Ben Hale is a senior consultant for Interface21, the company behind the Spring Framework and the Spring family of products. Ben's specialties include middle tier architecture with an emphasis on integration technologies such as JMS and JMX. Leading up to his role at Interface21 Ben has led teams in the architecture and development of large-scale enterprise management applications.

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 a partner in Zepheira, LLC, a new services company focused on using semantic-oriented technologies to solve architectural and data integration problems not handled by conventional tools and techniques.

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

Glenn Vanderburg is an independent consultant focused on cutting-edge software development technologies and techniques, including Ruby, JavaScript, Ajax, and state-of-the-art development practices.

Howard Lewis Ship is the creator and lead developer for the Apache Tapestry project, and the creator of the Apache HiveMind project. He has over fifteen years of full-time software development under his belt, with over nine years of Java. He cut his teeth writing customer support software for Stratus Computer, but eventually traded PL/1 for Objective-C and NeXTSTEP before settling into Java.

Howard is the author of Tapestry in Action for Manning Publications (which covers Tapestry 3.0), and is currently the Director of Open Source Technology for Formos Software Development. He lives in Portland, Oregon with his wife Suzanne, a novelist.

Howard is polishing the last rough edges of Tapestry 5 in anticipation of a final 5.0 release.

Jared Richardson, co-author of Ship It! A Practical Guide to Successful
Software Projects, is a speaker and agile coach at 6th Sense Analytics. Jared has been in the industry for more than fifteen years as a consultant, developer, tester, and manager.

Until recently he was an independent consultant focused helping teams build better software. He's now bringing that same focus to 6th Sense Analytics and their clients, using both the 6th Sense toolset and his unique experience. Jared can be found online at Agile Artisans and the Sixth Sense Analytics blog.

Nathaniel T. Schutta is a senior software engineer in the Twin Cities area of Minnesota with extensive experience developing Java Enterprise Edition–based Web applications. He graduated from St. John’s University (MN) with a degree in Computer Science and has a master’s of science degree in software engineering from the University of Minnesota. For the last several years, he has focused on user interface design. A long-time member of the Association for Computing Machinery’s Computer-Human Interaction Special Interest Group, Nathaniel believes that if the user can’t figure out your application, then you’ve done something wrong. Along with his user interface work, Nathaniel is the cocreator of the open-source Taconite framework, has contributed to two corporate Java frameworks, has developed training material, and has led several study groups. During the brief moments of warm weather found in his home state of Minnesota, he spends as much time on the golf course as his wife will tolerate. He’s currently exploring Ruby, Rails, and (after recently making the switch) Mac OS X. Nathaniel is the coauthor of the bestselling book, Foundations of Ajax.

Pete Behrens is the Founder and President of Trail Ridge Consulting, a firm specializing in enterprise-wide agile transitions and adoption. Their Organizational Agility Services align proven agile organizational patterns with enterprise-enabled agile practices to transform organizational ability to organizational agility.

Pete Behrens is a Certified Scrum Trainer and a Certified Scrum Coach. He has been guiding enterprise agile implementations for the past 6 years. Pete has over 17 years experience leading product development and architecture in adaptive, iterative and phased-based development methods for EDS and Rational Software. He led development of RequisitePro, the leading requirements management solution in the IBM Rational product line. He has extensive experience developing under the Rational Unified Process (RUP), Rapid Application Development (RAD), as well as traditional waterfall approaches. You can contact him at pete@trailridgeconsulting.com

Scott Davis is an internationally recognized author and speaker. He is passionate about open source solutions and agile development. He has worked on a variety of Java platforms, from J2EE to J2SE to J2ME (sometimes all on the same project).

Scott's books include Groovy Recipes: Greasing the Wheels of Java, GIS for Web Developers: Adding Where to Your Web Applications, The Google Maps API, and JBoss At Work.

Scott is the Editor in Chief of aboutGroovy.com, a news and information website that tracks the latest developments in Groovy and Grails. He also writes a regular column for IBM DeveloperWorks -- Mastering Grails.

Scott is a frequent presenter at national conferences (such as No Fluff, Just Stuff) and local user groups. He was the president of the Denver Java Users Group in 2003 when it was voted one of the top-ten JUGs in North America. After a quick move north, he is currently active in the leadership of the Boulder Java Users Group. Keep up with him at http://www.davisworld.org.

Ted Neward is an independent consultant specializing in high-scale enterprise systems, working with clients ranging in size from Fortune 500 corporations to small 20-person shops. He speaks on the conference circuit, including the No Fluff Just Stuff Symposium tour, discussing Java, .NET and XML service technologies, focusing on Java-.NET interoperability. He has written several widely-recognized books in both the Java and .NET space, including the recently-released "Effective Enterprise Java". He lives in the Pacific Northwest with his wife, two sons, four video-game consoles, thousands of books (on programming and otherwise), and eight PCs.

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).