Rails Underground: Rails Underground '09 Conference Speakers

Pat Allan

Ruby Hero, Pat Allan is a freelancing web developer usually located in Melbourne, Australia. When not caught up in code, he can be found helping organise unconferences such as Rails Camps and Trampoline. His thoughts are blogged semi-regularly at freelancing-gods.com, and he’s been known to make a mean pancake.

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Paul Campbell

Paul Campbell is an Irish Ruby on Rails developer. He has been programming using Ruby on Rails since 2004 and actively contributes open source plugins. Recently he has taken a strong interest in CouchDB. Paul has worked on a variety of high end Rails products with a number of clients.

You can catch up with Paul on Twitter @paulca or his blog http://www.pabcas.com

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Ariejan de Vroom

Ariejan de Vroom lives in Eindhoven, the Netherlands. He has been working with Rails and Ruby for over 3 years. Ariejan employed full-time by Kabisa ICT, a Ruby on Rails oriented company, as a Ruby on Rails developer. His hobbies include photography and reading and he blogs at http://ariejan.net.

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Obie Fernandez

Obie Fernandez is author of the The Rails Way and the editor of Addison-Wesley's Professional Ruby series He founded and heads Hashrocket, a company offering Ruby development services Obie founded the Ruby practice at ThoughtWorks and is a proponent of rails maturity models.

Obie blogs here.

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Fred George

"Fred George is a consultant with over 40 years experience in the industry including over twenty years doing object programming and a decade doing Agile/XP. He counts at least 60 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. He gave the first Agile/XP experience report at OOPSLA 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. IN 2007, he joined an Internet advertising firm, TrafficBroker. 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!"

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Geoffey Grosenbach

Geoffey Grosenbach is the boss at Topfunky Corporation, host of the Rails Podcast, and Peepcode producer. Read his blog at Nuby on Rails.

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David Heinemeier Hansson

David Heinemeier Hansson is the original author of Ruby on Rails. He is also a partner in 37signals. The company behind Basecamp, Highrise, Backpack, Campfire, Writeboard, and Ta-da List. 37 signals runs a popular weblog at Signal vs Noise and David blogs here.

For the work on Rails, he won Best Hacker of the Year 2005 at OSCON from Google and O'Reilly. And in 2006, he accepted the Jolt award of product excellence for Rails 1.0.

David will be taking questions via a video link.

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Lindsay Holmwood

Lindsay Holmwood is a Sysadmin/developer from Sydney, Australia. He specialises in deployment and configuration management, focusing on testing and automation. In his spare time he hacks on cucumber-nagios and Flapjack (a distributed monitoring system). He has spoken at Merbcamp, linux.conf.au, and OSDC.

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Elise Huard

Elise Huard is a belgian freelance developer. After studying metallurgy at university, she decided that software was more her cup of tea, and went to work for several companies, small and large. 7 years of development later (in C, C++ and Java), she took up Ruby and Rails, and has been doing it full-time for a year and a half now. She says that she has been lucky in working with universities and R&D departments, which has allowed her to make interesting and forward-thinking applications. She is passionate about her job, and open source (co-organiser of the FOSDEM conference), and also likes to read science fiction.

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Yehuda Katz

Yehuda Katz, member of the core teams for Rails and jQuery, lead developer of the Merb project, core contributor to DataMapper contributor to Rubinius and Johnson,creator of Thor and Moneta, and works for Engine Yard.

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Martin Kleppmann

Martin Kleppmann is founder of Ept Computing and architect of Go Test It, an awesome new solution for automated cross-browser functional testing in the cloud. Since graduating as top of class from the University of Cambridge, he has consulted various clients large and small on web application projects, and has worked on a number of open source projects including the Ruby invoicing framework gem. Martin loves using great technology and making it work commercially. His blog is at yes-no-cancel.co.uk and he tweets as @martinkl.

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Clemens Kofler

Built and engineered in Tyrol/Austria, web development geek since 2001 and alumnus from Management Center Innsbruck University of Applied Science with a degree in Management & Applied Informatics, Clemens Kofler follows his one true calling these days, working as a freelance Ruby on Rails developer and consultant. Apart from general geeking, Clemens enjoys reading good books and playing the guitar and the piano. Clemens has been working with Rails i18n since June 2008 (well before its official release). Since then, he has released three i18n-related plugins (localized_dates for better date/time localization; LaterDude, an i18n-aware calendar; and delocalize, a plugin to parse localized user input such as numbers and dates) as well as a well-known tutorial application that demos Rails i18n’s features. During the two years he worked as a tutor for programming languages and database systems at university, he gained experience in teaching both inexperienced and slightly advanced programmers and explaining various programming topics. GitHub: http://github.com/clemens

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Brendan G. Lim

Brendan Lim is the Director of Mobile Solutions at Intridea, Inc. Intridea develops high-performance, agile, Enterprise oriented Web 2.0 applications and services, geared to leverage collaborative technologies, social networking, mobile devices/applications and cloud computing. Before Intridea, Brendan spent his days as a systems architect at a mobile startup, kajeet, Inc., in Bethesda, MD. He also co-founded, Yappd, a microblogging social network, built on Rails, that was featured in such publications as PC Magazine, TechCrunch and Mashable.

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Desi McAdam

Desi McAdam is a former ThoughtWorker and a Ruby and Ruby on Rails developer at HashRocket Inc. She is one of the founders of DevChix and active in the Ruby/Rails community, and blogs at http://www.desimcadam.com/.

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Eleanor McHugh

London-based hacker Eleanor McHugh trained as a physicist and for the last thirteen years has worked on real-time software systems ranging from safety-critical cockpit avionics to mission-critical broadcast automation. She's always enjoyed high-level languages and discovered the Joy of Ruby in 2001. Since 2005 she's worked predominantly with the Ruby and related technologies with a particular interest in low-level networking and application scalability.

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Gwyn Morfey

Gwyn Morfey is a scrum master at New Bamboo. He has been working with rails since 2005, and moved to full-time Agile coaching in 2008. He's worked on Channel Five's new gadget site, Amnesty International's world-changing social network, and other exciting rails projects with New Bamboo in London. He believes in simple software, rapid iterations, and making hard decisions early. In his spare time he travels the world and plays with fire. Gwyn writes at http://gwynmorfey.com/ and http://blog.new-bamboo.co.uk/.

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Paolo Negri

Paolo Negri has been working full time on ruby/rails projects since the start of 2006. He worked with ruby for Velvet Software, Forward Internet Group and currently for autoscout24.de. Paolo blogs at Assert Buggy and presented at RailsConf this year.

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Charles Nutter

Charlie Nutter is co-lead on the JRuby project. He went to his first Ruby conference 5 years ago, and liked the language he quickly started contributing. In 2006 he joined Sun Microsystems, and has been working on JRuby ever since. Over the past couple years, he has also been an advocate for JVM languages and Java/JVM improvements that would make language development easier.

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George Palmer

George Palmer is a freelance Ruby and Rails developer who, after several years writing enterprise Java at IBM, stumbled across rails. He was impressed with the clarity and speed at which he could develop and quickly jumped on the ruby bandwagon to never look back. He has a particular interest in architecture and cloud computing, two areas that are becoming increasingly close, and spends a lot of time working with clients in these areas. In his spare time George is a general ruby hacker, Linux advocate and spends a lot of time playing sport. George has talked at Ruby Manor and Scotland on Rails, and is author of CouchFoo.

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Robby Russell

Robby Russell is co-founder and the Chief Evangelist of Planet Argon, which has been focusing on providing clients with design, development, consulting, training, and hosting with Ruby on Rails for the past four years. Robby is author of the Robby on Rails blog.

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Maik Schmidt

Maik Schmidt, author of Enterprise Integration and Enterprise Recipes with Ruby and Rails

Maik has worked as a software developer for more than 16 years now, mainly big companies with big enterprise applications using Java and C++. In 2000 he have bought the first edition of the Pickaxe and liked Ruby ever since.

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Ben Scofield

At Viget Labs, Ben Scofield builds Rails applications for Web 2.0 startups. He’s been using Ruby and Rails for over four years, and is the author of Practical REST on Rails 2 Projects, from Apress. He’s spoken at Railsconf, Rubyconf, Railsconf Europe, and more over the past few years. When he’s not hacking, he spends time with his wife and daughter, reads voraciously, and tries to make the world a better place for web developers everywhere. Ben blogs at www.culann.com and www.viget.com/extend.

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Jonathan Siegel

Jonathan Siegel is the founder of ELC Technologies, which has its headquarters in Santa Barbara, California, and president of ELC Technologies’ London-based operation, which services clients throughout Europe. As founder of ELC, Jonathan has established long-term relationships with global corporations including Cisco Systems, LiveNation, Formula 1 and others. As an entrepreneur, Jonathan has played a founding role in several Ruby on Rails product businesses including RightCart.com, RightScale.com and now RightSignature.com. Jonathan negotiated the sale of RightCart to Buy.com in 2007. RightScale received just under $20mn in venture funding within its first 18 months of operation. Jonathan holds degrees in Physics and Computer Science from the University of California, Santa Barbara.

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Vladimir Tarasov

Vladimir Tarasov is cofounder and VP of engineering of Rhomobile, the open mobile framework company. He is a long time mobile industry veteran and technologist who worked in all aspects of mobile software over the past 10 years as developer/director/VP for number of successful companies in mobile spaces (Motorola, GLU, Mobio).

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Jim Weirich

Jim Weirich is the Chief Scientist for EdgeCase LLC, and is the creator of rake. Jim is very active in the Ruby community, presenting at many conferences and contributing to open source projects such as RubyGems and flexmock. Jim blogs at http://onestepback.org/.

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Joseph Wilk

Joseph Wilk is a member of the core development team for Cucumber along with Aslak Hellesøy. He has been developing for the web for the last 10 years in both big and small companies and as an entrepreneur. After graduating from Imperial College London with first class honours he had stints working with Java and Python and a whole host of web frameworks until he finally found Ruby. He now spends his time having more fun than is healthy working as a Software Gardener building web systems and working on open source projects. He suffers from test obsession and is currently seeking treatment.

Joseph blogs at http://blog.josephwilk.net.

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Dr Nic Williams

Dr Nic runs the premier iPhone/Rails consultancy, Mocra. He has written contributed to many open source projects and written over 50 ruby projects - rails apps, rubygems, textmate bundles (that use Ruby inside) since he first went to RailsConf in 2006.

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Laurie Young

Laurie Young works at New Bamboo, and came to Rails via Java. After experience with many enterprise size projects that became bogged down with what he saw as unnecessary complexity, it was an easy transition to make. Laurie has a PhD in distributed applications on Grid systems, and so is very interested in Cloud computing, and how it is really delivering some of the promises seen in the Grid community, and how it is changing other aspects of it. He is very keen on the idea of Extreme Simplicity, especially in the context of architecture of larger software projects.