Speaker
Ola Bini
Ola Bini is a Swedish developer currently working for ThoughtWorks in London, United Kingdom. He has been one of the core developers for JRuby since 2006 and is the author of the APress book Practical JRuby on Rails. He has much experience with Java, Ruby and LISP, and has been involved with several other open source projects - but nowadays JRuby takes most of his time.
He has been known to like implementing languages, writing regular expression engines, YAML parsers and other similar things that exist at the border of computer science.
Steven Bristol Less Everything
Steve wrote his first program at the age of nine using BASIC. Since then he has written everything from proxy servers (C++ on Linux) to global human resources applications (C# on Windows) and has now settled on Ruby On Rails as the love of his life. He is a Core Contributor to the Rails Framework and has contributed to several other open source projects. He created the open source social network Lovd By Less. He has led teams of software engineers for over 11 years. He knows over fourteen different programming languages. He was a mentor in the 2007 Google Summer of Code. He has gone over 150 miles per hour with his knee on the ground while racing motorcycles. He has been married for 10 years. He has three children. He can divide by zero.
Vladimir Dobriakov innoQ Deutschland GmbH
Vladimir Dobriakov is a senior consultant at innoQ Deutschland GmbH and has been developing database-driven enterprise applications for 15 years.
In the last years he has focused on using modern programming languages for writing both interactive web applications and distributed applications that use the power of the web, and especially RESTful HTTP, as a platform for backend services. As a real geek he uses vim as his favourite IDE, latex for creating his presentation slides, xrandr for changing screen resolution and rake to glue it all together.
Jens-Christian Fischer InVisible GmbH
Jens-Christian has been a behaviour driven Rails advocate for 3 years. He's a professional Rails developer, CEO of a Rails company (www.invisible.ch), author of the best selling german book "Professionelle Webentwicklung mit Rails 2", teacher of Rails courses and a regular speaker at conferences.
Julian Fischer
Julian Fischer, CEO of Avarteq GmbH and associate lecturer at the University of Applied Sciences HTWdS in Saarbrücken, Germany, is delivering the lecture, Ruby on Rails. His main focus is about developing architectures for scalable and distributed web applications as well as the creation of hostings infrastructures such as RailsHoster.de and EnterpriseRails.de.
Neal Ford ThoughtWorks
Neal is an application architect at ThoughtWorks. He is also the designer and developer of applications, instructional materials, magazine articles, video presentations, and author of the books "Developing with Delphi: Object-Oriented Techniques", "JBuilder 3 Unleashed", and "Art of Java Web Development". Neal has also spoken extensively at national and international conferences.
Thomas Fuchs
Thomas Fuchs’ famous script.aculo.us framework was created during the development of one of the most highly interactive applications the Web had ever seen -- and it’s gone on to be used in such web sites & applications as CNN.com, NASA.gov, Me.com and more. In addition to being a Prototype core member and Rails core alumnus, Thomas is one of the world's top JavaScript and rich web app performance experts, and has co-authored JavaScript Performance Rocks! with his wife, Amy.
Amy Hoy
Amy Hoy hates writing about herself in the third person, but she's game if you are. When she's not dancing around trying to pull on her supersuit, she writes, wireframes, designs, speaks, trains, and generally does tricks, all under the slash7 moniker. Amy grew up in the US, and lives in Austria, and finds Mark Twain ever funnier since trying to learn German. She does not actually wear a cowboy hat.
Michael Johann rails-experts.com
Michael Johann is editor-in-chief of RailsWay magazine (www.railsway.de) and author of \"Ruby on Rails für JEE Experten\", (Hanser Verlag). He is a consultant and trainer for JRuby on Rails and a regular speaker at conferences around the globe. Bevor switching to Ruby on Rails he become a reknown JEE expert and editor-in-chief of JavaSpektrum magazine which was founded in 1996.
Yehuda Katz Engine Yard Inc.
Yehuda is currently employed by Engine Yard, and works full time as a Core Team Member on the Rails and Merb projects. He is the co-author of jQuery in Action and the upcoming Merb/Rails 3 in Action, and is a contributor to Ruby in Practice. He spends most of his time hacking on Rails and Merb, but also on other Ruby community projects, like Rubinius and Datamapper. And when the solution doesn't yet exist, he'll try his hand at creating one - as such, he's also created projects like Thor and DO.rb.
Michael Koziarski
Michael Koziarski (nzkoz) is a member of the Ruby on Rails core team and software consultant based in Wellington, New Zealand. After a successful stint as an enterprise Java developer, he switched to rails shortly after the first public release. He’s the author of The Rails Way a leading rails weblog and a partner at ActionRails.
Jan Krutisch mindmatters GmbH & Co. KG
Jan Krutisch is the Rails team captain at mindmatters GmbH & Co. KG in Hamburg, Germany. He has written a german book and quite a few articles on Rails and blogs at http://jan.krutisch.de.
He is one of the founders of the german rails usergroup.
Apart from webservers he likes to program every other device that accidentally or intentionally exposed its API. He's interested in unusual approaches to user interface design, patiently waits for the multitouch revolution to happen and wants the web to be more human (and more machine-readable at the same time). He's also trying to do some photography and likes the occasional dash into the world of electronic music making/programming.
Alexander Lang Upstream-Agile GmbH
Alex is the CEO of Upstream Agile GmbH in Berlin where he has been writing Ruby/Rails Software since 2005 and has become obsessed with test driven development. He helps his clients get their projects on track with code reviews and refactorings. He's a regular speaker at Ruby related events and has published a number of Ruby libraries.
Tim Lossen
Tim only vaguely remembers the time when he was still writing Java code for a living. Nowadays he prefers to work with Ruby, Python and Erlang. Lately, he has discovered a passion for hardware hacking and can often be found in the basement
where he is building a small server cluster. -- Tim has two daughters and lives in Berlin.
Mathias Meyer Peritor GmbH
Mathias Meyer (@roidrage) works for Peritor, a Rails and Amazon Web Services consultancy in Berlin. Apart from playing with new technologies, especially from the glamorous world of post-relational databases, his urge to automate just about anything has become nothing short of an obsession. It ultimately lead to the development of Scalarium (http://scalarium.com), an awesome cloud management and deployment platform.
Lourens Naudé Independent / freelance
Independent Consultant currently based in sunny Madeira Island, but originally from South Africa.With a twisted (and mostly non-academic) view on automated behavior based performance optimizations and deep service integration experience, he is shifting focus away from Rails to explore ad hoc backend solutions.He's still not fluent in Portuguese after 7 years.
Maik Schmidt Vodafone Group Services GmbH
Maik Schmidt is working as a software developer for more than fifteen years and makes a living from creating complex solutions for mid-size
enterprises. Besides his day-job he writes book reviews and articles for computer science magazines and contributes code to Open Source
projects. In addition, he has written the following books: „Enterprise Integration with Ruby“ (http://www.pragprog.com/titles/fr_eir/enterprise-integration-with-ruby), \"Enterprise Recipes with Ruby and Rails\" (http://www.pragprog.com/titles/msenr/enterprise-recipes-with-ruby-and-rails).
Stefan Tilkov innoQ Deutschland GmbH
Stefan Tilkov is co-founder and principal consultant at innoQ, a technology consulting company with offices in Germany and Switzerland. He has been involved in the design of large-scale, distributed systems for more than a decade, using a variety of technologies and tools ranging from C++ and CORBA over J2EE/Java EE and Web Services to REST and Ruby on Rails. Stefan is lead SOA editor of InfoQ, author of numerous articles and a frequent speaker at conferences around the world.
Thilo Utke Upstream-Agile GmbH
I'm owner and CEO of Upstream-Agile GmbH a ruby software and consulting shop in Berlin. Upstream is strongly involved in the local ruby/rails scene by hosting events like the DevHouseBerlin and contributing talks at various occasions. We are well known for our speed and quality.
I'm very passionate about software testing and think that the developer community still has to come a long way in that matter. Of course I contributed to various open source software, mostly to the ones released by upstream (http://upstream-berlin.com/open-source/).
Before I founded upstream together with Alexander Lang and came to ruby and rails in 10/2006, I wrote medical software in c# for the Charité Berlin and graduated at computer sciences.
When not making our customers happy or keep my skills sharp, I enjoy playing Basketball with friends, being a loving boyfriend, and live out my geekness.
Ralph von der Heyden XING AG
I have just finished studying Management Information Systems at the Münster University, where I received my MScIS. My Master's thesis was about frontend performance of web applications, so I know quite a lot about this topic. In May, I will join the XING Engineering team to work on their Rails applications.
Heiko Webers bauland42
Heiko is a web architect and the founder of bauland42. We create innovative and secure web applications and we provide Rails security audits and certification. We also run the Ruby on Rails Security Project (rorsecurity.info). Heiko has written books about Rails security, for example at http://www.rorsecurity.info/the-book
Jonathan Weiss Peritor GmbH
Jonathan Weiss is a Ruby consultant and partner at Peritor GmbH in Berlin, Germany. For the last years he has been developing and consulting large Ruby on Rails projects where he focused on Scalability and Security. He is an active member of the Ruby and Rails community and is the developer of the open source deployment tool Webistrano. In his spare time he maintains Rubygems and Rails in the FreeBSD Ports system.
