Speakers

Tim Berglund

VP Developer Relations at Confluent

Tim is a teacher, author, and technology leader with Confluent, where he serves as the Vice President of Developer Relations. He is a regular speaker at conferences and a presence on YouTube explaining complex technology topics in an accessible way. He tweets as @tlberglund, blogs every few years at http://timberglund.com. He has three grown children and two grandchildren, a fact about which he is rather excited.

Neal Ford

Director / Software Architect / Meme Wrangler

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.

Stuart Halloway

President of Cognitect

Stuart Halloway is a founder and President of Cognitect, Inc. (www.cognitect.com). He is a Clojure committer, and a developer of the Datomic database.

Stuart has spoken at a variety of industry events, including StrangeLoop, Clojure/conj, EuroClojure, ClojureWest, SpeakerConf, QCon, GOTO, OSCON, RailsConf, RubyConf, JavaOne, and NFJS.

Stuart has written a number of books and technical articles. Of these, he is most proud of Programming Clojure.

Learn more about Stu's presentations on his wiki.

Kirk Knoernschild

Software Developer & Mentor

Kirk is software developer with a passion for building great software. He takes a keen interest in design, architecture, application development platforms, agile development, and the IT industry in general, especially as it relates to software development. His recent book, Java Application Architecture was published in 2012, and presents 18 patterns that help you design modular software.

Kenneth Kousen

President, Kousen IT, Inc.

Ken Kousen is a Java Champion, several time JavaOne Rock Star, and a Grails Rock Star. He is the author of the Pragmatic Library books “Mockito Made Clear” and “Help Your Boss Help You,” the O'Reilly books “Kotlin Cookbook”, “Modern Java Recipes”, and “Gradle Recipes for Android”, and the Manning book “Making Java Groovy”. He also has recorded over a dozen video courses for the O'Reilly Learning Platform, covering topics related to Android, Spring, Java, Groovy, Grails, and Gradle.

His academic background include BS degrees in Mechanical Engineering and Mathematics from M.I.T., an MA and Ph.D. in Aerospace Engineering from Princeton, and an MS in Computer Science from R.P.I. He is currently President of Kousen IT, Inc., based in Connecticut.

Prasanna Pendse

Technical Principal at ThoughtWorks

Prasanna has been programming since 1994. He was involved in such adventures as creating India's first search engine and an on-line music and video store before getting a real job.

Prasanna's development skillz went up a notch when he learned about TDD in the early 2000s. In fact, TDD (along with pair programming, CI and other XP practices) is a major reason why he still writes code. In 2006, he joined ThoughtWorks.

His coding adventures took him around the US to places such as Chicago (IL), Atlanta (GA), Albany (NY), Warren (NJ), Malvern (PA), San Francisco (CA) as well as around the world to Krakow (Poland), Bangalore (India), Tokyo (Japan), Beijing (China), Pune (India), Hong Kong (China) and Johannesburg (South Africa)!

Prasanna plays any of many roles including developer, tech lead, software architect, agile coach, QA, project lead, enterprise architect, technical principal, infrastructure automation and build monkey. He has programmed professionally in JavaScript, Ruby, C#, Java, Perl, PHP, Tcl/Tk, C, C++, Bash and PowerShell.

Besides coding, he enjoys eating different types of food and photography.

Nilanjan Raychaudhuri

Author of "Scala in Action"

Nilanjan is a consultant and trainer for Typesafe. He started his professional career as a software developer in 2000 using object oriented programming languages. Nilanjan has previously worked with IBM, ThoughtWorks and LivingSocial where he gained a lot of experience in managing and developing software solutions in Java/JEE, Ruby, Groovy and also in Scala. He is zealous about programming in Scala ever since he got introduced to this beautiful language. Currently he spends his spare time working on the scala-webmachine open source project (restful resource framework). In the past Nilanjan worked on other open source projects and libraries. At Typesafe he is mainly teaching and designing Scala and Play courses and helping customers to adopt these technologies. Nilanjan enjoys sharing his experience via talks at various conferences. He is also the author of the “Scala in Action” book.

Brian Sletten

Forward Leaning Software Engineer @ Bosatsu Consulting

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, AI/ML, 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 @ Agile Developer, Inc.

Dr. Venkat Subramaniam is an award-winning author, founder of Agile Developer, Inc., creator of agilelearner.com, and an instructional professor at the University of Houston.

He has trained and mentored thousands of software developers in the US, Canada, Europe, and Asia, and is a regularly-invited speaker at several international conferences. Venkat helps his clients effectively apply and succeed with sustainable agile practices on their software projects.

Venkat is a (co)author of multiple technical books, including the 2007 Jolt Productivity award winning book Practices of an Agile Developer. You can find a list of his books at agiledeveloper.com. You can reach him by email at venkats@agiledeveloper.com or on twitter at @venkat_s.

Craig Walls

Author of 'Spring in Action' and 'Building Talking Apps'

Craig Walls is a Principal Engineer, Java Champion, Alexa Champion, and the author of Spring AI in Action, Spring in Action, and Build Talking Apps. He's a zealous promoter of the Spring Framework, speaking frequently at local user groups and conferences and writing about Spring. When he's not slinging code, Craig is planning his next trip to Disney World or Disneyland and spending as much time as he can with his wife, two daughters, 1 bird and 2 dogs.