Learn from the Flex & AIR experts (experienced developers, celebrated authors, speakers and ideators), mingle with your fellow Flex and AIR magicians and get ready to build your next cutting edge financial application. A 2-day event for Flex developers, architects and the Flex-curious.
Speakers include James Ward, Yakov Fain, Jeff Tapper, Shashank Tiwari, Jeffry Houser, Christian Saylor, Wade Arnold, Rich Shupe, Simon Horwith, Elad Elrom, Adam Flater, Daniel Holth and Brian O'Connor.
List of speakers (in alphabetical order by first name)
Adam Flater
Adam Flater is a Technical Architect and Evangelist at Roundarch. His career has been centered on building innovative graphical user interfaces and research of emerging technology. Adam has designed and implemented solutions using Microsoft, Java and Adobe technologies. Since the beta release of Adobe's Flex 2.0 platform in October of 2005, he has been an active member of the Flex community. Adam has been a featured speaker at at several developers conferences including: The eBay Developer Conference, Fig Leaf's Web Maniacs, 360 Flex, The Adobe OnAir Bus Tour, The Adobe MAX Conference, and several industry groups. He served as a Software Architect for Universal Mind and EffectiveUI where he was involved with projects like eBay Desktop and NASDAQ's Market Replay (both Adobe MAX award winners). Adam is also the project founder and principle contributor to the Merapi Project, a bridge for Java and Flex.
Brian O'Connor
As Principal Architect at Universal Mind, Brian O'Connor brings over 16 years of consulting experience across multiple disciplines and technologies. This includes a significant background in Insurance & Financial Services Solutions that demand high availability and real time messaging performance. Brian has spent the last five years driving business innovation with Flex, Air, LCDS & BlazeDS solutions. Before joining Universal Mind, Brian worked with Adobe/Macromedia Consulting. He was also the Enterprise Architect at Blue Cross Blue Shield of MA, where he concentrated on J2EE development for all core web-based solutions. Brian remains focused on delivering large-scale enterprise applications.
Christian Saylor
Christian Saylor's goal as a designer is to engage the user on a personal level independent of medium. To be able to meet them where they're at and in a way that's comfortable for them; be it in a mobile or embedded device, a car, a website, or even a well designed t-shirt! In Christian's words -- "Design is all around us. It consumes and often inspires change. And its my goal to make that message usable, simple and engaging!" With over 13 years in the design community it's Christian's core focus to bridge that gap between functionality and aesthetics and deliver to the client forward thinking, beautiful, engaging experiences.
Daniel Holth
Daniel Holth has been a consulting software engineer for Universal Mind since 2007. He specializes in Flash, Flex and the Adobe Integrated Runtime. He was pivotal in developing the Trippix client, DalTile's Design-A-Room environment, and QuickStep Flooring's Imagine It room visualizer. Daniel graduated from Saint John's University in Minnesota with a Computer Science major and an Art minor. He started his Flash Platform career as an instructional designer and e-Learning developer at a leading Minnesota insurance company. There he created course design frameworks and learning management systems. His skill at programming dynamic, intellectually and visually stimulating user interfaces makes him a natural fit for Universal Mind.
Elad Elrom
Elad Elrom is a rising star of the Flash development world. He brings a fresh perspective, a strong background, and an inherent knack for the more subtle aspects of the Flash platform. He’s been involved very early in a number of Adobe products. Elad Elrom is a consultant, technical writer and technical lead. As a technical writer, Elad wrote books covering Flash technologies. He maintains an active blog and has spoken at several conferences regarding the Flash platform. He has helped companies follow the XP and Scrum methodologies to implement popular frameworks, optimize and automate built processors and code review, and follow best practices. Elad has consulted a variety of clients in different fields and sizes, from large corporations such as Viacom, NBC Universal, and Weight Watchers to startups such as MotionBox.com and KickApps.com.
James Ward
James Ward is a Technical Evangelist for Flex at Adobe and Adobe’s JCP representative to JSR 286, 299, and 301. Much like his love for climbing mountains he enjoys programming because it provides endless new discoveries, elegant workarounds, summits and valleys. His adventures in climbing have taken him many places. Likewise, technology has brought him many adventures, including: Pascal and Assembly back in the early 90’s; Perl, HTML, and JavaScript in the mid 90’s; then Java and many of it’s frameworks beginning in the late 90’s. Today he primarily uses Flex to build beautiful front-ends for Java based back-ends. Prior to Adobe, James built a rich marketing and customer service portal for Pillar Data Systems.
Jeff Tapper
Jeff Tapper is a Senior Consultant at Digital Primates IT Consulting Group, which focuses on the development of RIAs and empowering clients through mentoring. Jeff has been developing internet-based applications since 1995, for a myriad of clients including Major League Baseball, Conde Nast, Harley Davidson, Toys R Us, IBM, Dow Jones, American Express and Morgan Stanley. As an Instructor, he is certified to teach all of Adobe's courses on Flex, AIR, ColdFusion and Flash development. He has been working with Flex since the earliest alphas of Flex 1, and started his ColdFusion development on CF 1.5. Jeff has written 9 books, and is currently working on his 10th. Among the more recent releases are "Adobe Flex 3: Training from the Source" and "Breaking out of the Browser with Adobe AIR".
Jeffry Houser
Jeffry Houser is a technical entrepreneur that likes to share cool stuff with other people. Jeffry Houser is the Brains behind Flextras, a set of interface Flex Components that save you time and help you create better Flex interfaces. Jeffry has a Computer Science degree from the days before business met the Internet and has solved a problem or two in his programming career. In 1999, Jeffry started DotComIt, an Adobe Solutions Partner specializing in Rich Internet Applications with Flex and ColdFusion. Jeffry is an Adobe Community Expert and produces The Flex Show, a podcast that includes expert interviews and screencast tutorials. He also hosts the Flextras Friday Lunch Podcast, a weekly live Q&A session where you can get your questions answered. Jeffry has spoken at user groups and conferences all over the US, is the co-manager of the Hartford CT Adobe User Group, author of three technical books, and over 30 articles. In his spare time Jeffry is a musician, old school adventure game aficionado, recording engineer, and he owns a Wii. Find more about Flextras at http://www.flextras.com, or check out his podcast at http://www.theflexshow.com, or you can read his personal blog at http://www.jeffryhouser.com
Rich Shupe
Rich Shupe is the founder of FMA -- a full-service multimedia development company and training facility in New York City. Rich teaches ActionScript and other digital technologies worldwide. He is a proud first-time presenter at Flash/Flex Wall Street, and a veteran of such conferences as Flashbelt, Flash on the Beach, Flash on Tap, and FlashForward, among others. He is an adjunct professor in the MFA department of New York's School of Visual Arts, as well as the the author or co-author of several Flash books including "Learning ActionScript 3.0", "The ActionScript 3 Quick Reference Guide", and "Learning Flash CS4 Professional" (all O'Reilly).
Shashank Tiwari
Shashank Tiwari is a Managing Partner & CTO at Treasury of Ideas, a technology driven innovation and value optimization company. As an experienced software developer and architect, he is adept in a multitude of technologies. He is an internationally recognized speaker, author and mentor. As an expert group member on a number of JCP (Java Community Process) specifications he has been actively participating in shaping the future of Java. He is also an Adobe Flex Champion and a common voice in the RIA community. Currently, he passionately builds rich high performance scalable applications and advises many on RIA and SOA adoption. His clients range from large financial service corporations to brilliant startups, whom he helps translate cutting edge ideas into reality. He is also actively engaged in training and mentoring developers and architects in leading edge technology. He is the author of a number of books and articles, including Advanced Flex 3 (Apress, 2008) and Professional BlazeDS (Wiley, 2009). He lives with his wife and two sons in New York. More information about him can be accessed at his website -- www.shanky.org.
Simon Horwith
Simon is the Chief Technology Officer at Nylon Technology, a software development company based in midtown Manhattan (http://www.nylontechnology.com). Simon joined Nylon after spending over a decade in the Washington, DC area developing and designing enterprise software solutions for large government and private sector clients. Simon has been using ColdFusion since version 1 and is the former Editor-in-Chief of ColdFusion Developer's Journal. In 2004, while Flex was still in Alpha, Simon embraced the technology and began focusing more of his attention on user experience - he has been using Flex to create cutting edge software ever since - even moving from the Adobe ColdFusion Community Expert team to the Adobe Flex Community Expert team and the Flex Champions program in 2007 - Simon is also an Adobe Certified Master Instructor for both the Flex and ColdFusion products. Though he still has a strong hands-on focus towards application architecture and development, as CTO at Nylon, Simon spends much of his time advising companies on technology and exploring new ways to deliver better returns on investment. In addition to presenting at user groups and conferences around the world, he has also been a contributing author of several books and technical papers, and in 2005 Simon won the MAX 2005 Speaker Competition at the Macromedia MAX conference in Anaheim, CA.
Wade Arnold
Wade Arnold is the CEO of T8DESIGN, a rich media and application firm. Arnold has an active dialog with Adobe and actively participates in prerelease beta development of Flash, Flex, and AIR. Arnold is passionately involved in open source Flash/Flex development and aligns T8DESIGN behind these initiatives. Arnold is the lead developer of Zend Amf an open source implementation of Flash Remoting. In 2008, Arnold co-authored "The Essential Guide to Open Source Flash Development". T8DESIGN works with hundreds of community banks and medium to enterprise customers including CKE Restaurants, Nike, McDonalds, John Deere, AT&T, Lindsay Corporation, Best Buy, and the Department of Defense. Arnold has a degree in Computer Science emphasizing intelligent systems and an MBA from the University of Iowa.
Yakov Fain
Yakov Fain is a Managing Director and a Partner at Farata Systems, a company that provides consulting services in the field of development of enterprise Rich Internet applications to Wall Street and other customers. He authored several technical books, and dozens of articles on software development. Recently he co-authored the book , "Rich Internet Applications with Adobe Flex and Java: Secrets of the Masters". He's a co-author of the upcoming O'Reilly book "Enterprise Development with Flex". Sun Microsystems has nominated and awarded Mr. Fain with the title of Java Champion, which was presented to only a hundred people in the world. He leads the Princeton Java Users Group. Yakov is Certified Adobe Flex Instructor.