Great Lakes Software Symposium

November 12 - 14, 2010 - Chicago, IL


Westin Chicago Northwest
400 Park Boulevard
Itasca, IL   60143
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NOTE: You are viewing details about a past event. We will be back in ChicagoNovember 8 - 10, 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.

Aaron Bedra - Principal at Relevance, Member Clojure/core

Aaron Bedra is a member of Clojure/core and a developer at Relevance, Inc. where he spends his time as a tech lead, speaker and author. He is a frequent contributor to the Clojure language and its supporting libraries as well as an active member of the Clojure community. Aaron has led the development of several commercial Clojure projects and is the co-author with Stuart Halloway of Programming Clojure, 2nd Edition.



Peter Bell - Evangelist/hacker for hackNY

Peter is an evangelist and hacker for hackNY - a not-for-profit that aims to federate the next generation of hackers for the New York innovation community.

Peter is a regular presenter at national and international conferences on ruby, nodejs, NoSQL (especially MongoDB and neo4j), cloud computing, software craftsmanship, java, groovy, javascript, and requirements and estimating. He is on the program committee for Code Generation in Cambridge, England and the Domain Specific Modeling workshop at SPLASH (was ooPSLA) and reviews and shepherds proposals for the BCS SPA conference.

He has presented at a range of conferences including DLD conference, ooPSLA, RubyNation, SpringOne2GX, Code Generation, Practical Product Lines, the British Computer Society Software Practices Advancement conference, DevNexus, cf.Objective(), CF United, Scotch on the Rocks, WebDU, WebManiacs, UberConf, the Rich Web Experience and the No Fluff Just Stuff Enterprise Java tour.

He has been published in IEEE Software, Dr. Dobbs, IBM developerWorks, Information Week, Methods & Tools, Mashed Code, NFJS the Magazine and GroovyMag. He's currently writing a book on managing software development for Pearson.

He is an organizer of the CTO School http://www.ctoschool.org - an organization in NYC devoted to creating the next generation of technical leaders. He also organizes the node.js meetup in New York and co-organizes the Domain Driven Design and Grails meetups.

He is a regular instructor at General Assembly in New York. His presentations cover managing software development, NoSQL, mobile development, Javascript development, Twitter Bootstrap and Javascript frameworks.

He tweets regularly as @peterbell.



Tim Berglund - GitHubber

Tim is a full-stack generalist and passionate teacher who loves working with people as much as he loves to code. He believes the best developer is one who is well-informed of specifics and can also make deep connections between software development and the broader world. He has recently been exploring non-relational data stores, why professionalized product management is a global suboptimization, and of course everything related to Git. He does not really believe that it is possible to teach, but rather believes that it is his responsibility to create an environment in which people can learn.

He is also a poet, having composed and produced companion videos for Oh, The Methods You'll Compose and The Maven, with another project currently in the works. If you've been in his Git classes, you've seen some famous poems make their way into the world's best version control system.

Tim is a speaker internationally and on the No Fluff Just Stuff tour in the United States, and is co-president of the Denver Open Source User Group, author of the Gradle Liquibase Plugin, the maintainer of the Ratpack web framework, co-presenter of the best-selling O'Reilly Git Master Class, co-author of Building and Testing with Gradle, a member of the O'Reilly Expert Network, and a member of the GigOM Pro Analyst Network. He occasionally blogs at timberglund.com.

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



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.



Jeremy Deane - Chief Architect - Software Engineering Aficionado

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



Esther Derby - Co-author of "Behind Closed Doors: Secrets of Great Management"

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

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

Follow me on Twitter @estherderby



Eric Mizell - Solutions Architect w/Terracotta

As a Solutions Architect on the Field Engineering Team for Terracotta, Eric Mizell helps enterprise IT organizations improve their service availability and application performance through the application of the industry leading Terracotta Java Scalability Technology. Prior to Terracotta, Eric was the lead architect for a large scale insurance application. He has over 15 years of experience designing and developing enterprise systems where performance and scalability were essential. Eric has presented at NFJS, AJUG, SUG, and blogs about Java and caching at http://javaquip.blogspot.com/.



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.



Ben Rady - Author, Creator of Infinitest

Ben is a passionate and pragmatic software developer. He is the creator of Infinitest, a continuous test runner for JUnit. Ben is the author of two books on the topic of CT: "Continuous Testing in Ruby" and "Continuous Testing in Java", both soon to be published with the Pragmatic Bookshelf. He also contributes to a number of other projects that benefit the open source community, and regularly speaks at conferences and user groups around the country.

Presently employed as a Senior Software Engineer at DRW Trading Group, Ben is focused on helping teams improve their development practices to support rapid and regular delivery of well crafted software.



Mark Richards - SOA and Integration Architect, Author of Java Message Service

Mark Richards is an Independent Consultant working in the field as an Enterprise, Integration, and Application Architect, where he is involved in the architecture, design, and implementation of SOA, EDA, messaging, and other architectures, primarily in the Java platform. Previously, 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.



Nathaniel Schutta - Author, speaker, software engineer focused on user interface design.

Nathaniel T. Schutta is a senior software engineer focussed on making usable applications. A proponent of polyglot programming, Nate has written two books on Ajax and speaks regularly at various worldwide conferences, No Fluff Just Stuff symposia, universities, and Java user groups. In addition to his day job, Nate is an adjunct professor at the University of Minnesota where he teaches students to embrace dynamic languages. In an effort to rid the world of bad presentations, Nate coauthored the book Presentation Patterns with Neal Ford and Matthew McCullough.



Ken Sipe - Architect, Web Security Expert

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.



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).



Craig Walls - Author of Spring in Action

Craig Walls is a senior engineer with SpringSource as the Spring Social project lead and is the author of Spring in Action and XDoclet in Action (both published by Manning) and Modular Java (published by Pragmatic Bookshelf). He's a zealous promoter of the Spring Framework, speaking frequently at local user groups and conferences and writing about Spring and OSGi on his blog. When he's not slinging code, Craig spends as much time as he can with his wife, two daughters, 2 birds and 3 dogs.