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

Michael Tiemann is Vice President of Open Source Affairs at Red Hat Inc, as well as President of the Open Source Initiative. He previously was the Chief Technical Officer of Red Hat. He serves on a number of boards, including the Embedded Linux Consortium, the Jabber Technical Advisory Board, the GNOME Foundation Advisory Board, and the Board of Directors of ActiveState Tool Corp.

He co-founded Cygnus Solutions in 1989. His programming contributions to free software include authorship of the GNU C++ compiler and work on the GNU C compiler and the GNU Debugger. Tiemann is featured in the 2001 documentary Revolution OS.

He earned a bachelor's degree from the Moore School of Engineering in 1986 at the University of Pennsylvania.

Scott Bain is a 30+-year veteran in computer technology, with a background in development, engineering, and design. He has also designed, delivered, and managed training programs for certification and end-user skills, both in traditional classrooms and via distance learning. Scott teaches courses and consults on Agile Analysis and Design Patterns, Advanced Software Design, and Sustainable Test-Driven Development. Scott is a frequent speaker at developer conferences such as JavaOne and SDWest.

Rod is an Enterprise Architect at Chariot Solutions focusing on SOA, Java, Open Source and lightweight frameworks.

David A. Black founded Ruby Power and Light, LLC in 2006 when he was making a transition from full-time university teaching to Ruby/Rails training and consulting. David had started programming in Ruby in 2000; had first written about Ruby for publication in 2001; and started using Rails in the Fall of 2004.

David is also one of the directors of Ruby Central, Inc., a non-profit corporation devoted to supporting and promoting Ruby-related events and projects.

Jeff Brown works with Engineering and Professional Services with SpringSource, is a member of the core Groovy and Grails development teams and is a co-author of The Definitive Guide To Grails Second Edition. For over 10 years Jeff has been involved in designing and building object oriented systems.

Jeff has done development and mentoring work for industries including Aerospace, Financial and Medical. Areas of expertise include Java, agile web development with Groovy and Grails, distributed computing, object database systems, object oriented analysis and design and agile development. Through his entire career Jeff has always been a hands-on technologist actively involved in software development, training, and mentoring. He is also an international public speaker, having been featured regularly on the No Fluff Just Stuff Software Symposium tour for a number of years.

With over 22 years of professional experience in software/systems engineering and architecture, Steve has extensive experience in the areas of e-commerce, performance/scalability tuning, capacity planning, technical writing, project management, security, and quality assurance.

David Chelimsky is the lead developer of RSpec and a leader in the discussion of Behaviour Driven Development in the Ruby space.

Through April of 2007, David worked as a consultant with Object Mentor, Inc, teaching courses and providing one on one mentoring in OO Design, Test Driven Development and Refactoring.

David now develops dynamic (in function and language!) web applications at Articulated Man, Inc, a Chicago-based web design and application consultancy.

Mike Culver joined the Developer Relations Group of Amazon Web Services in 2006. He brings with him fifteen years of technology leadership experience, including at companies such as Microsoft. In addition Mike has a strong background running an IT organization, with over a decade of experience in the Electrical Wholesale Distribution industry. As a Web Services Evangelist at Amazon, he helps developers take advantage of disruptive technologies that are going to change the way we think about computer applications, and the way that businesses compete.

Bill Dudney is a software developer and entrepreneur currently building software for the Mac. Bill started his computing career on a NeXT cube with a magneto-optical drive running NeXTStep 0.9. Over the years, Bill migrated into the Java world, where he worked for years on building cool enterprise software. But he never forgot his roots and how much fun it was to write software that did cool things for normal people. Bill is back to AppKit to stay. You can follow him on his blog at bill.dudney.net/roller/objc.

Mark Fisher is a Senior Software Engineer with SpringSource and lead of the Spring Integration project. As a core developer for the Spring Framework, he played a central role in developing the annotation-based configuration features of Spring 2.5. He has also provided consulting and training services for clients across numerous industries throughout North America. Mark speaks frequently on the No Fluff Just Stuff Software Symposium tour, at SpringOne in Europe and America, and has presented at several Java User Groups.

Joe Gregorio is a Developer Advocate at Google, a member of the AtomPub Working Group and editor of the Atom Publishing Protocol. He has a deep interest in web technologies, writing "The RESTFul Web" column for the online O'Reilly publication XML.com, writing the first desktop aggregator written in C#, and publishing various Python modules to help in putting together RESTful web services.

Michael is the Co-Chair of Fox Rothschild's Corporate Department, Office Managing Partner of the firm's Chester County (PA) Office and a member of the firm's Executive Committee. Michael concentrates his practice on representing regional, national and international early and middle stage technology and life sciences companies in private financing, mergers, acquisitions, licensing, taxation and related issues. Michael also advises many of this region's venture capital and private equity funds in connection with the acquisition, management and divestiture of portfolio companies.

Dan has been working for IONA for over 7 years providing expertise in Java technologies and Web Service standards. He has represented IONA on several standards groups including JAX-RPC, JAX-WS, and SCA/Java.

At Apache, Dan is a committer on the Apache Maven Plugins project as well as Apache CXF and Tuscany (both in incubation). In addition, he has helped out several other incubator projects adjust to Apache culture as well as use Maven.

Brian Marick was a programmer, tester, and team lead in the 80's, a testing consultant in the 90's, and is an Agile consultant this decade. He was one of the authors of the Manifesto for Agile Software Development and is the author of three books The Craft of Software Testing, Everyday Scripting with Ruby, and RubyCocoa and a bunch of articles.

With nearly 2 decades' experience in the software industry, Dianne Marsh is a specialist in providing coaching and project support in C++, Java, Python and object-oriented design. An entrepreneur, she has also assisted clients with securing Small Business Innovative Research grants, including prototype development. Dianne's expertise is in scientific and technical programming, including manufacturing, genomics, decision support, and real-time processing on both Windows and UNIX operating systems. She has developed and architected distributed, database-driven decision support applications written in C++ and Java. Dianne's principal strengths include large systems architecture, with emphasis on proper thread management, load balancing and fail-over in a distributed environment.

http://www.srtsolutions.com

Brian McCallister is a programmery kind of person who loves that folks are willing to pay him to write code. He works as an Architect and Engineering Manager at Ning, a platform for building your own social websites. Brian has worked variously as a programmer, technical writer, and systems administrator for over a decade on projects ranging from telecommunications GIS systems to loom control drivers. He is proud to be a Member of the Apache Software Foundation, and serves there as Vice President, Apache ActiveMQ.

Aaron Mulder is the chief technical officer of Chariot Solutions, where he helps companies with their Java, Java EE, Rails, and Open Source architecture challenges. When not consulting, you can usually find him presenting at conferences and user groups, wrangling with JCP spec committees, working on his latest book, or hacking away at Apache Geronimo, ActiveMQ, OpenEJB, and many more. Along the way, he has contributed to many other projects including, JBoss and PostgreSQL.

Gregg Pollack lives in Orlando, Florida where he works as the CTO of RailsEnvy.com, directs the Orlando Ruby Users Group, organizes BarCampOrlando, and enjoys producing lots of media. He can be heard on the Rails Envy Podcast covering the latest news in the Ruby and Rails world, and seen teaching Ruby and Rails topics on EnvyCasts.

Ken Pugh is a fellow consultant with Net Objectives. He consults, trains, mentors, and testifies on technology topics ranging from object-oriented design to Linux/Unix to the agile software development. He has written several programming books, including the 2006 Jolt Award winner, Prefactoring, and has served clients from London to Sydney. When not computing, he enjoys snowboarding, windsurfing, biking, and hiking the Appalachian Trail.

Tom Purcell's 19-year IT journey has tracked the course of the industry from the glass house of the 80's, to the client-server of the 90's and on to the J2EE Enterprise applications of the new millennium. He has designed and developed applications on numerous platforms and has worked with Java technology extensively since he installed the first IBM mainframe JVM in 1997. Recently, he has helped engineer several successful J2EE applications in the accounting and travel industries. Tom leads the Delaware Valley BEA Users Group, has been published in Weblogic Developer's Journal and was a speaker at last year's JavaOne.

John Resig is a JavaScript Evangelist for the Mozilla Corporation and the author of the book Pro JavaScript Techniques. He's also the creator and lead developer of the jQuery JavaScript library.

Currently, John is located in Boston, MA. He's hard at work on his second book, Secrets of the JavaScript Ninja, due in bookstores Fall 2008.

Chris Richardson is a developer and architect with over 20 years of experience. He's the author of "POJOs in Action", which describes how to build enterprise Java applications with POJOs and lightweight frameworks. Chris runs a consulting and training company that specializes in helping companies build better software faster. He has been a technical leader at Insignia, BEA, and elsewhere and is a Java champion. Chris has a computer science degree from the University of Cambridge in England and lives in Oakland, CA.

Website and blog: www.chrisrichardson.net

With over 15 years of industry experience, Ken Rimple has played a key role architecting and developing a wide variety of solutions in various settings, including finance, business-to-business purchasing, telecommunications provisioning, and more. His technology expertise has focused in recent years on Java-based frameworks such as Spring, J2EE and Hibernate, and he has worked with workflow tools like BEA Weblogic Integration and Metastorm. He possesses a strong background in relational database development and design, and has architected databases and solutions using Oracle, Sybase, Microsoft SQL Server, PostgreSQL and MySQL.

Bob Schatz specializes in consulting and coaching organizational leaders in the practice of successfully using agile project management techniques to transform their organizations and improve the performance of their software development projects. He began his practice as a result of leading the agile transition at Primavera and helping many other companies do the same.

Jason Seifer is a web developer and 1/2 of RailsEnvy.com. He is a frequent speaker at the Orlando Ruby Users Group and enjoys long walks on the beach, scotch, and poetry. His programming interests include ruby, rails, javascript, full text search, and objective c.

Nick Sieger is a member of the JRuby core team since December 2006, and has been programming Ruby for three years. He created and co-maintains the JDBC adapter for ActiveRecord that JRuby on Rails uses for database connectivity. Nick joined Sun in May 2007 and is excited to be one of the early groups putting Rails to real use at the company. He maintains a blog on mostly-Ruby and JRuby-related topics at blog.nicksieger.com.

James Ward is a Technical Evangelist for Flex at Adobe and Adobe's JCP representative to JSR 286, 299, and 301. Much like his love for climbing mountains he enjoys programming because it provides endless new discoveries, elegant workarounds, summits and valleys. His adventures in climbing have taken him many places. Likewise, technology has brought him many adventures, including: Pascal and Assembly back in the early 90's; Perl, HTML, and JavaScript in the mid 90's; then Java and many of it's frameworks beginning in the late 90's. Today he primarily uses Flex to build beautiful front-ends for Java based back-ends. Prior to Adobe, James built a rich marketing and customer service portal for Pillar Data Systems.

Jim York specializes in helping organizations radically reduce time to value. Lean and Agile thinking underpin the transformative practices that Jim teaches executive, management, and delivery teams. For more than 20 years as a management and IT consultant, he has led, mentored, and coached individuals, teams, and organizations in the implementation of Lean and Agile concepts. In addition to conducting public and on-site workshops, Jim blends his experience in Scrum, Agile Project Management, Lean Software Development, Extreme Program-ming, and traditional project management to deliver customized "just-in-time" train-ing to teams. As a Certified Scrum Trainer and member of the Scrum Alliance, Jim actively contributes to the advancement of the Scrum methodology. web.mac.com/jim.york/FoxHedge/welcome.html

Ezra is known as a contributor in the Rails community, especially regarding deployment. Ezra took to Rails in 2004 and joined Engine Yard in mid-2006. Ezra published a complete Rails deployment book through The Pragmatic Programmers in early 2007.

Ezra Zygmuntowicz and Engine Yard recently secured $15 million in funding to help the company cement its position as a leading Ruby and Rails in the cloud provider.