Announcement

LA Ruby Conference 2009

This is the inaugural year for LA Ruby Conference. Come and join us to learn more about ruby and related technologies and practices that might interest you.

April 4, 2009
Marconi Automotive Museum in Tustin, CA

Register Now!

Sponsors

Speakers

Wolfram Arnold Scaling "most popular" lists: a plugin solution
Wolfram Arnold, Ph.D. is the co-founder of RubyFocus, a boutique consulting and talent acquisition firm specializing on Ruby-on-Rails. His core expertise is in creating long-term viable and scalable applications and organizations. He has co-founded several companies and consulted and worked on several high-traffic web sites, including www.fansnap.com, www.edufire.com, www.divinecaroline.com. As part of the divinecaroline.com project, he worked as client engineer at Pivotal Labs. Wolfram currently lives in San Francisco.
John Barnette Johnson
   
Danny Blitz Herding Tigers - Software Development and the Art of War
Daniel Philpott AKA Danny Blitz is a 20 plus year veteran of the software industry. Daniel has built and managed systems for Citibank, Dell, Ticketmaster, Quest Diagnostics, US Military and other organizations. Daniel is currently serving as a development manager and agile evangelist for AT&T Interactive, and is building the Tiger Team program for the company.
Adam Blum Rhodes the Framework for Mobile Client Development
  Adam is a longtime VP of Engineering/CTO of several successful startups. He is now CEO of Rhomobile, which makes open source tools for developing mobile applications. He is also an adjunct professor at Carnegie Mellon University and an adviser to several other software companies.
Lewis Cirne Managing Ruby on Rails for High Performance
Lewis Cirne is Founder and CEO of New Relic, the leading provider of application performance tools for Ruby on Rails. Lew is a seasoned entrepreneur and software pioneer with more than 10 years of experience in application performance management. He holds seven patents related to application performance. Earlier in his career he held senior engineering positions at Apple and Hummingbird Communications. He holds an AB in Computer Science from Dartmouth College.
Pradeep Elankumaran Fast and Scalable Front/Back-end Services using Ruby, Rails and XMPP
A former computational scientist, Pradeep was writing astrophysical simulations in Ruby well before the language became fashionable. Since then, he has been working with and thinking a lot about social networks, machine learning and applying mathematical models to social data. At Intridea, he’s responsible for researching and developing emerging web technologies, launching new products and coding up Present.ly, the enterprise micro-sharing platform and CrowdSound, a next-generation feedback gathering tool. Recently, he’s been checking out Erlang & XMPP and has been spending lots of time hacking away deep in the guts of the Rails framework.
Damen Evans Flying Robot: Unmanned Aerial Vehicles Using Ruby And Arduino
  Damen Evans began his adult life pursuing a career in film, however he soon discovered that his true passions were technology, and making things move.

Always a dedicated hobbyist, Damen soon found himself building more serious toys. He was involved in the T3 personal mobility solution for the company T3Motion, where he applied his mechanical know-how in both design, and assembly, to help build one of the leading electric personal transporters.

Next, he found himself converting full-sized cars to run on electricity with his friend, the Reverend Gadget, at Left Coast Electric, including several high profile custom jobs for celebrities like Tommy Chong. After suffering a back injury from lifting heavy and outdated lead acid batteries, he found himself exploring a completely different suit of skills: putting what he had learned about being a producer in film school, as well as in the electric vehicle industry, to work in software project management. He is blogging about his experiences with homebrew flying vehicles at MyFirstAirship

Damen is currently a project manager at entertainment startup Talentboom.

Jeremy Evans Sequel
Jeremy Evans has been the maintainer of Sequel since March of 2008, and has been programming in ruby since early 2005. He has developed numerous ruby libraries and programs such as ThirdBase, Scaffolding Extensions, and ruby-style. Jeremy has contributed to numerous open source projects, such as DC++, BitTorrent, Rack, Ruby on Rails, and Sinatra. Jeremy is also a developer of Aqualung, an open source audio player written in C. He works in Sacramento for a small government agency.
Ron Evans Flying Robot: Unmanned Aerial Vehicles Using Ruby And Arduino
  Ron Evans is a software developer, contributor to several open source projects, occasional author and speaker, and iconoclast.

His first well-known project was HyperX, the first artificial intelligence toolkit written for Apple Computer's seminar HyperCard product. HyperX was considered "way ahead of it's time" and received a 4 mouse rating in MacUser Magazine. Ron's programming chops and creativity led to strategic development projects with Apple, Countrywide Financial, Citibank, Olympus and various startups including WildID, a digital certificate authority, and Great Big Noise, an email marketing management solution.

For the last few years, Ron has been a Ruby fanatic, and his blog "Dead Programmer Society" has been the venue for his programming obsessions. He is a contributor to a number of open source projects, including his own "Frankie", which allows easy creation of Facebook apps using Sinatra, as well as being one of the original contributors to "PoolParty" a auto-scaling and deployment solution for cloud computing now sponsored by AT&T.

Ron is currently CTO for entertainment startup Talentboom, as well as co-founder of the parental filtering company littleye.

Michael Fairchild Pool Party
Michael Fairchild is a lead software engineer at AT&T Interactive R&D in Los Angeles, CA. Prior to joining AT&T he worked with the UCLA Particle Beam Physics Lab, building and supporting the groups beowulf clusters.
Ari Lerner Pool Party
Ari Lerner is a lead software engineer for AT&T interactive in Glendale, CA. He is a core rails and sinatra contributor. He has been working in the clouds for as long as he can remember and performs improv every weekend in hollywood.
Brendan Lim Mobilize your Rails Application
Brendan Lim is the Director of Mobile Solutions at Intridea, Inc. Intridea develops high-performance, agile, Enterprise oriented Web 2.0 applications and services, geared to leverage collaborative technologies, social networking, mobile devices/applications and cloud computing. Before Intridea, Brendan spent his days as a systems architect at a mobile startup, kajeet, Inc., in Bethesda, MD. He also co-founded, Yappd, a microblogging social network, built on Rails, that was featured in such publications as PC Magazine, TechCrunch and Mashable. Brendan also is the author of the SMS Fu and Mobile Fu Rails plugins.
Pat Maddox Working Effectively with Legacy Rails Code
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Aaron Patterson Journey through a pointy forest: The state of XML parsing in Ruby
When Aaron Patterson's not searching the internet for pictures of adorable kittens, he creates large-scale Ruby on Rails applications as a Senior Software Engineer at AT&T Interactive. He's an open source contributor, releasing popular Ruby tools like Nokogiri and Mechanize. On Tuesday nights, Aaron can be found with the Rubyists from Seattle.rb.
Jim Weirich Keynote
Jim Weirich is the Chief Scientist for EdgeCase LLC, a Rails development firm located in Columbus Ohio. Jim has over twenty-five years of experience in software development. He has worked with real-time data systems for testing jet engines, networking software for information systems, and image processing software for the financial industry. Jim is active in the Ruby community and has contributed to several Ruby projects, including the Rake build system and the RubyGems package software.
Dan Yoder Waves
Dan has over two decades of experience in all aspects of the software business. He has been using Ruby for over three years and is the author of the resource-oriented Web application framework Waves as well as numerous other gems, including AutoCode, Functor, and Filebase. He has spoken on Waves at LoneStar RubyConf, RubyConf, and has been invited to speak at the first LA RubyConf. He is the Director of Development at AT&T Interactive R&D, where Ruby and Rails applications handle several million HTTP requests every day. Dan helped start the LA Ruby users' group, helping bring on AT&T Interactive as a major sponsor. His development group is also responsible for one of the first voice-enabled local search apps for the iPhone, Speak4It.