2GX - Groovy / Grails - Speakers

Andres is a Java/Groovy developer with mode 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.

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.

Core member of the Grails development team, Jeff Brown, is a Principal Software Engineer with SpringSource. Jeff has been involved in designing and building object oriented systems for over 10 years, he currently teaches a number of Java and object oriented training courses in addition to doing consulting and mentoring work for industries including Aerospace, Financial, and Medical. Jeff's areas of expertise include Java, agile web development with Groovy & Grails, distributing computing, object database systems, object oriented analysis and design and agile development.

Andy Clement is a senior software engineer at SpringSource, based in the languages and tools lab in Vancouver. Andy has more than ten years experience in Java and Enterprise Application Development. He is a recognized expert on Aspect Oriented Programming and leads the Eclipse AspectJ project as well as being co-founder of the Eclipse AspectJ Development Tools project. Most recently he has been using his compiler knowledge to enable first class language support for Groovy in Eclipse.

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).

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 Gradle. He is the CEO of Gradle Inc.. He works also as a trainer for Skills Matter, a UK based training company. Hans teaches Patterns, TDD and Domain Driven Design. In the past years he has worked as a Senior Developer for Krugle and Volkswagen. In the early days he was also a committer for the JBoss project and founded the JBoss-IDE.

Danno Ferrin has been programming in Java since the Netscape 2.0 beta and started his career programming in NetDynamics. After surviving three different startups he is currently working as a government contracter at Intelligent Software Solutions. His day job involves writing Swing applications in Java, but on his own time he writes Swing applications in Groovy.

In the open source Java world he is an emeritus commiter at the Apache Tomcat and Ant projects and currently is a committer for the Groovy project and a Despot (Project lead) for the Griffon project.

Robert Fischer is a multi-language open source developer currently specializing in Groovy in Grails. In the past, his specialties have been in Perl, Java, Ruby, and OCaml. In the future, his specialty will probably be F# or (preferably) a functional JVM language like Scala or Clojure.

Robert is the author of Grails Persistence in GORM and GSQL, a regular contributor to GroovyMag and JSMag, the founder of the JConch Java concurrency library, and the author/maintainer of Liquibase-DSL and the Autobase database migration plugin for Grails.

Andrew is the founder of the easyb BDD framework and the co-author of Addison Wesley's "Continuous Integration", Manning's "Groovy in Action" and "Java Testing Patterns". He is an author for multiple online publications including IBM's developerWorks and Oreilly's ONJava and ONLamp portals. He actively blogs about software at thediscoblog.com.

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 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

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.

Joseph Faisal Nusairat, author of "Beginning JBoss Seam" and co-author "Beginning Groovy & Grails", is a Java developer who has been working full time in the Columbus Ohio area since 1998, primarily focused on Java development. His career has taken him into a variety of Fortune 500 industries including military applications, data centers, banking, internet security, pharmaceuticals, and insurance. Joseph is particularly fond of open source projects and tries to use as much open source software as possible when working with clients. Joseph is a graduate of Ohio University with dual degrees in Computer Science and Microbiology with a minor in Chemistry. Currently, Joseph works as a Senior Partner at Integrallis Software (www.integrallis.com).

Chris Richardson is a developer, architect and mentor with over 20 years of experience and is the author of the recently published book "POJOs in Action". He runs a consulting company that helps development teams become more productive and successful by adopting POJOs and lightweight frameworks. Chris has been a technical leader at a variety of companies including Insignia Solutions and BEA Systems. Chris has a computer science degree from the University of Cambridge in England. He lives in Oakland, CA with his wife and three children.

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.

Ken Sipe is a Technology Director with Perficient, Inc. (PRFT), IBM's largest service partner, where he leads multiple teams in the development of solutions in the SOA, Web 2.0 and portal domains, on both the Java and .Net platforms.

Ken was the founder of CodeMentor, where he was the Chief Architect and Mentor, leading clients in the execution of RUP and Agile methodologies in the delivery of software solutions.
Ken has a deep need to be highly diversified. Ken often works with IT executives on high-level strategic roadmaps, currently geared around service oriented architectures (SOA). Ken also likes to keep his hands "dirty" in the code, which has him on a regular basis, pairing or otherwise producing code. Ken is regularly requested by clients that know him to "rescue" projects, either through the streamlining of processes or the rapid production of code.

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" (O'Reilly), coauthor of 2007 Jolt Productivity Award winning "Practices of an Agile Developer" (Pragmatic Bookshelf), and author of "Programming Groovy: Dynamic Productivity for the Java Developer" (Pragmatic Bookshelf).

Before working for G2One and SpringSource doing Groovy and Grails development, Matt worked as a Java developer, FORTRAN77 programmer, and military intelligence analyst. During his time with G2One / SpringSource, he was the lead programmer for the GrailsUI plugin, a team lead on an internal Contegix application, and main contributor on several other projects, including the Grails.org plugin portal.

Since leaving SpringSource, Matt has been a freelance Groovy/Grails developer and contributed to several other projects. He is currently very interested in jQuery, Flex, and the upcoming technological singularity that will change life as we know it for all humanity.

Learn more about Matt on his website at Dangertree.net.

Scott Vlaminck has been developing web applications for over a decade, and has spent most of that time using Java and J2EE. For the past two and a half years, however, he's been enjoying the freedom of programming in Groovy using Grails. He's an active member of the
Groovy Users of Minnesota and has contributed to both the Grails and Groovy projects. His weblog can be found at http://refactr.com/blog/and he can be contacted at [email protected].