Northern Virginia Software Symposium
November 2 - 4, 2007 - Reston, VA
View the event details here ».
Speakers
Our presenters are not simply vendor representatives -- they are industry recognized subject matter experts. They are published authors. They are the people writing the software you use on a daily basis.
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.
Scott Davis - Author of "Groovy Recipes"
Scott Davis is the founder of ThirstyHead.com, a training company that specializes in Groovy and Grails training.
Scott published one of the first public websites implemented in Grails in 2006 and has been actively working with the technology ever since. Author of the book Groovy Recipes: Greasing the Wheels of Java and two ongoing IBM developerWorks article series (Mastering Grails and in 2009, Practically Groovy), Scott writes extensively about how Groovy and Grails are the future of Java development.
Mark Fisher - Spring Integration Lead
Mark Fisher is an engineer within the SpringSource division of VMware and lead of the Spring Integration project. He is also a committer on the core Spring Framework and the Spring BlazeDS Integration project. Mark has provided consulting services for clients across numerous industries, and he has trained hundreds of developers how to use the Spring Framework and related projects effectively. Mark speaks regularly at conferences and user groups in America and Europe.
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.
Andrew Glover - Founder of easyb
Andrew is the founder of the easyb BDD framework and the co-author of Addison Wesley's "Continuous Integration", Manning's "Groovy in Action" and "Java Testing Patterns". He is an author for multiple online publications including IBM's developerWorks and Oreilly's ONJava and ONLamp portals. He actively blogs about software at thediscoblog.com.
Jason Harwig - Senior Software Engineer at Near Infinity
Jason Harwig full-time job is a senior software engineer at Near Infinity Corporation, an enterprise software development and consulting services company headquartered in Reston, Virginia. In his spare time he runs Pine Point Software LLC, writing Mac OS X applications in Cocoa/Objective-C.
His interests include Cocoa, JavaScript, OpenGL and user-interface design.
David Hussman - Agility Coach/Instructor/Practioner
David teaches and coaches the adoption and improvement of agility as a delivery tool. His work includes helping companies of all sizes all over the world. Sometimes he is pairing with developers and testers, while other times he is helping to invent, evolve and plan the delivery of all types of products and projects. David also spends a great deal of time helping leaders at all levels find ways to pragmatically use agility to foster innovation.
Prior to working as a full time coach, David spent years building software in a variety of domains: digital audio, digital biometrics, medical, financial, retail, and education to name a few. David now leads DevJam, a company composed of agile collaborators. As mentors and practitioners, DevJam focuses on agility as a tool to help people and companies improve their software production skills. DevJam provides seasoned leaders that strive to pragmatically match technology, people, and processes to create better and cooler products in competitive cycles.
Along with teaching and coaching, David participates in conferences around the world. He is the recipient of the Agile Alliance, 2009 Gordon Pask Award. David continuously contributes to books and various publications.
For coaching information, presentations, and more, visit www.devjam.com
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.
Ramnivas Laddad - Author of AspectJ in Action, Principal at SpringSource
Ramnivas Laddad is a SpringSource Principal Enginner. He has over a decade of experience in applying his enterprise Java and aspect-oriented programming (AOP) expertise to middleware, design automation, networking, web application, user interface, and security projects.
Ramnivas Laddad is a well-known expert in enterprise Java, especially in the area of AOP and Spring. He is the author of AspectJ in Action, the best-selling book on AOP and AspectJ that has been lauded by industry experts for its presentation of practical and innovative AOP applications to solve real-world problems. Ramnivas, a Spring framework committer, is also an active presenter at leading industry events such as JavaOne, JavaPolis, No Fluff Just Stuff, SpringOne, Software Development, and has been an active member of both the AspectJ and Spring communities from their beginnings.
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.
Kito Mann - Editor-in-chief of JSF Central and the author of JSF in Action
Kito D. Mann is editor-in-chief of JSF Central and the author of JavaServer Faces in Action (Manning). He is a member of several Java Community Process expert groups (including JSF and Portlets), and an internationally recognized speaker. Kito is also the Principal Consultant at Virtua specializing in enterprise application architecture, training, development, mentoring, and JSF product strategy. He holds a BA in Computer Science from Johns Hopkins University.
Ted Neward - Enterprise, Virtual Machine and Language Wonk
Ted Neward is an Architectural Consultant with Neudesic, LLC as well as the Principal with Neward & Associates. He speaks on the conference circuit discussing Java, .NET and XML service technologies, focusing on Java-.NET interoperability, programming languages, and virtual machine technologies. He has written several widely-recognized books in both the Java and .NET space, including the recently- released "Professional F#" and widely-acclaimed "Effective Enterprise Java". He lives in the Pacific Northwest.
Jason Rudolph - Author of Getting Started with Grails
Jason Rudolph is a Principal at Relevance, a leading development and training organization specializing in Ruby, Rails, Groovy, and Grails, and integrating them into enterprise environments. Jason has more than nine years of experience in developing software solutions for domestic and international clients of all sizes, including start-ups, Dow 30 companies, and government organizations.
Jason is the author of the highly-praised book, Getting Started with Grails, and speaks frequently at software conferences and user groups. Jason also contributes regularly to the open source community, both as an early committer to Grails, and also as a committer to the Streamlined framework and numerous other Ruby and Rails projects.
Jason holds a degree in Computer Science from the University of Virginia. You can find Jason online at http://jasonrudolph.com.
Pramod Sadalage - Co-author of "Refactoring Databases:Evolutionary Database Development"
Pramod Sadalage is the co-author of the 2007 Jolt Productivity Award winning
"Refactoring Databases: Evolutionary Database Development", a Martin Fowler
signature series book and author of "Recipes for Continuous Database
Integration". Pramod works as a DBA and developer at ThoughtWorks. He works on
large custom-developed applications that use agile methodologies. While on these
projects, he pioneered the practices and processes of agility in the database.
Pramod writes and speaks about these concepts and practices to help those
interested in using agile practices on databases. He has written and presented
about database administration on XP projects, the adoption of agile processes
with databases, and the impact of agile practices on database administration and
design. Pramod is the owner and founder of the agiledatabases Yahoo! group; he
moderates group discussions and helps group members learn about agile databases.
When he is not working, you can find him spending time with his wife Rupali and
daughter Arula, and trying to improve his running.
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".
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.
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).
