SpringOne 2GX 2011

Chicago, October 25-28, 2011

Magnificent Mile Marriott
Downtown Chicago
540 North Michigan Ave.
Chicago, Illinois   60611
1 (800) 228-9290
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2GX - Groovy / Grails - Speakers

Our speakers are project leaders, authors, professional trainers, and recognized industry experts. They are the people writing the software you use on a daily basis.

Andres Almiray - Griffon Project Lead

Andres is a Java/Groovy developer and Java Champion, with more than 11 years of experience in software design and development. He has been involved in web and desktop application developments since the early days of Java. He has also been teacher of computer science courses in the most prestigious education institute in Mexico. His current interests include Groovy and Swing. He is a true believer of open source and has participated in popular projects like Groovy, Griffon, JMatter and DbUnit, as well as starting his own projects (Json-lib, EZMorph, GraphicsBuilder, JideBuilder). Founding member and current project lead of the Griffon framework. He blogs periodically at http://jroller.com/aalmiray. You can find him on twitter too as @aalmiray. He likes to spend time with his beloved wife, Ixchel, when not hacking around.

Jean Barmash - Co-Founder & Lead Developer of EnergyScoreCards

Jean Barmash is the co-founder and lead developer of EnergyScoreCards, a startup company that helps benchmark energy efficiency of multi-family buildings. He is responsible for architecture and implementation of the SaaS software using the Grails framework.

To this role Jean brings over 10 years of experience in different areas of software industry. Most recently, he was Director of Technical Services at Alfresco Software, the Open Source Enterprise Content Management Company, where his responsibilities included architecture and hands-on development of content centric solutions, training, and working with open source community. He also worked as Sr. Consultant and Trainer at several Wall Street Firms. Well-versed in both .NET and Java Platforms, Jean is interested in applying latest development techniques to interesting problems.

Jean is a frequent speaker on technology and architecture topics at various user groups and industry conferences. He is also the founder of the New York Groovy / Grails Meetup.

Burt Beckwith - Core Member of the Grails Development Team

Burt Beckwith is a Java and Groovy developer with over ten years of experience in a variety of industries including biotech, travel, e-learning, social networking, and financial services. For the past three years he's been working with Grails and Groovy full-time. Along the way he's created over fifteen Grails plugins and made significant contributions to several others. He was the technical editor for Grails in Action.

Peter Bell - Agile Architect/CTO

Peter is the CTO of PowWow - a lean startup in NYC. He presents internationally and writes extensively on domain specific languages, agile architecture, NoSQL and requirements and estimating. He helps teams to develop great software quickly by improving the requirements gathering, estimating, project management processes, engineering practices and tools used.

He is on the program committee for Code Generation in Cambridge, England and the Domain Specific Modeling workshop at SPLASH (was ooPSLA). He has presented at a range of conferences including DLD Conference, ooPSLA, Code Generation, Practical Product Lines, the British Computer Society Software Practices Advancement conference, UberConf, the Rich Web Experience and the No Fluff Just Stuff tour. He has been published in IEEE Software, Dr. Dobbs, IBM developerWorks, Information Week, Methods & Tools, NFJS the Magazine, Mashed Code, JSMag and GroovyMag. He is also a regular instructor at General Assembly - a campus for technology, design, and entrepreneurship in New York.


Tim Berglund - Developer, Consultant, Author

Tim is a full-stack generalist and passionate teacher who loves coding, presenting, and working with people. He believes the best developer is one who is well-informed of specifics and can also make deep connections between software development and the broader world. He has recently been exploring non-relational data stores, continuous deployment, and how software architecture should resemble an ant colony.

His firm, the August Technology Group, helps clients with product development, technology consulting, and technology upgrade projects atop the JVM. The August Group's technology preferences reflect the generalist sensibilities of its founder, and its development practices are always lightweight, self-improving, and humanizing by design.

Tim is a speaker internationally and on the No Fluff Just Stuff tour in the United States, and is co-president of the Denver Open Source User Group in the Denver area, co-author of the DZone Clojure RefCard, co-presenter of the best-selling O'Reilly Git Master Class, co-author of Building and Testing with Gradle, and a member of the O'Reilly Expert Network.

He lives in Littleton, CO with the wife of his youth and their three children.


Jeff Brown - Core Member of the Grails Development Team

Core member of the Grails development team, Jeff Brown, is a Senior Software Engineer with SpringSource. Jeff has been involved in designing and building object oriented systems for over 15 years. Jeff's areas of expertise include web development with Groovy & Grails, Java and agile development.

Joshua Davis - Grails Portal Project Team Member

Joshua has been programming in Java for 12 years.. He now works for Cognizant Technology Solutions as a Senior Architect specializing in Open Source SOA and resides in Gotha, FL.

Joshua is presently working on the Grails Portal project, hosted on Google code (http://code.google.com/p/grailsportal/) which has the goal of creating a simple personalization scheme in Groovy and Grails.



Scott Davis - Author of "Groovy Recipes"

Scott Davis is the founder of ThirstyHead.com, a training company that specializes in Groovy and Grails training.

Scott published one of the first public websites implemented in Grails in 2006 and has been actively working with the technology ever since. Author of the book Groovy Recipes: Greasing the Wheels of Java and two ongoing IBM developerWorks article series (Mastering Grails and in 2009, Practically Groovy), Scott writes extensively about how Groovy and Grails are the future of Java development.



Hans Dockter - Founder of Gradle and CEO of Gradleware

Hans Dockter is the founder and project lead of the Gradle build system and the CEO of Gradleware, a company that provides training, support and consulting for Gradle and all forms of enterprise software project automation in general.

Hans has 13 years of experience as a software developer, team leader, architect, trainer, and technical mentor. Hans is a thought leader in the field of project automation and has successfully been in charge of numerous large-scale enterprise builds. He is also an advocate of Domain Driven Design, having taught classes and delivered presentations on this topic together with Eric Evans. In the earlier days, Hans was also a committer for the JBoss project and founded the JBoss-IDE.

Hamlet D`Arcy - Sr. Java/Groovy Developer, Groovy Committer

Hamlet D'Arcy has been writing software for over a decade, and has spent considerable time coding in C++, Java, and Groovy. He's passionate about learning new languages and different ways to think about problems. Hamlet is the founder of the Basel-based Hackergarten open source coding group, and regularly participates and speaks at local and international user groups and conferences. Hamlet is a committer on the Groovy and CodeNarc projects, and is a contributor on a few other open source projects (including JConch and the IDEA Groovy Plugin). He blogs regularly at http://hamletdarcy.blogspot.com and can be found on Twitter as HamletDRC (http://twitter.com/hamletdrc).

Colin Harrington - Senior Consultant, Object Partners, Inc

Colin Harrington is a Senior Consultant at Object Partners, Inc with over 3.5 years of Grails experience. Based in Minnesota, Colin has 10+ years of experience developing web-based applications.

Colin is an agile practitioner and has been a key component of many powerful fast-paced local and remote teams with varying levels of composition and ability. He is a Technical leader and a forward thinker with a knack for delivering potent and engaging web-applications.

Colin is an active member of the Groovy and Grails community and an active speaker at local user groups, events and conferences such as MinneBar, GUM, GR8Conf in the US, etc.

Paul King - co-author of "Groovy in Action"

Paul King leads ASERT, an organization based in Brisbane, Australia which provides software development, training and mentoring services to customers wanting to embrace new technologies, harness best practices and innovate. He has been contributing to open source projects for nearly 20 years and is an active committer on numerous projects including Groovy. Paul speaks at international conferences, publishes in software magazines and journals, and is a co-author of Manning's best-seller: Groovy in Action.

Dave Klein - Author of 'Grails: A Quick-Start Guide'

Dave is a consultant helping organizations of all sizes to develop applications more quickly (and have more fun doing it) with Grails. Dave has been involved in enterprise software development for the past 15 years. He has worked as a developer, architect, project manager, mentor and trainer. Dave has presented at user groups and national conferences. He is also the founder of the Capital Java User Group in Madison, Wisconsin, the Gateway Groovy Users in St. Louis, MO, and the author of Grails: A Quick-Start Guide, published by the Pragmatic Programmers. . Dave's Groovy and Grails related thoughts can be found at http://dave-klein.blogspot.com

Kenneth Kousen - Author of "Making Java Groovy"

Ken Kousen is the President of Kousen IT, Inc., through which he does technical training, mentoring, and consulting in all areas of Java and XML. He is the author of the O'Reilly screencast "Up and Running Groovy", and the upcoming Manning book about Java/Groovy integration, entitled "Making Java Groovy".

He has been a tech reviewer for several books on software development. Over the past decade he's taught thousands of developers in business and industry. He is also an adjunct professor at the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute site in Hartford, CT. His academic background includes two BS degrees from M.I.T., an MS and a Ph.D. from Princeton, and an MS in Computer Science from R.P.I.

Guillaume LaForge - Head of Groovy Development for SpringSource

As Head of Groovy Development for SpringSource, Guillaume Laforge is the official Groovy Project Manager, and the spec lead of JSR-241, the Java Specification Request that standardizes the Groovy dynamic language. He is also a frequent conference speaker presenting Groovy and Grails at JavaOne, SpringOne, QCon, the Sun TechDays, and JavaPolis. Guillaume also co-authored Groovy in Action along with Dierk König. Before founding G2One, which was acquired by SpringSource in late 2008, and taking the role of VP Technology, Guillaume worked for OCTO Technology, a consultancy focusing on architecture and agile methodologies. While at OCTO, Guillaume developed new offerings around Groovy and Grails for its customers.

Peter Ledbrook - Grails Advocate at SpringSource

A long-time Grails user, Peter is currently a committer to the project and officially Grails Advocate at SpringSource, a division of VMware. He is also co-author of Grails in Action with Glen Smith.

Peter Niederwieser - Creator of the Spock Framework

Peter Niederwieser is a computer language enthusiast from Linz, Austria. Having used Java since 1997, Peter nowadays prefers to work with more flexible languages - in particular Groovy, Scala, and Clojure. Peter is the creator of Spock and a Groovy committer.

In his day job, Peter is a Principal Software Engineer at Gradleware.

Graeme Rocher - Head of Grails Development for SpringSource

As Head of Grails Development for SpringSource, Graeme Rocher is the project lead and co-founder of the Grails web application framework. He's a member of the JSR-241 Expert Group which standardizes the Groovy language. Graeme authored the Definitive Guide to Grails for Apress and is a frequent speaker at JavaOne, JavaPolis, NoFluffJustStuff, JAOO, the Sun TechDays and more. Graeme joined SpringSource in late 2008 upon the acquisition of G2One Inc. Before founding G2One, Graeme was the CTO of SkillsMatter, a skills transfer company specializing in open source technology and agile software development, where Graeme was in charge of the company's courseware development strategy and general technical direction.

Brian Sletten - Forward Leaning Software Engineer

Brian Sletten is a liberal arts-educated software engineer with a focus on using and evangelizing forward-leaning technologies. He has a background as a system architect, a developer, a security consultant, a mentor, a team lead, an author and a trainer and operates in all of those roles as needed. His experience has spanned the online game, defense, finance, academic, hospitality, retail and commercial domains. He has worked with a wide variety of technologies such as network matrix switch controls, 3D simulation/visualization, Grid Computing, P2P and Semantic Web-based systems. He has a B.S. in Computer Science from the College of William and Mary. He is President of Bosatsu Consulting, Inc. and lives in Los Angeles, CA.

He focuses on web architecture, resource-oriented computing, social networking, the Semantic Web, scalable systems, security consulting and other technologies of the late 20th and early 21st Centuries.

Matt Stine - Technical Architect, AutoZone

Matt Stine is a Technical Architect at AutoZone in Memphis, TN. He is an eleven year veteran of the enterprise software and web development industries, with experience spanning the healthcare, biomedical research, e-commerce, and now retail store domains. His current focus is the development and support of an enterprise Java platform supporting 4600+ AutoZone stores. Matt appears frequently on the No Fluff Just Stuff symposium series tour, as well as at other conferences such as JavaOne, SpringOne/2GX, The Rich Web Experience, and The Project Automation Experience. He has served as Agile Zone Leader for DZone, and his articles also appear in GroovyMag and NFJS the Magazine. Matt is also author of the Selenium 2.0 DZone Refcard. When he’s not on the road, Matt also enjoys his role as President of the Memphis/Mid-South Java User Group. His current areas of interest include lean/agile software development, modular software architecture, object-oriented design, functional programming, automated testing of modern web applications, and NoSQL datastores.

Venkat Subramaniam - Founder of Agile Developer, Inc.

Dr. Venkat Subramaniam, founder of Agile Developer, Inc., has trained and mentored thousands of software developers in the US, Canada, Europe, and Asia. Venkat helps his clients effectively apply and succeed with agile practices on their software projects, and speaks frequently at international conferences and user groups. Venkat is also an adjunct faculty and teaches CS courses remotely at the University of Houston. He is author of ".NET Gotchas," coauthor of 2007 Jolt Productivity Award winning "Practices of an Agile Developer," author of "Programming Groovy: Dynamic Productivity for the Java Developer" and "Programming Scala: Tackle Multi-Core Complexity on the Java Virtual Machine" (Pragmatic Bookshelf).

James Williams - Co-creator of Griffon and Author of Learning HTML5 Game Programming

James Williams is a Senior Software Engineer for Taulia based in Silicon Valley and a frequent conference speaker. He is a co-creator of the Griffon project, a rich desktop framework for Java applications. He and his team WalkIN, created a product on a coach bus while riding to SXSW, and were crowned winners of StartupBus 2011. He is the author of the upcoming book "Learning HTML5 Game Programming..." for Addison-Wesley. He blogs at http://jameswilliams.be/blog and tweets as @ecspike.