Biography: Dave Thomas
Dave Thomas has a wide spectrum of experience in the software industry as an engineer, professor, consultant, architect, executive and investor. Dave is founder and CEO of Bedarra Corporation; which provides virtual CTO and CEO, business mentoring and seed investment to emerging companies. Recently formed Bedarra Research Labs undertakes speculative research on applications of emerging software technologies.
Dave is best known as the founder and past CEO and president of
Object Technology International Inc. (formerly OTI, now IBM OTI Labs)
and led the commercial introduction of object and component technology.
The company is often cited as the ideal model of a software technology
company.
He was also the principal visionary and architect for IBM VisualAge
Smalltalk and Java tools and virtual machines including the initial
work on popular multi-language Eclipse.org IDE. OTI pioneered the use
of virtual machines in embedded systems with Tektronix shipping the
first commercial products in 1988. He was instrumental in the
establishment of IBM's Pervasive computing efforts and in particular
the Java tooling.
Dave is an adjunct research professor at Carleton University, and the University Of Queensland and is widely published in the software engineering literature. He is a popular humorous albeit opinionated keynote speaker. Dave remains active in various roles within the technical community including ECOOP, AOSD, Evolve, and Agile Development Conference, Agile/XP Universe and OOPSLA Onward. He is a founding director of the Agile Alliance and most recently a founder of Open Augment Consortium. Dave writes expert columns in Otland Online in Germany, and the Journal Of Object Technology in Switzerland where he also serves on the editorial board.
Software Passion: The Joy of Building Great Software Together
Links:
Personal website: davethomas.net
eclipse.org
agilealliance.org