2GX - Groovy / Grails - Speakers

Andres is a Java/Groovy developer with more than 10 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, Scala 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 of the Griffon framework.

He likes to spend time with his beloved wife, Ixchel, when not hacking around.

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 is a Java 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 two years he's been working with Grails and Groovy full-time. Along the way he's released five Grails plugins and is the primary developer of the Spring Security plugin. He was the technical editor for Grails in Action.

Peter Bell has been presenting internationally for years on Domain Specific Languages, Domain Specific Modeling and Software Product Lines. His focus is on getting beyond the syntax to handle the engineering concerns when developing real world DSL solutions - from evolution to IDE support, constraint checking, documentation and testing DSLs.

He is on the Program Committee for Code Generation in Cambridge England and the Domain Specific Modeling workshop at SPLASH (was ooPSLA).

He is also the CEO/CTO of SystemsForge - a New York based company that uses DSLs and a Software Product Line built on top of Groovy and Grails to develop custom web applications quickly and cost effectively. The SystemsForge product line has been presented at ooPSLA and Code Generation and written up in IEEE Software and Methods & Tools.

Tim Berglund runs a consulting firm called the August Technology Group, which provides training and development services to customers building web applications with open-source tools running on the JVM. He likes it best when these include Groovy and Grails.

His technology interests span web applications, business integration, data architecture, and software architecture, but his greatest passion is to help developers improve in their craft. He is a speaker internationally and at conferences and user groups in the United States, and helps lead the Denver Open Source User Group.

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

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 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 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.

Scott teaches public and private classes on Groovy and Grails for start-ups and Fortune 100 companies. He is a regular presenter on the international technical conference circuit (including No Fluff Just Stuff). In 2008, Scott was voted the top Rock Star at JavaOne for his talk "Groovy, the Red Pill: How to blow the mind of a buttoned-down Java developer".

Hans Dockter is the founder and project lead of the Gradle build system and the CEO of Gradle Inc, 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 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, and recently he's been discovering the joys of both F# and Scheme. He's an active member of the Groovy Users of Minnesota and the Object Technology User Group, is a committer on the Groovy project, and is a contributor on a few 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 is a Senior Consultant at Object Partners, Inc with over 2.5 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 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 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

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 upcoming book about Java/Groovy integration, entitled "Java and Groovy: The Sweet Spots", from Manning.


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.

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.

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 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 chief engineer at Smarter Ecommerce GmbH.

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 is a liberal arts-educated software engineer with a focus on forward-leaning technologies. He has a background as a system architect, a developer, a mentor and a trainer. His experience has spanned the online games, defense, finance and commercial domains with security consulting, 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 is the Group Leader of Research Application Development in the Research Informatics Division of Information Sciences at St. Jude Children's Research Hospital in Memphis, Tennessee. Matt has been developing and supporting enterprise Java applications in support of life sciences research for St. Jude since 2001. Matt is a committer to multiple open source projects and is the founding member of the Memphis/Mid-South Java User Group. Matt is also the Zone Leader at http://agile.dzone.com, and his articles have also appeared in GroovyMag and NFJS the Magazine. His current areas of interest include lean/agile software development, modularity and OSGi, mobile application development (iPhone/iPad/Android), web development (HTML5, etc.), and Groovy/Grails.

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. 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 is a Sun Certified Programmer specializing in desktop Java and rich Groovy clients. He was a successful participant in the 2007 Google Summer of Code working to bring easy access to SwingLabs UI components to Groovy. He is a co-creator of the Griffon project, a rich desktop framework for Java applications. James works as a Senior Software Engineer for the Tools and Technology group at Ribbit, a Silicon Valley based VOIP provider.