Speaker Bios
Ali Afshar (Microlink PC (Medical))
* Senior Developer, MicrolinkPC. Medical GUI and web applications.
* Open source projects: PIDA, Python-poppler (author), Kiwi (major), PyGTK, Textpress, Pygments, Sphinx, Storm (minor patches).
* Articles published at pygtk.org
* Qualified medical doctor.
* Keen Python advocate
Andreas Schreiber (German Aerospace Center (DLR))
Andreas Schreiber is head of the Department for Distributed Systems and Component Software of the German Aerospace Center's (DLR) Simulation and Software Technology division. He received a degree in industrial mathematics from Technical University Clausthal. His research fields include grid computing, cloud computing, modern software architectures, user interfaces, and software engineering. He has been a visiting scientist at the Argonne National Laboratory working in the Globus Project group. He is involved in national and European grid research projects and the principal investigator for the software development of a ship design and simulation system (within the German national project SESIS). He leads the national AeroGrid project, in which Provenance technology is applied to the aerospace industry. He has a 15-year history of Python development in the field of scientific and industrial applications and has convinced many engineers in the aerospace industry to use Python.
DLR is Germany´s national research center for aeronautics and space. Its extensive research and development work in Aeronautics, Space, Transportation and Energy is integrated into national and international cooperative ventures. As Germany´s space agency, DLR has been given responsibility for the forward planning and the implementation of the German space program by the German federal government as well as for the international representation of German interests. Furthermore, Germany’s largest project-management agency is also part of DLR. Approximately 5,600 people are employed in DLR´s 28 institutes and facilities at thirteen locations in Germany: Koeln-Porz (headquarters), Berlin-Adlershof, Bonn-Oberkassel, Braunschweig, Bremen, Göttingen, Hamburg, Lampoldshausen, Neustrelitz, Oberpfaffenhofen, Stuttgart, Trauen and Weilheim. DLR also operates offices in Brussels, Paris, and Washington, D.C.
Andrew West
Andrew works in the gaming industry, creating software for networked entertainment systems.
Previously, Andrew worked for 10 years with a range of UK universities, providing support, knowledge and software for research departments; creating websites and software that enabled scholars to further their research and expand their knowledge of historical areas.
Andrew lives in the East Midlands with his cat Pixel, and enjoys home brewing and reviewing adventure games.
Andy Robinson (Reportlab)
Andy Robinson is the founder, CEO and Chief Architect of ReportLab, based in South West London. He has been using Python in production systems since 1994, and started ReportLab in 2000 to deliver Python-based reporting solutions. A very busy job and family life now prevent him from hacking as much as he used to, but in former times he co-authored "Python Programming on Win32" (O'Reilly, 2000) and was possibly the first Python advocate in the UK, moving up from pub meetups to organising the Python track at ACCU for 5 years.
Anil Asokan (Instrumentel Ltd.)
Anil Asokan completed his B.Eng(Hons) in a combined Electronic and Communications Engineering degree at the University of Leeds in 2004. Anil then started work in the field of theoretical physics, acquiring his Ph.D. in 2008 on the topic of "Analysis and development of particle based methods used in simulating heat transport." He is now the lead software developer for Instrumentel, a small electronics company.
Antonio Cuni (PyPy / University of Genova)
Antonio Cuni has been a geek and computer hobbyist since he was a child. He has been actively collaborating at PyPy since 2.5 years ago, first by writing the CLI/.NET backend as a part of his master thesis, then as a researcher at HHU University of Duesseldorf. At the moment he is a PhD student at University of Genova, and continues working on PyPy as a part of his scientific research; moreover, he is also collaborating with Merlinux GmbH on various activities.
Christian Tismer (tismerysoft GmbH)
I am known for being the Stackless Python guy. Joined the PyPy project as one of its founders and member of the core team. After a stroke, I'm recovering slowly by doing insane projects like Psyco.
Chris Withers (Simplistix Limited)
Chris has been wrestling snakes for almost a decade now. This has predominantly been with Zope but has branched out into the wider world of Python web frameworks and general Python programming as Zope has slowly tried to relinquish its status as the pariah of the Python world.
Christian Muirhead (Resolver Systems)
Christian's been playing around with Python since 1998, and using it at work for the last two-and-a-half years. He works with Michael, Menno, Giles, Jonathan and all the others at Resolver Systems. He's also helping Michael write IronPython in Action.
As well as geeking out, he's into running, cycling and singing.
Ciarán Mooney (University of Birmingham)
Ciarán is a chemistry student at the University of Birmingham, member of Birmingham Linux group and a GNU Privacy Guard enthusiast. Ciarán first learned about Python at the Introduction to Python tutorial at PyCon UK 2007. Ciarán organised Birmingham Software Freedom Day 2007 and leads the audio team at PyCon UK 2007-8.
David Beazley (Dabeaz LLC)
David Beazley is the creator of SWIG, author of the "Python Essential Reference, 3rd. Ed." and an independent Python trainer. A long time member of the Python community, David was involved with much of the early work in applying Python to high performance scientific software. He has also created a number of Python-related software development tools including PLY (A Python implementation of lex/yacc) and WAD (an embedded debugger for tracking down problems in C/C++ extension modules). David is a member of the Python Software Foundation. He lives in Chicago.
David Jones (Ravenbrook Limited)
Since graduating from Cambridge, David has been a professional programmer at a variety of small to medium software companies for 13 years. For the last 5 years David has been a Senior Consultant at Ravenbrook Limited, providing software engineering consulting services. For David this typically means programming, documenting, advising, training, in and on C, Python, Lua, and pretty much anything else that comes along. David's experience includes writing garbage collectors, video games, embedded robotic control software, GUI wireless network administration and analysis tools, and the odd language implementation or two.
David lives on the edge of the Peak District National Park and likes to rock climb in his spare time.
Giles Thomas (Resolver Systems Ltd)
After spending the 90s in a succession of small software companies and Internet startups, Giles spent four years at Goldman Sachs, where he became a vice president and learned just how widely-used spreadsheets really are, and how frequently they end up being a source of frustration to their users.
In 2005 he co-founded Resolver Systems with an explicit aim of helping to get people out of spreadsheet hell, and he has been using Python to do just that ever since.
Graham Higgins (Bel EPA)
Independent consultant & practitioner since 1996 in information architecture, semantic web technologies, website design / engineering and e-systems development. Previously, 12 years in commercial research covering artificial intelligence, knowledge engineering, applied cognitive science.
Holger Krekel (merlinux gmbh)
Holger Krekel is a co-founder of the PyPy project and participates on many levels in it. He is the initiator and maintainer of the popular py.test and a few other tools. In 2004 he founded merlinux, a company organising itself virtually, mostly with european developers from PyPy and py.test contexts.
Jack Diederich (Person at Large)
Jack Diederich is a serial dot-commer, core Python developer, and tenpin bowler. He wrote the class decorator draft PEP and wrote the implementation for 2.6 and 3.0 (and 2.5, and 2.4)
Jacob Kaplan-Moss (Whiskey Media)
Jacob Kaplan-Moss is one of the lead developers of Django. At his day job, he's a software architect for Whiskey Media, one of those newfangled Web One-Point-Oh companies you've read so much about. A good deal of Jacob's work time is devoted to working on Django.
Jacob previously worked for the Lawrence Journal-World, a locally-owned newspaper in Lawrence, KS where Django was developed. At the Journal-World Jacob was the lead developer of Ellington, a commercial web publishing platform for media companies.
James Gardner (3aims)
James is the co-founder of the Pylons Web Framework and works as Research and Development IT Consultant in London for the NIHR and UCL Institute of Child Health/Great Ormond Street Hospital and in Oxford for the Oxford Radcliffe Hospitals NHS Trust. James is interested in all things Python and the Web.
John Pinner (Clockwork Software Systems)
John Pinner has been using Unix and then Linux for more years than he cares to remember. He and his company, Clockwork Software Systems, have been using Python as their main development language since 1999 for applications as diverse as electromagnetic compatibility testing and payroll. Through the Linux Emporium they offer both scheduled and bespoke Python training courses, and have provided tutorials at Free Software conferences.
Jonathan Fine (LTS Strategic, The Open University)
Jonathan is trained as a mathematician, and is an expert in TeX and LaTeX. He learned Python because he wants to use it as a front-end language to the excellent TeX typesetting engine. Since then he's set up TeX as an online web-service for rendering formulas and is busy writing client side JavaScript to take advantage of MathTran.
He works for The Open University as a specialist in TeX and mathematical content, and currently has an internal secondment to work on problems and solutions of mathematical content on web pages, particularly in the context of distance learning.
Jonathan Hartley (Resolver Systems)
Jonathan Hartley came to software from a background in digital electronics. Nowadays he is delighted to find himself developing in IronPython at Resolver Systems, surrounded by people who are smarter than he is. He lives in London with his fabulous wife Susan (note the diff from last year's bio) and two trusty guitar hero controllers.
Kevin Noonan (Calbane Ltd.)
Kevin Noonan is a professional software developer with over a decade of commercial experience. He has worked on system and server software for two NASDAQ-quoted technology companies; as well as stints with four brand-name financial institutions in Ireland. In 2007, he made a presentation on Django at BarCampGalway, as well as one on XMPP/Jabber at the IJTC conference in Dublin. Earlier in 2008, he spoke on mobile web development with WURFL at the Irish Open Source Technology Conference. He's using the "preview" release of Google App Engine.
Maciej Fijalkowski (merlinux GmbH)
Maciej Fijalkowski is a core PyPy developer, particularly interested in the obscure details of various parts. He is always annoyed with existing code relying on reference counting, as well as lack of knowledge about how things like finalizers work.
Mano Marks (Google)
Mano Marks is a Developer Advocate with Google, specializing in Google App Engine and Geo APIs. He has been with Google for two years, and before that worked in data management positions in human services organizations.
Maqsood Mahmud (King Saud University, Riyadh, Saudi Arabia)
I am a Researcher at King Saud University in the Department of Information Systems. Web Servers Security Assessment is my hobby and research interest as well. My area of specialty is Information Security Engineering. Moreover I am Microsoft USA and CISCO Systems USA certified in the field of Networks and with a Research paper published at Greece ASM 2008 Conference on Arabic Encryption techniques.
Mark Fink (Tabane Limited, Schmiechen, Germany)
I earned a diploma degree in Computer Science at the Georg-Simon-Ohm UAS in Nuremberg, Germany. Programming is pure fun for me so after graduation I started as ... a programmer! Already in my first project assignment I realized that testing of the finished product was not given enough attention which resulted in the bad quality of the product. That experience was bugging me constantly. Consequently I moved into testing and programming test automation which is - to be honest - even more rewarding for me than what I did before.
Most of my experience lies in the areas of build automation, continuous integration, load testing, and functional testing. I started programming Python in 2005 when I needed a tool for bulk file analysis. Meanwhile Python is my first choice for programming testing tools and utilities.
Mark Shuttleworth
Mark Shuttleworth is a South African entrepreneur who founded Thawte, and then the Shuttleworth Foundation and Canonical Limited. He is a Python enthusiast.
Four years ago, at EuroPython, Mark told us that he was going to start a new Linux distribution based on Debian. Some of us thought that maybe he was off his trolley. Today his brainchild, Ubuntu, is the most popular Linux distribution worldwide and has won huge numbers of people over to Free Software. Now we wonder what Mark's keynote at PyCon UK will tell us.
Mark Summerfield (Qtrac Ltd.)
Mark is a computer science graduate who has spent many years working in the software industry. He is the author of "Rapid GUI Programming with Python and Qt: The Definitive Guide to PyQt Programming", and is currently writing "Programming in Python 3: A Complete Introduction to the Python Language". Mark owns Qtrac Ltd., http://www.qtrac.eu, where he works as an independent author, editor, trainer, and consultant, specialising in C++, Qt, Python, and PyQt.
Matthew Pontefract (ReThought Ltd)
Trained as an astrophysicist then fell into contracting in investment banking. The world was Java. Having moved through a couple of similar companies I worked then in Python and .NET. A spell in visual effects allowed me to develop the Python tool I'd been thinking up for months, an early version of Peloton. Now freelance, having set up my own company and becoming involved in others, I continue to work in the distributed computation and workflow arena.
Menno Smits (Resolver Systems)
Menno works in London with his esteemed colleagues at Resolver Systems developing a radical new spreadsheet application in IronPython. For the last 12 years he has worked in a variety of areas including automated vehicle guidance, real-time systems, network threat management and rich web-based data mining applications, mostly using Linux. When not shuffling bits around, he enjoys mixing records, travel and dining out.
Michael Brunton-Spall (Guardian.co.uk)
Currently a Java developer at the Guardian newspaper, I've written Python for fun for over 3 years now. I've worked in a number of languages professionally, including Java, C, C++, C# and Javascript, but have never been able to claim Python as a professional language.
Michael Foord (Resolver Systems)
Michael Foord has been a Python developer for five years and for the last two years he has been developing with IronPython at Resolver Systems in London. He is the author of "IronPython in Action" for Manning Publications.
Michael has written many articles on Python and IronPython and released a lot of Python code, some of which people have even used!
Michael Sparks (BBC Research)
Michael started writing code many many years ago, starting with those Osborne books with pictures of little robots back in the 80s on a ZX81. Over the years he's coded with a variety of stuff as a result, moving through 8 bit micros, to Amigas then to PCs, skipping to Linux over 10 years ago before it became fashionable. He settled on Python after years of BASIC, 6502 & 68000 machine code, C, Amiga E, perl, C++, Java and a smattering of other languages, and rarely feels the need to make his life hard by using a different language, though he does when a clear need arises.
His work on Kamaelia has been driven by the view that software development should get easier for developers in order for users to have more fun stuff to build for themselves. Concurrency is therefore a big part of that, but not the main driver. That said, he also thinks that any software system that can't be illustrated using pictures of little robots running around inside a computer is probably too complicated to be useful, even if you can prove it works. Fundamentally Kamaelia has also had to be useful to the BBC, usually with very short notice for specific problems.
Michael currently works at BBC Research as a Senior Research Engineer. His work there has involved all sorts of stuff from large scale network systems through digital TV transcode & archive systems, through user participation toolsets, web, mobile & TV, almost exclusively in Python for the past 6 years.
Nick Barnes (Ravenbrook Limited)
Founder and director of Ravenbrook Limited, a software consultancy firm based in Cambridge, delivering quality products, many using Python, on time and to budget since 1987.
Nick Booker (Clockwork Software Systems)
Nick is a Computer Science graduate, working at Clockwork Software Systems as a system administrator and Python programmer.
He has been programming from a young age having cut his teeth on Commodore BASIC, and has been using Python for three years for academic and personal purposes as well as for work.
Nick Efford (University of Leeds)
Nick leads the teaching of software engineering to undergraduates in the School of Computing at Leeds. He has also developed material on computer security with the support of Microsoft, and he currently teaches this subject at undergraduate and postgraduate level.
Nick has researched and taught in the area of image processing and computer vision. He has written a book on this subject, Digital Image Processing: A Practical Introduction Using Java, published under the Addison-Wesley imprint of Pearson Education. He has also contributed to Network Security: The Complete Reference, published by McGraw-Hill.
Oisin Mulvihill (Folding Software Limited)
Oisin Mulvihill is director of Folding Software Limited, a small Python development company based in the UK. He has been developing Python since 2001. He first used it to prototype a project then forgot to rewrite it in C++. He has never looked back since using Python in many places from straight forward web applications to telephone call card top-up systems.
Raymond D. Hettinger (Self-employed)
Raymond is a core developer for the Python language and is responsible for introducing generator expressions, creating the itertools module, optimizing the implementation, and designing several builtin functions including any(), all(), set(), frozenset(), sorted(), reversed() and enumerate(). He is active in the developer newsgroup and serves as a board member for the Python Software Foundation. He is the author of 40+ recipes in the ASPN Python cookbook and actively maintains several third-party Python tools including a matrix/eigenvalue package and a generic puzzle solving framework.
Rob Collins (Folding Software Ltd)
Rob Collins is a director of Folding Software Ltd, an enthusiastic Python development company based in the UK and Scandanavia. He first heard about Python at a Delphi users' group meeting, and made the switch five years ago. He likes solving problems with logic, strange inspiration, design patterns. Test first. Embrace change.
Visit the company web site at www.foldingsoftware.com, or keep in touch with Rob via his motivational blog.
Russel Winder (Concertant LLP)
I started as a theoretical physicist investigating heavy quark flavour production in hadronic processes. However the computing was more fun that the physics, so I switched to being a UNIX systems programmer -- 1980 so when it was fun. This led to a growing fascination with the human aspects of programming so I became an academic again (at UCL) teaching programming and human--computer interaction, and researching parallel programming languages and the programming process. I went on to become Professor of Computing Science and
Head of Department at KCL.
in 2000, I left academia to become CTO of a 'start up' building a JVM implementation for systems with ridiculously small resources. Just as product was ready for market, the funders pulled out, so, sadly, that all ended. Since the company went in to liquidation, I have been a freelance consultant, analyst, author and trainer. I wrote "Developing C++ Software", and joint authored "Developing Java Software" and "Python for Rookies". Other authoring projects are on going.
Recently I have started a new partnership, Concertant LLP, focused on issues of parallelism in the new world of pervasive multi-core processors.
Simon Brunning (ThoughtWorks)
I do agile web development in Java and a bit of Python. ThoughtWorker, currently working at the Guardian.
Simon Willison (Consultant)
Simon Willison is a consultant on OpenID and client- and server-side Web development, and a co-creator of the Django Web framework. Before going freelance, Simon worked on Yahoo!'s Technology Development team, and prior to that at the Lawrence Journal-World, the award winning local newspaper in Kansas where Django was born.
Simone Brunozzi (Amazon.com)
Simone Brunozzi is a technology enthusiast, involved in IT and computing since an early age. He joined Amazon in May 2008 in the role of Web Services Evangelist, and will travel across Europe and vicinity to showcase the innovative new solutions by Amazon Web Services and help developers build businesses and applications.
Of Italian origins, Simone loves travelling, cooking Italian food, meeting people and connecting with them. He is a Linux and Ubuntu passionate, loves blogging, and has interests in the environment, clean energies, and technology in general.
Prior to joining Amazon, Simone had his own small business in Italy, focusing on simple web applications. He also served as a professor of Programming Languages and Compilers at Perugia University and worked as a network and system administrator at the University for Foreigners in Perugia.
After obtaining his Computer Science degree, he spent six months at UC Irvine, California, where he studied the American approach to business. He gained early programming experience at the Ministry of Aerial Defense in Rome, Italy. He doesn't consider himself a tech guru, but he loves his broad experience in different fields, which quench his insatiable thirst for knowledge and curiosity.
You can keep in touch with Simone reading his english blog, www.brunozzi.com, or his twitter page, http://twitter.com/simone_brunozzi .
Steve Alexander (Canonical)
Steve Alexander is manager of the Launchpad team at Canonical, and has been using Python since 2000.
Stuart Langridge
Stuart Langridge is a Python and web hacker, author, and speaker living in the UK. When not writing books about web technologies or trying to convince more people to use Ubuntu, he's a Django developer and member of the WaSP's DOM Scripting task force and was a founder of LugRadio, still the world's best open source radio show. Code and writings and (the occasional) rant are to be found at kryogenix.org; Stuart is to be found outside in the rain looking for the smoking area.
Ted Leung (Sun Microsystems)
I have several passions, which include:
* Fixing computers so that they actually help people.
* Helping to apply the open source/commons-based peer production model to relevant areas in the software and other industries.
I have worked on a number of software projects where advanced technology was used to solve human problems. Since 2000 I have been a part of the open source community, and have helped individuals and companies make the changes necessary to succeed in that environment.
I have presented at a number of industry conferences, including OSCON, Software Development, PyCon, and ApacheCon. My first book, "Professional XML Development with Apache Tools", was published by Wrox in December 2003. My Specialties include:
Open Source community building, software design and architecture, AJAX, Java, Python, XML, Web Services, C++, Object-oriented databases, Conference presentations
Tim Golden (CBS Outdoor UK)
Tim Golden cut his teeth on a BBC Micro in the 1980s, did a degree in Computation at UMIST, and has been a SQL Developer since 1990 working in a variety of companies. He took up Python when looking for a free implementation of Modula3 back in the days of Python 1.5.2, and is a keen advocate of Python running on Microsoft platforms.
Tim Retout
Tim works with free software. In his spare time he fixes bugs in GNOME, and maintains packages for Debian and the GNU project.
He first started programming in BASIC on CP/M, and has never recovered.
Tony Jenkins (University of Leeds)
Tony Jenkins is a Senior Teaching Fellow in the School of Computing at the University of Leeds. He has taught programming for many years, and has even written a couple of text books. He has presented at any number of international conferences on teaching programming. He appears to be becoming known as a Python advocate in the UK higher education community.
Tony is now a confirmed devotee of all things Pythonic. He is really glad that he doesn't have to teach Java any more.
Zeth (University of Birmingham)
Zeth is a web development consultant based in Birmingham, currently working for the 'Institute for Textual Scholarship and Electronic Editing', Birmingham University, and for 'Scholarly Digital Editions'.
Zeth is also, for unknown reasons, a visiting researcher at the University of Münster, Westphalia, Germany, co-lugmaster of Birmingham Linux User Group, founder of Python West Midlands, vice-chair of the PyCon UK Society and an occasional member of Birmingham Fencing Club. He also makes a really good cup of tea.
