Speakers Part Twee (Two in Dutch)
Picking speakers for a conference is a hard job, you have so many things to take into account, like the theme, how many spots, experienced speaker vs first timer, local vs overseas, and the dreaded limited number of spots. Also, since we were using Pull Requests, the process was open, which meant we had lots of comments to take into account. (e.g. do we take a talk which has lots of +1’s or one with a few really good comments?)
Many times during the selection process we were left thinking ‘this sucks, we need to add more speakers!’ In fact, we said that enough times that we did just that, we created a mixture of 20min and 30min talk slots (each with 10 minutes for questions, and 5 minutes for changeover) just so we could add two more spots, and we think that it was worth it!
We are sorry we couldn’t accept more talks, because frankly we would have loved to accept all of them! If you would like further feedback please contact Josh and he will do his best to help.
So without a further ado, here are the final speakers for EuRuKo 2012!
Bruno Aguirre
Bruno is an old school coder who enjoys complex problems and simple solutions. He works at Cubox in Uruguay helping startups make their dreams come true. His love for new languages is stronger than ever, with Ruby, Python and Javascript under his belt he is now starting to fall in love with Go!
Bruno has worked in the telecoms field for far too long, but he has learnt many awesome and tragic things, from different async protocols to how to become a cronic workaholic.
Secretly Bruno is a clown in disguise who likes to dress up, maybe you might see him at EuRuKo, or maybe you won’t, or at least you won’t know it :)
Sean Cribbs - Basho
Sean is a pianist, software engineer, composer, philosopher, web designer, conductor, singer, teacher, and technology advocate. So I guess the question really is, ‘what isn’t Sean Cribbs?’
As a Software Engineer for Basho Technologies, Sean spends his time hacking in Ruby, Erlang, and JavaScript (and occasionally Python) on the client interfaces to Riak, Basho’s distributed, fault-tolerant database.
Random fact : Sean used to be a Choir director for 3 years, and we hear from a reputable source that he loves it when you sing Silent Night to him in falsetto!
Terence Lee - Heroku
The fantastic Mr Terence works at Heroku maintaining the Ruby stack and a slew of OSS projects such as Bundler and Resque, as well as helping with the Rails Girls movement. When he’s not going to an awesome Heroku or Ruby event, he lives in Austin, TX, the taco capital of America, where everything is three times bigger!
Terence will be talking about the inner workings of Bundler, including the shortcomings of 1.0 and how 1.1 has helped make developers happier worldwide. On top of this, the future of Bundler will also be a hot topic.
And what is a good talk without a great story of the bundler and gemcutter teams working together to make bundle install significantly faster in 1.1.
If you don’t walk away with a better understanding of how bundler works then Terence will personally give you your money back!.
(Terence loves Friday hugs, EVERY DAY OF THE WEEK!, give him a big one when you see him!)
Eloy Durán - Fingertips
Eloy, who was born and raised in this year’s host city ‘beautiful Amsterdam’, has long been working at the intersection of open-source Ruby and Objective-C/Cocoa. This combination has lead to his current job at Fingertips where he works on Web, iPhone, iPad and Mac OS X apps.
His open-source time is spent on CocoaPods, MacRuby, and many related projects.
If, at some point, you might think “who’s making that music?”, then it might be Eloy, who’s constantly beatboxing unconsciously. If you are up for it we can organize a beatbox showdown on stage!
Vicent Martí - GitHub
Vicent Martí has a name which is difficult to pronounce. Despite his main occupation as bananologist, he spends his spare time working full time at GitHub, where he builds tools for the people who build the Internet.
His dreams invaded by shadowy figures: pink ponies and raw pointers, he loves sharing his love for what he believes is beautiful technology. An European citizen (Spain, according to his passport), Vicent enjoys drums and yellow things and the sweet sweet smell of civilization.
We are slightly worried about his love for bananas, he even requested he have some available ‘backstage’, we didn’t even know we had a ‘backstage’!
Martin Rehfeld - Wooga
Did someone say German engineering? Let me tell you about German engineering: It is boring! It is thorough, it is efficient, and it just works.
Martin has been doing this stuff for more than 20 years now. He tamed the very first home computers, made assembly code fit into HBLANK, and ran a BSD-based home server before Linux had even surfaced. Currently he is developing highly scalable backends for the Berlin-based social gaming company Wooga.
Want to show him you know your stuff? Bring along a ZX Spectrum with Wolfenstein 3D ported to it!
And the final big welcome too……
Mitchell Hashimoto - Kiip
When we think ‘Mitchell Hashimoto’ the first thing that comes to mind for us is Vagrant, the awesome tool for creating and distributing virtualized development environments. In short, it makes VirtualBox awesome to use!
Mitchell spends his days as an operations engineer for a start-up company in San Francisco. He is Passionate (with a capital P) about all things open source, and boy does he show this passion with awesome contributions to the community.
We often hear crazy reasons why people got into programming, welllllll, did you know that Mitchell only wanted to learn how to code so he could cheat neopets!!! Without neopets, he may have never found computers!!!
Do you have a neopet? Maybe bring one to EuRuKo and get some special ‘hints’ from Mitchell ;)
So there we have it, all 13 speakers, including two amazing keynote speakers.
We are sorry for the delay in announcing this, and sorry that we couldn’t pick more, but join us in welcoming these amazing speakers to EuRuKo for 2012.
Huge <3 from the Nederlands!
The EuRuKo Team