Northern Virginia Software Symposium

Apr 29 - May 1, 2011 - Reston, VA


Sheraton Reston
11810 Sunrise Valley Drive
Reston, VA   20191
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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.

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.



Pratik Patel - CTO TripLingo & Code Hacker

Pratik Patel is the CTO of Atlanta based TripLingo (http://www.triplingo.com/). He wrote the first book on 'enterprise Java' in 1996, "Java Database Programming with JDBC." He has also spoken at various conferences and participates in several local tech groups and startup groups. He's in the startup world now and hacks iOS, Android, HTML5, CSS3, JavaScript, Rails, and ..... well everything except Perl.

Pratik's specialty is in large-scale applications for mission-critical and mobile applications use. He has designed and built applications in the retail, health care, financial services, and telecoms sectors. Pratik holds a master's in Biomedical Engineering from UNC, has worked in places such as New York, London, and Hong Kong, and currently lives in Atlanta, GA.



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.



Craig Walls - Author of Spring in Action

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.



Paul Rayner - Consultant and Partner at Domain Language

Paul is a seasoned team leader and design mentor with hands-on experience in the dominant technologies combined with a mastery of domain-driven design. He is one of those rare people who combines a deep understanding of agile software development process with hands-on technical design ability, able to focus teams on the areas where supple design matters most and leading them over the hurdles to an effective design.

Paul is passionate about pushing the boundaries of what is possible with software process and design - teaching others through public classes, coaching, speaking and writing. He has worked in a wide range of industries in the last two decades, including Government, Education, Mining, Insurance, Financial Services and Public Health. Paul combines years of solution development expertise in C#/.NET with broad practical experience in software ecosystems such as Java and Ruby, and open source tools and frameworks such as Git, NHibernate and SpecFlow.

Paul makes his home in Denver, Colorado with his wife and two children. He is an active member of the Colorado developer and agile communities, being an active member of Agile Denver and a founder of the DDD Denver Meetup group. Paul is a regular presenter at local user groups, on the No Fluff Just Stuff tour in the United States, and at local and international conferences. He can be reached at paul@domainlanguage.com and tweets with an Australian accent at @thepaulrayner.



Kenneth Kousen - Author of "Making Java Groovy"

Ken Kousen is the President of Kousen IT, Inc., through which he does technical training, mentoring, and consulting in all areas of Java and XML. He is the author of the O'Reilly screencast "Up and Running Groovy", and the upcoming Manning book about Java/Groovy integration, entitled "Making Java Groovy".

He has been a tech reviewer for several books on software development. Over the past decade he's taught thousands of developers in business and industry. He is also an adjunct professor at the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute site in Hartford, CT. His academic background includes two BS degrees from M.I.T., an MS and a Ph.D. from Princeton, and an MS in Computer Science from R.P.I.



David Bock - Principal Consultant, CodeSherpas Inc.

David Bock is a Principal Consultant at CodeSherpas, a company he founded in 2007. Mr. Bock is also the President of the Northern Virginia Java Users Group, the Editor of O'Reilly's OnJava.com website, and a frequent speaker on technology in venues such as the No Fluff Just Stuff Software Symposiums.

In January 2006, Mr. Bock was honored by being awarded the title of Java Champion by a panel of esteemed leaders in the Java Community in a program sponsored by Sun. There are approximately 100 active Java Champions worldwide.

David has also served on several JCP panels, including the Specification of the Java 6 Platform and the upcoming Java Module System.

In addition to his public speaking and training activities, Mr. Bock actively consults as a software engineer, project manager, and team mentor for commercial and government clients.