Speakers

Matt Stine - Community Engineer @CloudFoundry

Matt Stine is a Community Engineer with Cloud Foundry (http://cloudfoundry.com) by Pivotal (http://goPivotal.com). He is a twelve year veteran of the enterprise software and web development industries, with experience spanning the healthcare, biomedical research, e-commerce, retail store and insurance domains.

Matt is obsessed with the idea that enterprise IT “doesn’t have to suck,” and spends much of his time thinking about lean/agile software development methodologies, DevOps, architectural principles/patterns/practices, and programming paradigms in an attempt to find the perfect storm of techniques that will allow corporate IT departments to not only function like startup companies, but also create software that delights users while maintaining a high degree of conceptual integrity.

Matt has spoken at conferences ranging from JavaOne to CodeMash and serves as Technical Editor of NFJS the Magazine (https://www.nofluffjuststuff.com/home/magazine_subscribe). Matt is also the founder of the Memphis/Mid-South Java User Group.

Brian Sletten - Forward Leaning Software Engineer

Brian Sletten is a liberal arts-educated software engineer with a focus on forward-leaning technologies. His experience has spanned many industries including retail, banking, online games, defense, finance, hospitality and health care. He has a B.S. in Computer Science from the College of William and Mary and lives in Auburn, CA. He focuses on web architecture, resource-oriented computing, social networking, the Semantic Web, data science, 3D graphics, visualization, scalable systems, security consulting and other technologies of the late 20th and early 21st Centuries. He is also a rabid reader, devoted foodie and has excellent taste in music. If pressed, he might tell you about his International Pop Recording career.

Ken Sipe - Architect, Web Security Expert

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 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. In an effort to rid the world of bad presentations, Nate coauthored the book Presentation Patterns with Neal Ford and Matthew McCullough.

Mark Richards - SOA and Integration Architect, Author of Java Message Service

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.

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.

Matthew McCullough - Head of Training, GitHub

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 VP of Training at 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 (Gradle), distributed version control (Git, GitHub), Continuous Integration (Jenkins, Travis) 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 Director, 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 - GitHubber

Tim is a full-stack generalist and passionate teacher who loves working with people as much as he loves to code. 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, why professionalized product management is a global suboptimization, and of course everything related to Git. He does not really believe that it is possible to teach, but rather believes that it is his responsibility to create an environment in which people can learn.

He is also a poet, having composed and produced companion videos for Oh, The Methods You'll Compose and The Maven, with another project currently in the works. If you've been in his Git classes, you've seen some famous poems make their way into the world's best version control system.

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, author of the Gradle Liquibase Plugin, the maintainer of the Ratpack web framework, co-presenter of the best-selling O'Reilly Git Master Class, co-author of Building and Testing with Gradle, a member of the O'Reilly Expert Network, and a member of the GigOM Pro Analyst Network. He occasionally blogs at timberglund.com.

He lives in Littleton, CO, USA with the wife of his youth and their three children.

Peter Bell - Evangelist/hacker for hackNY

Peter is an evangelist and hacker for hackNY - a not-for-profit that aims to federate the next generation of hackers for the New York innovation community.

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 - Author of Spring in Action

Craig Walls 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, 2 birds and 3 dogs.

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).

Jeff Scott Brown - Core Member of the Grails Development Team

Core member of the Grails development team, Jeff Scott 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.

Hans Dockter - Founder of Gradle and CEO of Gradleware

Hans Dockter is the founder and project lead of the Gradle build system and the CEO of Gradleware, a company that provides training, support and consulting for Gradle and all forms of enterprise software project automation in general.

Hans has 13 years of experience as a software developer, team leader, architect, trainer, and technical mentor. Hans is a thought leader in the field of project automation and has successfully been in charge of numerous large-scale enterprise builds. He is also an advocate of Domain Driven Design, having taught classes and delivered presentations on this topic together with Eric Evans. In the earlier days, Hans was also a committer for the JBoss project and founded the JBoss-IDE.

James Ward - Developer Advocate, Typesafe

James Ward (www.jamesward.com) works for Typesafe where he teaches developers the Typesafe Stack (Play Framework, Scala, and Akka) . James frequently presents at conferences around the world such as JavaOne, Devoxx, and many other Java get-togethers. Along with Bruce Eckel, James co-authored First Steps in Flex. He has also published numerous screencasts, blogs, and technical articles. Starting with Pascal and Assembly in the 80′s, James found his passion for writing code. Beginning in the 90′s he began doing web development with HTML, Perl/CGI, then Java. After building a Flex and Java based customer service portal in 2004 for Pillar Data Systems he became a Technical Evangelist for Flex at Adobe. In 2011 James became a Principal Developer Evangelist at Salesforce.com where he taught developers how to deploy apps on the cloud with Heroku. James Tweets as @_JamesWard and posts code at github.com/jamesward.

Mark Volkmann - Software Consultant and Partner at OCI

Mark Volkmann is a partner at Object Computing, Inc. (OCI) in

St. Louis where he has provided software consulting since 1996.

As a consultant, Mark has assisted many companies with

Java, XML, Web, jQuery and Node.js application development.

Mark also has created and teaches many courses on topics including:

Java, Swing, XML, XML Schema, Relax NG, XPath, XSLT, XQuery,

DOM, SAX, JAXP, JDOM, JAXB, SOAP, WSDL, Ruby,

HTML5, CSS3, JavaScript, CoffeeScript and jQuery.

He is currently developing a course on Node.js.

Mark is a member of the St. Louis Java User Group steering

committee and a regular presenter for that group. He has written

for XML Journal and the No Fluff Just Stuff (NFJS) magazine.

He has presented the XML DevCon, NFJS and Strange Loop conferences.

Vladimir Vivien - Software Developer / Consultant / Author

Vladimir Vivien is a software engineer living in the United States. Past and current experiences include development in Java and C#.Net for industries including publishing, financial, and healthcare. He has a wide range of technology interests including Java, OSGi, Groovy/Grails, JavaFX, SunSPOT, BugLabs, module/component-based development, and anything else that runs on the JVM.

Vladimir is the author of "JavaFX Application Development Cookbook" published by Packt Publishing. He is the creator of the Groovv JmxBuilder open source project, a JMX DSL, that is now part of the Groovy language. Other open source endeavor includes JmxLogger and GenShell. You can follow Vladimir through his blog: http://blog.vladimirvivien.com/, Twitter: http://twitter.com/vladimirvivien, and Linked In: http://www.linkedin.com/in/vvivien.

Joe Sondow - Cloud Interface Tools Lead @ Netflix

Joe Sondow manages the Cloud Interface Tools team at Netflix, focused on creating usable open source web apps like Asgard to improve the experience of managing cloud resources and deploying code changes. Since 2005 Joe has been working alternately as a software engineer and as a manager, developing corporate and consumer web apps using various web front end and JVM technologies.

Brian Sam-Bodden - Java author, Ruby geek and Open Source Advocate

Brian Sam-Bodden is an author, instructor, speaker and hacker that has spent over fifteen years crafting software systems. He holds dual bachelor degrees from Ohio Wesleyan University in computer science and physics and heads Integrallis http://www.integrallis.com. He is a frequent speaker at user groups and conferences nationally and abroad. Brian is the author of "Beginning POJOs: Spring, Hibernate, JBoss and Tapestry", co-author of the "Enterprise Java Development on a Budget: Leveraging Java Open Source Technologies" and a contributor to O'reilly's "97 Things Every Project Manager Should Know".

Johanna Rothman - Speaker, Consultant, Author for managing product development

Johanna Rothman, known as the “Pragmatic Manager,” helps organizational leaders see problems and risks in their product development. She helps them recognize potential “gotchas,” seize opportunities, and remove impediments.

Johanna was the Agile 2009 conference chair. She is the current agileconnection.com technical editor. Johanna is the author of these books:

- Manage Your Job Search

- Hiring Geeks That Fit

- 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)

She is working on a book about agile program management. Find more of Johanna's articles and her blogs at www.jrothman.com and at www.createadaptablelife.com

Paul Rayner - Founder and Owner at Virtual Genius

Paul is a seasoned design coach and leadership mentor, helping teams ignite their design skills via DDD and BDD. He gets teams unstuck through intensive coaching workshops and hands-on pair programming, combined with focused one-on-one leadership mentoring. His company Virtual Genius is a software solutions provider, specializing in custom Ruby applications. Paul actively serves the community: co-authoring the upcoming Addison Wesley book, BDD with Cucumber, teaching classes in BDD and DDD, contributing to OSS, and co-leading the DDD Denver Meetup group.

Look for him speaking at user groups, on the No Fluff Just Stuff conference tour in the United States, and at local and international conferences. Paul is from Perth, Australia, but chooses to live, work and play with his amazing wife and two children in Denver. He tweets with an Australian accent at @ThePaulRayner and blogs at thepaulrayner.com

Nilanjan Raychaudhuri - Author of "Scala in Action"

Nilanjan is a consultant and trainer for Typesafe. He started his professional career as a software developer in 2000 using object oriented programming languages. Nilanjan has previously worked with IBM, ThoughtWorks and LivingSocial where he gained a lot of experience in managing and developing software solutions in Java/JEE, Ruby, Groovy and also in Scala. He is zealous about programming in Scala ever since he got introduced to this beautiful language. Currently he spends his spare time working on the scala-webmachine open source project (restful resource framework). In the past Nilanjan worked on other open source projects and libraries. At Typesafe he is mainly teaching and designing Scala and Play courses and helping customers to adopt these technologies. Nilanjan enjoys sharing his experience via talks at various conferences. He is also the author of the "Scala in Action" book.

Prasanna Pendse - Technical Principal at ThoughtWorks

Prasanna has been programming since 1994. He was involved in such adventures as creating India's first search engine and an on-line music and video store before getting a real job.

Prasanna's development skillz went up a notch when he learned about TDD in the early 2000s. In fact, TDD (along with pair programming, CI and other XP practices) is a major reason why he still writes code. In 2006, he joined ThoughtWorks.

His coding adventures took him around the US to places such as Chicago (IL), Atlanta (GA), Albany (NY), Warren (NJ), Malvern (PA), San Francisco (CA) as well as around the world to Krakow (Poland), Bangalore (India), Tokyo (Japan), Beijing (China), Pune (India), Hong Kong (China) and Johannesburg (South Africa)!

Prasanna plays any of many roles including developer, tech lead, software architect, agile coach, QA, project lead, enterprise architect, technical principal, infrastructure automation and build monkey. He has programmed professionally in JavaScript, Ruby, C#, Java, Perl, PHP, Tcl/Tk, C, C++, Bash and PowerShell.

Besides coding, he enjoys eating different types of food and photography.

Andy Painter - CTO of Davisbase Consulting

Andy Painter is the CTO of Davisbase Consulting. Davisbase Consulting uses a combination of training, coaching, and mentoring to develop individuals, teams, and organizations that create great software.

Andy has over 20 years of software development experience as a developer, architect, tester, manager and executive. Over the last decade, Andy has coupled deep technology experience with Agile practices to create teams and environments that are hyper-productive. This unique combination has provided real-world experience on how best to establish and enable successful software organizations and teams. This enablement process allows organizations, teams, and individuals to achieve a hyper-productive state by delivering continuous streams of value through the creation of quality software. In conjunction with establishing a successful Agile processes, Andy focuses heavily on helping teams develop strong Agile engineering practices and disciplines such as Test-Driven Development, Refactoring, Continuous Integration, and Continuous Delivery.

Kevin Nilson - VP of Engineering @ just.me

Kevin is a three time JavaOne Rock Star, Java Champion and VP of Engineering at just.me. just.me is a startup in the mobile and social space that is part of Google’s Startup Labs. Kevin has spoken at conferences such as JavaOne, Devoxx, JAX, Silicon Valley Code Camp, and AjaxWorld. Kevin is the co-author of Web 2.0 Fundamentals. In the past Kevin was an adjunct professor at the College of San Mateo. Kevin holds a MS and BS in Computer Science from Southern Illinois University. Kevin is the leader of the Silicon Valley Java User Group, Silicon Valley Google Developer Group and Silicon Valley JavaScript Meetup.

Demian Neidetcher - Sr. Engineer at Time Warner Cable

Demian Neidetcher is a Senior Engineer at Time Warner Cable working on customer portals and getting television content to IP devices. He first got the programming bug staying up late nights with his Commodore64.

He has been professionally writing software for over 15 years. Most of his experience is with JVM languages (Java, Scala, Groovy) in the telecommunications domain doing things like inventory systems for a long-haul carrier, integrating conferencing software and routing VoIP traffic including geo-spatial 911 call routing. He has worked for companies ranging from Fortune 500 to small start-ups. In every environment Demian has looked for pragmatic approaches, solutions and process to get teams delivering software that benefits users.

http://neidetcher.com

demian0311@gmail.com

Tom Marrs - Author of JBoss at Work and Principal Architect CIBER

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).

Howard Lewis Ship - Creator of Apache Tapestry

Howard Lewis Ship is the creator and lead developer for the Apache Tapestry project, and is a noted expert on Java framework design and developer productivity. He has over twenty years of full-time software development under his belt, with over ten 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 respected in the Java community as an expert on web application development, dependency injection, Java meta-programming, and developer productivity. He is a frequent speaker at JavaOne, NoFluffJustStuff, ApacheCon and other conferences, and the author of "Tapestry in Action" for Manning (covering Tapestry 3.0). Lately, he's been dipping his toes into alternate languages, including Clojure.

Howard is an independent consultant, offering Tapestry training, mentoring and project work as well as training in Clojure. He lives in Portland, Oregon with his wife Suzanne, and his children, Jacob and Olivia.

Tiffany Lentz - Principal Consultant & Program Manager with Thoughtworks

Tiffany Lentz, a Principal Consultant and Program Manager, is proudly employed at ThoughtWorks, a global IT services firm focused on end-to-end software delivery. She has worked extensively for large clients in the US, Canada, and China, delivering solutions for both disparate system delivery projects and agile enablement and organizational transformation efforts to incorporate and enhance efficiency and delivery processes. She is an author, mentor, coach and trainer of agile methodologies, processes, and practices. Tiffany is the author of Iteration Management Chapter in the ThoughtWorks anthology book and believes that the Iteration Manager's job is to build a well-oil delivery machine.

Scott Leberknight - Chief Architect at Near Infinity

Scott is Chief Architect at Near Infinity Corporation, an enterprise software development and consulting services company based in Reston, Virginia. He has been developing enterprise and web applications for 14 years professionally, and has developed applications using Java, Ruby, Groovy, and even an iPhone application with Objective-C. His main areas of interest include alternative persistence technologies, object-oriented design, system architecture, testing, and frameworks like Spring, Hibernate, and Ruby on Rails. In addition, Scott enjoys learning new languages to make himself a better and more well-rounded developer a la The Pragmatic Programmers' advice to "learn one language per year."

Scott holds a B.S. in Engineering Science and Mechanics from Virginia Tech, and an M. Eng. in Systems Engineering from the University of Maryland. Scott speaks at the No Fluff Just Stuff Symposiums and various other conferences. In his (sparse) spare time, Scott enjoys spending time with his wife, three children, and cat. He also tries to find time to play soccer, go snowboarding, and mountain bike whenever he can.

Brent Laster - Senior Manager, SAS

I've been involved in the software industry for over 21 years, holding various technical and management positions. Over my time in the industry, much has changed, but one constant is the need for those in the business to grow their skills and keep up with ever-changing technologies and paradigms.

To that end, I've always tried to make time to learn and develop both technical and leadership skills and share them with others. In the early days, I taught community college classes on topics like Lotus and early versions of Windows while working as a software developer by day.

Fast forward quite a few years and more recently, I've been fortunate enough to have a chance to explore and train others in technologies like Git and Jenkins as part of my job managing a group focusing on developer productivity and emerging technologies. Regardless of the topic or technology, there's no substitute for the excitement and sense of potential that come from providing others with the knowledge they need to help them accomplish their goals.

In my spare time, I hang out with my 3 sons, my wonderful wife, 2 dogs, a cat, and a dwarf hamster in Apex, North Carolina and volunteer in local Cub Scout and Boy Scout organizations.

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.

Kirk Knoernschild - Software Developer & Mentor

Kirk is software developer with a passion for building great software. 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. His recent book, Java Application Architecture was published in 2012, and presents 18 patterns that help you design modular software.

Mark Johnson - Advisory Engineer @ Pivotal

Mark Johnson is a Advisory Engineer at Pivotal where he focuses on helping people learn how to apply Fast and Big Data as well as PaaS solutions to address real world enterprise challenges. Mark has worked on a wide range of technology during his career. Most recently he has focused on Groovy, Grails, and Scala as technologies which enable high quality applications quickly. Mark is active in the software community as the President of the New England Java Users Group (NEJUG) and a regular presenter to user groups and various conferences. When not working, Mark can be found riding his mountain bike on local trails and playing with his family.

Daniel Hinojosa - Independent Consultant/Developer

Providing solutions to private, education, and government entities since 1999. He has also been a teacher and speaker since the early 90s, teaching development for 8 years. His business is currently emphasized on Java, Groovy, Grails, EJB3, and the JBoss Seam web framework. Daniel Hinojosa is also co-founder of the Albuquerque Java User's Group and is currently failing overcoming his addiction of NFJS conferences.

Douglas Hawkins - Lead Software Engineer

Douglas Hawkins has been passionately developing software for the past 10 years -- creating applications for bioinformatics, finance, and retail.

However, Doug's true interest is exploring and explaining the low-level details inside the virtual machines that we use everyday. To make byte code more accessible, he created the open-source Java Assembler Kit (JAK) which provides a fluent API for producing Java

byte code and includes a REPL to allow for interactive experimentation.

Doug lives in Boston and is a regular presenter at both the Boston Java Meetup and the New England Java User's Group.

Erik Hatcher - co-author of "Lucene in Action"

Erik Hatcher is the co-author of "Lucene in Action" as well as co-author of "Java Development with Ant". Erik has been an active member of the Lucene community - a leading Lucene and Solr committer, member of the Lucene Project Management Committee, member of the Apache Software Foundation as well as a frequent invited speaker at various industry events. Erik co-founded and works as a Senior Solutions Architect at LucidWorks.

James Harmon - Android Expert

James is an experienced Java developer and has spent a majority of his career building large-scale online applications at Accenture and at several Web-centric consulting firms. He now specializes in training Java developers to be more productive by using the latest technologies and frameworks. Jim has provided training for Fortune 500 companies and large private and governmental organizations including Knight Ridder Newspapers and the State of Wisconsin. He lectures extensively throughout the United States and Canada. He is also the author of "Dojo: Using the Dojo JavaScript Library to Build Ajax Applications".

James is also the founder and principal contributor to the site AndroidDevTools.com

Stuart Halloway - CEO of Relevance

Stuart Halloway is the CEO of Relevance, Inc. (www.thinkrelevance.com). With co-founder Justin Gehtland, Stuart helps companies adopt agile, as well as innovative technologies such as Clojure and Ruby on Rails. Stuart is the author of Programming Clojure, Rails for Java Developers, and Component Development for the Java Platform. Prior to founding Relevance, Stuart was the Chief Architect at Near-Time, and the Chief Technical Officer at DevelopMentor.

Arun Gupta - Java EE & GlassFish Evangelist @ Oracle

Arun Gupta is a Java EE & GlassFish Evangelist working at Oracle. Arun has over 14 years of experience in the software industry working in various technologies, Java(TM) platform, and several web-related technologies. In his current role, he works very closely to create and foster the community around Java EE & GlassFish. He has participated in several standard bodies and worked amicably with members from other companies. He has been with the Java EE team since it’s inception. And since then he has contibuted to all Java EE releases.

He is a prolific blogger at http://blogs.sun.com/arungupta with over 1000 blog entries and frequent visitors from all over the world reaching up to 25,000 hits/day.

Victor Grazi - Java Evangelist

Victor Grazi is Vice President of Java Consultancy at Credit Suisse Architecture.

He is a Java evangelist and has been building real time financial systems in Java since JDK version 1.02

Raju Gandhi - Java/Ruby Developer/Language Geek

Raju Gandhi is a Java/Ruby developer and a programming language geek. He has been writing software for the better part of a decade in several industries including education, finance, construction and the manufacturing sector. Raju has a graduate degree in Industrial Engineering from Ohio University. In his spare time you will find Raju reading, or watching movies, or playing with yet another programming language. He is affectionately known as looselytyped on Twitter.

Hamlet D`Arcy - Sr. Java/Groovy Developer, Groovy Committer

Hamlet D'Arcy has been writing software for over a decade, and has spent considerable time coding in C++, Java, and Groovy. He's passionate about learning new languages and different ways to think about problems. Hamlet is the founder of the Basel-based Hackergarten open source coding group, and regularly participates and speaks at local and international user groups and conferences. Hamlet is a committer on the Groovy and CodeNarc projects, and is a contributor on a few other open source projects (including JConch and the IDEA Groovy Plugin). He blogs regularly at http://hamletdarcy.blogspot.com and can be found on Twitter as HamletDRC (http://twitter.com/hamletdrc).

Esther Derby - Co-author of "Behind Closed Doors: Secrets of Great Management"

I started my career as a programmer, and over the years I’ve worn many hats, including business owner, internal consultant and manager. From all these perspectives, one thing became clear: our level of individual, team and company success was deeply impacted by our work environment and organizational dynamics. As a result, I have spent the last twenty-five years helping companies design their environment, culture, and human dynamics for optimum success.

I’ve written over 100 articles, and co-authored two books–Agile Retrospectives: Making Good Teams Great and Behind Closed Doors: Secrets of Great Management. I write about management, leadership, collaboration, organizations and change (or another topic I’m currently exploring).

Follow me on Twitter @estherderby

Jeremy Deane - Chief Architect - Software Engineering Aficionado

Jeremy Deane has over 18 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.

Luke Daley - Principal Engineer @ Gradleware

Luke Daley is a member of the Gradleware engineering team. At Gradleware Luke works on Gradle (A JVM based build automation tool) and helps teams reach new levels of project automation and quality.

Luke is the lead of the Geb project (a productivity focussed Groovy browser automation/web testing tool) project which he created in 2010. You'll also find Luke contributing to other Open Source projects such as Grails (a Groovy web development framework), Spock (a next generation testing framework for the JVM) and anything else that catches his attention.

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.

Dan Allen - Principal Software Engineer at Red Hat, Author and Open Source Advocate

As Principal Software Engineer at Red Hat, Dan serves as the JBoss Community liaison, leads the JBoss Testing Initiative and is a member of the Arquillian, ShrinkWrap and JBoss Forge projects. He authored Seam in Action (Manning), served as a representative for Red Hat on the JSR-314 Expert Group (JSF 2.0), writes for IBM developerWorks and NFJS magazine and is an internationally recognized speaker. He's appeared at major industry conferences including JavaOne, Devoxx, NFJS, JAX and Jazoon and has received recognition as a JavaOne Rock Star, a JBossWorld Top Presenter and a JAX Hall of Fame speaker.

To colleagues, Dan's known for his hard work and passion for Open Source technologies. His technical expertise includes Java frameworks (Seam, CDI, Weld, JSF, EJB 3, JPA, Hibernate, Spring), testing frameworks (Arquillian, JUnit, TestNG, Selenium), build tools (Maven 2, Gradle, Ant) and web development (Ajax, JavaScript, CSS) and more.

You can keep up with Dan's discoveries by reading his blogs at http://mojavelinux.com and http://community.jboss.org/people/dan.j.allen/blog or tracking what he's currently up to by following him on Twitter at http://twitter.com/mojavelinux.