Speakers

Carl started building web applications at 13 with PHP. He started learning so that he could one up his friends who were only building static HTML. Since then, he's dabbled with quite a few technologies before settling with ruby four years ago. Carl is a software engineer at Engine Yard, a member of the merb team (currently working on Rails 3), and a contributor to many OSS projects. He plans to build a web server in haskell, ocaml, or ____ in his spare time for no tangible reason.

Carl likes chocolate, coffee, scuba diving, and long walks on the beach.

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.

Glenn Vanderburg is a principal at Relevance, where he is focused on cutting-edge software development technologies and techniques. He brings more than 20 years of experience developing software across a wide range of domains, and using a variety of tools and technologies. Glenn is always searching for ways to improve the state of software development, and was an early adopter and proponent of Ruby, Rails, and agile practices.

Jared Richardson, co-author of Ship It! A Practical Guide to Successful
Software Projects, is a speaker, consultant, and mentor with NFJS One. Jared has been in the industry for more than fifteen years as a consultant, developer, tester, and manager.

Jared can be found online at Agile Artisans.

Kevin Smith has, at various times, been a network administrator, DBA, developer, team lead and trainer over his 14 year career. He first learned about Erlang in 2006 via Joe Armstrong's excellent "Programming Erlang" and has never looked back. Kevin is the founder of Hypothetical Labs, a consultancy focused on Erlang training and development.

Matthew Bass is an independent software developer, entrepreneur, speaker, and writer. He has over ten years of experience across a diverse set of technologies and has worked at places like SAS Institute, the world's largest privately held software company. An agilist from the very beginning, he continues evangelizing and experimenting with pair programming, test-first and behavior-driven development, and continuous integration. Matthew has spoken at several regional and national software conferences and regularly writes for publications like InfoQ.

Nathaniel's really just another coder. He was in the right place at the right time back in 2000 when he initially fell in love with Ruby, and the love affair continues to this day. An attendee and a speaker at every RubyConf to date, he's seen the rise of Ruby and has a deep understanding of the source and nature of its popularity. For the past three years he's been getting better at the business side of things by running Terralien, a Rails-focused custom development consultancy, and also more recently Spreedly, a robust subscription management platform. At the same time he continues to write code on a regular basis to keep his creative side fed, and you can check out his Github profile to see what he's been up to.

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.

I am a long-time object oriented technologies, practitioner, evangelist, and provocateur. I've been a Ruby programmer and consultant since 2006.

Some highlights from my 32 year career at IBM include: the development of the initial proof of concept for IBM VisualAge/Smalltalk, a distributed implementation of the Smalltalk
language, work on VisualAge Micro Edition for Java (the precursor to Eclipse), serving as a founding member and secretary of
the X3J20 Smalltalk committee, and appearances in the
early decades of OOPSLA.

I've had the opportunity to know, work, and interact with many of those who laid the groundwork for what we do with Ruby and how we do it.

My sporadic thoughts, mostly about the Ruby language and related topics can be found at my blog. http://talklikeaduck.denhaven2.com

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.

Yehuda is currently employed by Engine Yard, and works full time as a Core Team Member on the Rails and Merb projects. He is the co-author of jQuery in Action and the upcoming Merb in Action, and is a contributor to Ruby in Practice. He spends most of his time hacking on Rails and Merb, but also on other Ruby community projects, like Rubinius and Datamapper. And when the solution doesn't yet exist, he'll try his hand at creating one – as such, he's also created projects like Thor and DO.rb