Fluent 2012 Keynotes

Dion Almaer is a technologist who loves to code and build. He and his long time partner-in-crime Ben Galbraith recently brought their team to Walmart to power the mobile engineering efforts. He enjoys sharing his passion for software production across various communities, including a new property called FunctionSource.com.

Dion has been 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.

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

Peter Cooper is the founder of Cooper Press and the editor of several weekly newsletters, including JavaScript Weekly, and co-host of The JavaScript Show as well as the editor of several popular Ruby Web sites and author of Beginning Ruby. He publishes programming oriented e-mail newsletters, podcasts, screencasts and blogs full-time.

He also chairs O’Reilly’s JavaScript and Web technology conference, Fluent.

Cunningham is the Chief Inventor of AboutUs.org, a growth company hosting the communities formed by organizations and their constituents, and currently serves as the chairman of the technical advisory board for ZoomAtlas. He also co-founded the consultancy, Cunningham & Cunningham, Inc., has served as a Director of the Eclipse Foundation, an Architect in Microsoft’s Patterns & Practices Group, the Director of R&D at Wyatt Software and as Principle Engineer in the Tektronix Computer Research Laboratory. Ward is well known for his contributions to the developing practice of object-oriented programming, the variation called Extreme Programming, and the communities supported by his WikiWikiWeb. Ward hosts the AgileManifesto.org. He is a founder of the Hillside Group and there created the Pattern Languages of Programs conferences which continue to... Read More.

Brendan is responsible for architecture and the technical direction of Mozilla. He is charged with authorizing module owners, owning architectural issues of the source base and writing the roadmap that outlines the direction of the Mozilla project.

Brendan created JavaScript, did the work through Navigator 4.0, and helped carry it through international standardization. Before Netscape, he wrote operating system and network code for SGI; and at MicroUnity, wrote micro-kernel and DSP code, and did the first MIPS R4K port of gcc, the GNU C compiler.

Dr. Gary William Flake is the CEO of Clipboard Inc., a seed stage Internet startup that allows users to save, organize and share their favorite parts of the web. Prior to founding Clipboard, Gary held executive positions at Microsoft, Yahoo!, and Overture, where he managed applied research teams, corporate-wide innovation efforts, and helped guide corporate strategy. Gary has filed over 150 patents and has numerous publications spanning over 20 years which have focused on machine learning, data mining, and complex systems. Gary has also appeared in leading national publications including The New York Times, The Washington Post, Time Magazine, Forbes Magazine, Nature Science, CNET News, Computer World, Fast Company, TechCrunch and Mashable, and has presented at leadership events such as the TED... Read More.

Brady Forrest is Program Chair for O’Reilly’s Where and co-chair for Android Open . Additionally, he co-chaired the Web 2.0 Expo in San Francisco and NYC. Brady writes for O’Reilly Radar tracking changes in technology. He previously worked at Microsoft on Live Search (he came to Microsoft when it acquired MongoMusic). Brady lives in Seattle, where he builds cars for Burning Man and runs Ignite. You can track his web travels at Truffle Honey.

Ben Galbraith, together with his long-time friend Dion Almaer, forms one-half of the dynamic “Ben and Dion” duo that founded Ajaxian.com, headed Developer Tools at Mozilla, ran Developer Relations at Palm and is now running mobile architecture and engineering at Walmart.com after being acquired along with their start-up team in early 2011. Ben’s been writing code since he was six and starting businesses since he was ten; he’s written books, given hundreds of award-winning presentations world-wide, produced a few technical conferences, sold three companies, and has held CEO, CIO, CTO, and Software Architect positions in the medical, publishing, media, consumer electronics, advertising, software and internet industries. He lives in Palo Alto with his wife and six children.

Tom Hughes-Croucher is the Principal at Jetpacks for Dinosaurs, a consultancy that helps to make their client’s web sites really fast. He provides technology leadership and expertise in high performance web sites and Node.js for the company.

Tom is the co-author of the O’Reilly book “Up and Running with Node.js”.

Tom has also worked at Joyent as the Chief Evangelist with the Node.js team. Before that he was the Lead Technology Evangelist for North America and a Senior Developer at Yahoo!.

Tom has contributed to a number of Web standards for the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) and the British Standards Institute (BSI). He is worked with some of the world’s leading brands including Walmart, NASA, Yahoo!, Tesco, Three Telecom and the UK’s Channel... Read More.

Paul Irish is a front-end developer who loves the web. He is on Google Chrome’s Developer Relations team as well as jQuery’s.

He develops the HTML5 Boilerplate, the HTML5/CSS3 feature detection library Modernizr, HTML5 Please, CSS3 Please, and other bits and bobs of open source code.

As a veteran of the mobile industry with over a decade at Palm, Enda leads the Developer Relations team at HP that supports both the Enyo and Open webOS product lines. He began his professional career as an electronic engineer before switching to web development. In 2000, he began working on Palm’s line of PDAs and smart phones, ultimately returning to his passion for web technologies with the introduction of webOS. He has spent the last 4 years developing WebOS from the ground up and supporting its enthusiastic developer community.

Dr. Axel Rauschmayer is a consultant and trainer for JavaScript, web technologies and information management. He has been developing web applications since 1995 and held his first talk on Ajax in 2006. In 1999, he was technical manager at an internet startup that later expanded internationally.

Located in Munich, Germany. Speaks German, English, French, and Spanish.

Steve works at Google on web performance and open source initiatives. He previously served as Chief Performance Yahoo!. Steve is the author of High Performance Web Sites and Even Faster Web Sites. He is the creator of YSlow, one of the top 25 of 2 billion Firefox add-ons. He’s created many other performance tools and services including Cuzillion, Jdrop, ControlJS, and Browserscope. He serves as co-chair of Velocity, the web performance and operations conference from O’Reilly, and is co-founder of the Firebug Working Group. He taught CS193H: High Performance Web Sites at Stanford University.

Nicole is an evangelist, front-end performance consultant, CSS Ninja, and author. She started the Object-Oriented CSS open source project, which answers the question: how do you scale CSS for millions of visitors or thousands of pages? She also consulted with the W3C for their beta redesign, and is the co-creator of Smush.it, an image optimization service in the cloud. She is passionate about CSS, web standards, and scalable front-end architecture for large commercial websites.

She co-authored Even Faster Websites and blogs at stubbornella.org.

Lea works as a Developer Advocate for W3C. She has a long-standing passion for open web standards, which she fulfills by researching new ways to use them, blogging, speaking, writing, and coding popular open source projects to help fellow developers. She is a member of the CSS Working Group, which architects the language itself. Lea studied Computer Science in Athens University of Economics and Business, where she co-organized and occasionally lectured a cutting edge Web development course for 4th year undergrads. She is one of the few misfits who love code and design equally.