Conference - Feb 15-16, 2013
Union South - Madison, WI
Speakers
Adam Steinert
Adam is software architect and all around geek who has been implementing solutions in .NET for the past 10 years. He has published with MSDN magazine and authored web articles on a variety of programming topics. He is currently a senior software architect at Yahara software in Madison, WI where he helps clients design and build enterprise applications and instrument control systems. His experience has taken him from the desktop, to the web, to mobile on iOS, Android and Windows phone, and just about everywhere in between.
Aijaz Ansari
As a hacker by nature, I enjoy making things. I started my career writing call processing software for telecom switches, and then moved to the financial industry where I designed web services and arbitration systems. Now I make iOS apps for a living. I’ve also written a pretty nifty open-source job scheduler called TaskForest. In my free time I dabble in juggling, woodworking, origami, and making tangible things with my hands. Oh, and I can tell two jokes really, really well. So if you need a laugh, stop me and ask.
Ashe Dryden
Ashe Dryden is an indie developer living in Madison, WI. She's been involved with the web in some form or another over the course of the past 12 years. She's actively involved in multiple communities both off and online. Ashe is known for being outspoken about the need for diversity, inclusiveness, and empathy. And also for inventing the grilled cheese emoticon. {[ ]} When she isn't talking about technology, she's cycling, tweeting, playing board games, debating the social implications of Star Trek episodes, being the world's best catmom, trying not to be that awkward girl at the party, and waiting for her next burrito fix.
Benjamin Stein
Benjamin Stein is the Executive Director of the BadgerBOTS Education Center and Wisconsin’s Operational Partner for FIRST LEGO League. Before switching entirely to education, he worked as an electrical engineer in the fields of photonics and semiconductor electronics.
Chris Wilson
My name’s Chris Wilson. I’m a sciency kinda dude who's happily hacking Rails and Clojure for Bendyworks. I’ve always been interested in more stuff than I could possibly really know well; among them: science, technology, codes, econ, radio, sailing, biking, music, movies, the future, and also the past (I hope that I’m a little bit less likely to be doomed to repeat it). And, of course, I love programming and computers. I was fascinated by Linux back around 1999, but really didn’t get rolling until a bit later. I played with slackware enough to compile my Fortran 77 code for my computational physics class the next year. I handn’t yet taken the full-Linux plunge and so I had a terminal-only computer stuffed under my dorm bed for when I needed f77 or g++. From there I started writing reports using LaTeX in nedit on the school’s SGI O2s and was pretty much hooked on *NIX. I was shown around Red Hat and Fedora Linux by a seasoned perl hacker who also inducted me into the church of Emacs around 2002 at the rank of acolyte. This was a time of much perl hackery (I loved the book Computers and the Imagination).
Clarissa Peterson
Clarissa Peterson is an independent web/UX designer & developer. Before recently setting off on her own, she spent 10 years managing websites at various nonprofits in Washington, DC. She now lives in Montreal, Quebec, which she has discovered is much snowier than her native Wisconsin. Clarissa is currently writing a book on responsive design for O’Reilly, scheduled to be published in mid-2013.
David Walsh
David Walsh is a web development enthusiast whose experience ranges from development with the MooTools JavaScript Framework, to hacking the Dojo Toolkit, to experimenting with just about everything on his blog. He spends his days improving the Mozilla Developer Network and Mozilla Marketplace websites at Mozilla.
Don Coleman
Don leads the mobile practice at Chariot Solutions, a consulting company outside of Philadelphia. He is the man behind the PhoneGap-NFC plugin which supports NFC across 4 platforms (now we need Apple to re-invent NFC). In his spare time he deconstructs anything with more than one moving part and is co-authoring a book on NFC, PhoneGap and Arduino for O'Reilly.
Eric Knapp
Eric Knapp teaches computer programming at Madison College in Madison, WI. After a long career as a software developer he decided to return to his first career love of teaching. He currently teaches Java and iOS development and is the program director for the new Mobile Apps Development degree at the college. He has had several previous careers including teaching HS and making furniture. Eric has lived in the Madison area since he was 12 and enjoys life with his wife and two daughters.
Hampton Catlin
Hampton Catlin is the inventor of Sass, Haml, and Wikipedia Mobile. He is the Director of Engineering at Moovweb, a bootstrapped and profitable startup of 50 people building mobile web toolkits.
Jason Goodrich
Jason Goodrich is the founder and CEO of Shortlist, which answers every conference attendees' burning question: "Who should I meet here?" Prior to Shortlist, Jason was an award-winning journalist at the Chicago Tribune. He's still answering the same six questions: Who? What? When? Where? Why? and How? Jason lives in Wilmette, IL, with his wife, young son, and two alley cats named Capt. Billy and Mr. Bubbles.
Jessie Shternshus
As the founder and owner of The IMPROV EFFECT, Jessie weds her lifelong passion for and expertise in applied improv with the fast pace and demands of the corporate world. In her classes and workshops she helps people become better listeners, team players, problem solvers, leaders, and communicators. Throughout her career, Jessie has worked with companies such as CBS, Living Social, Expedia, Fidelity Investments and Groupon. Her workshops have been successfully implemented with start-ups, as well as Fortune 500 companies. Jessie has also been speaker at conferences such as Madison Ruby, Conferencia Rails, UXMad, Scrum Alliance, and Agile DC. To find out more go to www.improveffect.com
Jim "Big Tiger" Remsik
"Big Tiger" has several years of government-sector, full life-cycle business process automation projects under his belt before joining the Ruby community via Hashrocket in 2007. Years of experience in leading a maintenance team means he has answered to angry customers and the developers, project leads, and clients responsible. A simple philosophy of building simple software that works as expected emerged from that experience. You will find him speaking at user groups, conferences, and board rooms on everything from agile development tools and techniques to deep technical dives into Ruby or other best in breed technologies.
Kevin Jones
Kevin Jones has lived all of his life in the Madison Wisconsin area, except for 11 months during high school in Brazil as an exchange student. After getting a CS degree in college, Kevin worked 11 years at Cuna Mutual Group, where among other things he helped squash the Y2K bug. His first computer was an Apple 2E back in 11th grade, and after 16 years in the Microsoft world he returned to the Mac in 2010, where he feels accessibility for blind users like himself have more future potential. Kevin is currently spending a great deal of his time working to further that in hopes other blind computer geeks will eventually agree.
Mattt Thompson
Mattt Thompson is the Mobile Lead at Heroku, and the creator & maintainer of AFNetworking and other popular open-source projects, including Postgres.app & Induction. He also writes about obscure & overlooked parts of Cocoa on NSHipster.
Peter Traeg
Peter brings 25+ years of experience in the application development field to Universal Mind, having worked on a wide range of applications from data warehousing to online photo sharing sites. Since 1995, he has been working with web development technologies. At the Eastman Kodak Company, he served as software architect for two of Kodak's leading online retail offerings. Most recently, he served as the presentation layer software architect for Kodak Gallery where he made extensive use of Flex, AIR, HTML5, iOS, and Android technologies to help Kodak customers share their memories across a wide range of devices. As a solutions architect at Universal Mind, Peter brings his broad base of technical and business consulting skills to work for our clients. He is always interested in learning new application development technologies and sharing those learning experiences with others. He is active in several development user groups where he regularly speaks on web and mobile application development technologies. When he's not experimenting with his seemingly ever growing list of mobile devices, you can find him engaging in activities such as photography, cycling, and spending time with his family in Rochester, NY.
Ray Hightower
Ray Hightower is a perpetual student, founder of WisdomGroup, and organizer of ChicagoRuby & WindyCityRails. He is currently exploring RubyMotion & iOS.
Smith Schwartz
Smith Schwartz is a digital nomad, currently circling the globe while working as a freelance front-end developer and designer. She also authors the column, Well-Designed Travel at Apartment Therapy.com where she explores the intersection of travel, design and making a home on the road.
Stephen Caudill
Stephen is an old hand in the world of Software Development. He spends his days in sunny Jacksonville Beach, FL working at Hashrocket as their most venerable developer (an honorific that comes with a cane). He's been working on the web building applications and APIs since the first dot com bust and has been slinging Objective-C for iOS full time for the last two years. Stephen loves Agile Development and is anxiously trying to improve the state of and tooling for BDD for iOS.
Tim Anglade
Tim Anglade works at Apigee, a Silicon Valley start-up dedicated to powering the API and Mobile revolutions. When he’s not helping developers build cool apps or RESTful APIs, he’s speaking at conferences from Malmö to Tokyo.
Tim Kadlec
Tim Kadlec is a developer living in a tiny town in the north woods of Wisconsin. He's very passionate about the Web and can frequently be found speaking about what he's learned at a variety of web conferences. Tim is the author of Implementing Responsive Design: Building sites for an anywhere, everywhere web (New Riders, 2012) and was a contributing author for the Web Performance Daybook Volume 2 (O'Reilly, 2012). He writes sporadically at timkadlec.com and you can find him sharing his thoughts in a briefer format on Twitter at @tkadlec.
Trevor Gruehn
Trevor is a coffee professional and manager of Johnson Public House. He has worked in the coffee industry for the past seven years and has played numerous roles from blending, packaging and shipping coffee to sample roasting and consulting. Trevor is level 2 certified by the Barista Guild of America and is also a lead instructor and credentialed examiner for the SCAA. Trevor is excited to work abroad as a Barista Guild instructor in the near future.
Tristan Waddington
Tristan Waddington is the lead Android Engineer at Simple, a replacement for your bank. He's spent the last 6-years building creative web and mobile software for companies like Dark Horse Comics and Geoloqi (now part of Esri). He specializes in writing clean, idiomatic, well documented code and is passionate about user experience. He currently resides in Portland, Oregon.
Wes Bos
Wes Bos is an independent web developer, UI designer and all around hacker from Toronto, Canada. He is super passionate about design, development, and business spending most of his time working with JavaScript, CSS3, HTML5 and PHP. Wes is one to push the limits of new technology and has been known to publish HTML5 and Node.js experiments and tutorials to his blog. Wes loves open source software and community learning, he spends a lot of time on github, twitter, and IRC (freenode) connecting with other developers. Wes is a lead instructor at Ladies Learning Code and HackerYou
Zach Legein
Zach is a test driven developer and agile evangelist, who has taken the best practices learned on the server side of the equation and is applying them whole heartedly to the client side. He is currently working on various mobile web projects to make health care more convenient.