Spring 2012 - Speakers
Emma Smith
Emma is a psychology and web design student at UW-Eau Claire. She has been working
professionally in web development since June 2011, and designing with HTML and CSS
in her free time since 2006. Her language of choice: Ruby on Rails. When she's not
programming, she enjoys drawing, training in the Korean martial art Tae Soo Do,
playing and listening to music, and catching the latest episodes of "My Little Pony:
Friendship is Magic."
Robert Boedigheimer
Robert Boedigheimer works for Schwans Shared Services, LLC providing business solutions
with web technologies and leads Robert Boedigheimer Consulting, LLC. Robert has
been designing and developing web sites for the past 15 years including the early
days of ASP and ASP.NET. He is a columnist for aspalliance.com, a Pluralsight Author,
an ASP.NET MVP, an author, a MCPD: ASP.NET 3.5, and a 3rd degree black belt in Tae
Kwon Do. Robert has spoken at industry conferences including VSLive, Heartland Developers
Conference, DevLink, DevTeach, Tulsa Tech Fest, DevWeek, DevReach, SDC, TechEd,
DevConnections, AJAXWorld, and numerous national and international events.
Robert Altman
Robert Altman is mobile software developer and consultant. He is the lead iOS developer
at TelventDTN. Robert has 20 years of experience in the software development and
a broad experience base covering iPhone, iPad, Windows Mobile and CE; as well as
Windows, .NET, Mac, and many other systems; as well as a number of Microsoft certifications,
including MCP, MCAD, MCSD, and MCSD for .NET (C#). Robert is currently Vice President
of Public Relations for TechMaster-TC, a Twin Cities technology-focused Toastmasters
chapter. In his spare time, Robert enjoys learning new technologies; and pursuing
current topics in Quantum Information Theory. He is particularly interested in development
of and software for quantum computers (although there is still a great deal of uncertainty
about them).
Mike Hodnick
Mike Hodnick is an independent consultant in the Twin Cities and has worked as a
software developer for over 13 years. He has a deep background in .NET programming
with C# and has always had a passion for web development. Most recently in his spare
time he has been programming with digital audio synthesis libraries in JavaScript.
If Mike isn't coding audio apps, he's probably playing pick-up hockey, Rock Band,
Halo, Minecraft, or baking a chocolate soufflé. Mike is currently working on a playable
Rock Band 3 game version of the Twin Cities Code Camp Theme Song.
James Greene
James Greene is a Lead Software Engineer for Thomson Reuters where he is focused on highly scalable web
applications. His recent technical foci include JavaScript, HTML5, .NET (mainly
REST-ful JSON-based services in ASP.NET MVC), and Android. He has been developing
professionally since 2006 and holds a Master's degree in Software Engineering. On
the rare occasion that he is not staring at a computer or smartphone screen (a rarity),
you may find him spending time with his family, traveling abroad, playing board
games, hiking, or scuba diving. For more info, check out: http://about.me/James.M.Greene.
Wade Schultz
{bio forthcoming...}
Brent Nelson
{bio forthcoming...}
Vince Bullinger
Vince Bullinger has been a passionate .NET developer and consultant since 2005.
He has an MCSD for .NET with C#. In his spare time, he likes to do home projects,
work out, play video games and learn everything there is to know about everything.
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. His recent books
include HTML5 and CSS3
and Web Development Recipes.
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.
Mohammad Faridi
Mohammad Faridi is an independent consultant in the twin cities. He has been working
in the .NET arena since it came out. Mohammad has a passion for technology, especially
mobile and cloud. When he is not working, he is obsessing about cars.
Brandy Favilla
Brandy is an experienced Marketing, Community and Communications Manager, Social
Media Leader, Volunteer, Presenter and Educator with over 11 years of corporate
experience. She has extensive experience in public relations, public speaking and
marketing strategies while relationship building with colleagues, clients and across
organizations and teams to exceed business goals. Brandy has her BS in Education
and will earn her MBA with a marketing and HR emphasis in 2012.
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.
Mike Marshall
Mike Marshall is a software developer and Lead Architect at MorphoTrust - a local
biometrics company that specializes in face, fingerprint and iris recognition systems.
Mike has been developing software for over 15 years and started dabbling in Android
development 2 years ago. He has published one application to the Android Market
and has another in the pipeline. He can be found online at http://mike-marshall.net or @MustGolf on Twittter.
Brad Broulik
Brad Broulik is an author and senior developer specializing in enterprise mobile
development at HealthPartners.
Prior to mobile development he was the lead software architect at a financial services
organization. His recent book is Pro jQuery Mobile and he blogs regularly at http://bradbroulik.blogspot.com.
Jason Bock
Jason Bock is a Principal Consultant for
Magenic and a Microsoft MVP (C#). 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",
and the forthcoming "Metaprogramming in .NET". 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 and the Twin Cities Windows 8 User Group. Jason holds
a Master's degree in Electrical Engineering from Marquette University. Visit his
web site at http://www.jasonbock.net.
Barry S. Stahl
Barry is a .NET software engineer, Election Integrity Activist, baseball and hockey
fan, husband of one genius and father of another, and is a nearly 30 year Phoenix
resident. Barry spends his days building integrated systems for Crew Operations
at US Airways and his nights thinking about the next AZGiveCamp. You can follow Barry on Twitter @bsstahl or read his blog at http://www.cognitiveinheritance.com.
Joshua Ramirez
Joshua has 12 years experience in .NET Software Development and is currently a Principle
Consultant at ILM Services. He's passionate about developing, designing, and integrating
enterprise class systems through service oriented principles. Recent work has have
included building distributed and enterprise systems at Ally Financial (GMAC), General
Mills, Lender Processing Services, and other firms across the Twin Cities.
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.
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.
Matt Ronge
Matt Ronge is an iOS consultant who has been programming in Objective-C since the
early days of Mac OS X. Matt has built and worked on numerous Mac apps and for the
last two years he's been focused on iOS apps. Matt spent a couple years doing web
development in Java and Python but found he enjoys mobile development more. When
not programming you might find Matt hanging out at home with his fiancee, fishing,
reading non-fiction or collecting NES games. He can be found online at http://www.mronge.com or on Twitter as @mronge.
Jeff Brand
Jeff Brand is a .NET Developer in Microsoft's Developer and Platform Group. Jeff
assists customers in evaluating, developing and deploying applications built on
the .NET Framework and the Microsoft platform, with a current focus on Windows Phone
and Windows 8. He has been with Microsoft for sixteen years and has served in variety
of roles including infrastructure consultant, e-commerce technology specialist,
and enterprise technology advisor.
Nick Schweitzer
Nick Schweitzer is a Milwaukee Area Software Consultant with more than 12 years
of experience, and currently is a Surgeon at SpiderLogic. He's worked with and for
several Milwaukee area consulting companies, with clients ranging from medium size
firms, to Fortune 500 companies. He sometimes blogs at The Coding Monkey (http://www.thecodingmonkey.net) and is active on Twitter
(@CodingMonkeyNet).
J Wynia
J Wynia is a software consultant, writer and geek who lives in Minneapolis, MN with
his wife and 2 basset hounds. He's been solving business problems with software
for 10+ years. When not at the keyboard, he enjoys brewing beer, cider, wine and
mead as well as tending to his backyard smoker, turning out tasty BBQ.
Kevin Griffin
Kevin Griffin has been working as a professional developer since 2006, where his
first job was working on components for the Symantec security suites. Kevin is the
owner of Griffin Consulting, Inc, and currently works with ComponentOne as a Technical
Evangelist. As an Microsoft ASP.NET MVP and ASPInsider, Kevin spends a lot of time
teaching and mentoring developers to learn new technologies and to be better developers.
Over three years ago, Kevin started the Hampton Roads .NET Users Group and now serves
as a Senior Mentor for INETA. You can find Kevin speaking at conferences, code camps,
and user groups across the country.
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.
John Urberg
John Urberg is an Applications Architect at Nash Finch Company focusing on building
JEE applications using IBM's WebSphere application server. John has two decades
of experience in all areas of software development including managing developers,
introducing and running Agile processes, gather requirements, developing use cases,
defining architecture, object and database design, development, support and training
developers.
Lee Brandt
Lee has been programming professionally for more than a decade and currently works
as a Project Lead Consultant with AdventureTech. He speaks regionally about software
development practices and has mentored teams on improving their approach to lean
software development through achieving technical proficiency. He is a Microsoft
Most Valuable Professional, one of the leaders of the Kansas City .Net User Group,
and serves as the Regional Mentor for .Net user groups in Kansas and Missouri.
Brent Edwards
Brent Edwards is a Senior Consultant for
Magenic, a Microsoft Gold Partner consulting company. He is an accomplished
software developer, architect, mentor and speaker with over 7 years of experience
in developing innovative solutions with Microsoft technologies. Brent has worked
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 two 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.
Jachin Rupe
Jachin's name is pronounced JAY-kin. He’s a developer for Clockwork Active Media
Systems. Jachin spends most of his time at work writing Javascript and PHP, but
likes to work with Python when he gets the chance. He has been making websites for
over 15 years. When he is not in front of a computer he enjoys listening to podcasts
and audiobooks, playing basketball, volleyball and ultimate frisbee. He blogs at
http://jachin.rupe.name.
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.
Greg Levenhagen
Greg Levenhagen has been designing and developing enterprise solutions and leading
projects for a variety of businesses for over 10 years. He has worked on a diverse
set of platforms using many different tools. He is a true enthusiast of computer
science, with passions and interests including mobile, cloud, architecture, parallel,
testing, agile, UX, 3D/games, languages and much more. Greg is a Senior Software
Engineer with Skyline Technologies, Board member of the Fox Valley .NET User's Group,
cofounder of the Northeast WI Agile User’s Group, INETA speaker, IEEE member, ACM
member, substitute professor and a PhD student. Along with being a life-long geek,
Greg enjoys golfing, football, woodworking, philosophy and stimulating conversation.
Jason More
Jason More is a software developer in the Twin Cities, currently consulting for
ILM Professional Services. He likes building awesome applications.
Joe Mayo
Joe Mayo is an author and independent consultant. His multiple books include C#
Unleashed/Sams and LINQ Programming/McGraw-Hill. Joe's latest book is Microsoft
Visual Studio 2010: A Beginner's Guide: McGraw-Hill. Joe has several industry certifications
and has been consulting, teaching, and writing for several years. For his community
contributions, Microsoft has awarded Joe with several Most Valuable Professional
(MVP) awards.
Judah Himango
Judah's a nerd who loves writing code, giving tech talks, and playing guitar. He
predicts technology
futures on his tech blog and
pontificates on Messianic Judaism on his personal blog. His personal software
projects are often a fusion of the two. He's the author of the most popular Messianic Jewish radio on the web, as well
as the best Messianic Jewish
lyrics & chords site. He works for
Avtex, writes software for 3M, and regularly infuses llamas and rage
comics into his presentations.
Andy Pickett
Andy is a journeyman coder, trying to hone his craft and suck less every day. He
is lead game designer for QONQR, The GeoSocial game of World Domination! He bought
his first Apple ][e at 14 and taught himself BASIC by hand coding game programs
out of PC magazines, and was on his server's first Onyxia kill (non-WoW nerds please
move along). Professionally Andy has been a Software Developer, predominantly in
the Microsoft space, for over 10 years. He has lead a variety of successful development
teams at major Retail, Financial, and State Government clients. Andy is an avid
Community Organizer and has a drive to help other developers to master their craft
as well. He Co-Leads the Twin Cities .Net User Group and helps run local conferences
like the Minnesota Developer's Conference and Twin Cities Code Camp. @apickett
@qonqr.