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.

Douglas Hawkins has been passionately developing software for the past 10 years -- creating applications for bioinformatics, finance, and retail.

However, Doug's true interest is exploring and explaining the low-level details inside the virtual machines that we use everyday. To make byte code more accessible, he created the open-source Java Assembler Kit (JAK) which provides a fluent API for producing Java

byte code and includes a REPL to allow for interactive experimentation.

Doug lives in Boston and is a regular presenter at both the Boston Java Meetup and the New England Java User's Group.

Providing solutions to private, education, and government entities since 1999. He has also been a teacher and speaker since the early 90s, teaching development for 8 years. His business is currently emphasized on Java, Groovy, Grails, EJB3, and the JBoss Seam web framework. Daniel Hinojosa is also co-founder of the Albuquerque Java User's Group and is currently failing overcoming his addiction of NFJS conferences.

Howard Lewis Ship is the creator and lead developer for the Apache Tapestry project, and is a noted expert on Java framework design and developer productivity. He has over twenty years of full-time software development under his belt, with over ten years of Java. He cut his teeth writing customer support software for Stratus Computer, but eventually traded PL/1 for Objective-C and NeXTSTEP before settling into Java.

Howard is respected in the Java community as an expert on web application development, dependency injection, Java meta-programming, and developer productivity. He is a frequent speaker at JavaOne, NoFluffJustStuff, ApacheCon and other conferences, and the author of "Tapestry in Action" for Manning (covering Tapestry 3.0). Lately, he's been dipping his toes into alternate languages, including Clojure.

Howard is an independent consultant, offering Tapestry training, mentoring and project work as well as training in Clojure. He lives in Portland, Oregon with his wife Suzanne, and his children, Jacob and Olivia.

Nathaniel T. Schutta is a senior software engineer focussed on making usable applications. A proponent of polyglot programming, Nate has written two books on Ajax and speaks regularly at various worldwide conferences, No Fluff Just Stuff symposia, universities, and Java user groups. In addition to his day job, Nate is an adjunct professor at the University of Minnesota where he teaches students to embrace dynamic languages. In an effort to rid the world of bad presentations, Nate coauthored the book Presentation Patterns with Neal Ford and Matthew McCullough.

Ken has been a practitioner and instructor of RUP since the late 1990s, and an extreme programmer and coach since the middle 2000s. Ken has worked with Fortune 500 companies to small startups in the roles of developer, designer, application architect and enterprise architect. Ken's current focus is on enterprise system automation and continuous delivery systems.

Ken is an international speaker on the subject of software engineering speaking at conferences such as JavaOne, JavaZone, Jax-India, and The Strange Loop. He is a regular speaker with NFJS where he is best known for his architecture and security hacking talks. In 2009, Ken was honored by being awarded the JavaOne Rockstar Award at JavaOne in SF, California and the JavaZone Rockstar Award at JavaZone in Oslo, Norway as the top ranked speaker.

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.

Matt Stine is an Enterprise Java/Cloud consultant based in Memphis, TN. He is a twelve year veteran of the enterprise software and web development industries, with experience spanning the healthcare, biomedical research, e-commerce, and retail store domains.

Matt has spoken at conferences ranging from JavaOne to CodeMash and has published several articles for Agile Zone, GroovyMag and NFJS the Magazine, as well as the Selenium 2.0 DZone Refcard. Matt is also the founder of the Memphis/Mid-South Java User Group.

His current areas of interest include lean/agile software development, software architecture, mobile application development and functional languages.

Craig Walls is a senior engineer with SpringSource as the Spring Social project lead and is the author of Spring in Action and XDoclet in Action (both published by Manning) and Modular Java (published by Pragmatic Bookshelf). He's a zealous promoter of the Spring Framework, speaking frequently at local user groups and conferences and writing about Spring and OSGi on his blog. When he's not slinging code, Craig spends as much time as he can with his wife, two daughters, 2 birds and 3 dogs.