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).

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 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.

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.

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 Senior VP Engineering and Senior Fellow at General Assembly, a campus for technology, design, and entrepreneurship. He is responsible for hiring and managing an engineering team and is involved in the development and teaching of the technology curriculum.

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.

Craig Walls has been professionally developing software for almost 18 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.

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.

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.

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/.

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 17 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.

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.