Biography: Fred George

Fred George is a consultant with over 43 years experience in the industry including over twenty years doing object programming and over a dozen years doing Agile/XP. He counts at least 70 languages with which he has written code. A veteran of the IBM-Microsoft wars, Fred did early work in computer networking, LAN's, GUI's and objects for IBM. As an independent consultant from 1991-2003, he counted HP, Morgan-Stanley, American Express, IBM, and USAA among his clients. He gave the first Agile/XP experience report at OOPSLA in 1999 about an embedded system done in Java, and has mentored many clients in use of objects in Java under an XP process. He has shared the stage at JavaOne with Martin Fowler, acting as his foil, and assisted in XP Immersion sessions with Kent Beck, Ron Jeffries, and Robert Martin. Fred spent a year as a visiting lecturer at N.C. State University teaching Java programming to over 800 undergraduates, with a generous dose of object design, patterns, and XP practices thrown in. Fred joined ThoughtWorks in 2003, delivering yet more projects using agile processes. He has worked with clients in four countries since then, including a ten-month assignment in India (where he founded ThoughtWorks University), four months of projects in China, and a post in the London office. In 2007, he joined the London Internet advertising firm, Forward, bringing Agile practices to all aspects of the business. He has been writing about the post-agile work at Forward under the moniker of Programmer Anarchy. He believes in objects, Lean processes, fun in programming, and the client's successes. He holds a bachelors degree from N. C. State University in Computer Science, and a masters degree from MIT in the Management of Technology. Oh, and he still writes code!

Twitter: @fgeorge52

Biography: Kevlin Henney

Kevlin is an independent consultant and trainer based in the UK. His development interests are in patterns, programming, practice and process. He has been a columnist for various magazines and web sites, including Better Software, The Register, Application Development Advisor, Java Report and the C/C++ Users Journal. Kevlin is co-author of A Pattern Language for Distributed Computing and On Patterns and Pattern Languages, two volumes in the Pattern-Oriented Software Architecture series. He is also editor of the 97 Things Every Programmer Should Know site and book.

97 Things: http://programmer.97things.oreilly.com
Personal blog: http://asemantic.blogspot.com
Company site: http://curbralan.com
Twitter: @KevlinHenney

Biography: Martin Thompson

Martin has had a passion for pushing software and electronics to the limit since childhood. He was the type of kid who took the video recorder apart and then fixed it. Since then he has always been attracted to business problems where high performance computing can open new, previously impossible, opportunities. Ranging from stock market data feeds to PCs as in the early 90s, working on the first generation of internet banks, implementing the largest product content management systems, working on the worlds largest sports betting exchange (Betfair) and now founding LMAX. Martin brings his mechanical sympathy for the hardware that it runs on, to the software that he creates, which has taken him deep into the subjects of concurrency and parallel computing. Martin is the co-founder and CTO of LMAX where he leads the building of the world’s highest performance financial exchange using a radical new architecture that takes it all back to basics.

Twitter: @mjpt777
Video presentations: 4 Years of living Continuous Delivery - TDD of a business plan

Biography: Ola Bini

Ola Bini works as a language geek for ThoughtWorks in Chicago. He is from Sweden but don't hold that against him. He is one of the JRuby core developers and have been involved in JRuby development since 2006. At one point in time, Ola got tired of all existing programming languages and decided to create his own, called Ioke. Then he did it again, and started work on Seph. He has written a book called Practical JRuby on Rails Projects for APress, and coauthered Using JRuby for the Pragmatic Programmers, talked at numerous conferences, and contributed to a large amount of open source projects. He is also a member of the JSR292 Expert Group

His main passion lies in expression engines and trying to figure out how to create good YAML parsers.

Book:Practical JRuby on Rails Web 2.0 Projects: Bringing Ruby on Rails to Java (Expert's Voice in Java)
Twitter:@olabini
Video presentations: Adopting the JVM, Domain Specific Languages - What, Why, How, Evolving the Java Platform, JRuby: Power on the JVM

Biography: Tudor Girba

Tudor Gîrba (http://tudorgirba.com) attained his PhD in 2005 from the University of Berne, and he now works as Innovation Lead at CompuGroup Medical Schweiz, and as software assessment consultant through netstyle.ch.

Among others, since 2003 he leads the work on Moose, an extensive open-source platform for software and data analysis (http://moosetechnology.org). He published all sorts of peer reviewed publications, he served in program committees for several dozen international venues, and he is regularly invited to give talks and lectures.

He is advocating that assessment must be recognized as a critical software engineering activity. He developed the humane assessment method (http://humane-assessment.com), and he is currently helping companies to rethink the way they manage complex software systems and data sets.