We’re excited to share an in-depth look at just some of the confirmed speakers for DevDays 2011! The program is comprised of heavy hitters on topics picked by you and the rest of the Stack Overflow community. As Joel mentioned, the purpose of DevDays is to provide a top-notch education on several technologies and these speakers certainly live up to that challenge.
Salman Khan Sal Khan is the founder and one-man faculty of the Khan Academy (khanacademy.org), a nonprofit with the mission of providing free, high-quality education to “anyone, anywhere” in the world. A former hedge fund analyst with degrees from MIT and Harvard, Khan was helping a young cousin with math in 2004, communicating by phone and using an interactive notepad. When others expressed interest, he began posting videos of his hand-scribbled tutorials on YouTube. Demand took off, and in 2009 he quit his day job. The Khan Academy is the most-used library of educational videos on the web, with two million unique students per month and over 50 million lessons delivered.
Scott Chacon Scott Chacon is the VP of Git at GitHub. He is the author of the Pro Git book by Apress (progit.org), the Git Internals Peepcode DF as well as the maintainer of the Git homepage (git-scm.com) and the Git Community Book.
Scott has presented all over the world. LinuxConf.au, OSCON, RuPy, Symfony Live, Ruby Kaigi, RailsConf, RubyConf, Scotland on Rails, Euruko to drop a few names. He also does corporate training on Git all over the world.
Chris Smith Chris Smith is author of "Programming F#" and was part of the F# team at Microsoft. Now he works at Google bringing next generation language tools and IDE services to the cloud. He has a passion for fruity drinks with umbrellas and writing movie reviews.
Sam Saffron Sam is Stack Exchange Valued Associate #00008, joining the team in June of 2010. Living in Australia, Sam is a core developer on the Stack Exchange platform focusing on performance and scalability. Sam enjoys building his own stuff too, most notably Community Tracker, written in Ruby on Rails, and Media Browser, written in C#. Since Sam started working for Stack Exchange he launched the Dapper ORM and Data Explorer open source projects and helped design and launch the MVC MiniProfiler open source project. Sam also built profiling products for Symantec, where he worked as development manager for the performance team for Altiris platform prior to joining Stack Exchange.
Ryan Thomas Ryan is a developer on the Confluence team at Atlassian, currently working on Confluence 4.0 and having implemented the current continuous deployment infrastructure.
Jon Skeet Jon Skeet is user 22656 on Stack Overflow, where he tends to post about C# and Java. If you want to attract his attention, post a question pointing out a situation where a C# program doesn’t behave in an expected way, citing the specification. Please don’t do so shortly before this talk though, as he’ll be very distracted until he gets a chance to dig into it.
In terms of coding-for-money, Jon is a software engineer at Google’s London office, currently working on the Google Offers project. He speaks in a personal capacity, however, not on behalf of Google. Except to say that Google is hiring, and any CVs should be sent directly to him.
Marc Gravell Marc is a long-time Stack Overflow user, elected moderator, and has been working on the Stack Overflow / Stack Exchange team since 2010. He also writes some code occasionally (focusing on C#), and is involved in a number of OSS projects in the .NET community.
Michael Barker
Michael Barker is currently a lead developer at London Multi-Asset eXchange (LMAX) where he spends most of his time scratching his head while thinking about simpler and faster solutions.
Intermingled with travelling to various countries around the world, Michael’s 10+ years of experience has been spent battling unnecessary complexity across a variety of industries (finance, telecoms, government) and in whatever technology that happens to have been hurled in his direction (Java/JavaEE, C++, .NET). Michael is also a sporadic Open Source contributor having dropped patches into a number of OSS projects including PostgreSQL, JBoss, GNU Classpath and most recently Mono.
Washington DC, December 15 & 16:
Rick Minerich Richard Minerich is a Researcher at Bayard Rock, a new company dedicated to applying the cutting edge from academia to solve real world problems. He's been working in, speaking on, and writing about F# for the past three years and was recently awarded F# MVP of the Year for his work in the Microsoft community. His most recent publication is "Professional F# 2.0", a guide to F# for the object-oriented .NET developer.
Ryan McGeary Ryan McGeary is a freelance software consultant, business starter, speaker, and amateur triathlete. Ryan is the owner of McGeary Consulting Group, a software development and consulting firm in Northern Virginia. He is a partner and co-founder of BusyConf.com, a conference organizing web application. Ryan is also co-founder of Let Me Google That For You. Ryan specializes in web application development and enjoys leveraging new tools and frameworks for his day to day development efforts.
Stay tuned for additional speaker announcements as we complete the agenda(s). If you haven’t already registered, head over to our page on Eventbrite to register. Don’t forget to use discount code “blog” to save $100!