2008 JavaOne Conference Rock Stars

Alexander, Jeffrey Almaer, Dion Balachandran, Girish Berkus, Josh Bloch, Joshua Brownrigg, Rick Campbell, Christopher Click, Cliff Colebourne, Stephen Davis, Scott Fabulich, Dan Fast, Todd Ford, Neal Fowler, Amy Galbraith, Ben Gaskins, Tom Grev, Michael Guy, Romain Haase, Chet Hadley, Marc Haslam, Jonathan Herlitz, Rikard Hickey, Shannon Kersten, Mik Koelle, David Lightbody, Patrick Pugh, William Purdy, Cameron Ritter, Simon Sandoz, Paul Santos, Michael Slack, Joshua Warman, Matt Jeffrey Alexander Member of Technical Staff Sun Microsystems, Inc. Jeff Alexander is a researcher at Sun Microsystems Laboratories in Burlington, Massachusetts. He is currently a contributer to the Aura Project, an effort to create an open recommender system. While at Sun he has also contributed to the Minion Search Engine, an open source Java search engine. Prior to joining Sun, Jeff worked at EMC Corporation on a variety of data access and management software products. Before moving on, he was the technical lead for EMC's automated provisioning software. Jeff graduated with a Sc.B. in Computer Science from Brown University in 1999. Dion Almaer Founder Ajaxian, Inc. Dion is the co-founder of Ajaxian.com, the leading Ajax community, and "Audible Ajax" the popular podcast. He is a columnist on Enterprise Java topics at openxource.com, onjava.com, TheServerSide.com, and of course his blog at almaer.com/blog. He enjoys writing, and speaking at events such as JavaOne, JavaPolis, TheServerSide Symposium, and the No Fluff Just Stuff symposium tour. He also participates on JCP expert groups, and the open source community as a whole. Girish Balachandran Member of Technical Staff Sun Microsystems, Inc. Girish Balachandran is an engineer in the Java Studio Enterprise team. He has worked in different aspects of the tool. His current interests include defining XML tooling area in the IDE. Josh Berkus Sun Microsystems, Inc. Josh Berkus has been a contributor to the PostgreSQL Project for 8 years and is a member of the PostgreSQL Core Team. At Sun, he leads our PostgreSQL strategy for the Database Technology Group, and often works directly with large customers interested in deploying PostgreSQL on Solaris. His other specialties include benchmarking, performance tuning, advanced SQL and working with open source communities. Josh Berkus regularly speaks at Open Source and Sun events worldwide. Joshua Bloch Google, Inc. Joshua Bloch is Chief Java Architect at Google. He was previously a Distinguished Engineer at Sun Microsystems. He wrote the bestselling book "Effective Java" (Addison-Wesley, 2001), winner of the 2002 Jolt Award. He led the design and implementation of numerous award-winning Java platform features, including the JDK 5.0 language enhancements and the Java Collections Framework. He holds a Ph.D. in Computer Science from Carnegie-Mellon University and a B.S. in Computer Science from Columbia. Rick Brownrigg Raytheon/NASA Rick Brownrigg is a Sr. Software Engineer with NASA's WorldWind team. He has worked in the commercial, research and government sectors, developing software for visualizing and processing geospatial data. He has a Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Kansas. Christopher Campbell Sun Microsystems, Inc. Member of Technical Staff, Java 2D Team Cliff Click Azul Systems With more than twenty-five years experience developing compilers, Cliff serves as Azul Systems' Chief JVM Architect. Cliff joined Azul in 2002 from Sun Microsystems where he was the architect and lead developer of the HotSpot Server Compiler, a technology that has delivered dramatic improvements in Java performance since its inception. Previously he was with Motorola where he helped deliver industry leading SpecInt2000 scores on PowerPC chips, and before that he researched compiler technology at HP Labs. Cliff has been writing optimizing compilers and JITs for over 15 years and is the inventor of more than a dozen patents. He is invited to speak regularly at industry and academic conferences including JavaOne, TSSJS, JVM'04 and VEE'05; serves on the Program Committee of many conferences (including PLDI, CGO and OOPSLA); and has published many papers about HotSpot technology. Cliff holds a PhD in Computer Science from Rice University. Stephen Colebourne SITA ATS Ltd Stephen Colebourne has been working with Java since version 1.0 and contributed to open source software since 2000. He leads Joda-Time and is one of the developers working on Apache Jakarta Commons. He is currently a co-spec lead on JSR-310 and co-author of the FCM closure proposal. Scott Davis Founder Davisworld Consulting, Inc. Scott Davis is an internationally recognized author, speaker, and software developer. His books include The Definitive Guide to Grails (co-author, 2nd edition), Groovy Recipes: Greasing the Wheels of Java, GIS for Web Developers: Adding Where to Your Application, The Google Maps API, and JBoss At Work. He is the Editor in Chief of http://aboutGroovy.com. Dan Fabulich Senior QA Engineer Redfin Dan Fabulich is a Senior QA Engineer at Redfin and a Developer Lead for Selenium. He has been writing and running multi-platform automated tests in Java and .NET since 2002, and has specialized in developing automated testing tools and infrastructure. He has a B.S. in Biomedical Engineering and Philosophy from Yale University. Todd Fast Principal Engineer, Social Media Sun Microsystems, Inc. Neal Ford Application Architect ThoughtWorks Inc. Neal Ford is an senior application architect at ThoughtWorks, a global IT consultancy with an exclusive focus on end-to-end software development and delivery. He is also the designer and developer of applications, instructional materials, magazine articles, courseware, video/DVD presentations, and author of the books Developing with Delphi: Object-Oriented Techniques, JBuilder 3 Unleashed, and Art of Java Web Development. He is also the editor and a contributor to No Fluff, Just Stuff Anthology Volume 1 and Volume 2. His primary consulting focus is the building of large-scale enterprise applications. He is also an internationally acclaimed speaker, having spoken at numerous developers conferences worldwide. Check out his web site at http://www.nealford.com. Amy Fowler Senior Staff Engineer Sun Microsystems, Inc. Amy is one of the founders and architects of Project Swing and wrote many of the components in Swing. Amy is the architect of the JDNC components that are designed to make Swing development easier Ben Galbraith MediaBank Tom Gaskins NASA Tom Gaskins leads the NASA engineering team developing NASA World Wind. He has worked the majority of his 20-year career in 3D graphics and large-model visualization, and started his graphics career at Sun Microsystems in 1985. Since then he has developed several 3D graphics APIs and applications, written two books for O'Reilly & Associates, and directed software technology programs for Hewlett-Packard and NASA. Brian Goetz Sun Microsystems, Inc. Brian Goetz is a Sr. Staff Engineer at Sun Microsystems. He is the author of the best-selling Java Concurrency in Practice, and has published over 75 articles on Java development. He serves on the JCP Expert Group for JSRs 107, 166, and 305. Stephen Green Senior Staff Engineer Sun Microsystems, Inc. Stephen Green is a Senior Staff Engineer at Sun Microsystems Laboratories in Burlington, Massachusetts, where he is the Principal Investigator of the Aura Project. He is the chief architect and implementor of the Minion Search Engine, a high-performance, open source Java search engine incorporating techniques from information retrieval, natural language processing, and knowledge representation. The engine is currently shipping with the Portal Server and the Web Server. Before joining Sun, Stephen spent two years as a Research Fellow in the Division of Information and Communication Studies at Macquarie University in Sydney, Australia. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Toronto in 1997. Before joining Sun, Stephen spent two years as a Research Fellow in the Division of Information and Communication Studies at Macquarie University in Sydney, Australia. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Toronto in 1997. In addition to teaching at the university level, Stephen has presented at major conferences world-wide and given many talks about the Sun Labs Search Technology to groups within Sun. He has presented demos of the search engine at JavaOne. Mikael Grev Developer MiG InfoCom AB Mikael Grev is the owner and CEO of MiG InfoCom AB. He is the creator of the best selling MiG Calendar Component as well as the Wing Flight Planning System which is in use by several Air Forces. Mikael Grev is also working as a Instructor Fighter Pilot in the Swedish Air Force, currently flying the JAS 39 Gripen. Romain Guy Google Romain Guy is a French student currently working as an intern at Google. He has 8 years of experience in Java development, as an Open Source and freelance developer. He has also worked as a freelance journalist for a French computing magazine, as a translator for O'Reilly, and taught Java technology in a University. Today Romain focuses on UI design and human interaction. Romain Guy also has the distinction of being selected as one of the JavaOne Conference Rock Star speakers by JavaOne conference attendees for the two years the program has been in existance. Chet Haase Senior Staff Engineer Adobe His background is mostly in computer graphics, from the application level down to the drivers. His primary engineering focus on the client team has been on graphics hardware acceleration and functionality for the Windows platform. Check out his articles on graphics and performance from his blog at http://weblogs.java.net/blog/chet. Marc Hadley Senior Staff Engineer Sun Microsystems, Inc. Dr. Marc J. Hadley is a Senior Staff Engineer in the Office of the CTO of Sun Microsystems where he works on a variety of Web-based technologies. He is currently co-spec lead for JSR 311, a Java API for RESTful Web Services. Previously Marc represented Sun in the W3C XML Protocol and W3C Web Services Addressing working groups where he was co-editor of the SOAP 1.2 and WS-Addressing specifications respectively. Marc also served as the technical lead for Sun's participation at the Web Services Interoperability Organisation (WS-I) and was co-spec lead for JSR 224 (JAX-WS) at the JCP. Jonathan Haslam Staff Engineer Sun Microsystems, Inc. Jon is an engineer in the Performance, Architecture and Availability Engineering group at Sun. Having to debug performance and scalability issues on todays complex architectures lead Jon to become an observability junkie; the more he can get, the better. He has been involved in DTrace since early on in it's life and still finds daily satisfaction in its application. For fun and no profit , Jon likes to write small extensions to DTrace (which may never see he light of day). Jon has presented on DTrace at many and various conferences around the world. He has several technical articles on DTrace published in developer journals and has authored the DTrace chapter in the second edition of "Solaris Internals' by Richard McDougall and James Mauro. Rikard Herlitz Developer jMonkeyEngine Shannon Hickey Swing Technical Lead Sun Microsystems, Inc. Shannon Hickey is a Staff Engineer and Technical Lead for the Swing team at Sun Microsystems. He has spent seven years becoming intimately familiar with the Swing toolkit, and he continues to guide its technical direction. His current focus is on enabling data binding to Swing components through JSR 295: Beans Binding, a project for which he is the Specification Lead. Shannon has a B.S. degree in Computer Science from the University of Toronto in Ontario, Canada. Mik Kersten President and CTO Tasktop Technologies Mik's passion is building tools that make being focused and productive easy. As a research scientist at Xerox PARC, he created the first aspect-oriented programming tools, including AspectJ plug-ins for JBuilder, NetBeans, and Eclipse. While doing his PhD at the University of British Columbia, he created the task-focused user interface and the Eclipse Mylar project. Presentation experience: have presented top-rated technical sessions at EclipseCon, OOPSLA, the SD series, and many other conferences. Received highest attendee ranking of all tutorials at OOPSLA 2004. Selected presentations are listed here: http://kerstens.org/mik/presentations.html Recent webinar available here: http://adobedev.adobe.acrobat.com/p46246963 David Koelle Senior Software Engineer Charles River Analytics Inc. David Koelle is the author of JFugue, an open-source API for programming music in Java. When not working on his own projects, David develops artificial intelligence software for a Boston-area company, where he has the opportunity to pontificate on API usability. Patrick Lightbody Product Manager Gomez William Pugh Professor Univ. of Maryland William Pugh received received a Ph.D. in Computer Science (with in minor in Acting) from Cornell University. He is currently a professor at the University of Maryland, College Park. Some of Prof. Pugh's accomplishments include the invention of skip lists, the revision of the Java Memory Model (JSR-133), and the development of FindBugs, an open source static analysis tool for finding coding defects in Java programs. He currently serves as the Spec Lead for JSR-305, Annotations for Software Defect Detection. Prof. Pugh is a three-time JavaOne Rock Star. Cameron Purdy Vice President, Development Oracle Cameron Purdy is Vice President of Development at Oracle. Prior to joining Oracle, Mr. Purdy was the CEO of Tangosol, whose revolutionary Coherence Data Grid product provides reliable and scalable data management across the enterprise. Mr. Purdy has over ten years of experience with Java and Java-related technology. As a software visionary and industry leader, Mr. Purdy is a frequent presenter at industry conferences and has received a number of awards in recognition of his contribution to the Java community, including twice being named as a JavaOne RockStar and being recognized in TheServerSide's "Who's Who in Enterprise Java". He regularly participates in industry standards development and is a specification lead for the Java Community Process. Simon Ritter Technology Evangelist Sun Microsystems, Inc. Simon Ritter is a Java Technology Evangelist at Sun Microsystems. Simon has been in the IT business since 1984 and holds a Bachelor of Science degree in Physics from Brunel University in the U.K. Originally working in the area of UNIX development for AT&T UNIX System Labs and then Novell, Simon moved to Sun in 1996. At this time he started working with Java technology and has spent time working both in Java technology development and consultancy. He now specialises in looking at emerging technologies including grid computing, robotics, wearable computing and wireless sensor networks. Simon and his performing Java powered Lego robots have appeared before audiences worldwide. Paul Sandoz Staff Engineer Sun Microsystems, Inc. Paul Sandoz is a staff engineer in the Web Products and Technologies group at Sun Microsystems. Michael Santos Summa Technologies do Brasil Michael Nascimento Santos is a seasoned developer with more than 9 years of experience with the Java platform, from J2ME to J2EE, and over 15 years of practical programming experience. He is a Java Champion, the java.net Community Manager for the JSR Community, a java.net blogger, co-leads JSR-310 (Date & Time API) and an expert at 5 JSRs, JSR-207 (PD4J), JSR-250 (Common Annotations) and JSR-270 (Mustang/Java 6), JSR-296 (Swing Application Framework) and JSR-303 (Bean Validation). He also helps to run SouJava, one of the largest JUGs in the world and collaborates with many open-source projects, such as Thinlet, AspectWerkz and genesis. He has spoken at many Java-related events, such as JavaOne 2003/2007, JustJava 2003/2004/2005/2006/2007, Abaporu 2003, FISL 2004, COMDEX Brasil 2004, BrasilOne 2004 and Conexao Java 2005/2006. Joshua Slack Senior Developer jMonkeyEngine Joshua Slack is a lead developer of the jMonkeyEngine, a High performance Java gaming engine. Matt Warman Consultant STAR BASE Consulting Inc. Matt is a 20 year veteran of the IT industry. He has been using both JavaEE and Java SE since 1998. Matt has developed Web and Desktop applications for a variety of clients in various industries, including the airline and banking fields. He was a tester for Java Studio Creator, and was the first Creator Hero, highlighting his emergency responder application. He currently is a Java trainer, presenter, and consultant in the Cincinnati area, and is owner of JFrets, an open source guitar teaching and tablature creation application. Matt is a guitar player for The Stone Bunnies and bass player for G.P.S.