Lone Star Software Symposium: Austin

July 11 - 13, 2008 - Austin, TX


Marriott Austin Airport Hotel
4415 South IH-35
Austin, TX   78744
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NOTE: You are viewing details about a past event. We will be back in AustinJune 28 - 30, 2013.
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Speakers

Our presenters are not simply vendor representatives -- they are industry recognized subject matter experts. They are published authors. They are the people writing the software you use on a daily basis.

David Bock - Principal Consultant, CodeSherpas Inc.

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.



Jeff Scott Brown - Core Member of the Grails Development Team

Core member of the Grails development team, Jeff Scott 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.



Keith Donald - SpringSource Principal & Founding Partner

Keith Donald is a principal and founding partner at SpringSource, the company behind Spring and a division of VMware. At SpringSource, Keith is a full-time member of the Spring development team focusing on web application development productivity. He is also the architect behind SpringSource's state-of-the-art training curriculum, which has provided practical Spring training to over 10,000 students worldwide.

Over his career, Keith, an experienced enterprise software developer and mentor, has built business applications for customers spanning a diverse set of industries including banking, network management, information assurance, education, retail, and healthcare. He is particularly skilled at translating business requirements into technical solutions.



Neal Ford - Application Architect at ThoughtWorks, Inc.

Neal is Director, Software Architect, and Meme Wrangler at ThoughtWorks, a global IT consultancy with an exclusive focus on end-to-end software development and delivery.

Before joining ThoughtWorks, Neal was the Chief Technology Officer at The DSW Group, Ltd., a nationally recognized training and development firm. Neal has a degree in Computer Science from Georgia State University specializing in languages and compilers and a minor in mathematics specializing in statistical analysis.

He is also the designer and developer of applications, instructional materials, magazine articles, video presentations, and author of 6 books, including the most recent The Productive Programmer. His language proficiencies include Java, C#/.NET, Ruby, Groovy, functional languages, Scheme, Object Pascal, C++, and C. His primary consulting focus is the design and construction of large-scale enterprise applications. Neal has taught on-site classes nationally and internationally to all phases of the military and to many Fortune 500 companies. He is also an internationally acclaimed speaker, having spoken at over 100 developer conferences worldwide, delivering more than 600 talks. If you have an insatiable curiosity about Neal, visit his web site at http://www.nealford.com. He welcomes feedback and can be reached at nford@thoughtworks.com.



David Geary - Author of Graphic Java, co-author of Core JSF, member of the JSF Expert Group

David Geary is the president of Clarity Training, Inc. (corewebdevelopment.com), where he teaches developers to implement web applications using JavaServer Faces (JSF) and the Google Web Toolkit (GWT).

A prominent author, speaker, and consultant, David holds a unique qualification as a Java expert: He wrote the best-selling books on both Java component frameworks: Swing and JavaServer Faces. David's Graphic Java Swing was the best-selling Swing book, and is one of the best-selling Java books of all-time, and Core JSF, which David wrote with Cay Horstman, is the best-selling book on JavaServer Faces.

David was one of a handful of experts on the JSF 1.0 Expert Group (EG) that actively defined the standard Java-based web application framework, and David is currently on the JSF 2 Expert Group, helping to vastly improve JSF in version 2.

Besides serving on the JSF and JSTL Expert Groups, David has contributed to open-source projects and he has written questions for two of Sun's Certification Exams: Web Developer Certification and JavaServer Faces Certification. He invented the Struts Template library which was the precursor to Tiles, a popular framework for composing web pages from JSP fragments, was the 2nd Struts committer and contributed to the Apache Shale project.

David has spoken at more than 100 NFJS symposiums since 2003, and he also speaks at other conferences such as TheServerSide Java Symposium, JavaOne, JavaPolis, and JAOO. David has taught at Java University for the past three years, and is a three-time JavaOne rock star.



Stuart Halloway - CEO of Relevance

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



John Heintz - President of Gist Labs

Agile/Kanban coach, REST architect, software craftsman

John D. Heintz is a husband, father, developer, Agilist, entrepreneur. After studying electrons in college, John's intuition led him to pursue software, and he's been a digital craftsmen since. Always seeking solutions with higher leverage and deeper simplicity has led John to important methods and tools. John's approach to building systems and teams started with leading his first Scrum team in 1999, included XP and TDD, and now Agile and Lean methods are part of his daily work and consulting. John has built single-source hyperdocument SGML publishing systems, a version control CORBA/Python CMS, an AspectJ dependency acquisition framework, added test automation to many Java and .NET systems, coached a 100-person Agile/Lean game studio, and built RESTful Web integration systems. John has launched his own company, Gist Labs, to further his focus on essential innovation.



Ramnivas Laddad - Author of AspectJ in Action, Principal at SpringSource

Ramnivas Laddad is a SpringSource Principal Enginner. He has over a decade of experience in applying his enterprise Java and aspect-oriented programming (AOP) expertise to middleware, design automation, networking, web application, user interface, and security projects.

Ramnivas Laddad is a well-known expert in enterprise Java, especially in the area of AOP and Spring. He is the author of AspectJ in Action, the best-selling book on AOP and AspectJ that has been lauded by industry experts for its presentation of practical and innovative AOP applications to solve real-world problems. Ramnivas, a Spring framework committer, is also an active presenter at leading industry events such as JavaOne, JavaPolis, No Fluff Just Stuff, SpringOne, Software Development, and has been an active member of both the AspectJ and Spring communities from their beginnings.



Scott Leberknight - Chief Architect at Near Infinity

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.



Alex Miller - Sr. Engineer with Terracotta Inc.

Alex Miller is a Sr. Engineer with Terracotta Inc, the makers of the open-source Java clustering product Terracotta. Prior to Terracotta, Alex worked at BEA Systems on the AquaLogic product line and was Chief Architect at MetaMatrix. His interests include Java, concurrency, distributed systems, query languages, and software design. Alex enjoys writing his blog at http://tech.puredanger.com and has spoken at a number of Java user group meetings and conferences.

In St. Louis, Alex is responsible for founding the Lambda Lounge, a user group for the study of functional and dynamic languages.



Ted Neward - Enterprise, Virtual Machine and Language Wonk

Ted Neward is an Architectural Consultant with Neudesic, LLC as well as the Principal with Neward & Associates. He speaks on the conference circuit discussing Java, .NET and XML service technologies, focusing on Java-.NET interoperability, programming languages, and virtual machine technologies. He has written several widely-recognized books in both the Java and .NET space, including the recently- released "Professional F#" and widely-acclaimed "Effective Enterprise Java". He lives in the Pacific Northwest.



Pratik Patel - CTO TripLingo & Code Hacker

Pratik Patel is the CTO of Atlanta based TripLingo (http://www.triplingo.com/). He wrote the first book on 'enterprise Java' in 1996, "Java Database Programming with JDBC." He has also spoken at various conferences and participates in several local tech groups and startup groups. He's in the startup world now and hacks iOS, Android, HTML5, CSS3, JavaScript, Rails, and ..... well everything except Perl.

Pratik's specialty is in large-scale applications for mission-critical and mobile applications use. He has designed and built applications in the retail, health care, financial services, and telecoms sectors. Pratik holds a master's in Biomedical Engineering from UNC, has worked in places such as New York, London, and Hong Kong, and currently lives in Atlanta, GA.



Jared Richardson - Agile coach and co-author of Ship It

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.



Brian Sletten - Forward Leaning Software Engineer

Brian Sletten is a liberal arts-educated software engineer with a focus on forward-leaning technologies. His experience has spanned many industries including retail, banking, online games, defense, finance, hospitality and health care. He has a B.S. in Computer Science from the College of William and Mary and lives in Auburn, CA. He focuses on web architecture, resource-oriented computing, social networking, the Semantic Web, data science, 3D graphics, visualization, scalable systems, security consulting and other technologies of the late 20th and early 21st Centuries. He is also a rabid reader, devoted foodie and has excellent taste in music. If pressed, he might tell you about his International Pop Recording career.



Venkat Subramaniam - Founder of Agile Developer, Inc.

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).



Eitan Suez - Eitan Suez is the creator of the open source framework JMatter

Eitan Suez is an independent software developer based in Austin, Texas. Some of the more visible work Eitan has done includes the open source project 'ashkelon' (sourceforge), a system for Java API documentation management; more recently, the open source framework JMatter (jmatter.org), a framework for constructing rich domain-driven workgroup applications (Java, Swing). Eitan has spoken at various NFJS events in years past, is active with his local JUG, and passionate about the practice of software development.