Biography: Christophe Grand

Christophe Grand is an independent software engineer and consultant who has been spoiled by early exposure to functional programming.

His encounter with Clojure was love at first sight: sane state management, metaprogrammability and easy interop with Java, what is not to love?

Christophe is a contributor to Clojure itself and has also authored the massively popular Enlive library as well as the micro webframework Moustache.

Christophe worked for many companies in automotive, industrial and energy sector. He successfully used Clojure for exploratory programming of legacy systems and integration with those systems.

In addition Christophe after having been technical reviewer of noth Practical Clojure and of The Joy Of Clojure, is now writing Clojure Programming to be published by O'Reilly.

Biography: Lau Jensen

Lau is a Danish National who has been involved in software development for many years. After ending a career as a Project Manager at a Danish Consulting company, he launched his own firm Best In Class.

Best In Class is more than a name as it expresses the determination Lau has for pursuing the highest quality in all his dealings and Clojure is central to achieving this goal.

Lau has personally built industry applications using Clojure, which are deployed in the Danish Health Care industry, the Energy Sector and in Financial Trading - All of which have been tremendously successful.

To get a feel for Laus approach to Clojure, you are recommended to visit his blog.

Biography: Stefan Richter

Stefan is the founder and CTO of freiheit.com technologies gmbh, a very successful german software company. Since 1999 he and his now 70 programmers are developing large internet applications - mostly in Java - for the Who-is-Who internet companies in europe. He studied computer science and systems analysis because he fell in love with computer programming in 1983. His favorite programming languages are Common Lisp, Clojure ( a modern lisp on the JVM) and JavaScript.

Stefan thinks, that the time has come for functional programming. His company deployed several large-scale applications written in Common Lisp and Clojure in the last couple of years and he wants to share his experiences with the GOTO community.

Besides being a programmer he loves books, photography and CrossFit (http://www.crossfit.com). As a board member of pre-seed investor HackFwd (http://www.hackfwd.com) he tries to help startups to become successful. As an activist he supports the Free Software movement and the Free Software Foundation Europe  (http://www.fsfe.org) and the fight against software-patents in europe. You can follow him on Twitter if you like (http://www.twitter.com/smartrevolution).

Biography: Stefan Tilkov

Stefan Tilkov is a 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. He has authored numerous articles and a book ("REST und HTTP", German), and is a frequent speaker at conferences around the world.