Matz needs no introduction. As the creator of the beautiful and elegant language we all love, we are honored to have Matz joining us for this year's EuRuKo.

Although, did you expect anything less? ;)

Geoffrey Grosenbach has been designing and developing web applications since 1997. You might recognize his soothing voice from the Peepcode screencasts, of which he is the founder. Or maybe you also know he is nuts about road cycling, a hobby and so much more!

Residing in Seattle, WA, the birthplace of grunge music, maybe try sharing your favorite coffee tip, or even mention the 'amazing' Starbucks ;)

Brian is probably best known for his role on the Rubinius team, where he has worked full-time for the past four years thanks to Engine Yard. He has also created the RubySpec project to improve the standards for high quality, consistent, and compliant Ruby implementations, and is focused on improving Ruby and thereby making the lives of developers even better.

Want to chat him up? FYI he enjoys whisky but will accept good wine in a pinch.

Charles has been programming most of his life, as a Java developer for the past decade and as a JRuby developer for over six years. He co-leads the JRuby project, an effort to bring the beauty of Ruby and the power of the JVM together. Charles believes in open source and open standards and hopes his efforts on JRuby and other languages will ensure the JVM remains the preferred open-source managed runtime for many years to come.

Did you know Charles has an awesome beard? Maybe you might both bond over beard grooming advice!

Rick is a developer at GitHub, a self-diagnosed REST nerd, bleeding edge DB enthusiast, with an active OSS profile. Rick calls himself a gif artist and a crappy Looptastic DJ who enjoys reading comic books. But really, if you know Rick, he loves his Dubstep :)

Want to pick Ricks amazing mind? Quote some Dubstep lyrics! "hey Rick, I really love that song that goes 'boom boom waap waap boom boom woosh woosh'"

As current maintainer of Sinatra, Konstantin is an Open Source developer by heart. Ruby has become his language of choice since 2005, and with an open source addition, he regularly contributes to different projects of all shapes and forms like Rubinius, Rack, Travis, Rails and MRI. Konstantin is even rumored to be part machine!

Interested to know what goes on inside his head? Bring a toolset!

Roy has been a front-end specialist for almost a decade. As one of the co-founders of consultancy 80beans here in Amsterdam, he weaves HTML5 and CSS3 magic on an hourly basis. As well as being in love with front-end meta languages like haml, sass and coffeescript, he is all about a sweet mixture of function and form.

Fun Fact: We hear Roy loves a good vodka or 10 ;)

Living in the land of muscles, and Jean Claude Van Damme, Elise has been a software developer in Belgium for more than 10 years. She has used a variety of languages on a variety of environments, and has spoken at a variety of conferences all over the world.

We hate to admit it, but Belgium makes some awesome beers, let her know how much you love a Duvel or Chimay.

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 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!

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, 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 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'!

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!

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 ;)