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Speakers for DevNexus 2011

Speaker Biographies

Brad Anderson

Brad Anderson has been wrangling data for 20 years, more recently building and using non-relational data stores. His firm, Scaling Data (http://scalingdata.com) assists clients with analytics projects ranging from architecture, sizing & cluster construction to algorithm selection & implementation. Previously, Brad has worked on a large-scale video-on-demand platform, helped Cloudant build their hosted NoSQL offering based on CouchDB, and organized the NoSQL East 2009 conference in Atlanta.

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Twitter: @boorad


David Chandler

David Chandler works with the Google Developer Tools Team in Atlanta. An electrical engineer by training, Chandler got hooked on developing database Web applications in the days of NCSA Mosaic and has since written Web applications in a variety of languages, including C, perl, ksh, ColdFusion, Java, JSF, GWT, and now Dart. Prior to joining Google, Chandler worked on Internet banking applications with Intuit and launched a non-profit startup built with GWT and AppEngine. Chandler holds a patent on a method of organizing hierarchical data in a relational database and blogs about Java Web development at http://turbomanage.wordpress.com.

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Roy Clarkson

Roy Clarkson studied computer science before beginning his career as a software engineer. He has worked in software development for over ten years, with a variety of languages and technologies. He is currently working as an engineer with SpringSource, a division of VMware, where he is the lead on the Spring Android project. He also participates on the Greenhouse project, and built it’s associated mobile clients. Roy has spent the last few years focusing on mobile application development, including iPhone, Android, and mobile web. Prior to that, he focused most of his time on web based application development. Roy has presented on mobile technologies at several of the Atlanta based user groups, including the Atlanta Mobile Developers, and Atlanta Spring User Groups.

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Twitter: @royclarkson


Hans Dockter

Hans Dockter is the founder and project lead of the Gradle build system and the CEO of Gradle Inc, 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.

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Keith Donald

Keith Donald is a principal and founding partner at SpringSource, the company behind Spring and a division of VMware. At SpringSource, Keith is a full-time member of the Spring development team focusing on web application development productivity. He is also the architect behind SpringSource’s state-of-the-art training curriculum, which has provided practical Spring training to over 10,000 students worldwide. Over his career, Keith, an experienced enterprise software developer and mentor, has built business applications for customers spanning a diverse set of industries including banking, network management, information assurance, education, retail, and healthcare. He is particularly skilled at translating business requirements into technical solutions.

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Ben Evans

Ben has been a professional developer and Open Source enthusiast since the late 90s. He has delivered world-class projects for banks, media companies and charities in that time, and currently works as an architect, lead developer and in-house Java expert at one of the world’s leading financial institutions.

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Mark Fisher

Mark Fisher is an engineer within the SpringSource division of VMware and lead of the Spring Integration team. He is also a committer on the core Spring Framework, co-lead of the Spring AMQP project, and a contributor of messaging support to the Spring BlazeDS Integration project.

Mark is a frequent speaker at conferences and user groups in North America and Europe, and along with other Spring Integration committers, is an author of the forthcoming book, “Spring Integration in Action” to be published by Manning.

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Twitter: @m_f_


Neil Green

As self-diagnosed “recovering technical team lead,” Neil has taken a sabbatical from the exciting world of architect/lead/manager to go back to what he loves - being a full time coder. In his own words, “The technical part wasn’t hard, it was having to say the same thing over and over expecting different results (incidentally the definition for both insanity and stupidity) that wore me down over time. I needed a break.”

Today Neil finds himself sitting comfortably in a dark window-less cubical, with no direct reports, no project schedule to satisfy, no political in-fights, and best of all a manager to keep all the non-code related cruft at bay. Though cruel and unusual, Neil has taken to walking into his manager’s office and declaring, “Now YOU have to deal with it all! Hahahahah!!!!” Incidentally, he has found that this never gets old.

Further abusing his new-found freedom, he has also been known to start conversations with, “If you’re not writing clean code we can’t work together - sorry, I’m getting too old to sift through garbage” and “I get it – you don’t write units tests. That’s cool. I’ll just delete everything you commit so we don’t have to suffer with your steaming pile of well-it-worked-when-I-tested-it.”

Most days will find Neil belting out code with his favorite HTML5 stack: CoffeeScript, SASS, Backbone.js, Underscore.js, Handlebars.js, jQuery, jQuery UI, and jQuery Mobile while muttering, “These kids today don’t know how good they have it.” When asked if he’ll ever do backend development again he replied, “If I look at another line of Java I may stab myself in the eye. I’m holding out until the world realizes it should just learn something else – anything else. I’m starting to not care which.”

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Twitter: @feyn


Barry Hawkins

Barry has played various roles in his 17 years in the software industry, including lone developer, team lead, director, and Agile coach and mentor. Barry is one of the few native Atlantans, currently specializing in coaching and mentoring for Agile software development in addition to doing contract software development. Over the years, he has developed on multiple platforms, focusing primarily on Microsoft technologies and then Java from 2003 onward. He views technology as a set of tools, and embraces the use of dynamic as well as statically-typed languages, procedural, object-oriented, and functional programming, each having their own strengths in a given problem domain.

Prior to his career in software, Barry Hawkins spent 10 years designing, selling, and delivering turn-key industrial packaging and marking systems into manufacturing plants throughout the southeastern United States. He was responsible for the implementation, maintenance, and support of every system he sold, which was a formative experience that continues to influence his approach to consulting and coaching.

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Twitter: @barryhawkins


Les Hazlewood

Les Hazelwood is co-founder and CTO of Katasoft, an application security start-up, and the Apache Shiro PMC Chair. Prior to forming Katasoft, he was senior web architect at Bloomberg. Before that, he was an architect consultant for large-scale distributed systems at Delta Airlines and former CTO of a mid-size software engineering firm supporting educational and government agencies. Les has been actively involved in Open Source development for more than 9 years, committing or contributing to to projects like the Spring Framework, JBoss, OpenSpaces, and of course JSecurity, Apache Shiro’s long-time predecessor. Les currently lives in San Mateo, CA and practices Kendo and studies Japanese when he’s not programming.

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Claus Ibsen

Claus Ibsen is a software engineer and integration specialists from FuseSource (http://fusesource.com/). Claus is project lead on the open source integration framework Apache Camel (http://camel.apache.org) and co-author of the “Camel in Action” book (http://www.manning.com/ibsen).

Claus is the most active contributor to Apache Camel and is very active in the Camel community. He hang out on the Camel mailing lists, irc-room and often blogs about Camel.

At FuseSource he leads the development of Camel and provides consulting and support to customers.
Claus is frequent speaker at FuseSource community day events on subjects related to Camel. Claus spoke at Devoxx 2010 as well.

Prior to joining FuseSource, Claus has worked with integration in all sorts for the last decade.

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Jevgeni Kabanov

Jevgeni Kabanov is the founder and CTO of ZeroTurnaround (www.zeroturnaround.com), a development tools company that focuses on productivity. Before that he worked as the R&D director of Webmedia, Ltd, the largest custom software development company in the Baltics. As part of the effort to reduce development time tunraround he wrote the prototype of the ZeroTurnaround flagship product, JRebel, a class reloading JVM plugin.

Jevgeni has been speaking at international conferences for over 5 years, including JavaPolis/Devoxx, JavaZone, JAOO, QCon, TSSJS, JFokus and so on. He also has an active research interest in programming languages, types and virtual machines, publishing several papers on topics ranging from category theoretical notions to typesafe Java DSLs.

Besides the commercial products made for ZeroTurnaround, Jevgeni is a co-founder of two open-source projects – Aranea and Squill. Aranea (www.araneaframework.org) is a web development and integration platform based on strong object-oriented principles. Squill (squill.dev.java.net) is a typesafe internal DSL for constructing and executing SQL queries.

You can follow Jevgeni on Twitter as @ekabanov.

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Yehuda Katz

Yehuda Katz is a member of the SproutCore, Ruby on Rails and jQuery Core Teams; during the daytime, he works as an architect at Strobe. Yehuda is the co-author of the best-selling jQuery in Action, the upcoming Rails 3 in Action, and is a contributor to Ruby in Practice. He spends most of his time hacking on open source—his main projects, along with others, like Thor, Handlebars and Janus—or traveling the world doing evangelism work. He blogs at http://yehudakatz.com and can be found on Twitter as @wycats.

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Josh Marinacci

Josh Marinacci first tried Java in 1995 at the request of his favorite TA and never looked back. He is a blogger and co-author of Swing Hacks for O’Reilly. He is currently a Developer Advocate for the webOS at Palm, Inc where he focuses on mobile and advanced HTML technology. He previously worked on JavaFX, Swing, NetBeans, and client lead for the Java Store at Sun Microsystems. Josh lives in Eugene, Oregon and is passionate about open source technology & great user interfaces. He uses a Palm Pre, MacBook Pro, and Nikon D50 SLR to spread understanding of great design in software.

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Matthew McCullough

Matthew McCullough is an energetic 15 year veteran of enterprise software development, open source education, and co-founder of Ambient Ideas, LLC, a US consultancy. Matthew currently is a trainer for GitHub.com, author of the Git Master Class series for O’Reilly, speaker on the No Fluff Just Stuff tour, 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, USA with his beautiful wife and two young daughters, who are active in nearly every outdoor activity Colorado has to offer.

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Bob McWhirter

Bob McWhirter has been involved in open-source for over a decade, including founding the Codehaus and the Jaxen, Drools, and Groovy projects. He’s taken a shine to Ruby in the past few years, and is currently trying to make it more enterprisey.

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Eric Mizell

As a Solutions Architect on the Field Engineering Team for Terracotta, Eric Mizell helps enterprise IT organizations improve their service availability and application performance through the application of the industry leading Terracotta Java Scalability Technology. Prior to Terracotta, Eric was the lead architect for a large scale insurance application. He has over 13 years of experience designing and developing enterprise systems where performance and scalability were essential. Eric has presented at NFJS, AJUG, and blogs about Java scaling at http://javascaling.blogspot.com/.

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Pratik Patel

Pratik Patel 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 the CTO of Atlanta based TripLingo (http://www.triplingo.com/). You can find him on twitter here: @prpatel
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.

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Twitter: @prpatel


Andrew Rubinger

As Senior Software Engineer at JBoss by Red Hat, Andrew Lee Rubinger is primarily tasked with development of the company’s EJB 3.x implementation. Prior to employment within open source, he was an early adopter of JEE technologies and community contributor from within the private sector. Andrew’s interests are in advancing the success of open standards, easing testability, and he is author of O’Reilly Media’s “Enterprise JavaBeans 3.1”. His role as Core Developer within the Application Server is supplemented by leading the Embedded and ShrinkWrap subprojects.

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Venkat Subramaniam

Dr. Venkat Subramaniam is an award winning author, founder of Agile Developer, Inc., and an adjunct faculty at the University of Houston. He has trained and mentored thousands of software developers in the US, Canada, Europe, and Asia, and is a regular invited speaker at several international conferences. Venkat is the coauthor of 2007 Jolt Productivity Award winning “Practices of an Agile Developer,” author of
“Programming Groovy” and “Programming Scala”.

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Martijn Verburg

Traveller, open source and Java advocate, London JUG co-organiser, UK Graduate Developers co-organiser, moderator on the Javaranch, Community leader for Ikasan EIP and PCGen, upcoming author of “The Well-Grounded Java Developer”, speaker, beer drinker, whiskey drinker, you see where this is going?…

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Dick Wall

Dick Wall is a software engineer and has been a Java developer for over 15 years, more recently gaining an interest in the Scala language and now working primarily in Scala as well as teaching it as a part of his enterprise with Bill Venners: Escalate Software - http://www.escalatesoft.com

In addition Dick works for Locus Development, a company doing genetic risk research, and finds time to co-host the Java Posse podcast -http://www.javaposse.com - and run the local Scala developer’s group BASE (the Bay Area Scala Enthusiasts - http://svscala.org).

Dick also enjoys road and mountain biking, riding his motorcycle, hiking, and lots, and lots, of music.

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James Ward

James Ward (http://www.jamesward.com) is a Principal Developer Evangelist at Heroku. Today he focuses on teaching developers how to deploy Java, Play! and Scala apps to the cloud. 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. You can find him tweeting as @_JamesWard, answering questions on StackOverflow.com and posting code at http://github.com/jamesward.

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Twitter: @_JamesWard


Patrick Wilson-Welsh

With over 30 years of professional software development experience, I’ve worn a lot of hats. Over the last 7 years or so I’ve worked as an agile consultant, specializing in building development teams, and training and mentoring them in agile development and agile testing practices. I’ve worked mostly in Java. Currently focusing on Storytesting as a struggling agile practice meme.

In the past I’ve also been an entrepreneur, producer, project manager, composer, and sound designer for award-winning games and multimedia titles for CD-ROM and the web. I’ve been a user interface designer for interactive television. I spent my first ten years in software as a technical writer, marketing writer, and manager of writers. Writing, speaking, teaching, mentoring, community-building, recruiting, and selling are what I am best at, however diligently I work at the craft of programming, which I certainly do.

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