Twin Cities Software Symposium: Fall
October 15 - 16, 2010 - Minneapolis, MN
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.
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).
Matt Stine - Enterprise Java/Cloud Consultant
Matt Stine is an Enterprise Java/Cloud consultant based in Memphis, TN. He is a twelve year veteran of the enterprise software and web development industries, with experience spanning the healthcare, biomedical research, e-commerce, and retail store domains.
Matt has spoken at conferences ranging from JavaOne to CodeMash and has published several articles for Agile Zone, GroovyMag and NFJS the Magazine, as well as the Selenium 2.0 DZone Refcard. Matt is also the founder of the Memphis/Mid-South Java User Group.
His current areas of interest include lean/agile software development, software architecture, mobile application development and functional languages.
Brian Sletten - Forward Leaning Software Engineer
Brian Sletten is a liberal arts-educated software engineer with a focus on using and evangelizing forward-leaning technologies. He has a background as a system architect, a developer, a security consultant, a mentor, a team lead, an author and a trainer and operates in all of those roles as needed. His experience has spanned the online game, defense, finance, academic, hospitality, retail and commercial domains. He has worked with a wide variety of technologies such as 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. He is President of Bosatsu Consulting, Inc. and lives in Los Angeles, CA.
He focuses on web architecture, resource-oriented computing, social networking, the Semantic Web, scalable systems, security consulting and other technologies of the late 20th and early 21st Centuries.
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.
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.
Matthew McCullough - Open Source Architect, Ambient Ideas
Matthew McCullough is an energetic 15 year veteran of enterprise software development, open source education, and co-founder of Ambient Ideas, LLC, a Denver consultancy. Matthew currently is a trainer for GitHub.com, author of the Git Master Class series for O'Reilly, speaker at over 30 national and international conferences, author of three of the top 10 DZone RefCards, and President of the Denver Open Source Users Group. His current topics of research center around project automation: build tools (Maven, Leiningen, Gradle), distributed version control (Git), Continuous Integration (Hudson) and Quality Metrics (Sonar). Matthew resides in Denver, Colorado with his beautiful wife and two young daughters, who are active in nearly every outdoor activity Colorado has to offer.
Neal Ford - Application Architect at ThoughtWorks, Inc.
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.
Tim Berglund - Developer, Consultant, Author
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 Bell - Senior VP Engineering, General Assembly
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.
Jeff Brown - Core Member of the Grails Development Team
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.
Johanna Rothman - Speaker, Consultant, author for managing product development
Johanna Rothman helps managers and leaders solve problems and seize opportunities.
She consults, speaks, and writes on managing high-technology product development. She enables managers, teams, and organizations to become more effective by applying her pragmatic approaches to the issues of project management, risk management, and people management.
Johanna writes two blogs: Managing Product Development and Hiring Technical People. She is the author of:
- Manage Your Project Portfolio: Increase Your Capacity and Finish More Projects.
- 2008 Jolt Productivity award winning Manage It! Your Guide to Modern, Pragmatic Project Management
- Behind Closed Doors: Secrets of Great Management (with Esther Derby)
- Hiring the Best Knowledge Workers, Techies & Nerds: The Secrets and Science of Hiring Technical People
Find more of Johanna's articles and her blogs at www.jrothman.com.
David Hussman - Agility Coach/Instructor/Practioner
David teaches and coaches the adoption and improvement of agility as a delivery tool. His work includes helping companies of all sizes all over the world. Sometimes he is pairing with developers and testers, while other times he is helping to invent, evolve and plan the delivery of all types of products and projects. David also spends a great deal of time helping leaders at all levels find ways to pragmatically use agility to foster innovation.
Prior to working as a full time coach, David spent years building software in a variety of domains: digital audio, digital biometrics, medical, financial, retail, and education to name a few. David now leads DevJam, a company composed of agile collaborators. As mentors and practitioners, DevJam focuses on agility as a tool to help people and companies improve their software production skills. DevJam provides seasoned leaders that strive to pragmatically match technology, people, and processes to create better and cooler products in competitive cycles.
Along with teaching and coaching, David participates in conferences around the world. He is the recipient of the Agile Alliance, 2009 Gordon Pask Award. David continuously contributes to books and various publications.
For coaching information, presentations, and more, visit www.devjam.com



