Neal Ford

Neal Ford is an 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, Art of Java Web Development, and The 2006 No Fluff, Just Stuff Anthology. 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 nealford.com

Glenn Vanderburg

Glenn Vanderburg is a principal at Relevance, where he is focused on cutting-edge software development technologies and techniques. He brings more than 20 years of experience developing software across a wide range of domains, and using a variety of tools and technologies. Glenn is always searching for ways to improve the state of software development, and was an early adopter and proponent of Ruby, Rails, and agile practices.

Josh Holmes

Josh Holmes is a RIA Architect Evangelist with Microsoft focused on building and educating the dev partners with a Rich Internet Application offering in Central Region. Prior to joining Microsoft in October 2006, Josh was a consultant working with a variety of clients ranging from large Fortune 500 firms to smaller sized companies. Josh is a frequent speaker and lead panelist at national and international software development conferences focusing on emerging technologies, software design and development with an emphasis on mobility and RIA (Rich Internet Applications). Community focused, Josh has founded and/or run many technology organizations from the Great Lakes Area .NET Users Group to the Ann Arbor Computer Society and was on the forming committee for CodeMash. You can contact Josh through his blog at http://www.joshholmes.com.

Leon Gersing

Leon has been bringing value to clients large and small for over ten years, and has a passion for technology, art and community. He has experience using technologies ranging from ASP.Net and C++, to Objective-C, Ajax, and Actionscript – and of course, Ruby and Rails. Leon also has high hopes for IronRuby and the much needed efficiency and agility that it has the potential to bring to the .Net world.

A believer in building strong communities, Leon spends time presenting on a wide variety of development topics at events and user groups in the region. He loves nothing more than to be around other developers, working together to create something unique and fresh; something that has never been done before. He believes there is no challenge that can't be overcome with passion and creativity. He spends his spare time with his wife, two beautiful girls, two sweet kitties, and his ukulele.

Adam McCrea

As the logician at EdgeCase, Adam is responsible for ensuring that logic trumps nonsense at all times. He comes to EdgeCase after fighting The Machine of corporate IT for many years, so he is no stranger to nonsense.

Adam's passions include creating intuitive user interfaces, mastering the Ruby Way, and showing the world that JavaScript can be powerful and elegant. He is also a husband, father, and all-around swell guy.

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.

Randall Thomas

Randall Thomas is a classically trained musician that took one too many calculus classes along the way and got sucked into the sciences. Being both blessed and cursed with a strange form of technology ADD, Randall has worked in various industries with numerous startups: everything from robotics, to low level telecommunications and networking to applied computing for stock trading systems. Randall's most recent obsession with shiny new technology comes in the form of not-quite-yet-mainstream languages like Ruby, Erlang, and OCaml.

Jim Weirich

Jim Weirich has been active in the software development world for over twenty-five years, with experience that ranges from real-time data acquisition for jet engine testing to image processing and web services for the financial industry. Although Jim has experience in C++ and Java/J2EE technologies, his real passion is about delivering business value in a timely and efficient manner, and one of the best ways of doing just that is leveraging the power of Ruby and Rails. Jim is very active in the Ruby community and has contributed to several Ruby projects, including the Rake build system and the RubyGems package software.