Speakers

Peter Bell

Evangelist/hacker for hackNY

Peter is an evangelist and hacker for hackNY - a not-for-profit that aims to federate the next generation of hackers for the New York innovation community.

Peter is a regular presenter at national and international conferences on ruby, nodejs, NoSQL (especially MongoDB and neo4j), cloud computing, software craftsmanship, java, groovy, javascript, and requirements and estimating. He is on the program committee for Code Generation in Cambridge, England and the Domain Specific Modeling workshop at SPLASH (was ooPSLA) and reviews and shepherds proposals for the BCS SPA conference.

He has presented at a range of conferences including DLD conference, ooPSLA, RubyNation, SpringOne2GX, Code Generation, Practical Product Lines, the British Computer Society Software Practices Advancement conference, DevNexus, cf.Objective(), CF United, Scotch on the Rocks, WebDU, WebManiacs, UberConf, the Rich Web Experience and the No Fluff Just Stuff Enterprise Java tour.

He has been published in IEEE Software, Dr. Dobbs, IBM developerWorks, Information Week, Methods & Tools, Mashed Code, NFJS the Magazine and GroovyMag. He's currently writing a book on managing software development for Pearson.

He is an organizer of the CTO School http://www.ctoschool.org - an organization in NYC devoted to creating the next generation of technical leaders. He also organizes the node.js meetup in New York and co-organizes the Domain Driven Design and Grails meetups.

He is a regular instructor at General Assembly in New York. His presentations cover managing software development, NoSQL, mobile development, Javascript development, Twitter Bootstrap and Javascript frameworks.

He tweets regularly as @peterbell.

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.

Jeff Brown

Grails Practice Lead - OCI Grails Team

Grails co-founder and OCI Grails Practice Lead, Jeff Scott Brown has been doing JVM application development for as long as the JVM has existed. He has spent most of the last decade focused specifically on work related to the Grails framework. Jeff co-authored The Definitive Guide to Grails Second Edition and The Definitive Guide to Grails 2, in partnership with Grails co-founder and OCI Grails Team Lead, Graeme Rocher. Jeff is also a regular public speaker on Grails, Groovy, and other JVM-related technologies.

James Carr

Software Craftsman

James is a contractor in the St.Louis area that shares a passion for software craftsmanship and has enjoyed software development since he wrote his first program in Basic on the Tandy Color Computer 3 way back in 1988.

In addition to a passion for technology, he also has a keen interest in improving teamwork and collaboration through interactive activities to get people thinking creatively and develop stronger, richer communication channels with their stakeholders.

Jeremy Deane

Chief Architect at Foundation Medicine

Jeremy Deane is innovative technology leader, conference speaker, and technical author with diverse experience, in premier technical settings, with proven expertise in Enterprise Architecture, Software Architecture, and Software Process Improvement.

Dave Klein

Developer Advocate with Confluent

After 28 years as a developer, architect, project manager (recovered), author, trainer, conference organizer, and homeschooling dad, Dave Klein landed his dream job as a developer advocate at Confluent. Dave is marveling in and eager to help others explore the amazing world of event streaming with Apache Kafka.

Matthew McCullough

Training Innovator, GitHub

Matthew McCullough is an energetic 15 year veteran of enterprise software development, open source education, and co-founder of Ambient Ideas, LLC, a Denver consultancy. Matthew currently is VP of Training at GitHub.com, author of the Git Master Class series for O'Reilly, speaker at over 30 national and international conferences, author of three of the top 10 DZone RefCards, and President of the Denver Open Source Users Group. His current topics of research center around project automation: build tools (Gradle), distributed version control (Git, GitHub), Continuous Integration (Jenkins, Travis) and Quality Metrics (Sonar). Matthew resides in Denver, Colorado with his beautiful wife and two young daughters, who are active in nearly every outdoor activity Colorado has to offer.

Ted Neward

Pratik Patel

Developer Advocate @ Azul Systems

Pratik Patel is a Java Champion and developer advocate at Azul Systems and has written 3 books on programming (Java, Cloud and OSS). An all around software and hardware nerd with experience in the healthcare, telecom, financial services, and startup sectors. He's also a co-organizer of the Atlanta Java User Group and North Atlanta JavaScript meetup, frequent speaker at tech events, and master builder of nachos.

Paul Rayner

Founder and Owner at Virtual Genius LLC

Paul is a seasoned design coach and leadership mentor, helping teams ignite their design skills via Domain-Driven Design (DDD) and Behavior-Driven Development (BDD). He gets teams unstuck through intensive coaching workshops and hands-on pair programming, combined with focused one-on-one leadership mentoring. His company Virtual Genius, provides training and coaching in collaborative design for agile teams. Paul actively serves the community: teaching classes in BDD and DDD, contributing to OSS, and co-leading the DDD Denver Meetup group.

Look for him speaking at user groups and at local and international conferences. Paul is from Perth, Australia, but chooses to live, work and play with his wife and two children, in Denver, Colorado. He tweets with an Australian accent at @ThePaulRayner and blogs at thepaulrayner.com

Nathaniel Schutta

Architect as a Service

Nathaniel T. Schutta is a software architect and Java Champion focused on cloud computing, developer happiness and building usable applications. A proponent of polyglot programming, Nate has written multiple books, appeared in countless videos and many podcasts. He’s also a seasoned speaker who regularly presents at worldwide conferences, No Fluff Just Stuff symposia, meetups, universities, and user groups. In addition to his day job, Nate is an adjunct professor at the University of Minnesota, where he teaches students to embrace (and evaluate) technical change. Driven to rid the world of bad presentations, he coauthored the book Presentation Patterns with Neal Ford and Matthew McCullough, and he also published Thinking Architecturally and Responsible Microservices available from O’Reilly. His latest book, Fundamentals of Software Engineering, is currently available in early release.

Ken Sipe

Cloud Architect & Tech Leader

Ken is a distributed application engineer. 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 containers, container orchestration, high scale micro-service design and continuous delivery systems.

Ken is an international speaker on the subject of software engineering speaking at conferences such as JavaOne, JavaZone, Great Indian Developer Summit (GIDS), 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.

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.

Mark Volkmann

Software Consultant and Partner at OCI

Mark Volkmann is a partner at Object Computing, Inc. (OCI) in St. Louis where he has provided software consulting and training since 1996. As a consultant, Mark has assisted many companies with Java, XML, Web, JavaScript, jQuery, Node.js, and AngularJS application development.

Mark has created and taught many courses on topics including: Java, Swing, XML, Ruby, HTML5, CSS3, JavaScript, jQuery, Node.js, and AngularJS.

Mark is a frequent presenter at St. Louis area user groups. He has written for XML Journal and the No Fluff Just Stuff (NFJS) magazine. He has presented at the XML DevCon, NFJS and Strange Loop conferences.

Mark frequently writes articles on various software development topics. These can be found at http://ociweb.com/sett.