speakers.html

---
layout: post
title: Speakers - Euruko 2011
---
<ul id="speakers">
  <li>
    <a name="Yukihiro-Matsumoto"></a>
    <div class="person">
      <img src="images/speakers/yukihiro-matsumoto.jpg" alt="Yukihiro Matsumoto"/>
    </div>
    <h3>Yukihiro Matsumoto</h3>
    <h2>Keynote</h2>
    <p>&nbsp;</p>
  </li>
  <li>
    <a name="Paul-Campbell"></a>
    <div class="person">
      <img src="images/speakers/paul-campbell.jpg" alt="Paul Campell"/>
    </div>
    <h3>Paul Campbell</h3>
    <h2>Keynote</h2>
    <p>
      Paul is a web guy from Dublin, Ireland. He is co-curator of <a href='http://funconf.com/'>funconf</a> and a maker of fine web apps at <a href="http://www.hypertiny.ie/">HyperTiny</a>.
    </p>
  </li>
  <li>
    <a name="Pat-Allan"></a>
    <div class="person">
      <img src="images/speakers/pat-allan.jpg" alt="Pat Allan"/>
    </div>
    <h3>Pat Allan</h3>
    <h2>Tales of the Big White Cloud</h2>
    <p>
      Pat Allan is a freelancing web developer usually located in Melbourne, Australia. When not caught up in code, he can be found helping organise <a href="http://railscamps.com/">Rails Camps</a> and <a href="http://trampolineday.com/">Trampolines</a>. His thoughts are blogged semi-regularly at <a href="http://freelancing-gods.com/">freelancing-gods.com</a>, and he’s been known to make a mean pancake.
    </p>
    <p>
      The cloud may look all light and fluffy, but should you go flying through the depths of the internet, you will find challenges and pitfalls aplenty. Gather round as Pat puts on his storytelling hat and regales you with tales of the trials and tribulations, the technology and automation, the lessons and rewards that are part of building a service in the cloud.
    </p>
  </li>
  
  <li>
    <a name="Ben-Langfeld"></a>
    <div class="person">
      <img src="images/speakers/ben-langfeld.jpg" alt="Ben Langfeld"/>
    </div>
    <h3>Ben Klang / Ben Langfeld</h3>
    <h2>Getting Hands On with Adhearsion</h2>
    <p>
      A recovering Physics graduate, Ben now spends approximately 25 hours per day slinging Ruby and is enjoying it a lot more than quantum field theory.

      Writing voice applications is a perfect fit for him, not least as a result of his addiction to talking. That this can be directed towards a robot can only make the world a better place.
      
      Ben has a passion for integrating multiple technologies and has some interesting examples to share to demonstrate the power of Ruby in the field of communications.
      
    </p>
    <p>
      Adhearsion is the first open source framework to enable the creation of telephony applications. Watch as they demonstrate how to integrate with an existing Asterisk install or develop something fresh and interactive in the cloud. Use your phone to send instant messages or collect data. Plenty of code examples will be shared as they show you how to teach Ruby new telephony tricks.
    </p>
  </li>
  <li>
     <a name="Nick-Sutterer"></a>
     <div class="person">
       <img src="images/speakers/nick-sutterer.jpg" alt="Nick Sutterer"/>
     </div>
     <h3>Nick Sutterer</h3>
     <h2>Be Restful. Be web 2.0. But don't mix it</h2>
     <p>
       Nick Sutterer appreciates the beauty of elegant code, and the value of
       open source software. Through his tireless development and advocacy of
       the Cells and Apotomo gems, he has brought the
       concepts of component-oriented UI development to the world of Rails,
       proving that there should be no such thing as a
       double-render error, and that one need not be slave to the great
       monolithic view mentality. Also, he would like to have beer with you.
       
     </p>
     <p>
       While you were hacking on your frontend, frantically trying to make
       that form do a PUT, just to be “RESTful”, did you ever consider just
       separating things? What if your GUI simply is a GUI, talking to REST
       backends behind the scenes? What if your backend is not a monolithic
       beast but multiple applications that are exposed as REST services?

       It is a common misapprehension that GUI and REST backend have to be
       one single, highly coupled system. Taking the best out of each
       framework, let's explore what other ways are possible!
      
     </p>
   </li>
  <li>
    <a name="Bodo-Tasche"></a>
    <div class="person">
      <img src="images/speakers/bodo-tasche.jpg" alt="Bodo Tasche"/>
    </div>
    <h3>Bodo Tasche</h3>
    <h2>Endless fun with Arduino and Eventmachine</h2>
    <p>
      After seven years of working as a java developer, Bodo fall in love
      with ruby and moved to cologne to work as a full time ruby developer.
      He started tinkering with hardware as a teenager with his C-64, his
      dad created the robots and he wrote the software that made them move.

      Besides coding Bodo loves diving, traveling and biking.
    </p>
    <p>
      In his talk he will show how to connect an arduino with ruby using
      eventmachine. He will also
      show potential use cases and projects that can be created using this
      technique. Most of the projects can be finished on one weekend.
    </p>
  </li>
  <li>
    <a name="Lourens-Naude"></a>
    <div class="person">
      <img src="images/speakers/lourens-naude.jpg" alt="Lourens Naudé"/>
    </div>
    <h3>Lourens Naudé</h3>
    <h2>In the Loop</h2>
    <p>
      Lourens is an independent Consultant originally from South Africa but currently based in sunny Madeira Island. He specializes in backend, platform, domain solutions and is well versed full stack and is known for his offbeat Ruby patches and extensions.

      He spends weekdays in the Platform team at <a href="http://www.wildfireapp.com">wildfireapp.com</a> and pushes Open Source contributions to <a href="http://github.com/methodmissing">github.com/methodmissing</a>.
    </p>
    <p>
    
      The recent boom in Event Driven components and tools such as node.js, EventMachine, 0MQ and Redis resulted in product dependencies often misunderstood by development teams. All these components address the need for efficiently shifting and processing data between network, disk, memory and CPU - they fill a very specific niche for high performance data services. In practice however they often make their way into complex, coarse grained services.

      In his talk Lourens will address several gotchas through low level instrumentation and other visual cues, context switching (pun intended) between EventMachine and Redis specific examples.
    </p>
  </li>
  <li>
    <a name="Federico-Brubacher"></a>
    <div class="person">
      <img src="images/speakers/frederico-brubacher.jpg" alt="Frederico Brubacher"/>
    </div>
    <h3>Federico Brubacher</h3>
    <h2>The Expression Problem in Ruby: A focus on Traits.</h2>
    <p>
      After changing careers thrice, Federico found his true love in being a
      language lover and a Ruby fan. Part of it being the awesome
      expressiveness of the Ruby language and part its amazing community.

      You can think about Federico as your next-door abstraction junkie. He
      is a fan of all the languages and all kind of weird abstractions for
      example bananas (aka folds), monads, arrows, etc. He then applies this
      knowledge in his everyday coding in Ruby.
    </p>
    <p>
      In his mind blowing talk Federico will explain what is know as the
      Expression Problem, which you might already have suffered but you
      didn't know it. Federico will continue then to give solutions in Ruby
      and explain why traits, a Ruby 2.0 feature, will be perfect for
      nullifying the Expression Problem.
    </p>
  </li>
  <li>
    <a name="Thorben-Schroeder"></a>
    <div class="person">
      <img src="images/speakers/thorben-schroeder.jpg" alt="Thorben Schröder"/>
    </div>
    <h3>Thorben Schröder</h3>
    <h2>Bridging the gap - Using JavaScript in Rails to write DRY rich client applications</h2>
    <p>
      Thorben has a crush on Rails since he first got his hands wet in late 2006 and he never looked back. He graduated from University with a bachelor thesis on how to scale large Rails applications. Together with Jan Steinmetz he started kopfmaschine, a Rails shop located in Bremen, Germany, where their goal is to create the living room for local hackers. Bringing good people together, build great stuff, that's what kopfmaschine is all about.
    </p>
    <p>
      Beside normal web apps "kopfmaschine" is looking to bring their knowledge to customers who would not normally look for a web solution. Therefore they have built HTML5 apps that are used as "native" apps on Windows or mobile clients like the iPad. This was the starting point for his efforts to bridge the gap between Rails and JavaScript and that is what his talk is all about.
    </p>
  </li>
  <li>
    <a name="Karel-Minarik"></a>
    <div class="person">
      <img src="images/speakers/karel-minarik.jpg" alt="Karel Minařík"/>
    </div>
    <h3>Karel Minařík</h3>
    <h2>Your Data, Your Search</h2>
    <p>
      Karel Minařík is as a web development mercenary doing consulting work in Ruby/Rails and evangelizing about CouchDB, Git, NoSQL and distributed architectures. You can find more about him at <a href="http://karmi.cz">karmi.cz</a>.
    </p>
    <p>
      His talk will touch search in general and focus on <a href="http://elasticsearch.org">ElasticSearch</a>, a promising search engine and database, which fully embraces HTTP, understands JSON and comes with advanced distributed features. It's “elastic” both in the sense of working with data, as well as horizontal scaling, and its purpose is to make advanced search features, such as geo search and complex faceted navigation/aggregation widely available.
    </p>
  </li>
  
  <li>
    <a name="Kornelius-Kalnbach"></a>
    <div class="person">
      <img src="images/speakers/kornelius-kalnbach.jpg" alt="Kornelius Kalnbach"/>
    </div>
    <h3>Kornelius Kalnbach</h3>
    <h2>Scanning Strings at Supersonic Speed</h2>
    <p>
      Kornelius Kalnbach (a.k.a. murphy) is a Ruby programmer born
      in Berlin. He is in love with Ruby-chan since 2002. He also
      loves regular expressions and syntax highlighting. Thus he is tinkering with
      the CodeRay library. He works as a Rails developer since 2007,
      currently for <a href="http://sofatutor.com">sofatutor.com</a>.<br/>
      His other interests include user interfaces, design, philosophy, Shadowrun,
      and he believes there's a ghost in the shell.
    </p>
    <p>
      In his talk Kornelius will explain how CodeRay manages to outperform
      other syntax highlighting libraries with pure Ruby code. After comparing
      performance on different Ruby platforms, he will show the key concepts
      of fast scanning. Visualizing some advanced ideas for further speedups,
      and will explain how syntax highlighting can take advantage of
      multi-core processors.
    </p>
  </li>
  <li>
    <a name="David-Calavera"></a>
    <div class="person">
      <img src="images/speakers/david-calavera.jpg" alt="David Calavera"/>
    </div>
    <h3>David Calavera</h3>
    <h2>JRuby Hacking Guide</h2>
    <p>
      David had a great idea for a pet project once. The same day he started to work on it he had to send a patch to the JRuby project. A hundred of bugs fixed later he became a member of the JRuby Core Team.
    </p>
    <p>
      In his talk we’ll learn how to deal with the JRuby internal code from a more rubist and friendly point of view. Guided by tests we’ll discover what’s hidden underneath and we’ll learn how we can also start to contribute easily.
    </p>
  </li>
  
  <li>
    <a name="Elise-Huard"></a>
    <div class="person">
      <img src="images/speakers/elise-huard.jpg" alt="Elise Huard"/>
    </div>
    <h3>Elise Huard</h3>
    <h2>Actors on Stage</h2>
    <p>
      After her studies in metallurgy, Elise realized a job in that area was 
      not her cup of tea, so she looked for jobs in an earlier interest, software.
      10 years in software have helped her get a firm understanding on what works 
      and what will make you cry blood and tears on nights before deadlines.
      She’s a jack of all trades, loves reading, tinkering, food, travel, 
      learning, and people out of the ordinary.
    </p>
    <p>
      In her talk she will explore several ways to implement the actor model in Ruby. The talk will also allude to the fact that threads in Ruby should ideally have separate state, so that all programs using threads could also use the actor model (or other similar concurrency models).
    </p>
  </li>
  <li>
    <a name="Paolo-Perrotta"></a>
    <div class="person">
      <img src="images/speakers/paolo-perrotta.jpg" alt="Paolo Perrotta"/>
    </div>
    <h3>Paolo Perrotta</h3>
    <h2>The Revenge of method_missing()</h2>
    <p>
      Paolo "Nusco" Perrotta worked for a dozen years as a developer and
      writer, in domains ranging from embedded to enterprise software,
      computer games, and web applications. By day, he earns his food as a
      trainer, mentor and agile coach for large corporations. At night, he
      likes to get his hands dirty with code.
    </p>
    <p>
      Nusco wrote the Metaprogramming Ruby book for the Pragmatic
      Programmers. After establishing himself as a premier expert on the
      subject, he was dissed by other rubyists for being a method_missing() fanboy.
    </p>
    <p>
      Convinced that nobody can bully method_missing() and get away with it,
      Nusco resolved to present a talk about it. When is method_missing()
      appropriate, and when should you pick an alternative metaprogramming
      magic spell instead? Is method_missing() really dangerous? What are
      the common method_missing() pitfalls, and how can you avoid them?
    </p>
  </li>
  <li>
    <a name="Jose-Valim"></a>
    <div class="person">
      <img src="images/speakers/jose-valim.jpg" alt="José Valim"/>
    </div>
    <h3>José Valim</h3>
    <h2>Writing your own programming language to understand Ruby better</h2>
    <p>
      José Valim (<a href="http://twitter.com/josevalim">@josevalim</a>) is a Rails Core
      member and author of <a href="http://pragprog.com/titles/jvrails/crafting-rails-applications">Crafting Rails
      Applications</a>.
      Also, he is the lead-developer of <a href="http://blog.plataformatec.com">Plataforma</a> Tec,
      a Ruby on Rails consultancy firm based in Brazil. He started working with
      Ruby in late 2006 and since then he's been working on several <a href="http://github.com/josevalim">open source
      projects</a>.
    </p>
    <p>
     In this talk, José Valim will share what he has learned about Ruby while writing a small programming language. He will discuss the basic structure of a programming language, suggest improvements and debate about the Ruby's parser, Object Model, methods, iterators and blocks.
    </p>
  </li>
  <li>
    <a name="Julik-Tarkhanov"></a>
    <div class="person">
      <img src="images/speakers/julik-tarkhanov.jpg" alt="Julik Tarkhanov"/>
    </div>
    <h3>Julik Tarkhanov</h3>
    <h2>Ruby helps to make movies</h2>
    <p>
      Julik has been smoking the Ruby pipe since 2004, when he has first seen a presentation about Rails.
      After graduating as a motion designer and starting his dream career in visual effects at HecticElectric,
      he still finds himself reaching for Ruby whenever a solution for problem needs to be found quickly
      (or even when he just feels like it!). Also he is the only person in VFX who officially uses IRB as his calculator.
    </p><p>
      In his talk he would like to tell how he created <a href="http://guerilla-di.org">Guerilla-DI</a>, a niche opensource project in Ruby that
      quite a few people in the field are using, even though Ruby is not really known or used in the post-production
      community. He will explain what kind of problems Ruby can help with in post and VFX, and how to create a downloadable
      Ruby application. He will also explore the constraints
      that you might want to observe when deploying a ruby application to end users.
    </p>
  </li>
  <li>
    <a name="Jesper-Richter-Reichhelm"></a>
    <div class="person">
      <img src="images/speakers/jesper-richter-reichhelm.jpg" alt="Jesper Richter-Reichhelm"/>
    </div>
    <h3>Jesper Richter-Reichhelm</h3>
    <h2>Games for the Masses: Scaling Rails to the Extreme</h2>
    <p>
      Jesper Richter-Reichhelm has two big passions: developing software and games. For the last 10 years he had fun by developing software for large scale web sites.
      After he joined wooga as Head of Engineering he could do both as wooga is developing games for Facebook. Currently Jesper is happy and busy using Ruby and NoSQL databases to build social games that have more than 1,000,000 users every day at Europe's largest developer of social games.
    </p>
    <p>
      In his talk Jasper will explain and compare the work of two engineering teams that build Facebook game backends: Cloud vs. dedicated servers, SQL vs. NoSQL, specialized servers in a n-tier architecture vs. a swarm architecture where all servers can assume any role. He will highlight their respective advantages and disadvantages and discuss some common patterns both teams came up with to solve their problems.
    </p>
  </li>
  <li>
    <a name="Mateusz-Drozdzynski"></a>
    <div class="person">
      <img src="images/speakers/mateusz-drozdzynski.jpg" alt="Jesper Richter-Reichhelm"/>
    </div>
    <h3>Mateusz Drożdżyński</h3>
    <h2>Sentiment analysis of Twitter messages</h2>
    <p>
      Mateusz Drożdżyński is the founder and CEO of Object Reload, a small software development house with offices in Cambridge (UK) and Gliwice (Poland).
      He is a Computer Science undergraduate at the University of Cambridge and has worked with multiple startup.
      He is an avid rower, chronic self-experimenter and a huge fan of quantifying and measuring all things meaningful. 
    </p>
    <p>
      His talk will briefly cover the topic of sentiment classification, why is it difficult and why it matters in the first place. He then will go on to outline different classification methods and how to apply them in Ruby. He will also elaborate on how this approach holds up for multilingual messages.
    </p>
  </li>
</ul>