RubyRX - Speakers

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.

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.

Andy Hunt is a programmer turned consultant, author and publisher. He authored the best-selling book "The Pragmatic Programmer" and six others, including his latest, "Pragmatic Thinking and Learning". Andy was one of the 17 founders of the Agile Alliance and authors of the Agile Manifesto, and co-founded the Pragmatic Bookshelf, publishing award-winning and critically acclaimed books for software developers.

Richard Kilmer is the founder of Virginia-based software and services company InfoEther, Inc and is a board member of Ruby Central. Rich's background includes peer-to-peer software, wireless web, workflow, and pen computing. Rich has been using Ruby in production systems since 2002 and has contributed to many Ruby projects over the years including RubyGems and starting RubyForge. Rich's current Ruby efforts are focused on simplifying OS X development with HotCocoa and is a contributor to the MacRuby project.

Joe is a father, speaker, author, developer and owner of EdgeCase. Before helping found EdgeCase, LLC, Joe was a developer with ThoughtWorks and spent much of his time working with large J2EE and .NET systems for Fortune 500 companies. He has spent his career as a developer, project manager, and everything in between. Joe is a passionate member of the open source community. He co-founded the Columbus Ruby Brigade and helped organize the Chicago Area Ruby Users Group. His passions are Agile Development in the Enterprise, Ruby, and demonstrating to the Fortune 500 the elegance and power of this incredible language.

Andrea O. K. Wright specializes in Ruby technology for Chariot Solutions, a consulting firm based in Fort Washington, PA. A 14-year IT industry veteran, she has presented about advanced classloading concepts and annotation processing at JavaOne and topics ranging from developing games in Ruby to thread safety at national and regional Ruby conferences including RubyConf and RailsConf. She enjoyed introducing elementary school age children to Ruby String manipulation at CodeMash 2009 with her "Playing with Strings" session.

Russ Olsen's career spans a couple of decades, during which he has written everything from graphics device drivers to document management applications. These days, Russ diligently codes away at GIS systems, web service security and process automation solutions with both J2EE and Rails.

Russ spends a lot of his otherwise free time talking and writing about programming, especially Ruby. Russ is the author of Design Patterns In Ruby and the Technology As If People Mattered (http://www.russolsen.com) blog. Russ has spoken at various conferences including Paris On Rails, RubyNation and the VTM Professional Ruby Conference.

An Extreme, Test-Driven Software Developer, Christopher has been programming since the mid-90s, when he cut his teeth on Perl while working his way through college in Maine. After putting in his time in the dot-com world, with the stock options to prove it, he made the jump to consulting. During that time he used the myriad of available Java based web frameworks and came to the conclusion that there must be a better way. That better way for him started with the "Agile Manifesto", and peaked with "Getting Real" and Ruby on Rails.

Christopher is now running his Ruby on Rails consulting business in balmy North Carolina where he resides with his family, to whom he devotes much of his free time. More can be read at his online presence at http://www.agiledisciple.com.

Brian Sam-Bodden is an author and recognized international speaker that has spent over twelve years working with object technologies, with an emphasis on the Java platform and in recent times falling in love with Ruby. He holds dual bachelor degrees from Ohio Wesleyan University in computer science and physics and is the president and chief software architect for Integrallis http://www.integrallis.com, where he focuses on building great applications with Java and Ruby. Brian has worked as an architect, developer, mentor, and trainer for several Fortune 500 companies in the tax, insurance, retail sciences, telecommunications, distribution, banking, finance, aviation, and scientific data management industries. As an independent consultant, he has promoted the use of open source in the industry by educating his clients on the cost benefits and productivity gains they can achieve. 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" and has also co-authored the Apress Java title "Enterprise Java Development on a Budget: Leveraging Java Open Source Technologies".

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.

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.