RailsConf 2009 Keynote Speakers

Jon Crosby is a San Francisco Bay Area developer specializing in Ruby, JavaScript, Objective-C, and Open Web technologies. Jon is the author of CloudKit, and a committer on several open source projects including rack-contrib and the OAuth ruby gem. He is an active member of the Open Web community and is currently employed by Engine Yard.

Serial entrepreneur and ultravagabond Timothy Ferriss is author of the #1 New York Times, Wall Street Journal, and BusinessWeek bestseller, The 4-Hour Workweek. He has been featured by dozens of media, including The New York Times, The Economist, TIME, National Geographic Traveler, CNN, CBS, and MAXIM. He speaks six languages, runs a multinational firm from wireless locations worldwide, and has been a popular guest lecturer at Princeton University since 2003, where he presents entrepreneurship as a tool for ideal lifestyle design and world change.

Since his debut presentation on The 4-Hour Workweek at the world-famous SXSW Interactive conference on March 12, 2007, Tim has been invited to speak at some of the most innovative companies and universities in the world, ranging from Google and PayPal to Harvard Business School, MIT, Princeton University, the Wharton School, and the Stanford Graduate School of Business. He has also been invited to speak and keynote at world-renowned technology summits including Supernova, FOO Camp, and the Web 2.0 Exposition, where he shared the stage with figures like Eric Schmidt, Chairman of the Board of Google, and Jeff Bezos, founder and CEO of Amazon.

Tim has been profiled in The Success Principles, the New York Times bestseller written by Jack Canfield, and is a main character in the upcoming feature-length documentary “As Seen on TV,” produced by Emmy Award winner Dan Partland.

As a professional polymath, he has amassed a diverse roster of credentials and experience:

• Princeton University guest lecturer in High-Tech Entrepreneurship and Electrical Engineering
• First American in history to hold a Guinness World Record in tango (video)
• Advisor to more than 30 world record holders in professional and Olympic sports
• National Chinese kickboxing champion (video)
• Glycemic Index (GI) researcher Political asylum researcher and activist
• MTV breakdancer in Taiwan
• Hurling competitor in Ireland
• Actor on hit TV series in mainland China and Hong Kong

Tim received his BA from Princeton University in 2000, where he studied in the Neuroscience and East Asian Studies departments. He developed his nonfiction writing with Pulitzer Prize winner John McPhee and formed his life philosophies under Nobel Prize winner Kenzaburo Oe.

David Heinemeier Hansson is a programmer and evangelist of Less Software. He’s the creator of applications like Instiki, Basecamp, and Ta-da, and works with the open source community and design extraordinaires 37signals. Since its release in late July 2004, he’s also been leading the development of Ruby on Rails, a web application framework and environment for building real-world applications with joy and less code than most frameworks spend doing XML sit-ups.

Yehuda Katz is currently employed by Engine Yard, and works full time as a Core Team Member on the Rails and Merb projects. 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 Rails and 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.

Jeremy Kemper (bitsweat) is a programmer at 37signals hailing from Pasadena, California. Hot on the heels of DHH, he has been the most active contributor to Rails. He’s knee deep in pretty much all aspects of the framework and one of the top batters against new, incoming tickets.

Michael “Koz” Koziarski is a software consultant specialising in Ruby on Rails, database architecture, web based businesses and object oriented design. He’s been a contributor to Rails since 2004, a Rails Core Team member since 2005 and helps other programmers improve their code on The Rails Way, a popular Rails architecture weblog.

Robert C. Martin (Uncle Bob) has been a software professional since 1970 and is founder and president of Object Mentor Inc., in Gurnee, Illinois. Object Mentor, Inc., is an international firm of highly experienced software developers and managers who specialize in helping companies get their projects done. Object Mentor offers process improvement consulting, object-oriented software design consulting, training, and skill development services to major corporations worldwide.

Mr. Martin has published dozens of articles in various trade journals, and is a regular speaker at international conferences and trade shows.

Mr. Martin has authored and edited many books including:

• Designing Object Oriented C++ Applications using the Booch Method

• Patterns Langauages of Program Design 3

• More C++ Gems

• Extreme Programming in Practice

• Agile Software Development: Principles, Patterns, and Practices.

• UML for Java Programmers

• Clean Code

A leader in the industry of software development, Mr. Martin served three years as the editor-in-chief of the C++ Report, and he served as the first chairman of the Agile Alliance.

Rick is a 26 year old web application developer specializing in Ruby on Rails. He is currently a member of the Ruby on Rails Core Team and works on Mephisto and Beast in his spare programming time.

Josh Peek (joshp) has been working with almost all parts of Rails. A lot of work spent on performance and thread safety for Action Pack. He’s the latest addition to the team.

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