java security courses, and participates in the Hacme Books open-source project. In his ever-dwindling spare time Roman enjoys mountaineering, scuba diving, and other outdoor pursuits.

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.

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.