Fall 2011 - Speakers

Ken Sykora

Ken is a .NET and Flash developer that has been doing web development since HTML 1.0 when NCSA Mosaic was in its prime. He has intimate knowledge with numerous .NET Content Management Systems. As an avid geek and tech hobbyist, he has always been driven to finding awesome ways to integrate music with technology. Since starting at the Nerdery, Ken has seen almost 100 projects launch, most of which involving a content management system.

Brock Noland

Brock Noland is an Instructor at Cloudera where he teaches Apache Hadoop developer and admin courses to public and private audiences. He attended the University of Minnesota and is formerly a Lead Software Engineer at Thomson Reuters were he implemented log processing on Hadoop. He spends most of his time dealing with broken abstractions and other odd phenomena of large distributed systems. When not working, he likes to sail, scuba dive, and trek.

Jamie Miley

Jamie Miley is a .NET Developer and CRM Architect with Sogeti USA out of their Minneapolis branch office and has been working in the Microsoft development space for 7 years. He lives in Richfield, MN with his wife Kristina, daughters Adelyn (19 months old) and Elenora (4 months old), cats Tux and Java, and dog Samba. When he's not doing CRM or blogging (mileyja.blogspot.com) he enjoys fiddling with Windows Phone 7 and hanging out with his friends and family.

Brian Gorman

Brian has 10 years of professional programming experience using .Net for various organizations including both large corporations and small startup-types of businesses, and is an accomplished adjunct professor of computer science. Currently, Brian is working remotely from home in Austin, MN for a software company from Illinios, while teaching an online session of algorithms and data structures for Franklin University from Columbus, OH. Brian has attained MCSD certification, and holds a bachelors degree in computer science from Iowa State University and a masters degree in computer information systems from the University of Phoenix.

Mike Hodnick

Mike Hodnick is a Technology Strategist at Avtex in Bloomington, MN and has over thirteen years of development experience on the Microsoft stack in the Twin Cities area. Mike enjoys going off the beaten path when tinkering with new technology and has most recently spent the last nine months researching motion, touch, and speech-based technologies. In his spare time Mike enjoys playing hockey, writing weird music, camping, fishing, and llama-watching.

Jason Bock

Jason Bock is a Principal Consultant for Magenic (http://www.magenic.com), a Microsoft MVP (C#), and an INETA (http://www.ineta.org) speaker. He has worked on a number of business applications using a diverse set of substrates and languages such as C#, .NET, and Java. He is the author of "Applied .NET Attributes", "CIL Programming: Under the Hood of .NET", ".NET Security", and "Visual Basic 6 Win32 API Tutorial". He has written numerous articles on software development issues and has presented at a number of conferences and user groups. He is a leader of the Twin Cities Code Camp (http://www.twincitiescodecamp.com) and runs the Twin Cities Languages User Group (http://www.twincitieslanguagesusergroup.com). Jason holds a Master's degree in Electrical Engineering from Marquette University. Visit his web site at http://www.jasonbock.net.

Jeff Brand

Jeff Brand is a .NET Developer in Microsoft's Developer and Platform Group. Focused on Microsoft client technologies, Jeff assists customers in evaluating, developing and deploying applications that target Windows 7, Silverlight, Windows Phone, and HTML5. He has been with Microsoft for fifteen years and has served in variety of roles including infrastructure consultant, e-commerce technology specialist, and enterprise technology advisor.

Scott K. Davis

Scott is a seasoned consultant with over a decade of consulting experience on both the Microsoft and Java platforms, involving mostly web application development. Scott began working with Silverlight in the 1.1 Alpha. Scott is currently the owner and principal consultant for Ignition Point Solutions and COO of QONQR, a mobile gaming company.

Larry Louisiana

Larry Louisiana has worked in academic research for 9 years, and after getting bored with photo-physical chemistry, has been developing in C and C#. He is an author on a pending software process patent, and has been spending his free time playing with XNA. Larry is passionate about efficient, concise and reusable code as well as threading and concurrent paradigms. Larry likes complicated problems.

Matt Christian

Matthew Christian is a programmer/analyst in mid-Wisconsin and has been developing software for 8+ years during which he's worked on general software and game development. Matt has a Bachelors Degree in Applied Mathematics and Computer Science: Software Development from the University of Wisconsin – Stout and an Associate's Degree in Computer Information Systems: Programmer/Analyst from Northcentral Technical College. He is an expert blogger on the gaming website Gamasutra.com and has been featured several weeks in the 'Best of Expert Blogs' column for articles related to both programming and design. Find out more about Matt at http://www.insidegamer.org/.

Brian Hogan

Brian P. Hogan is an author, editor, trainer, and web developer who's been building web sites professionally since 1995 as a freelancer and consultant. He enjoys teaching and writing about technology, particularly web design, accessibility, and development. When not hacking on Ruby or JavaScript code, he's writing songs, watching "The Simpsons," or spending quality time with his wife and daughters.

Mike Weber

Mike Weber is a web developer living in Minneapolis, Minnesota. He's been developing professionally since 2005, almost exclusively with Ruby on Rails. When not counting whitespace he enjoys running, swimming and golfing as well as spending time with his wife and dog.

Chris Johnson

Chris Johnson is a web developer and technology consultant living outside of Madison, Wisconsin. He has been developing websites professionally since 2003 when he got his first paycheck as a freelancer. When he's not developing, he enjoys tinkering with technology and mechanical things, photography, video games, playing hockey and spending time with his wife and their two dogs.

Aaron Godin

Aaron Godin is a programmer and designer. If he's not deep in a Rails application or programming in Ruby, he spends his time working with all things front-end. Besides being a Macophile, his other interests include electronic music, martial arts, skateboarding, and making fun of iPad commercials.

Jeff Klawiter

Jeff Klawiter is currently a Senior .NET Developer at The Nerdery. There he works on a wide variety of .NET applications. From HTML 5 ASP.NET MVC websites, to interactive Touch Screen WPF apps with Kinect. In his spare time he maintains the Html Agility Pack open source project and works on various other applications. Visit his website at http://blog.j-maxx.net.

Avonelle Lovhaug

Avonelle Lovhaug escaped the corporate grind in 2003. Since then she's been running Code Poetry, her freelance programming venture serving tech savvy small businesses in the Twin Cities. Avonelle lives just outside St. Paul with her husband, and after raising two geek sons with careers in tech-related fields, she's done her part for future generations. She'd tell you how long she's been working with computers, but her age is classified. Avonelle writes about going freelance at www.IndyCoding.com.

Todd H. Gardner

Todd is a passionate builder of software in a variety of languages and platforms. He is an advocate for testable design, agile development, and lean products. Todd is the founder of WocketWare LLC, an agile software consulting firm.

Justin Chase

Justin Chase is a Software Developer for Microsoft. He works on Expression Blend in the St. Paul office. By night he satiates his love of programming languages by working on the open source project meta#. He also likes to play paintball, attend the Zombie Pub Crawl and enjoy excellent beers.

Kevin Hakanson

Kevin Hakanson is an application architect for Thomson Reuters where he is focused on highly, scalable web applications. His background includes both .NET and Java, but he is most nostalgic about Lotus Notes. He has been developing professionally since 1994 and holds a Master’s degree in Software Engineering. When not staring at a computer screen, he is probably staring at another screen, either watching TV or playing video games with his family.

Kevin Moot

Kevin Moot has been fortified with a healthy dose of javascript, having worked with HTML5 Canvas for several leading-edge websites. He has held an interest in computer graphics since creating games on his Apple IIe (with its vast array of 6 colors and mind-boggling 280×192 resolution), with more recent experience including low-level graphics APIs such as DirectX and OpenGL.

Brent Edwards

Brent Edwards is a Senior Consultant for Magenic, a Microsoft Gold Partner consulting company. Brent has been knocking around the .NET world for over seven years, working on projects ranging from ASP.NET MVC with C# and jQuery to WPF with VB.NET. He is also the author of MVVM Fabric (http://mvvmfabric.com/), a free MVVM framework for WPF. In his spare time, Brent develops applications for the Android platform. His apps have over one million downloads and he was selected by Google as a Top Android Developer for their Device Seeding Program. When not cranking out code, you can find him hanging out with his wife and four kids or riding his wakeboard, snowboard or mountain bike. Check out his blog at http://brentedwards.net.

Jordan Terrell

Jordan Terrell is a software developer with 16 years of experience, with close to 10 years of experience with .NET. He is currently employed at Thomson Reuters working on a financial data service platform. Jordan creates and contributes to open source projects, maintains a blog and is passionate about software development. Find more information about Jordan looking at his code (github.com/iSynaptic), by visiting his wiki (wiki.jordanterrell.com) or by following him on Twitter - @jordanterrell.

Aaron Erickson

Aaron is a veteran technology consultant, writer, and developer at ThoughtWorks. He is the author of "The Nomadic Developer" and most recently a co-author of "Professional F# 2.0". His life's work is helping organizations better leverage technology by contributing to solutions that have substantial positive economic impact for his clients. He is an enthusiast of agile software development and continuous delivery. He is also an "armchair economist" with lots of unfounded opinions on the topic, a deeply mediocre skier, and has an XBOX 360 GamerScore well approaching 15,000.

Adam Grocholski

Adam Grocholski is a Technical Evangelist at RBA Consulting where he spends time focusing on the Windows Azure Platform as well as the latest UI technologies such as Windows Phone 7 and Silverlight. He also has a penchant for hanging around some of the darker corners of the .NET Framework (i.e. T4 and MEF). In 2010 he was named as a Microsoft MVP for his commitment to the Microsoft development community. From founding and presenting at the Twin Cities Cloud Computing user group to speaking at the local .NET and Silverlight user groups along with code camps and local, regional, and national conferences, he is committed to building a great community of well-educated Microsoft developers.

David Berry

David Berry is an IT Manager with Ameriprise Auto and HomeInsurance in De Pere, WI. Starting as aJava developer over 15 years ago, he has spent his last 9 years developingapplications in .NET. He has worked withboth SQL Server and Oracle relational databases with a special interest indatabase performance tuning. In his freetime he enjoys road cycling in the summer and cross country skiing in the winter.

Loren Halvorson

Loren is an independent software consultant. He has worked on large and small business systems in financial, healthcare, government, and retail organizations. Loren lives in Mankato with his wife and 3 children. He leads the Mankato .NET User Group, and enjoys playing acoustic guitar with two bands in his spare time.

Walker Wilkins

Walker Wilkins is an independent contractor currently working on ASP.NET and Ruby on Rails projects. Before coming to Minnesota, he rangled documentation at a small banking software company as a Technical Writier. While teaching himself to program he had plenty of help from a misplaced, forward-thinking programming manager and a number of books.

Judah Himango

Judah is a nerdly simpleton with Avtex, where he was recently promoted to Amplifier of the Shining Countenance of Hodnick's Bare Scalp. His business credentials include the ability to make a great plate of Chips 'N Cheese, and being impressively proficient at duct-taping his rear view mirror. He enjoys taking it easy. He will wear sandals for as long as the harsh Minnesota winters allow. He may have been Jack Johnson in a previous life. He thinks suspenders and bow ties are hilarious. His code is so hot, you'll need to wear sunglasses. He has a software idea that will change the internet and pay for his retirement, and when he says that, he's only half-joking. His wife loves him despite all this; he thinks that's totally hawt. He's got 2 great kids, enjoys playing guitar, is the author of the best Messianic Jewish radio on the web, and he gives a surprisingly decent foot massage.

Kenny Goers

Kenny is a Mobile Architect with the ITR Group working with mobile platforms since 1998. He has worked with Windows CE, Windows Mobile, Windows Phone, iPhones, iPads and Android in both their native development languages and Mono extensively in that time. He is a contributor to a few open source Mono projects. He is also a very marginal hockey player and is lucky to still be upright.

Jon Stonecash

Jon Stonecash is a senior consultant at Magenic, a Microsoft Gold Partner consulting company. Jon Stonecash has worked in software development for much longer than he would like to admit. In that time Jon has had the opportunity to make most of the serious software development mistakes at least once. He has programmed in over a dozen languages including several different assembly languages, Fortran, COBOL, SNOBOL, classic Visual Basic, VB.NET, and C#. He has survived the structured programming revolution and the object-oriented revolutions. Jon’s software development activities have included the development of operating systems, scientific and engineering applications, and enterprise systems. He has worked in every phase of software development from the initial specification of requirements through to customer support. Along the way, he picked up a BS in Mathematics and an MBA. He still has hopes of finding something that he can be reasonably good at. His long term interests center about databases and the aspects of the application that handle data access and business logic. He is also interested in the tools and processes that assist the development process. Jon can be reached at jons@magenic.com . Jon also has an active blog on "Designing Out Loud in the .NET Space" at http://blog.magenic.com/blogs/jons/default.aspx.

Keith Dahlby

Keith Dahlby is a new father, .NET developer, language geek and C# MVP from Cedar Rapids, IA. He works as the technical lead at J&P Cycles and blogs about various software development topics with Los Techies. Keith has spoken at community events around the midwest and studied Human-Computer Interaction at Iowa State University. His talks have been described as "terrific!", "very interactive!", and "the best I've seen all hour!".

Chad Kulesa

Chad Kulesa is an Enterprise Architect at Verifications, Inc., and has been developing software professionally for 14+ years. In that time he's worked with C#, Java, JavaScript, Perl, C/C++, as well as several other specialized languages. Chad enjoys learning new technologies, especially technologies that make developers more productive. He tries to follow the rule, "As simple as possible, but no simpler" when designing software. When not coding, Chad spends most of his time with his wife and 4 children.

Vince Bullinger

Vince Bullinger has been a .NET developer and consultant since 2005. He has an MCSD for .NET with C#. In his spare time, he likes to work on the house and yard, work out, play video games and learn everything there is to know about everything.

Nazmul Siddiqui

Nazmul is a consultant with over 15 years of software development experience primarily on Microsoft platform. He began his career writing client applications and switched between client and web application development. His interests lie in distributed architecture, object and relational modeling as well as developing design patterns and raising code security, performance, maintainability, and scalability awareness. He’s currently the CEO of Naz-Tek, and regularly blogs on technology matters and leads the local WCF user group, hosting monthly (1st Wednesday of the month at noon) knowledge share meetings at Bloomington Microsoft. His main focus is to bring efficiency and quantitative measures into the software development industry and reorient the general concept of information technology as an investment center rather than a cost center.

Jaim Zuber

Jaim Zuber is an Independent Consultant who's written code for everything from Embedded Linux to .NET before jumping into the Mobile Realm. His wife is convinced it's merely a ploy for him to mess around on his phone and call it "research". When he's not writing code he's often spending time with the aforementioned wife, biking around town or making noise with his modest array of musical instruments... sometimes in public.

Kurt Christensen

Since 1995, Kurt Christensen has been paid to program computers using Pascal, C, x86 assembly language, C++, SQL, Java, VB.NET, Javascript, C#, Clojure and Ruby. Amazingly, a small portion of this code actually worked and made it into production. Kurt has also spent the last 9 years working as an "agile coach", whatever that means.

Steve Peterson

Steve Peterson is a Principal Architect for Microsoft at their office in St. Paul. He works in DevDiv on the Expression and Visual Studio development tools.

Mike Benkovich

Mike Benkovich delivers technical presentations around the U.S. as a developer evangelist on the MSDN team at Microsoft. He has worked in a variety of professional roles, including architect, project manager, developer, and technical writer. Mike is also a published author of books from WROX Press and APress that show developers how to get the most from their SQL databases. Since appearing in the 1994 Microsoft DevCast, Mike has presented technical information at seminars, conferences, and corporate boardrooms across America.

Christopher Hertel

Chris Hertel is CTO of ubiqx Consulting, Inc., author of the book "Implementing CIFS", lead author (under contract) of the Microsoft SMB/CIFS specifications. Chris is also a long-haul member of the Samba Team, founding member of the jCIFS project, and a member of two Minnesota food cooperatives.

Brian Bosak

Brian Bosak is an open-source .NET/Mono developer from Minnesota. He has been developing software for 4 years, and specializes in cross-platform software development, and network protocol development. He currently has a patent-pending on the Global Grid, which is a peer-to-peer networking infrastructure designed to be highly scalable, high-performance, and usable across many platforms. The software is designed to seamlessly traverse NAT firewalls when possible, and always establish the most direct connection possible to the desired service. He is the founder of IDWNet Cloud Computing, and co-founder of Pie Distribution (a software distribution company), and is planning on publishing the first application which uses the Global Grid this summer.