Special Guest Speaker

David Heinemeier Hansson

David was born in 1979 in Copenhagen, Denmark. After he graduated from Copenhagen Business School in 2005, he moved to Chicago, USA. He's a a partner in 37signals. The company behind Basecamp, Highrise, Backpack, Writeboard, and Ta-Da List. They run a popular weblog at Signal vs. Noise. He is also the creator of the web-application framework Ruby on Rails. The infrastructure software that they use to build all the applications at 37signals. For the work on Rails, he won Best Hacker of the Year 2005 at OSCON from Google and O'Reilly. And in 2006, he accepted the Jolt award of product excellence for Rails 1.0. Similarly, for the work on Rails, he's been featured on the cover of LinuxJournal and in the pages of Wired, Business 2.0, Chicago Tribune, and other publications.

2009 Keynoters

Dan Benjamin

Dan Benjamin is a software developer, user interface designer, and writer with over 15 years of industry experience in software development and interface design. Dan co-founded Cork'd, the web’s first social network and reviewing application for wine aficionados, which was later acquired by WLTV. He also developed a Ruby on Rails content management system for web design magazine, A List Apart, and built software for companies including MCI, Capgemini, Vitalsource, and Tupperware. Dan publishes technology articles and tutorials on his popular software development website, Hivelogic, and has been a featured speaker at the programming conference, RailsConf. Dan holds a B.A. in Technical Writing with a Computer Science focus from the University of Central Florida. He is the Chief Technology Officer of Rails Machine.

Nathaniel Talbott

Nathaniel's really just another coder. He was in the right place at the right time back in 2000 when he initially fell in love with Ruby, and the love affair continues to this day. An attendee and a speaker at every RubyConf to date, he's seen the rise of Ruby and has a deep understanding of the source and nature of its popularity. For the past three years he's been getting better at the business side of things by running Terralien, a Rails-focused custom development consultancy, and also more recently Spreedly, a robust subscription management platform. At the same time he continues to write code on a regular basis to keep his creative side fed, and you can check out his Github profile to see what he's been up to.

2009 Speakers

Paul Barry

Paul Barry is a Senior Software Engineer with BrowserMedia. Paul was born in Albany, NY, grew up in Wichita, KS and attended college at Loyola College in Maryland. He has lived in New York City, Washington DC, and currently lives in Federal Hill in Baltimore, MD. Paul has over 10 years experience developing web applications in a variety of languages and frameworks, including Java, Perl, PHP and of course, Ruby on Rails. He blogs about Ruby, Programming and a variety of other topics at http://paulbarry.com.

Steven Bristol

Steve is the co-founder and head geek of Less Everything. He wrote his first program at the age of nine using BASIC. Since then he has written everything from proxy servers (C++ on Linux) to global human resources applications (C# on Windows) and has now settled on Ruby On Rails as the love of his life. Some of the things he has done include: He is a Core Contributor to the Rails Framework and has contributed to several other open source projects. He created the open source social network Lovd By Less. He has led teams of software engineers for over 11 years. He knows over fourteen different programming languages. He was a mentor in the 2007 Google Summer of Code. He has gone over 150 miles per hour with his knee on the ground while racing motorcycles. He has been married for 10 years. He has three children. He can divide by zero.

Lew Cirne

Lew Cirne is Founder and CEO of New Relic, the leading provider of application performance tools for Rails. Lew is a seasoned entrepreneur and software pioneer who founded Wily Technology in 1998. Lew served as Wily's chief executive officer for the first four years and subsequently as its chief technical officer. He invented its flagship application performance management solution, Introscope, and played a key role in Wily's 2006 acquisition by CA, Inc. He holds seven patents related to application performance. Earlier in his career he held senior engineering positions at Apple and Hummingbird Communications. He holds an AB in Computer Science from Dartmouth College.

Yehuda Katz

Yehuda is currently employed by Engine Yard, and works full time on the Merb project. He is the co-author of jQuery in Action and the upcoming Merb in Action, and is a contributor to Ruby in Practice. He spends most of his time hacking on Merb, but also on other Ruby community projects, like Rubinius and Datamapper. And when the solution doesn't yet exist, he'll try his hand at creating one -- as such, he's also created projects like Thor and DO.rb.

Will Leinweber

Will is currently a graduate student in bioengineering at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He's been doing Rails for close to 3 years, and he's done professional Rails work the last two summers at Collaborative Drug Discovery. His current project uses CouchDB instead of a more traditional relational database as the data store, and so far he's loving developing with it.

Bryan Liles

Bryan Liles is a Ruby on Rails developer working on Revolution Health Group's portal. Bryan also is working on his own line of smarticasts (screencasts) and a book under the name of the Smarticus University. The focus of Smarticus University is to allow understanding of programming topics by building a solid foundation of knowledge and adding more knowledge through example. Bryan can be found online at http://smartic.us.

Jon Larkowski

Jon "Lark" Larkowski is a senior developer at Hashrocket. He hails from scenic Chippewa Falls, Wisconsin, home of speedy Cray Supercomputers and refreshing Leinenkugel's beer. He holds an Electrical Engineering degree with Computer Science major from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He has over eight years experience in web development, experience with Agile methodologies, and full-spectrum skills ranging from database management to graphic design. Following last year's career transition to Rails development, he co-created RubyJax, which is Jacksonville, Florida's Ruby & Rails user group. He rocks out on the guitar, both speed-metal-electric and unplugged-acoustic. He loves table tennis way more than a well-adjusted grown man should. He often sports a bandana, which puts him in the same category as both Axl Rose and stylish Labrador Retrievers.

Guy Naor

Guy Naor is the CTO of Morph Labs, and is a veteran of the computing and technology world since 1981. Guy's technology experience spans evolution and revolution eras, where he was involved with multiple companies and projects, working in a wide variety of computing platforms from mainframes to hand held devices as well as dozens of languages and operating systems. Serving as the CTO of Morph Labs, Guy architected and oversaw the implementation of Morph's Rails, Java and PHP deployment and hosting platforms. Prior to that, Guy served as CTO of Famundo, a Web 2.0 start-up. Prior to that, he led the development of Goldmine software for four (4) years and had served as an advisor and a consulting architect on a variety of Web 2.0 products.

Patrick Peak

Patrick Peak is the CTO of BrowserMedia, a full service interactive agency in the Washington DC area. Originally from the chilly northeast state of Connecticut, Patrick graduated from James Madison University in Virginia, and after serving in the US Army, eventually settled in the DC Metro area to pursue the fortune and glory in the world of web development, starting in 2000. A career fan of agile development methodologies, he has been involved in many software development projects, ranging from managing iPhone application development, to developing custom java applications, teaching java certification classes for Virginia Tech, building his first Web CMS in 2002. His career has focused on productively applying open source tools and frameworks to solve client needs, especially Java frameworks like Struts, WebWork, and Hibernate. His current professional interests include making sense of the world of web content management systems and a drive to make software usable for non-geeks. He is also the co-author of Hibernate Quickly, an introduction to the open source Java ORM tool, by Manning Publishing.

Gregg Pollack & Jason Seifer: The Rails Envy Guys

Gregg Pollack and Jason Seifer can be heard every week on the Rails Envy Podcast, reporting the latest news in the Ruby and Rails World. Aside from doing the podcast, they've been building Rails Apps for over 2 years now and recently started up EnvyCasts where they produce $9 video screencasts.

Tim Rosenblatt

Tim is the Agile Development Director at Cloudspace, an Orlando-based web apps shop. He's been coding for nearly a decade, but unless you're *really* into Firefox Extensions or Twitter, you've probably never heard of him. When he's not writing code for fun and profit, he spends time with his wonderful girlfriend, and aspires to awesomeness on the drums.

Jim Weirich

Jim Weirich is the Chief Scientist for Edge Case, 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.