John Adams (Twitter Operations) has worked in web security, operations, and systems engineering for over 15 years. Prior to Twitter, he has worked at Apple, Inktomi, c|net, and a major video-on-demand site, improving security, performance, and reliability at large scale.

Sameer has been building large-scale distributed systems at Google since 2004, including work on parallel data processing, Bigtable, and, most recently, content delivery systems for DoubleClick image and video ad creatives. He is now leading a new effort at Google to make the Web faster by making ads load faster.

John has worked in systems operations for over ten years in biotech, government and online media. He started out tuning parallel clusters running vehicle crash simulations for the U.S. government, and then moved on to the Internet in 1997. He built the backing infrastructures at Salon.com, InfoWorld.com, Friendster.com and Flickr.com, where he currently manages the Operations Engineering group.

He is the author of “The Art of Capacity Planning: Scaling Web Resources”

Dion Almaer is the director of Developer Relations at Palm where he has the pleasure of working with Ben Galbraith. The pair co-founded Ajaxian.com together and the are now focused on delivering a fantastic developer experience on the mobile Web.

Dion has been a technologist and a developer writing Web applications since it took over from Gopher. He has been fortunate enough to speak around the world, has published many articles, a book, and of course covers life the universe and everything on his blog at almaer.com/blog.

He has been called a human aggregator, and you can see that in full force if you follow him on Twitter @dalmaer.

David Artz is Director of Optimization at AOL, LLC. His team’s charter at AOL is to ensure that all experiences are optimized for speed, SEO, and browser accessibility. His team develops, maintains, and evangelizes a broad set of optimization tools, standards, and best practices that stretch across roles in design, development, and copywriting. Their innovative solutions have led to real results in page monetization for AOL.com, and their evangelism has paid off in lighter, more streamlined designs. Their ultimate goal is to infuse the optimization mindset and skillset into AOL’s workforce and their outsourcing partners and help drive and track results, maximizing revenue by optimizing pages. See also http://www.artzstudio.com.

Adam Bechtel is the chief architect covering network, storage, and systems at Yahoo!. Prior to Yahoo!, Adam was the network architect for Inktomi. Prior to Inktomi, Adam was like everyone else working 100 hour weeks at a start-up.

Mike Belshe has been an early member of the Google Chrome team, working on a number of performance-related areas including network speed, plugins, and javascript performance. Mike has worked at several startups in silicon valley over the last 15 years, including Netscape, Remarq, Good Technology, and Lookout Software. His performance work for the web started in 1995 when he was a lead engineer on the Netscape Enterprise Server 2.0 team. Ironically, he never thought he’d ever be working on browsers back then.

Artur Bergman, hacker and technologist at-large, is the VP of Engineering and Operations at Wikia. He provides the technical backbone necessary for Wikia’s mission to compile and index the world’s knowledge. He is also an enthusiastic apologist for federated identity and a board member of the OpenID Foundation. In past lives, he’s built high volume financial trading systems, re-implemented Perl 5’s threading system, wrote djabberd, managed LiveJournal’s engineering team, and served as operations architect at Six Apart. His current interests extend to encompass semantic search, large scale infrastructure, open source development, federated instant messaging, neurotransmitters, and the future of cyborgs.

Jeremy Bingham is the CTO and man-behind-the-curtain for DailyKos.com, a progressive Democratic weblog that is one of the largest sites in the political blogosphere. He considers himself lucky that a gig with the State of Washington fell through a while back, because otherwise he wouldn’t be doing this.

Chris is the Chief Software Architect at MySpace.com. In other words, he comes up with overly convoluted ‘design patterns’ in order to lengthen the development process.

Christopher Blizzard has been with the Mozilla project for the better part of the decade. He maintained the GTK+ front end in Mozilla for a number of years as a contributor but recently joined the Corporation as a full time Mobile and Open Source Evangelist.

Mike Brittain is the Engineering Architect at CafeMom, the largest social networking site for mothers. Mike has been working with front-end and back-end technologies for the last 11 years, specializing in LAMP stacks, start ups, and more recently, cloud computing. He spends much of his day building foundational tools for other developers on the team, working closely with the operations group, managing servers, monitoring performance, and daydreaming about that next big ski trip.

Jake Brutlag is a data analyst with 9 years of industry experience, first at Microsoft, then at Google. He has published papers on distinct value estimation, email classification, aberrant behavior detection for network time series, and search engine latency.

Dr. John Busch is a co-founder of Schooner Information Technology. Prior to Schooner, Dr. Busch was Research Director of Computer System Architecture and Analysis at Sun Microsystems laboratories from 1999 through 2006. In this role, he led research explorations in chip-multi-processing, advanced multi-tier clustered systems for deployment of internet based services, and advanced HPC systems. Dr. Busch received the top President’s Award for Innovation at Sun, and oversaw many division technology transfers. Prior to Sun, Dr. Busch was VP of Engineering and Business Partnerships with Diba Inc, and was general manager of the Diba Division after Sun acquired Diba in 1997. From 1989 to 1994, Dr. Busch was co-founder and CTO/VP of Engineering of Clarity Software, and led creation of advanced multi-media composition... Read More.

Since 1996 Richard has worked in internet and computing related industries, during this time he has been involved in development of commercial websites and marketing technology.

During Richard’s 6 years at RBI UK, he has been involved with best practice and creation of many of RBI’s ad funded websites.

In his current role as a Director at ADTECH US, Richard has responsibility for the teams that implement the ADTECH AD server for customers, and has many years of hands on experience with day to day ad delivery, for many of ADTECH’s largest customers.

Richard, who has 30 years of high-tech experience, is a Microsoft Regional Director for British Columbia and is recognized as a Microsoft Most Valuable Professional (MVP) in the area of ASP.NET development. An impressive list of North American organizations, including Barnes&Noble.com, Dow Chemical, Johnson & Johnson Health Care Services, Reuters, Subaru/Isuzu and the U.S. Air Force, have benefited from Richard’s consulting expertise. Richard’s PWOP Productions creates a variety of multimedia programs including ”.NET Rocks!, the Internet Audio Talk Show for .NET Developers,” a podcast produced twice a week for about 150,000 listeners. Richard has contributed nearly 300 Advisor columns to Microsoft Access Advisor, and is the author of courseware for AppDev’s national SQL Server 7.0 training seminars and video series. Since 1995,... Read More.

Michael Carter has always been driven to understand what makes scalable systems tick, particularly real-time, browser-facing systems. He is especially focused on standardizing a protocol for Comet (HTTP Push) and is working closely with the HTML 5.0 specification leads to ensure that all developers can benefit from his research on Comet and real-time Web infrastructures.

Michael leads the development on Orbited, the Open Source Comet daemon. In his work with Orbited he has made significant advances not only in backporting future standards to today’s browsers, but also in experimenting with various server architectures for real-time applications. Much of his involvement with the project has centered on creating scalable Comet technology and providing solid integration points with today’s synchronous, request/response-based technologies.

Michael previously worked at... Read More.

Vik Chaudhary has been at Keynote for 6 years managing Keynote’s flagship products – Transaction Perspective® and Application Perspective® – and has extended the company into new markets via ten acquisitions. He has spent 19 years in chief executive, product strategy and engineering positions at blue-chip and start-up technology companies, holds a B. S. in Computer Science and Engineering from MIT and is a frequent speaker at Web performance industry events.

J. Bradley Chen manages the Native Client project at Google, where he has also worked on cluster performance analysis projects. Prior to joining Google, he was Director of the Performance Tools Lab in Intel’s Software Products Division. Chen served on the faculty of Harvard University from 1994-1998, conducting research in operating systems, computer architecture and distributed system, and teaching a variety of related graduate and undergraduate courses. He has published widely on the subjects of systems performance and computer architecture. Dr. Chen has bachelors and masters degrees from Stanford University and a Ph.D. from Carnegie Mellon University.

Douglas Crockford is a product of our public education system. A registered voter, he owns his own car. He has developed office automation systems. He did research in games and music at Atari. He was Director of Technology at Lucasfilm Ltd. He was Director of New Media at Paramount. He was the founder and CEO of Electric Communities/Communities.com. He was founder and CTO of State Software, where he discovered JSON. He is now an architect at Yahoo!. He is the world’s foremost living authority on JavaScript. He is also the author of the best-selling pamphlet, JavaScript: The Good Parts.

Alistair is a principal at analyst firm Bitcurrent, and a frequent contributor to the GigaOm family of sites. Prior to Bitcurrent, Alistair co-foundedCoradiant, a leader in online user monitoring, as well as research firm Networkshop. He has held product management positions with 3Com Corporation, Primary Access, and Eicon Technology.

Alistair has coordinated and spoken at a wide range of industry events, including Interop, Structure, Web2Expo and Unconference. He is the author of numerous articles on Internet performance and security, and co-author of Managing Bandwidth: Deploying QOS in Enterprise Applications from Prentice-Hall.

Richard started his career as part of the Yahoo! Intern Class of 2006 and was subsequently offered a position at Flickr. After building the Flickr Uploadr, today used by millions of Flickr users around the world, Richard left Flickr to join OpenDNS, the world’s largest and fastest-growing DNS provider. At OpenDNS, Richard leads engineering on backend systems, namely the DNS Stats processing system which handles more than 8 billion DNS queries daily. Richard is a 2007 graduate of Washington University in Saint Louis, where he earned Bachelor’s Degrees in Computer Engineering and Computer Science.

Jeremy Custenborder has spent several years in the trenches at MySpace, resolving many bottlenecks and issues.

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Yaron is a software engineer on the web search infrastructure team. In his role, he focuses on writing software to ensure that Google Search is as fast as possible. He also provides consultation and guidance for new features, helping to ensure that they conform with the fast and consistent experience that users expect.

Yaron has a bachelor’s degree in software engineering from the University of Waterloo, where he graduated with distinction on the Dean’s List.

Ben Galbraith is the co-director of Developer Tools at Mozilla. Ben has long juggled interests in both business and tech, having written his first computer program at six years old, started his first business at ten, and entered the IT workforce at twelve. He has delivered hundreds of technical presentations world-wide, produced several technical conferences, and co-authored over a half-dozen books. He has enjoyed a variety of business and technical roles throughout his career, including CEO, CIO, CTO, and Chief Software Architect roles in medical, publishing, media, manufacturing, advertising, and software industries. He lives in Palo Alto with his wife and five children.

Tony Gentilcore is a Software Engineer at Google working on the Websearch Infrastructure team.

He is also the co-creator of the recently open-sourced Page Speed tool and a contributing author to Steve Souders’ upcoming Even Faster Web Sites book.

Eric Goldsmith, Operations Architect at AOL, has more than 18 years of experience in the areas of product development, engineering and operations. At AOL he has led efforts to deliver the highest levels of performance and availability for top Web sites, including: AOL.com; AIM.com; and AOL Video; among others.

His areas of expertise include Performance Analysis, Capacity Planning, Network Engineering and Security, and Software and Product Development. Prior to AOL, Eric worked for companies such as UUNet, WorldCom and CompuServe, as well as telecom and Internet startups. He holds a BS in Computer Science from The Ohio State University.

Umang Gupta has served since 1997 as chairman and chief executive officer of Keynote Systems (NASDAQ: KEYN), the global leader in test and measurement solutions that improve mobile communications and online business performance. A well-known technology visionary and Silicon Valley entrepreneur, Umang began his career in 1973 with IBM. Umang joined Oracle Corporation in 1981 where he wrote the first business plan for the company, and served as Vice President and General Manager of the Microcomputer Products Division through 1984. He left Oracle to become Founder, Chairman, and Chief Executive Officer of Gupta Corporation, which he took public in 1993 (NASDAQ: GPTA). Gupta Corporation was responsible for ushering in the era of enterprise client/server computing by introducing many seminal innovations, including the... Read More.

Jeff Hammerbacher was an Entrepreneur in Residence at Accel Partners immediately prior to joining Cloudera. Before Accel, he conceived, built, and led the Data team at Facebook. The Data team was responsible for driving many of the applications of statistics and machine learning at Facebook, as well as building out the infrastructure to support these tasks for massive data sets. The team produced two open source projects: Hive, a system for offline analysis built above Hadoop, and Cassandra, a structured storage system on a P2P network. Before joining Facebook, Jeff was a quantitative analyst on Wall Street. Jeff earned his Bachelor’s Degree in Mathematics from Harvard University.

Paul Hammond is a web developer, product manager and father. He has been building websites for as long as he can remember, and now leads a team of hard-working supernerds at Flickr. Before then he was part of the Yahoo Brickhouse team, and previously led technical project management at BBC Radio and Music interactive.

Paul regularly speaks on subjects from Javascript and APIs to the future of broadcasting, at events including South By Southwest, Web 2.0 expo and Web Directions North. He currently lives in San Francisco, and keeps an irregularly updated technical weblog at paulhammond.org

Jonathan Heiliger is the Vice President of Technical Operations at Facebook, where he oversees global infrastructure, site architecture and IT. Prior to Facebook, he was a technology advisor to several early-stage companies in connection with Index Ventures and Sequoia Capital. He formerly led the engineering team at Walmart.com, where he was responsible for infrastructure and building scalable systems. Jonathan also spent several years at Loudcloud (which became Opsware and was later acquired by HP) as the Chief Operating Officer. Earlier in his career, Jonathan was the CTO of Frontier GlobalCenter, and later founded Global Crossing’s corporate venture capital group.

Small company veteran Justin graduated from the University of Washington with a degree in computer engineering and has played key roles in startups ranging from imaging SONAR at BlueView Technologies, home automation at 1Control/Pluto, and non-relational databases at Applied Technical Systems. Since moving into the corner window desk at Picnik World HQ, he’s been busy with many tasks, most having to do with Linux, and finds that his adventurous resume has proved useful when building, scaling, and dumping water on Picnik’s ever-expanding infrastructure. When not at work, you’ll usually find him out on a run, strapped to a scuba tank, attempting some new feat of home improvement, or being urged into a triathlon by fellow Picniker Mike. His plans for 2009 include hitting the... Read More.

A twelve year system operations veteran, Adam is the CTO of Opscode, whose mission is to bring “Infrastructure Automation to the Masses”. He is the primary author of Chef.

Dr. Changhao Jiang is a research scientist at Facebook Inc. His responsibilities at Facebooks are mainly focused on improving Facebook’s user perceived performance and making the site more scalable. Specifically, he currently leads the Quickling project at Facebook which ajaxifies the whole website. He also designed and implemented a client side caching system calledPageCache to cache users’ visited pages at client side browser. Changhao is also one of the lead developers for the XHProf project, which was open-sourced by Facebook in March 2009. Prior to joining Facebook, Dr. Changhao Jiang worked at Google for a year. He also worked as a researcher at Carnegie MellonUniversity for two years. Changhao holds a bachelor’s of science degree and a master’s of science degree from Tsinghua University, and... Read More.

Robert is Director of Engineering at Facebook, where he leads software development for scaling and performance. He has overseen more than a tenfold expansion of the site to over 150 million users and billions of page views a day and the development of a scalable architecture for Facebook’s fast paced development environment. He received a B.S. in Engineering and Applied Science from Caltech, and has spent the last ten years working in a variety of engineering and management roles at startups in Silicon Valley.

Doug has over a decade of software engineering experience in the area of distributed computing and information retrieval. He joined Inktomi’s Web Search division in 1997 where he held both engineering and management positions. During his five year tenure, he designed and developed large-scale distributed systems, including significant pieces of the crawling and indexing software. Doug later joined Kosmix, Inc., where he built a distributed web crawler and scaled it to a billion documents. Earlier in his career he worked as an engineer at Verity, helping to develop VDK, the core developer toolkit. Doug currently holds the position of Principal Search Architect at Zvents, Inc., a local search engine. His primary responsibility is to lead the development of Hypertable, a next generation, high performance,... Read More.

Luke has been publishing and speaking on his work in Unix administration since 1997. He has focused on tool development since 2001, developing and publishing multiple simple sysadmin tools and contributing to established products like Cfengine. He founded Reductive Labs in 2005 as a response to the stagnation in sysadmin tools, to be a vehicle for changing the way we interact with and manage our computers. He is currently focused on Puppet, an open-source automation framework written in Ruby, and he is always researching and developing new ways to make it easier to talk to computers on your terms. He has presented on Puppet and other tools around the world, including at OSCON, LISA, Linux.Conf.au, and FOSS.in.

Kasindorf is the MySQL DBA for Six Apart’s properties, as well as many of their scaling tools. A sysadmin for livejournal.com in 2002, he has since helped build numerous large web sites with open source software and is an advocate and contributor for Memcached, mogilefs, perlbal, and others.

Frank Mashraqi is a renowned speaker and scalability advisor to several startups. He comes to NetEdge with nearly a decade of scalability, engineering management and monetization experience. Prior to NetEdge, Frank was Director of Business Operations and Technical Strategy for Fotolog where he played a pivotal role in helping Fotolog scale to become the 13th largest website on the Internet (Alexa: based on traffic) and the third most actively used social network in the world (ComScore). Frank holds a BBA in Accounting and a BS in Computer Information Systems.

Bryant Mason is a Principal Test Manager with the Microsoft Advertising Research and Development Group, where he is responsible for performance engineering. He has been optimizing large-scale Internet services at Microsoft since the late 90s. Over the past nine years, he has been busy building advertising platforms that handle tens of billions of requests each day. When not working on the next generation advertising platform for Microsoft, he contributes to industry standards for on-line ad performance.

Eric Mattingly is a performance engineer in the Microsoft IT ACE Performance team, which focuses on Web application and SQL layers in order to identify and eliminate root-cause performance bottlenecks issues for Microsoft internal customers. The Ace Performance team also teaches developers the skills and techniques needed to produce reliable systems based on Microsoft IT’s internal process and best practices.

Marissa leads Google’s efforts on search products – web search, images, news, books, products, maps, – and other consumer-facing initiatives such as iGoogle, Google Earth, Google Chrome, and more. Her contributions have included designing and developing Google’s search interface, internationalizing the site to over 100 languages, and launching more than 100 features and products on Google.com. Several patents have been filed on her work in artificial intelligence and interface design. Google’s first female engineer, Marissa joined in 1999 and led the user interface and web server teams at that time.

Concurrently with her full-time work at Google, Marissa has taught introductory computer programming classes at Stanford University, where she earned both her B.S. in Symbolic Systems and her M.S. in Computer Science. Stanford has recognized... Read More.

During Bryan’s time at Google, he has contributed to various projects that make the web faster, including Shared Dictionary Compression over HTTP, optimizing web servers to better utilize HTTP, and most recently, the Page Speed web performance tool. Prior to working on web performance, Bryan was the first full time engineer on the Google TV Ads team, where he helped to build some of Google’s TV ad auction and video management systems.

Brian Moon has been working with the LAMP platform since before it was called LAMP. He is the Senior Web Engineer for dealnews.com. He has made a few small contributions to the PHP project and been a casual participant in discussions on the PHP internals list. He is the founder and lead developer of the Phorum project, the first PHP/MySQL message board ever created.

Matt Mullenweg blogs at ma.tt. He is best known as the founding developer of WordPress, the blogging software he guided from a handful of users to the most widely used open source blog tool. In late 2005 he left CNET to found Automattic, the company behind WordPress.com, Akismet.com, and Gravatar. In his spare time he enjoys taking photographs and playing jazz.

Aladdin Nassar is the Client Performance Champion for Hotmail. His prime job is to make sure Hotmail’s 500+ Million users get their best, most performant user experience from around the world. He received his Masters & Ph.D. from Stanford. He is an authority on large-scale Client-Side Performance Tuning, Instrumentation & Monitoring. He also specializes in Location Based Services and Risk Management. He prides himself on versatility and multi-disciplinary subject matter expertise. Prior to joining Microsoft, he consulted for Senior Executives at Verizon, Chase Manhattan and leading Financial Institutions.

Ryan Nelson is Director of Operations , and has been one of the chief “scalability guys”, for MLB Advanced Media and MLB.com since 2001. He has a passion for both baseball and Unix, which makes his job fairly rewarding, although he still likes to get out of the office before the 7:05pm games start. Originally from central Iowa, he currently commutes past Yankees Stadium every morning on the way to his office in downtown NYC.

Jan Odvarko is independent software consultant currently working for Mozilla. He previously cofounded AllPeers and has been active in Firefox extension development for many years. He is currently spending most of his time contributing to the Firebug project (open source in-browser development tool).

Simon Perkins is the CEO and Founder of Simtec Limited

At Microsoft since 1996, Jim initially built tools to collect and analyze router and WAN statistics. After optimizing the WAN for 300 offices, he found many apps across the WAN were still slow. This led Jim to focus on the communications between client and server and build up a class he calls, Building Network Smart Applications. Since 2001 Jim has led efforts focused on improving web site performance for MSN and Live. Jim will be presenting the Visual Round Trip Analyzer (VRTA) tool now available on download.microsoft.com.

Sean spends way too much time on the computer and needs to get out more. He has worked as a web systems administrator since the mid 90s, has worked with online communities for companies such as MTV Northern Europe, and helped users reduce the headaches of managing and monitoring web infrastructures through Coradiant, a web performance monitoring vendor. Prior to working at Coradiant, he was technical reviewer for the Addison-Wesley book Troubleshooting Linux Firewalls.

Sean is now working as community gardener for Akoha, a company pioneering the industry of “social games”, where he handles all things community and analytics. This puts a smile on his face, and lets him sleep better at night.

He completes his full plate by working on a book for... Read More.

Richard Rabbat is a product manager at Google. He recently released Page Speed, a Firefox add-on that analyzes web pages and gives suggestions on how to improve them in addition to doing some of the optimizations itself. He works on projects that power Google’s infrastructure including latency measurements for Google apps. Previously, Richard worked on data center technologies.

Richard was VP of Entrepreneurship at the MIT Club of Northern California where he helped incubate the green energy and clean technologies program.

Richard is a Senior Member of IEEE and holds a Ph.D. degree from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a Masters degree in Computer and Communications Engineering from the American University of Beirut.

An 8 year Yahoo! veteran, I have worked directly with display ad delivery for the last 4. One aspect of this work is the monitoring and analysis of 3rd Party ad quality and performance. This work has helped lead to the formation of an IAB Working Group with other major publishers on ad performance.

Yadid has spent much time mentoring the MySpace development community on client site performance.

Jesse Robbins (@jesserobbins) is CEO of Opscode (makers of Chef) and a recognized expert in Infrastructure, Web Operations, and Emergency Management.

He serves as co-chair of the Velocity Web Performance & Operations Conference and contributes to the O’Reilly Radar . Prior to co-founding Opscode, he worked at Amazon.com with a title of “Master of Disaster” where he was responsible for Website Availability for every property bearing the Amazon brand.

Robbins is a volunteer Firefighter/EMT and Emergency Manager, and led a task force deployed in Operation Hurricane Katrina. His experiences in the fire service profoundly influence his efforts in technology, and he strives to distill his knowledge from these two worlds and apply it in service of both.

Ed Robinson is Chief Executive Officer of Aptimize Software, the world leader in automated website performance tuning. Ed concentrates on simple solutions for the world’s website speed problems – no one should have to wait for slow web pages to load, Aptimize Website Accelerator fixes the problem instantly.

Ben Rushlo, Director Performance Consulting, Keynote Systems

Ben Rushlo, Director of Keynote Performance Consulting at Keynote Systems, is one of the world’s leading Internet performance experts. Ben advises Fortune 500 and Fortune 1000 companies in the Retail, Automotive, and Financial Services industries, helping to transform their global sites into highly performing, highly available Web assets that provide superior end-user experiences every time.

Before joining Keynote, Ben was a Senior Performance and Capacity Planning Engineer at American Express, where he served as a core member of the team that launched American Express on the Web.

With more than 10 years of experience in Internet and Intranet technologies, Ben has expertise in Internet performance and performance tuning with the major Web technologies.

Ben is a frequent speaker... Read More.

Scott Ruthfield is founder of Rooster Park Consulting, a Seattle-based engineering leadership and custom software development consultancy, and is the acting VP of Engineering at Virtuoso, the industry’s leading leisure travel network. He was the previous VP of Engineering at WhitePages.com, and ran various technology + business teams at Amazon.com. He very occasionally blogs at scottru.com.

Theo Schlossnagle is a Founder and Principal at OmniTI where he designs and implements scalable solutions for highly trafficked sites and other clients in need of sound, scalable architectural engineering. He is the architect of the highly scalable Ecelerity mail transport agent. Theo is a participant in various open source communities including OpenSolaris, Linux, Apache, PostgreSQL, perl, and many others. He is a published author in the area of scalability and distributed systems as well as a veteran speaker in the open source conference circuit.

Kyle Scholz is a Software Engineer at Google, where he focuses on Search performance and infrastructure.

Eric Schurman has been working with the web since the early versions of NCSA Mosaic. In his most recent gig at Microsoft, he’s in charge of site performance for Live Search. He’s worn many other hats at Microsoft, including architect and development lead of Microsoft.com’s highest traffic sites, the home page and Download Center. His experiences writing books on web development, working with disabled users, and teaching classes in computer use have given him a passion for doing the right thing for the customer.

Andrew Shafer joined Reductive Labs to help make Puppet even more awesome. He brings with him a background in high performance computing, computational science, embedded Linux development, web frameworks and Agile methods.

Andrew has a Bachelor’s in Mathematics and a Master’s in Scientific Computing, has worked for two venture funded startups and has been an Open Source user and advocate since the late 90s.

Andrew lives in Salt Lake City with his wife of 10 years. His two sons think he is pretty cool, but they are still young.

Lindsey Simon is a Front-End Developer for Google’s User Experience team. Simon hails from Austin, TX where he slaved at a few startups, taught computing at the Griffin School, and was the webmaster for many years at the Austin Chronicle. He currently lives in San Francisco and runs a foodie website – dishola.com.

Steve Souders works at Google on web performance and open source initiatives. His books High Performance Web Sites and Even Faster Web Sites explain his best practices for performance along with the research and real-world results behind them. Steve is the creator of YSlow, Cuzillion, and SpriteMe. He is co-chair of Velocity and co-founder of the Firebug Working Group. He taught CS193H High Performance Web Sites at Stanford, and frequently speaks at conferences including OSCON, The Ajax Experience, SXSW, and Web 2.0 Expo.

I work for Yahoo!’s Exceptional Performance team. My daily tasks include research, experiments and building tools (such as YSlow) to improve the performance of the Yahoo! properties worldwide. I’m also a contributor to several open source projects and author of a few books and numerous online articles. Creator of the smush.it (http://smushit.com) online image optimization tool.

Christian Stockwell is a Program Manager and works every day to improve Internet Explorer performance.

Nicole Sullivan is a performance guru and CSS Ninja. She is writing about Image Optimization for “Even Faster Websites”, an upcoming book for O’Reilly. She is also working on the redesign of the W3C website.

Previously, she researched and improved the performance of Yahoo sites worldwide as a part of their YSlow team.

She is passionate about CSS, web standards, and scalable front-end architecture for sites with large numbers of pages and visitors. She speaks about performance at conferences around the world, most recently at Ajax Experience and ParisWeb.

She has enjoyed working on large commercial sites including; Yahoo!, SFR, FNAC, Club Med, Accor, Renault, SNCF, and La Poste. She writes on her blog http://stubbornella.org as well as other developer... Read More.

Matt Tanase has always had the entrepreneurial spirit. Immediately following college, Matt started Qaddisin, a company focused on network security services and application development. After working on software consulting projects and being disappointed with the state of webhosting, he took matters into his own hands and co-founded Slicehost, with college friend Jason Seats, in the summer of 2006. Known for its passionate customer service, the company currently has over 11,000 customers and 15,000 virtual servers located in downtown St. Louis. Along with his various entrepreneurial successes, Matt has received several recognitions. He was a regular security columnist for Security Focus, the Product Picks monthly columnist for Linux Magazine, and in 2002 he won the 30 under 30 Award for the St. Louis Business Journal. Matt... Read More.

Monty Taylor is an Engineer for Sun. He’s currently hacking on Drizzle full time, and was the crazy guy who wrote the NDB/Bindings in the first place (why write for one language when you can have six?) Before that, he was a Senior Consultant for MySQL which took him all over the word focusing on Cluster and High Availability.

He’s a Python programmer by first choice(and yet hears the obvious joke surprisingly infrequently) but seems to be spending all of his time recently in C, C++ and Java.

Mandi Walls is a Principal System Administrator at AOL, where she is currently responsible for the daily care and feeding of AOL.com. She has also been involved with AOL’s Channels, Video, News, and Travel sites. Mandi holds a Master’s degree in Computer Science from George Washington University and is pursuing an MBA at UNC’s Kenan-Flagler Business School. In her spare time, Mandi has taught undergraduate IT classes and does volunteer work.

As a geneticist with a love of mathematics and a fascination in economics, Simon has always found himself dealing with complex systems, whether it’s in behavioural patterns, environmental risks of chemical pollution, developing novel computer systems or managing companies. These days Simon works as the Software Services Manager for Canonical, helping define future cloud computing strategies for Ubuntu. He is a passionate advocate and researcher in the fields of open source, commoditisation, innovation and cybernetics . He is also fond of ducks. As he says “they’re fowl but not through choice”.

Xiaoliang “David” Wei is a research scientist at Facebook, where he works on front-end performance. He focuses on user latency measurement, end user latency optimization, and best practices for maintaining long-term web performance. Prior to Facebook, David worked on network simulation, TCP enhancement, QoS, and peer-to-peer file sharing systems at Google and two startups. David holds a bachelor’s degree in computer science from Tsinghua University, China, and a PhD in computer science from Caltech, where he co-invented FastTCP, a new Internet congestion control algorithm that led to the startup FastSoft Inc.

I am a freelance journalist. I am currently working with TechTarget/SearchCloudComputing.com. I focus on Cloud Computing and IT Management.

Here is a link to my published works:

http://claimid.com/botchagalupe

Dr. Rich Wolski is the Chief Technology Officer and co-founder of Eucalyptus Systems Inc., and a Professor of Computer Science at the University of California, Santa Barbara (UCSB). Having received his M.S. and Ph.D. degrees from the University of California at Davis (while a researcher at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory) he has also held positions at the University of California, San Diego, and the University of Tennessee. He is currently also a strategic advisor to the San Diego Supercomputer Center and an adjunct faculty member at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. Rich has led several national scale research efforts in the area of high-performance distributed computing and grid computing, is the author of numerous research articles concerning the empirical study of distributed systems, and is... Read More.

Nicholas is the author of Professional JavaScript and Professional Ajax, a contributor to the upcoming book Even Faster Web Sites, as well as principal front end engineer on the Yahoo! homepage.

Jeremy joined craigslist after over eight years in a variety of roles at Yahoo! He hacks on MySQL, search, and various back-end bits of the craigslist infrastructure.

Jeremy blogs at http://jeremy.zawodny.com/blog/ and flies both small airplanes and gliders in his spare time.

Ezra Zygmuntowicz is a founder and Director of Software Engineering for Engine Yard, a scalable Ruby hosting platform. He has been active in the ruby community for over 4 years with contributions to many open source projects such as Rails, Merb, Rack and Rubinius. He is the author of Deploying Rails Application for the pragmatic programmers and is an active speaker at many ruby and Cloud computing based events.