Andrew was the founder of Vanward Technologies, which was acquired by JNetDirect in 2005. Subsequently, he served as President of Stelligent Incorporated.

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.

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 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 and currently lives in Fairfax, VA. He is the President of Bosatsu Consulting, Inc., a professional services company focused on web architecture, resource-oriented computing, the Semantic Web, scalable systems, security consulting and other technologies of the late 20th and early 21st Centuries.

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

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 (JSF). David's Graphic Java Swing was 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 he's currently helping to define the next version of JSF on the JSF 2.0 EG.

Besides serving on the JSF and JSTL Expert Groups, David has contributed to open-source projects and co-authored Sun's Web Developer Certification Exam. 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 Shale.

A regular on the NFJS tour, David also speaks at other conferences such as TheServerSide Symposium, JavaOne and JavaPolis. David has taught at Java University and was twice voted a JavaOne rock star, for presentations in 2005 and 2007.

David has been creating software for more than 15 years in a variety of domains: digital audio, digital biometrics, medical, financial, retail, legal, and education to name a few. For the past 8 years, David has mentored and coached agile teams in the U.S., Canada, Europe, India, Egypt, Russia, and Ukraine. Along with presenting and leading workshops / tutorials at conferences in the U.S. and Europe, David has contributed to several books (Managing Agile Projects and Agile in the Large), and worked on agile curriculum for The University of Minnesota and Capella University. David is currently writing a book for the Pragmatic Programmer series.

David leads DevJam, a Minneapolis based company composed of agile collaborators. As mentors and practitioners, DevJam focuses on using agile to help people and companies improve their software production skills. DevJam provides seasoned leaders that strive to pragmatically match technology, people, and processes in a way which produces software that makes people happier and more productive.

For more information, check out the DevJam website www.devjam.com

Justin is the co-founder of Relevance, a consulting/training/research organization located in the Research Triangle of North Carolina. Justin has been developing applications with static and dynamic languages since 1992. He has written code with Java, .NET, C#, Visual Basic, Perl, Python and Ruby. He loves to talk, especially in front of people, but all by himself in the corner if he must. Justin is currently focused on: Rails (because its the law), Spring (because Java isn't going anywhere) and security (because paranoia is your friend).

Kirk is an industry analyst at Burton Group. For 15 years, he has worked in the trenches on real software projects. He takes a keen interest in design, architecture, application development platforms, agile development, and the IT industry in general, especially as it relates to software development.

In 2002, Kirk wrote the book Java Design: Objects, UML, and Process, published by Addison-Wesley. He has also written numerous whitepapers and articles, including The Agile Developer column for The Agile Journal. Kirk is the founder of Extensible Java, a growing resource of component design pattern heuristics for Java that can easily be applied to most other platforms, including .Net. Kirk has trained thousands of software professionals, teaching courses on UML, Java J2EE technology, object-oriented development, component based development, software architecture, and software process. He enjoys hacking in a variety of languages, including Java, .Net, Ruby, and PHP.

Neal Ford is an Application Architect for ThoughtWorks. He is an architect, designer, and developer of applications, instructional materials, magazine articles, and video/DVD presentations. Neal is also the author of Developing with Delphi: Object-Oriented Techniques (Prentice Hall PTR, 1996), JBuilder 3 Unleashed (SAMS Publishing, 1999), and Art of Java Web Development (Manning, 2003). His language proficiencies include Java, C#/.NET, Ruby, Object Pascal, C++, and C. Neal’s primary consulting focus is the design and construction of large-scale enterprise applications. He is also an internationally acclaimed speaker, having spoken at over 30 developers’ conferences worldwide.

Ramnivas Laddad is an Interface21 Principal. 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 is a well-known expert in enterprise Java, especially in the area of AOP. He is the author of AspectJ in Action, the best-selling book on AOP and AspectJ. His book is highly recommended by leading industry experts for its practical and innovative applications of AOP solving a wide range of real-world problems. Ramnivas is also one of the industry's leading conference speakers, who has given over one hundred talks at conferences such as JavaOne, No Fluff Just Stuff, JavaPolis, and EclipseCon. Ramnivas hosts the Aspectivity blog, where he shares his thoughts on AOP and related topics. He is an active member of the AspectJ community and has been involved with AOP since its early form.

Ramnivas’ role at SpringSource includes working with the Spring community and SpringSource clients to help them leverage the power of AOP. He is currently involved in interesting work combining ideas in domain-driven design with AOP and DI. He is also working on creating reusable aspects to simplify development of typical Spring-based projects. His work at SpringSource is expected to drive major new innovations atop the Spring 2.0 platform.

Ramnivas lives in Princeton, New Jersey.

Tom Marrs is a Principal Architect with CIBER, where he specializes in Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA), JavaEE, Open Source, and AJAX/Web 2.0. He designs and implements mission-critical business applications using the latest technologies, leads technical teams, and trains and mentors other developers.

Tom is the co-author of JBoss At Work: A Practical Guide (O?Reilly, 10/2005), speaks regularly at software conferences, and reviews best-selling technical books for major publishers. An active participant in the local technical community, Tom founded the Denver Open Source Users Group (http://www.denveropensource.org) and has served as President of the Denver Java Users Group (http://www.denverjug.org).

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. He is author of ".NET Gotchas" (O'Reilly), coauthor of 2007 Jolt Productivity Award winning "Practices of an Agile Developer" (Pragmatic Bookshelf), and author of "Programming Groovy: Dynamic Productivity for the Java Developer" (Pragmatic Bookshelf).