Speakers

Here are the presenters for CPOSC 2009…

Michael Badger

Scratch: Programming for the Young and the Young at Heart

Michael Badger is a technical communicator who writes computer books for Packt Publishing. His books include Zenoss Core Systems and Network Monitoring and Scratch 1.4 Beginner’s Guide. For fun he raises pigs, honeybees, and a family.

Eric Beyeler

How to Get There and What’s Along the Way: Driving Directions and Geospatial Search

Eric has been in the software industry since Windows 95 was in beta. He has been working at MapQuest for the past 3 years. His preference is C++ development but he has been in Javaland for the past year. He thinks software development is as much art as it is science. In his spare time he enjoys photography, rock climbing, and spicy food.

Kyle Burton

Survey of Fuzzy String Matching Algorithms

Kyle has been a software developer using and participating in open source for more than 10 years. He has experience designing and architecting software applications ranging from interactive websites to data integration systems. Kyle enjoy studying new programming languages and techniques and learning from other technologists.

Jim Capp

Making Java Fun Again, Web App Development with Tomcat & Eclipse

As C.E.O. of Anteil, Inc., James Capp has been providing programming and consulting services since 1981. In 1983, he recognized the power and elegance of UNIX and adopted it as his platform for software development. He has been leading the development of Web-based applications, using Linux, since 1994.

Tom Clark

MySQL Performance Tuning for non-DBAs

After years of harsh experience convinced him that the infantry was not his true calling, Tom Clark embarked upon a new career developing software. Many years have elapsed, but he has not regretted this decision. For the past ten years, Tom has worked as a programmer, sysadmin, and occasional college lecturer. His current projects include the online video system used by PBS news and public affairs programs including FRONTLINE and The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer.

Brian Gorka

DRBD, Network Raid, High Availability and General Awesomeness

Brian Gorka has been in the IT industry for 14 years, and is currently working as a technical architect for a large public corporation. He’s been working with Linux since Yggdrasil was cool. Linux has been part of his job and a hobby since the .com boom. Brian has been involved with various open source projects over the years including the NT port of Emacs.

Bob Igo

Virtualization is Easy Now: An Introduction to VirtualBox OSE

Since graduating from Carnegie Mellon in 1994, Bob Igo has applied his combined Computer Science / Math / German degree in his work with some of the world’s leading technology researchers and fortune 100 companies. In addition to developing custom software solutions for clients, he has worked in the diverse fields of Machine Translation, Computer-Assisted Surgery, Automated Package Sortation, Software Automation, and Quality Assurance. His driving philosophy is to make technology easier to use by implementing smart heuristics behind the scenes that encode the best practices of human experts.

He is currently employed by stormlogic.com and mythic.tv.

Seth Jerome

Wonderful Desktop Tricks, and Aesthetics

Seth is a full-on linux home automation guy. By day he is a Solaris/RHEL administrator. By night, he works with the LinuxMCE project, trying to help with new user issues, as well as bug squashing. Seth also plays music and is in two bands, one with his church, one in his free time. Seth is married and has three wonderful children. He’s been using Linux for about 18 years. Seth has made the switch to Linux/OSS for all his computing/gaming needs… and now, it controls his home.

Phil Kostenbader

Proper Use of a Computing Cluster

Phil has 26 years in IT including four years with IBM and seven years with Johnson & Johnson. He has written various security related articles for the SANS Institute, SecurityFocus and FedTech magazine. Phil is currently the system administrator for the Center for Advanced Biotechnology and Medicine at Rutgers University.

Elizabeth Krumbach

Contributing to Open Source Projects

Elizabeth works as a Debian and Ubuntu Sysadmin for LinuxForce, a technology services provider just outside of Philadelphila. She currently contributes to both the Debian and Ubuntu projects, has worked with Canonical on the Ubuntu Certified Professionals course and is the coordinator of the Philadelphia Linux Users Group.

Andrew Libby

Stop Worrying and Start Monitoring with Nagios

Andrew is a long time linux and FOSS enthusiast living and working in the Philadelphia Region. For the past few years he has been specializing in Ruby on Rails development, Nagios monitoring, and Linux systems administration in general.

Joshua Miller

Building Scalable, Fault-Tolerant Applications with Erlang

Josh is a freelance web developer specializing in Ruby and Erlang. Most recently, he worked on the Erlang-powered data collection for CoTweet, a web-based Twitter platform for business. Josh is co-organizer of the Central PA Ruby Brigade. When not hacking new stuff or putting out fires on old stuff, Josh enjoys running, soccer, and fleeing Pennsylvania winters.

Shawn Milochik

Why You’ll Love Python

Shawn is a Python and Django developer working at a start-up in King of Prussia, PA. He has been using Python for three years and Django for five months.

Christian Pearce

Drupal: Challenges, and Techniques for Managing Change

Christian Pearce lives in Harrisburg, PA and has supported open source software since he first discovered Linux at college. He has spent the last fourteen years developing web applications in Perl, PHP and Ruby or working as a system administrator configuring Apache, MySQL, Postgresql, Linux, OpenLDAP, Sendmail, Postfix or any other open source project that gets the job done. Currently he is a consultant with xforty technolgies. Most of all he enjoys spending time with his wife and two kids.

Josiah Ritchie

Watching and Manipulating Your Network Traffic

Josiah has been working with Christian non-profits using Open Source software for 9 years. His experience ranges from routers to file servers and directory servers to web servers. He is happily married, has one daughter and is passionate about facilitating personal relationships with missionaries around the world using technology.

Baron Schwartz

Maatkit, a Toolkit for MySQL Users

Baron is a co-author of High Performance MySQL 2nd edition, and creator of innotop and Maatkit. He blogs frequently under his online alias Xaprb. Baron is the Director of Consulting at Percona, a firm that helps customers build high-performance applications with open-source software stacks such as LAMP. He is best known in the MySQL world, where he is a popular writer and presenter.

Jonathan Simpson

The Value of IRC to Open Source Projects and Groups

Jonathan works as a systems administrator for a small company, but he is also one of the volunteers who help run the Freenode IRC network. In this capacity he also gets the chance to work with many members of the F/OSS community towards various goals.

Premal Vora

The Statistical Significance of R

Premal is a Finance professor at Penn State Harrisburg. He engages in a lot of number crunching for his research, is passionate about computing, and uses a variety of open source and other software. Premal’s hobbies are reading, music listening, travel, cooking, and movies.

David Whittington

Clojure: Usable Lisp

David Whittington works for Sentry Data Systems, Inc. where he writes Ruby and PHP web applications and data procesing tools. In the past he has worked on software development projects ranging from automated grading systems to handheld synchronisation software. He is a long time open source enthusiast and enjoys learning about emerging technologies.

Owen Winkler

The Business of Open Source Licensing

By day, Owen Winkler is a web developer for Rock River Star, an internet consulting company in suburban Philadelphia. By night, he’s known by his IRC nickname, ringmaster — an emeritus developer of WordPress and current project management committee member of the Habari Project.

Rob Yates

Jump Start Django: The Web Framework for Perfectionists with Deadlines

Rob Yates is the VP of Technology and Chief Architect for Corporate University Xchange (CorpU), a Learning & Development research company in Central Pennsylvania. Rob has over 10 years of experience in professional service, consulting, software development, and architecture for enterprise software vendor, KnowledgePlanet. He is currently using Python and Django to streamline internal business processes and increase engagement of client-facing tools. Rob lives in Mechanicsburg, PA with his wife and three young kids and enjoys spending time with his family and is passionate about hockey, FOSS, RAD frameworks, and standards-based web development.

Other helpful links…

Presentation abstracts are available if you want to find out more about a talk!

Are you one of this year’s speakers? The Speaker FAQ has some tips and information that might be useful!

Looking for last year’s information? You can view the list of CPOSC 2008 speakers on the wiki.