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.

Located in Munich/Germany, I'm doing freelancing in software engineering and consulting since +12 years. My technical focus is Grails and Neo4j and other emerging technologies. The second part of my professional life is Netjay, a small co-founded company doing larger scale projects. Last couple of years I gave several talks at various conferences like gr8conf.eu, grailsXchange, AgileWorld. In my spare time I serve as a volunteer firefighter, that's my there is the nice helmet on my avatar image.

Burt Beckwith has been a software developer for 15 years, most of that as a JVM developer, and for the last five years working with Grails and Groovy. He is a core developer on the Grails team at SpringSource, and has created over 40 Grails plugins. Burt is a frequent speaker at conferences and user groups where he shares his passion for Grails and other Groovy-based technologies, in particular those that are related to persistence, security, and performance. He is the author of "Programming Grails" and blogs at http://burtbeckwith.com/blog/

Sébastien Blanc is JEE engineer with 8 years of experience. After spending 7 years in the Netherlands as Software Engineer, he decided to go back to his roots in the South of France. He is working for the company Sopra and he is working on a prestigious assignment for the client Amadeus including a lot of Groovy.

Besides his “heavy” JEE profile (middleware, banking and insurance products) Sébastien spends a lot of time in Groovy and Grails. He is the author of several Grails plugins such as Spring Mobile, Jquery Mobile Scaffolding or Geolocation. He believes that Mobile Web Apps are the future and tries to evangelize this through different conferences (Gr8Conf, Devoxx, RivieraDev, Grails Exchange).

Nenad Bogojevic is a software architect in Sales and E-commerce Platform division of Amadeus IT Group. For the last 12 or so years, Nenad has been working on a high volume web based travel reservation platform using Java technologies. As a key actor he has been influencing the technical direction of the company's e-commerce platform. Currently, he provides technical guidance for mission critical travel agency application platform with paramount scalability and extensibility requirements. Nenad loves experimenting and whenever time permits, he mashes up a prototype or two to test or prove new technologies. At home, when he needs a dose of geekiness, he constructs robots with his daughters.

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.

Cédric Champeau is a core Groovy committer. He joined SpringSource, a division of VMware, in order to help developing the language. Prior to that, he spent several years at Lingway, a software editor, where he used Groovy in multiple industrial contexts including DSLs for natural language processing, scripting or even workflows.

He his currently working on the implementation of static type checking and static compilation for Groovy 2.0.

Emiliano Conde is the Founder and President of jBilling Software, Ltd. He oversees the architecture and product direction of jBilling, the leader in open source enterprise billing systems. He is often working on-site with companies around the world helping implement large, enterprise class billing solutions on Java environments. Emiliano Code counts 17 years of experience in software development, his last position prior to the founding of jBilling being Software Architect for HSBC Global Systems (ranked 2nd largest bank in the world). He holds a certificate on Software Engineer from the University of British Columbia (Canada). He now lives in Ottawa, Canada.

Luke Daley is a member of the Gradleware engineering team. At Gradleware Luke works on Gradle (A JVM based build automation tool) and helps teams reach new levels of project automation and quality.

Luke is the lead of the Geb project (a productivity focussed Groovy browser automation/web testing tool) project which he created in 2010. You'll also find Luke contributing to other Open Source projects such as Grails (a Groovy web development framework), Spock (a next generation testing framework for the JVM) and anything else that catches his attention. With a “results over rhetoric” ethos, Luke's focus is on tools that empower software professionals to deliver and innovate, not try to save them from themselves.

Originally from Australia, Luke now resides in London where he spreads his time among work, software crafstmanship, musicianship and cursing the local weather.

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.

Todd is a 15 year veteran of the Java development and has 4 years of professional Grails development experience. He is currently the V.P. of Engineering for VirtualTourist.com a TripAdvisor Media Group Company. In 2008, VirtualTourist.com was acquired by TripAdvisor/Expedia(EXPE), and Todd was brought in to lead a team of Java/Groovy/Grails engineers in the redevelopment effort. A graduate of the University of Arizona, with a B.S. in Computer Engineering, and an MBA from ASU with an emphasis on management of the creative software engineering process. When he is not actively writing code for his own startup ideas, you will find him entertaining his daughters or getting lost in a glass of wine, both of which usually lead to other crazy coding ideas like this one: "What would happen if I did a screencast of writing the same web application in eight different languages?" -- www.betterwebapp.com

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.

Brian is the Chief Architect for Avantia, Inc., a custom solutions firm that specializes in Spring and open source solutions for enterprises. Brian has more than 7 years of experience designing and developing enterprise Spring solutions, and has been a Spring and Grails advocate for both Fortune 500 companies and SMB organizations. Brian is also actively involved in the Spring, Grails, and vFabric communities.

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.

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.

As Head of Groovy Development for SpringSource, Guillaume Laforge is the official Groovy Project Manager. He initiated the creation of the Grails web framework, and created the Gaelyk lightweight toolkit for Google App Engine. 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. 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.

Ken is a software engineer for the IEEE based in the NYC metro area. He leads the development of several websites for IEEE Spectrum (http://spectrum.ieee.org).

Ken has been working with Groovy and Grails exclusively for the past two years and has over 15 years of experience building large Java-based applications in many diverse industries including publishing, pharma, automotive, telecom, and travel. Ken holds a BS in Computer Engineering from Virginia Tech.

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 Saville spent the majority of his life pretending he did not want to be a software engineer. After a BS in Computer Engineering and a MS in IT, he found that he just wanted to write applications. He has spent several years scripting and writing web applications as a system administrator and web developer, but has most enjoyed working with web frameworks such as Grails. After being introduced to the project a year and a half ago, Brian has become an active member of the Grails community, writing several plugins and frequenting the mailing lists. He is currently the lead engineer for a major API integration application written in Grails at Adaptive Computing.

Ken has been a practitioner and instructor of RUP since the late 1990s, and an extreme programmer and coach since the middle 2000s. Ken has worked with Fortune 500 companies to small startups in the roles of developer, designer, application architect and enterprise architect. Ken's current focus is on enterprise system automation and continuous delivery systems.

Ken is an international speaker on the subject of software engineering speaking at conferences such as JavaOne, JavaZone, Jax-India, and The Strange Loop. He is a regular speaker with NFJS where he is best known for his architecture and security hacking talks. In 2009, Ken was honored by being awarded the JavaOne Rockstar Award at JavaOne in SF, California and the JavaZone Rockstar Award at JavaZone in Oslo, Norway as the top ranked speaker.

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).

Ryan is Chief Architect and Director of Products at ReachForce and formerly Lead Architect at
Developerprogram.com.

ReachForce provides B2B marketers with cloud-based software and services to accelerate lead conversions from inbound, outbound, and database marketing initiatives

Ryan is currently building a Grails infrastructure for ReachForce as well as teaching Grails to the developer team.

In the past Ryan has he has architected a Grails solution for Developerprogram.com that allows rapid deployment of Developer Program portals for all kinds of companies, specializing in the mobile industry. He has also done Java and Linux based webcasting for events such as
SXSW, built telecom software, and ASP's for the financial sector.