Speakers

Michael Koziarski

Michael Koziarski (nzkoz) is a software consultant based in Wellington, New Zealand. After a successful stint as an enterprise Java developer, he switched to rails shortly after the first public release. He’s a contributor to The Rails Way and maintains a personal blog.

Michael is presenting Keynote (Friday)

David A Black

David started programming in Ruby in 2000, first wrote about Ruby for publication in 2001, and started using Rails in the Fall of 2004. David is also one of the directors of Ruby Central, Inc., a non-profit corporation devoted to supporting and promoting Ruby-related events and projects.

David is presenting Keynote (Saturday)

Anthony Bailey

Anthony Bailey works for amazon.com by day and plays with Rails mostly out-of-hours.

Anthony is presenting Regression Therapy - Contentful Testing

Steven Baker

Steven Baker is the one of the key figures in the Ruby community when it comes to Test-Driven development. Having created RSpec, the Behavior Driven Development framework for Ruby, Steven has studied and worked with some of the largest contributors in the Agile Development community. He has trained teams managing over 7 million community members how to adopt Test-riven techniques, greatly enhancing their productivity and development focus.

Steven is presenting Good OO Design on Rails (CANCELLED)

Tom Beddard

Tom Beddard started out as a laser physicist but moved into web development over eight years ago specialising in CMS and e-commerce apps. For the past two years he has been the technical director at tictoc in Glasgow, one of Scotland’s largest agencies developing exclusively with Rails.

Tom is presenting Deploying Rails with Litespeed: a developers best kept secret!

Giles Bowkett

Giles Bowkett has been building Rails applications for two years. He was writing short articles for Wired back when most people thought the Web would never be as mainstream as AOL. For fun, he builds Lego robots and plays bit parts in student films.

Giles is presenting Code Generation: The Safety Scissors of Metaprogramming

Paul Dix

Paul Dix has been working with Ruby and Rails since 2005 when he first started attending meetings at nyc.rb. Paul was a speaker at the Gotham Ruby Conference in 2007. He is also the author of the Basset Ruby Gem, which provides an API for various machine learning tasks. Paul has worked as a Rails consultant for EastMedia, a software engineer intern at Google, a senior research engineer at McAfee, a software development consultant at Air Force Space Command, and a software tester contractor at Microsoft. He currently works for Mint Digital where he contributes to various Rails applications for clients and Mint’s Rails application platform. In addition to his consulting, Paul is working on a new startup that makes use of the collective intelligence techniques this talk covers.

Paul is presenting Collective Intelligence: Leveraging User Data to Create Intelligent Rails Applications

Thomas Enebo

Thomas is a core developer of the JRuby project and he is also an employee of Sun Microsystems. Tom has been using Java for over a decade and Ruby over half a decade. At Sun, he is working to make JRuby a piece of software that will capture the hearts and minds of Ruby and Java developers everywhere. Tom is also working to make Ruby a first-class citizen on the JVM. Tom, along with Charles Nutter, will be writing a book on JRuby this year.

Thomas is presenting JRuby on Rails: Up And Running!

Gordon Guthrie

Gordon Guthrie is CEO/CTO of hypernumbers.com, an early stage semi-stealth start-up.

He has previously had a range of senior technical and business positions including Chief Technical Architect at if.com and more recently as Solutions Architect at BT/City of Edinburgh Council.

Gordon is presenting Bonus Ruby-free Erlang Session

Maria Gutierrez

Maria Gutierrez is a Software Engineer at I-play, a mobile games publisher based in Dunfermline, where she’s enjoyed working on Rails applications for over 2 years. Before working at I-play, she was an analyst-programmer at Aegon UK, life insurance and pensions company, working with Enterprise Java. In a previous life, she was a radio journalist in Barcelona where she once interviewed Tom Jones. Don’t hold it against her!

Maria is presenting Pushing Rails onto our Stack: a system integration study

Bryan Helmkamp

Bryan Helmkamp is a Rails software engineer in New York. He is a strong advocate for Behavior Driven Development and an active participant in the RSpec community. During his three years of professional Ruby/Rails programming he has been continually active in the community by organizing events like Rails Day 2007 and co-organizing the first (and the upcoming second) annual Gotham Ruby Conference (GoRuCo). Bryan’s software development blog is located at http://brynary.com/.

Bryan is presenting Story Driven Development: The Next Generation of Rails Functional Testing

Richard McMahon

For the past 6 years Richie McMahon was technical lead on I-play’s internal content management system. After seeing the Rails screencast in early-2005 he pushed for the adoption of Rails into the companies standard solution stack and ended up writing the Perforce adaptor in Capistrano to help that happen. While Rails is still close to his heart, Richie recently took up a new position at Adobe Systems. He loves Grape soda – donations gratefully received.

Richard is presenting Pushing Rails onto our Stack: a system integration study

Joe O'Brien

Joe is a father, speaker, author and developer. Before helping found EdgeCase, LLC, Joe was a developer with ThoughtWorks and spent much of his time working with large J2EE and .NET systems for Fortune 500 companies. He has spent his career as a developer, project manager, and everything in between. Joe is a passionate member of the open source community. He co-founded the Columbus Ruby Brigade and helped organize the Chicago Area Ruby Users Group. His passions are Agile Development in the Enterprise, Ruby, and demonstrating to the Fortune 500 the elegance and power of this incredible language.

Joe is presenting Domain Specific Languages : Molding Ruby

Charles Oliver Nutter

Charles Oliver Nutter co-leads the JRuby project and is one of the three core developers. He joined Sun Microsystems in September 2006 and has since worked to improve and advance JRuby and other dynamic language support on the JVM. Charles has developed in Java for the past decade as well as having written Windows and .NET applications and led the LiteStep project’s rewrite in the late 90s. Before coming to Sun, Charles was a lead Java EE architect, and now hopes to make dynamic languages ready for enterprise Java platform development.

Charles is presenting JRuby on Rails: Up And Running!

Thomas Pomfret

Thomas is VP Technology at Mint Digital (http://mintdigital.com). Mint conceives, builds and runs mass-participation Rails websites, typically for TV related projects. Recent clients include Channel 4, MTV, BBC, ABC Family/Disney. Thomas is responsible for building and maintaining all of Mint’s UK web applications. Additionally, Thomas has written a number of mdules in Mint’s core BloomBox technology. Prior to joining Mint, Thomas was in charge of internet operations at a large UK shoe retailer.

Thomas is presenting mobileAct: a high-risk Rails app for Channel 4

Martin Sadler

Martin has been working in the web development industry for over ten years enabling a wide spectrum of organizations to meet their online goals – from Bluechips and public sector bodies to independents and start-ups. At DSC, Martin created the Working With Rails community site that helps Rails developers connect with one another and find out who is doing what with Rails. It is the insight gained from this site that is the basis for Martin’s presentation. He is currently working at CitySafe in London developing mission critical apps in use daily by the Police, Government, and high profile financial and retail institution.

Martin is presenting Lessons Learned from Working With Rails

Tammer Saleh

Tammer Saleh is an experienced Developer with Thoughtbot in Boston. He has worked for the NCSA, University of Illinois, Caltech’s Earthquake Detection Network, and Citysearch.com — performing tasks ranging from Network Administration to designing AI applications. He is the lead developer for the Shoulda rails plugin, as well as for the LDAP-Activerecord gateway. H presented ‘Angels and Daemons’ for RailsConf 2007, which was very well received. You can find more information about him and his blog at tammersaleh.com.

Tammer is presenting BDD with Shoulda

Andrew Stewart

Andrew runs his own small company, AirBlade Software, which uses Ruby and Rails to make other businesses look good. Before starting AirBlade he worked in signals intelligence (despite the blond hair). He graduated from Trinity College, Cambridge with a Master’s in Engineering almost a decade ago.

Andrew is presenting Handling Long-Running Tasks in Rails

Jim Weirich

Jim Weirich is the Chief Scientist for EdgeCase LLC, a Rails development firm located in Columbus Ohio. Jim has over twenty-five years of experience in software development. He has worked with real-time data systems for testing jet engines, networking software for information systems, and image processing software for the financial industry. Jim is active in the Ruby community and has contributed to several Ruby projects, including the Rake build system and the RubyGems package software.

Jim is presenting Advanced Ruby Class Design

Jonathan Weiss

Jonathan Weiss is a German Ruby enthusiast from Berlin where he is a partner and consultant at Peritor Wissensmanagement GmbH. Besides training and supporting clients in code reviews or architecture he is responsible for developing a Rails based groupware and collaboration suite. In his spare time he maintains Rubygems and Rails in the FreeBSD Ports system. Furthermore, he developed Webistrano, a web UI for deployment management with Capistrano.

Jonathan is presenting Rails Patterns

Bruce Williams

A Ruby developer since 2001, Bruce Williams has been pleased to see his favorite language rise out of obscurity the last few years—and pay the bills in the process. A developer for FiveRuns, Bruce also does a bit of independent consulting, has contributed to or served as the technical editor for a number of Ruby and Rails books, speaks at conferences when inspiration strikes, and is an aimless open source hacker and language designer in his copious free time.

Bruce is presenting Migrating to Ruby1.9