Speakers

Molly E. Holzschlag is a well-known Web standards advocate, instructor, and author. She has served as Group Lead for the Web Standards Project (WaSP), has been an invited expert to the W3C, and has written more than 30 books covering client-side development and design for the Web.

Currently, Molly works to educate designers and developers on using Web technologies in practical ways to create highly sustainable, maintainable, accessible, interactive and beautiful Web sites for the global community. She consults with major companies and organizations such as AOL, BBC, Microsoft, Yahoo! and many others in an effort to improve standards support, workflow, solve interoperability concerns and address the long-term management of highly interactive, large-scale sites.

A popular and colorful individual, Molly has a particular passion for people, blogs, and the use of technology for social progress.

Crock is a product of our public school system. A registered voter, he owns his own car. He has developed office automation systems. He did research in games and music at Atari. He was Director of Technology at Lucasfilm. He was Director of New Media at Paramount. He was the founder and CEO of Electric Communities/Communities.com. He was founder and CTO of State Software, where he discovered JSON. He is now an architect at Yahoo!.

Bill Scott leads engineering for a new & upcoming Yahoo! site... Yahoo! Teachers a web 2.0 community allowing teachers to gather, organize & share web resources and lesson planning. For the past 1.5 years Bill has been the Ajax Evangelist at Yahoo! where he focused on spreading the goodness of "rich and sane" Ajax design & development. Bill is a frequent speaker at conferences and workshops discussing the nuances of good design and the challenges of great engineering. At Yahoo! Bill was also the Design Pattern curator where he launched the public Yahoo! Design Pattern Library (http://developer.yahoo.com/ypatterns).

Before Yahoo! Bill led User Experience at Sabre Airline Solutions and co-founded Rico (an open source Ajax framework, openrico.org.) For 20 years Bill has bounced back and forth between design and engineering projects, creating products in areas as diverse as video games, widget libraries, war gaming, IDE tools, airline management and Web consumer sites. His musings can be found at http://looksgoodworkswell.com.

Christian Schalk is a Developer Advocate and works to promote Google's APIs and technologies. He is currently engaging the international Web development community with Google's new OpenSocial API. Before joining Google, Chris was a Principal Product Manager and technology evangelist at Oracle in the Java development tools group. Chris also co-authored the book: "JavaServer Faces, The Complete Reference" published through McGraw-Hill-Osborne. Chris was also one of the original members of the Open Ajax alliance and helped Oracle and later Google join the alliance. Chris has spoken on Web, Java and Ajax development at numerous Oracle, Java and Ajax conferences, as well as Google related events including Google Developer Day and recently at Google IO.

Alex Russell served as Project Lead for the Dojo Toolkit from 2004 to 2008 and is Director of R&D at SitePen, a consultancy focused on the development of web applications, exceptional user experience, and pushing the limits of the web. Currently, he serves as President of the Dojo Foundation, an organization that supports development of several high-quality, open source, JavaScript projects and distributes them under liberal terms. Prior to joining SitePen, Russell was a senior engineer at JotSpot and Informatica where he helped both companies build highly interactive, web interfaces. His earlier, open source involvement included stints as editor of the OWASP Guide to Building Secure Web Applications and primary author of the netWindows DHTML toolkit.

Brian Sletten is a liberal arts-educated software engineer with a focus on forward-leaning technologies. He has a background as a system architect, a developer, a mentor and a trainer. His experience has spanned defense, finance and commercial domains with security consulting, network matrix switch controls, 3D simulation/visualization, Grid Computing, P2P and Semantic Web-based systems. He has a B.S. in Computer Science from the College of William and Mary and currently lives in Fairfax, VA. He is the President of Bosatsu Consulting, Inc., a professional services company focused on web architecture, resource-oriented computing, the Semantic Web, scalable systems, security consulting and other technologies of the late 20th and early 21st Centuries.

David Verba is the Technology Advisor for Adaptive Path and the Chief Technical Officer of Emmett Labs. His many years of technical leadership and architecture experience cover a broad range of projects and strategies, including Sun, Java, Oracle, and a variety of open source technologies.

David served as Director of Technology for WholePeople.com, a large e-commerce initiative by Whole Foods, Inc., and was a core developer for CodeZoo.net, a web site for programmers sponsored by O’Reilly Media. He also provided essential technical leadership to Measure Map, a free web service (now part of Google) that tracks blogs’ traffic stats.

Greg is the lead developer of the Jetty open source servlet server and a member of the experts group for the servlet specification from the Java Community Process. Greg has contributed to Geronimo, JBoss, activemq, DWR and other open source projects. Born in Sydney in 1964, Greg graduated from Sydney University with an honours degree in Computer Science in 1986. Since then he has worked as developer, designer, team leader and architect on varied problem domains including telecoms and WWW. Greg is the founder of Mort Bay Consulting and the CEO of Webtide.

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.

Kris Zyp is a research and development associate with SitePen, a forward-thinking company that is committed to building and enhancing the open web. He represents the Dojo foundation on the EcmaScript 4 committee. Kris is the lead developer of the Persevere project and the JSON Schema format. He is actively researching and developing technologies in Ajax REST client/server architecture, JSON-RPC, JSONPath, JSON Referencing, and JavaScript persistence. He is also a contributor to Comet Daily and is working on RESTful HTTP Comet approaches.

Mark Meeker is an Architect on the UI Engineering team at Orbitz Worldwide. He leads the the UI Engineering team responsible for building the presentation tier of online travel sites Orbitz and CheapTickets in the Americas and ebookers in Europe. His focus is on building rich, interactive and internationalized sites that are standards-based and accessible. Previous to Orbitz, he helped develop Britannica.com and earned a M.S. in Software Engineering from the Illinois Institute of Technology. He rarely blogs, but when he does it is at http://markmeeker.com.

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 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.

Neal Ford is an Application Architect for ThoughtWorks. He is an architect, designer, and developer of applications, instructional materials, magazine articles, and video/DVD presentations. Neal is also the author of Developing with Delphi: Object-Oriented Techniques (Prentice Hall PTR, 1996), JBuilder 3 Unleashed (SAMS Publishing, 1999), and Art of Java Web Development (Manning, 2003). His language proficiencies include Java, C#/.NET, Ruby, Object Pascal, C++, and C. Neal’s primary consulting focus is the design and construction of large-scale enterprise applications. He is also an internationally acclaimed speaker, having spoken at over 30 developers’ conferences worldwide.

Nicholas C. Zakas is a principal front end engineer at Yahoo!, where he works on the Yahoo! front page. He is the author of two books, Professional JavaScript for Web Developers and Professional Ajax, (the latter is in its 2nd edition, the former will have a 2nd edition by the end of the eyar) as well as over a dozen online articles on JavaScript.

Nicholas began his career as webmaster of a small software company, transitioning into a user interface designer and prototyper before moving fully into software engineering. He moved to Silicon Valley from Massachusetts in 2006 to join Yahoo! Nicholas can be contacted through his web site.

Nik Krimm is a Senior Architect at Orbitz Worldwide. He has spent five years driving the UI Engineering team, building world class user experiences and the technology that powers them, for Orbitz and CheapTickets in the US and ebookers throughout Europe. His passion is empowering developers building high-quality, standards-based rich user interfaces.
Prior to Orbitz, he cut his teeth at spectacular web flameout marchFirst, and built advanced SVG applications at eMac digital.

Richard Monson-Haefel is the author of Enterprise JavaBeans (Editions 1 - 5), Java Message Service and one of the world's leading experts and book authors on enterprise computing. He was the lead architect of OpenEJB, an open source EJB container used in Apache Geronimo, a member of the JCP Executive Committee, member of JCP EJB expert groups, and an industry analyst for Burton Group researching enterprise computing, open source, and Rich Internet Application (RIA) development. Today, Richard is the VP of Developer Relations for Curl, Inc. a RIA platform used in enterprise computing. You can learn more about Richard at his web site http://www.monson-haefel.com

Richard D. Worth is a Web developer in the Washington, DC area. He works for Fulcrum IT on Web services contracts, primarily for the government.

Richard is one of the lead developers of jQuery UI, a component framework built on top of jQuery, designed to make Rich Internet Applications as simple as jQuery has made Ajax. Richard is also a contributing author on dmxzone.com, writing regular beginner and advanced jQuery UI articles, and has been selected as a Technical Reviewer for a book on jQuery to be published in the fall.

Roman is a Principal Software Security Consultant at Foundstone, a small division of McAfee that provides security assessment, training, and software design services to corporate and government organizations around the world. After spending most of his life building software, now he figures out ways to break it through penetration testing, threat modeling, and code review. On the proactive side, he leads software design sessions, teaches Java security courses, and participates in the Hacme Books open-source project. In his ever-dwindling spare time Roman enjoys mountaineering, scuba diving, and other outdoor pursuits.

Scott Davis is an internationally recognized author and speaker. He is passionate about open source solutions and agile development. He has worked on a variety of Java platforms, from J2EE to J2SE to J2ME (sometimes all on the same project).

Scott's books include Groovy Recipes: Greasing the Wheels of Java, GIS for Web Developers: Adding Where to Your Web Applications, The Google Maps API, and JBoss At Work.

Scott is the Editor in Chief of aboutGroovy.com, a news and information website that tracks the latest developments in Groovy and Grails. He also writes a regular column for IBM DeveloperWorks -- Mastering Grails.

Scott is a frequent presenter at national conferences (such as No Fluff, Just Stuff) and local user groups. He was the president of the Denver Java Users Group in 2003 when it was voted one of the top-ten JUGs in North America. After a quick move north, he is currently active in the leadership of the Boulder Java Users Group. Keep up with him at http://www.davisworld.org.

Shashank Tiwari is the Chief Technologist at Saven Technologies (http://www.saventech.com), a technology driven business solutions company headquartered in Chicago, IL. As an experienced software developer and architect, he is adept in a multitude of technologies. He is an expert group member on a number of JCP (Java Community Process) specifications, JSRs 274, 283, 299, 301 & 312, and is an Adobe Flex Champion. Currently, he passionately builds rich high performance applications and advises many on RIA and SOA adoption. Many of his clients are banking, money management, and financial service companies that he has helped build robust, quantitative, data-intensive, highly interactive, and scalable high performance applications. He writes regularly in many technical magazines, presents in seminars and mentors developers and architects. His book on Advanced Flex3 is due for release later this year. He is an ardent supporter of and contributor to open source software. He lives with his wife and two sons in New York. More information about him can be accessed at his website (http://www.shanky.org).

Steve works at Google on Web performance and open source initiatives. His book, High Performance Web Sites, explains his best practices for performance along with the research and real-world results behind them. Steve is the creator of YSlow, the performance analysis extension to Firebug.

Steve previously worked at Yahoo! as the Chief Performance Yahoo!, where he blogged about Web performance on Yahoo! Developer Network. He was named a Yahoo! Superstar. Steve worked on many of the platforms and products within the company, including running the development team for My Yahoo!.

Prior to Yahoo!, Steve worked at several small to mid-sized startups including two companies he co-founded, Helix Systems and CoolSync. He also worked at General Magic, WhoWhere?, and Lycos. In the early 80's, Steve caught the Artificial Intelligence bug and worked at a few companies doing research on Machine Learning, including several publications and conference appearances. He received a B.S. in Systems Engineering from the University of Virginia and a M.S. in Management Science and Engineering from Stanford University.

Stuart Halloway is the CEO of Relevance, Inc. (www.thinkrelevance.com). With co-founder Justin Gehtland, Stuart helps enterprises adopt emerging best practices such as Ruby on Rails. Justin and Stuart founded the Streamlined Framework (www.streamlinedframework.org), and authored Rails for Java Developers. Stuart is also the author of Component Development for the Java Platform. Prior to founding Relevance, Stuart was the Chief Architect at Near-Time, and the Chief Technical Officer at DevelopMentor.