EuroPython 2009 Speaker Bios
Ali Afshar
Retired medical doctor. Senior software engineer for a company developing PyGTK based medical software. Author of PIDA IDE, Glashammer. Many other open source contributions. Published articles on pygtk.org. Open source advocate.
Emily Bache
Emily Bache is an experienced software developer and programming coach, with a preference for agile methods and Test Driven Development. Over the past decade Emily has worked in a variety of organizations from very small to very large, including many years at AstraZeneca. There she was responsible for the development of an award winning platform for computational chemistry, which was implemented in python. As well as speaking at international conferences such as XP2009, agile2008 and Scandinavian Developer Conference, Emily runs a local python user group, and regularly leads Coder's Dojo sessions there.
Geoffrey Bache
Geoff Bache is an experienced software developer and works for Jeppesen Systems (part of the Boeing Group) in Gothenburg, Sweden. Geoff has particular interests in agile methodologies and dynamic languages, and has pioneered the use of automated system acceptance tests to facilitate frequent communication and feedback between developers and subject matter experts in his organization. Over the years he has used and developed various techniques and tools, most recently the acceptance test tool “TextTest” and the Python GUI recorder/replayer “PyUseCase”. Geoff has presented his work in papers, workshops and tutorials at various conferences in Europe and the USA, including XP, Agile, Europython and Expo-C.
Cosmin Basca
Cosmin is a PhD student with the Digital Enterprise Research Institute at the National University of Ireland, Galway. He is doing research in the field of the Semantic Web and likes to use Python for his work.
In his free time, he wonders how to put Chuck Norris and linked data in the same joke.
Henning Bergmeyer (German Aerospace Centre)
- 1995-2006: Study of Computer Science at the University of Bielefeld, Germany. Focus on robotics, artificial intelligence, agent systems, human-machine interaction and virtual reality
- 2006: Received Master of Computer Science (Diplom) from the University of Bielefeld, Germany. Thesis about ontology modelling for automatic classification of dynamic user interactions in Virtual Reality systems
- since 2007: Research associate at the German Aerospace Center's department for Simulation- and Software Technology. Main subjects: Grid Computing, Scientifc Data Management, Data Provenance
Dr Sue Black (University of Westminster)
Sue Black is Head of Department of Information and Software Systems in the Harrow School of Computer Science at the University of Westminster. She was formerly a Reader in Software Engineering and Head of the Centre for Systems and Software Engineering at London South Bank University.
Sue has recently been campaigning to save Bletchley Park. Details of the campaign can be found at http://www.savingbletchleypark.org/
Sue is involved with the British Computer Society in several respects. She founded the BCSWomen Specialist Group and is a Council member. Sue has been invited to speak on several occasions on the subject of women in IT, the BCSWomen group and recently about Bletchley Park, most notably on BBC News 24 and the BBC Radio 4 Today program
Kit Blake (Infrae)
Kit Blake steers the business course of Infrae, a software servcies company located in Rotterdam, the Netherlands. The company builds open source solutions for content, asset, and document management, including the Silva CMS, the Document Library, and the MOAI Server. Python is the company's lingua franca.
Thomas Bleier (Austrian Institute of Technology)
Thomas Bleier is a system architect at the Austrian Institute of Technology / Austrian Research Centers Gmbh, working at the Environmental Information Systems group on designing and developing data collection, processing and management systems and applications.
Carl Friedrich Bolz (University of Düsseldorf)
Carl Friedrich Bolz is a PhD researcher at the University of Düsseldorf, Germany. He is mostly interested in the efficient implementation of dynamic programming languages. In 2005 he started to contribute to the PyPy project and subsequently became one of the core developers. He has been involved in nearly all areas of PyPy development, from garbage collectors to stackless implementation.
Nick Booker (Clockwork Software Systems)
Nick is a Computer Science graduate, working at Clockwork Software Systems as a system administrator and Python programmer.
He has been programming from a young age having cut his teeth on Commodore BASIC, and has been using Python for four years for work, academic and personal purposes.
Richard Boulton (Lemur Consulting)
I've worked on search technologies in Cambridge, UK, since graduating in Mathematics in 1997, and started the project which became Xapian in 1999, being instrumental in getting it released under the GPL in 2000. Since 2001 I've worked as a consultant, with Lemur Consulting Ltd, helping customers develop and integrate Xapian (and other systems) into all sorts of environments.
Over the last couple of years, I've developed Xappy, and I'm currently building a large suite of components (Flax) to provide ready-to-use interfaces for various search and categorisation functions.
I'm still based in Cambridge, and frequently attend community events in Cambridge and London. Follow me on twitter at @rboulton.
Bojan Bozic (Austrian Institute of Technology)
Bozic Bojan is a software developer at the Austrian Institute of Technology / Austrian Research Centers Gmbh, working at the Environmental Information Systems group on designing and developing data collection, processing and management systems and applications.
Michael Brunton-Spall (Guardian News and Media)
Michael Brunton-Spall is a web developer, working for guardian.co.uk, the website for the Guardian newspaper; the worlds leading liberal voice. As his job mostly involves full time java coding, he uses every opportunity to utilise python where possible, and has presented on Google AppEngine and Django a number of times.
Patrick Büchler
I was born 6 December 1976 in Lucerne Switzerland. Already as a child I was very intersted in computers. I must admit that I used the computer mainly for gaming which is still a big hobby of mine.
After finishing high school I worked for 1 year as a system administrator in a bigger company in the electricity industry. Then, I went to the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology )(ETH) in Zürich and studied computer science. Beginning of 2003 I graduated as Master of Computer Science.
Already during my studies I took part in the foundation of the company soXes which focuses on individual software development. I am now partner of soXes and manage the software development and systems group.
Goncalo Carvalho (The Foundry)
Senior Software Engineer at the Foundry and responsible for the Nuke Python bindings. I have a maths degree and published at SIGGRAPH on topics related to programmable shading. In my free time I like motorsport and can be found around track circuits in the UK.
Nicolas Chauvat
Long-time Python user. Founder and CEO of Logilab. Former member of the EuroPython organisation team.
John Cobo (British Airways)
John been involved in most aspects of software development, design, and architecture over many years using a wide variety of languages, tools and frameworks. When confronted with automated testing tools he found what was missing was a tool to generate full coverage tests. He set about creating such a tool using Python (for the first time). The result is Test-O-Matic.
Rob Collins (Folding Software)
Rob Collins is a director of Folding Software Ltd, specialising in web applications and online payment systems. He has been working mainly in Python for the last six years, with the objective of being able to write vastly complex software systems in ten lines of code. FilterPype is a first step in this direction.
Antonio Cuni (PyPy / University of Genova)
Antonio Cuni has been a geek and computer hobbyist since he was a child. He has been actively collaborating at PyPy 3.5 years, first by writing the CLI/.NET backend as a part of his master thesis, then as a researcher at HHU University of Duesseldorf. At the moment he is a PhD student at University of Genova, and continues working on PyPy as a part of his scientific research; moreover, he is also collaborating with Merlinux GmbH on various activities.
Andrew Dalke
Andrew Dalke is a Gothenburg, Sweden based consultant, specializing in software development and training for computational chemistry and biology. It seems like every piece of software has its own specialized output format, so I've been writing parsers for a long time. I've also written about them for my web site, including LOLPython, a LOLCAT-influenced version of Python which I presented at a lightning talk at EuroPython 2007.
Damien Diederen
Damien spent more than seven years developing commercial software using a mixture of low- and high-level languages without ever being able to "pick a winner." A few months ago, he decided to see what could be done to bridge the throughput of the former with the productivity of the latter.
His previous activities include teaching people advanced topics in dynamic languages, customizing large EDA systems (http://cadence.com), and generating pretty maps under critical time constraints (http://ionicsoft.com).
Damien has a background in Computer Science, and a specialization in robotics and control systems.
Mike Dirolf (10gen)
I am a 23 year old Python programmer living and working in New York City. I started learning Python in 2003 and continued using it throughout my studies at Princeton University. When I graduated I was hired at a small startup called 10gen. As we began to focus entirely on our database - MongoDB - I became responsible for all of our tools supporting MongoDB in Python. Our Python driver now powers ShopWiki and several other large sites, with more on the way.
Outside of work I love to play soccer, longboard, and write the occasional web app just for fun.
Cory Doctorow
Cory Doctorow (craphound.com) is a science fiction author, activist, journalist and blogger -- the co-editor of Boing Boing (boingboing.net) and the author of the bestselling Tor Teens novel LITTLE BROTHER. He is the former European director of the Electronic Frontier Foundation and co-founded the UK Open Rights Group. Born in Toronto, Canada, he now lives in London.
Bernd Dorn
- Currently CTO at Lovely Systems (http://www.lovelysystems.com) implementing large-scale portals for publishing companies.
- Contributor to Zope and related projects, Pyjamas and various other open source projects.
- Programming Python since 1999
Bea Düring
I am a PMP certified project manager who have been working with agile practices since 1999. I was involved in the project management of the EU-funded part of the PyPy project and am still involved in PyPy. Since almost two year I have been working as a development manager at Open End, working on the product launch of Eutaxia. I also teach project management, user requirements and agile project management with Scrum for Learning Tree International. Oh, and I published some papers as well (for XP2006, Agile2006 and some more conferences).
Edward Easton
Edward Easton has been a software engineer since graduating from Sydney University in 2001 and a Python enthusiast for over five years after being drawn to Python’s elegance and agility. Edward is a director of Folding Software Ltd and has worked in most corners of the software business but specialises in financial payment systems and web-based applications.
Bruce Eckel (MindView, Inc)
Bruce Eckel (www.BruceEckel.com) is the author of Thinking in Java (Prentice-Hall, 1998, 2nd Edition, 2000, 3rd Edition, 2003, 4th Edition, 2006), the Hands-On Java Seminar CD ROM (available on the Web site), Thinking in C++ (PH 1995; 2nd edition 2000, Volume 2 with Chuck Allison, 2003), C++ Inside & Out (Osborne/McGraw-Hill 1993), among others. He's given hundreds of presentations throughout the world, published over 150 articles in numerous magazines, was a founding member of the ANSI/ISO C++ committee and speaks regularly at conferences. He provides public and private seminars & design consulting in OO Design and Python (with Flex UIs).
Kyle Ellrott (UCSD)
Kyle Ellrott is a Post Doctoral researcher working for the University of California in San Diego. His PhD is in Life Science, with a BS in Computer Science. He works on computational aspects of protein analysis as part of the Joint Center for Structural Genomics, a project of the US National Institute of Health (NIH). His research interests include Bioinformatics, Computational Biology and applying high performance computing to the analysis of biological information.
Martijn Faassen
Martijn Faassen has been a Python programmer for over a decade. He has worked on many projects but is especially active in the Zope community. He's also the founder of the lxml project which is the go-to library for XML programming in Python.
In the last few years he's been busy kicking Zope into the second decade of the 21th century a few years early with the help of a caveman called Grok.
Esteve Fernandez
Based in Barcelona, Esteve Fernandez is the CTO of Fluidinfo where he works on the design and implementation of FluidDB - a new non-relational database. Prior to Fluidinfo, he was a Software Architect at BMAT (2006-07), a Software Architect at Scytl Secure Electronic Voting (2005-07), a Software Engineer at AASIT (2004-05) and a Programmer with Sindominio (2000-03). He holds a M.Sc. in CS from the Open University of Catalunya, and a B.Sc. in CS from the University of Barcelona.
Jonathan Fine
Jonathan is trained as a mathematician, and is an expert in TeX and LaTeX. He learned Python because he wants to use it as a front-end language to the excellent TeX typesetting engine. Since then he's set up TeX as an online web-service for rendering formulas and is busy writing client side JavaScript to take advantage of MathTran.
He works for The Open University as a specialist in TeX and mathematical content, and currently has an internal secondment to work on problems and solutions of mathematical content on web pages, particularly in the context of distance learning.
Mark Fink (Tabane Limited, Schmiechen, Germany)
Mark Fink earned a diploma degree in Computer Science at the Georg-Simon-Ohm UAS in Nuremberg, Germany. Programming is pure fun for him so after graduation he started as ... a programmer! Already in his first project assignment he realized that testing of the finished product was not given enough attention which resulted in bad quality of the product. That experience was bugging him constantly. Consequently he moved into testing and test automation.
Mark Fink has years of experience in the areas of build automation, continuous integration, load testing, and functional testing. He started programming Python in 2005 when he needed tools for bulk file analysis. Meanwhile Python is his first choice for programming testing tools and utilities.
Michael Foord (Resolver Systems)
Michael Foord has been programming with Python since 2003. Since 2006 he has been working full time with IronPython for Resolver Systems.
He is the author of "IronPython in Action" for Manning Publications, and blogs and writes far more on Python than is healthy. In 2008 he was made the first Microsoft MVP for dynamic languages.
Geoffrey French
I started out working in 3D graphics, initially with an interest in game development. I came across Python in 2004 through the use of SCONS. My interests now focus on UI and application development.
Michael Graz
Michael is a software architect working in the area of algorithmic trading. He has extensive experience in software engineering and development in the financial and aerospace industries. Michael was a speaker at the 2007 EuroPython conference, and has been a contributor to the development of the IPython pyreadline module.
Zeth (University of Birmingham)
Zeth is a web development consultant based in Birmingham, who works for the University of Birmingham, as well as doing freelance work for private companies. Zeth is also, for unknown reasons, co-lugmaster of Birmingham Linux User Group, founder of Python West Midlands and vice-chair of the PyCon UK Society.
Simon Greenish (Bletchley Park Trust)
Simon Greenish, Director/CEO – Bletchley Park Trust
Simon has a Degree in Engineering Science from Durham University and is a Chartered Civil Engineer.
He spent the first 25 years of his working life in the construction industry, with some 15 years involved with planning and building the new infrastructure for the UK’s air traffic control system, this included the new air traffic control centre at Swanwick. He then joined the Royal Air Force Museum to help them develop and expand and in the course of 10 years raised £23million for three major projects at two sites, the last of which, (an international display based on the history of the Cold war) was opened to the public in 2007. He became Director of Collections at the Museum in 2004, responsible for over 1 million objects and some 200 historic aircraft, and in 2006 left to take over the position of Director/CEO of Bletchley Park.
His interests include classical music, restoring old cars and history
Jacob Hallén
Jacob Hallén has been programming in various languages for the last 30 years. It is now 9 years since he came to Python and decided that other languages were too much of a bother. He has since then worked on many Python based projects, including a trouble ticket system at Open End, a booking application for canoes and kayaks, a webshop for wines and several different conference handling systems. While Nevow has caused a lot of frustration, it has been bliss compared to all other web frameworks that Jacob has tried.
Matt Hamilton (Netsight Internet Solutions)
Matt Hamilton is Technical Director of Netsight Internet Solutions, one of the UKs longest established Zope and Plone development companies.
Matt has been involved in Zope since 1999 and a strong advocate for Open Source and python, speaking at conferences and universities. Matt is also a member of the Plone Foundation board of directors.
Jonathan Hartley (Resolver Systems)
Jonathan is delighted to find himself developing in IronPython for Resolver Systems, a feisty start-up populated entirely by people who are smarter than he is. Previous work includes digital signal processing of radar echoes from 'non-co-operative targets' for the EuroFighter aircraft, and geographical information systems for clients such as Ordnance Survey. He lives in London with his wife Susan and a growing collection of trusty Guitar Hero controllers.
Sir Tony Hoare (Microsoft Research)
Professor Sir Tony Hoare is well-known for developing the Quicksort algorithm: subsequently he headed up the Programming Research Group in the Oxford University Computing Laboratory and developed Hoare logic for verifying program correctness, and the formal language Communicating Sequential Processes (CSP) used to specify the interactions of concurrent processes (including the Dining philosophers problem) and inspired the Occam programming language.
Sir Tony was awarded the ACM Turing award in 1980 and was knighted in 2000 for services to education and computer science.
Steve Holden (Holden Web, LLC)
Steve is a long-time Python user, author of "Python Web Programming" and chairman of the Python Software Foundation. He lives in Fairfax, Virginia with his wife, Dorothy, two cats and a dog.
Steve is looking forward to hearing from Python users about how the PSF can help them, and how they can help the PSF.
Greg Holling
Greg Holling is an independent consultant specializing in software mentoring, training, and development.
He has over 25 years of software experience in a wide variety of application domains. He has been developing Python applications since 2007. Greg has developed and taught software development courses for companies across the U.S.
Tobias Ivarsson
Tobias Ivarsson has worked on the Jython project since 2007, with emphasis on compiler work, and is the main developer behind the advanced compiler project. He has completed two Google Summer of Code projects on Jython compilation. Tobias is also a contributor to OpenJDK working on features that make the JVM a better platform for dynamic languages. Tobias is finishing his masters degree at Linköping University in Sweden. In addition Tobias works at the promising Swedish startup Neo Technology that develops the Neo4j graph database where he works with framework integration and tooling.
Horst JENS
My name is Horst JENS, i work as an programmer / computer teacher in Vienna, Austria. Founded http://www.spielend-programmieren.at (~programming while playing) and teach young students and kids the joy of open source game development. I also try to write a book about PyGame.
David Jones (Ravenbrook Limited)
David is a consultant employed by Ravenbrook Limited http://www.ravenbrook.com a software engineering consultancy founded in 1987. Python has been used in Ravenbrook since 1999 to create bespoke software solutions. Being a lazy sort of chap David increasingly finds himself coding things up in Python because it's simply too much effort to use anything else. David holds a degree in maths from Cambridge, but since then has been a professional software engineer creating things like memory managers, language implementations, robot controllers, video games, and even the odd bit of information retrieval.
In his spare time David enjoys rock climbing and playing Lego with his nephew.
Terry Jones (Fluidinfo)
Bio - this is reduced from a version O'Reilly use. If you want more meat, see http://en.oreilly.com/et2008/public/schedule/speaker/4631
Terry Jones is founder and CEO of Fluidinfo, a London and Barcelona based startup. Previously he was a postdoc in Zoology at the Uni. of Cambridge (2004-07), part-time professor in CS at Pompeu Fabra (2005-06), CTO of Eatoni Ergonomics in New York (2000-04), a postdoc in Cognitive Science at UCSD (1998-99), CEO of Teclata in Barcelona (1996-98), and a postdoc and graduate fellow at the Santa Fe Institute (1992-96). He has a Ph.D. in CS from the Uni. of New Mexico, an M.Math from the Uni. of Waterloo, and a B.Sc. in CS from Sydney Uni.
Andreas Kaempf (Soundience Limited)
Andreas Kaempf helps clients in a variety of industries solve complex problems by applying computer simulation, social network analysis, data mining, and other analytic techniques. Solutions are delivered using richly interactive web sites, created in Python of course. Andreas has been developing in Python, C/C++ and the Web as part of his consulting for 8 years. Prior to starting Soundience in 2001, he worked at the consulting firm McKinsey & Company and at Air Canada. Andreas holds an MBA from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and an undergraduate degree in business and computer science from McGill University, and lives near London.
Pekka Klärck (Eliga Oy)
I am a tester-developer and software contractor from Finland. I work for Eliga Oy, which is a one-man company concentrating on test automation and Agile testing. My other areas of interest and expertise include Agile practices in general, dynamic programming languages (particularly Python), and open source software development. I am also the lead developer of Robot Framework.
Holger Krekel (MerLinux GMBH)
Holger Krekel is a co-founder of the PyPy project and participates on many levels. He is the initiator and maintainer of the popular py.test and a few other tools. In 2004 he founded merlinux, a company focusing on PyPy and py.test developments. Holger has spoken at many EuroPython and PyCon confereces and gave well received testing tutorials at EuroPython 2008, Pycon-UK 2008 and Pycon US 2009.
Jonathan Lange (Canonical)
Born from a stone egg on a mountain-top, Jonathan has been hacking in Python for all of his adult life.
Core contributor to Twisted; primary author of the Twisted Trial testing framework; Bazaar hacker; Launchpadder and sought-after conversationalist.
Very interested in testing, developer collaboration and building big things that don't break.
Jan Langer (TU Chemnitz)
Jan is a research assistent and PhD student in the Circuit and System Design Group at Chemnitz University of Technology. His research interests are in hardware design and verification.
Luke Leighton
Luke Leighton is an outspoken and independent Free Software Advocate with a wide range of rare expertise in highly complex systems such as NT Domains Architecture, Exchange 5.5 and MAPI, Samba TNG, FreeDCE, Webkit, Wine, Linux embedded kernel HTC Smartphone reverse-engineering and much more.
So he likes Pyjamas a lot because the simplicity and power it brings to web development is a refreshing change to all that alphabet soup.
Gregor Lingl
I'm high school teacher in Vienna. I've been teaching mathematics, physics and computer science to 5th to 12th graders for more than 30 years.
I am also engaged in teacher's education and training and I gave courses and seminars on various topics from computer science and mathematics during the last twenty years. I have written the book "Python für Kids" (in German, 3rd. ed. in 2008) aimed at beginning programmers at the age from 12 to 18.
I have developed Python's new turtle module, which now is part of the standard library (since Python 2.6/3.0)
Andreas Löscher
I was born in 1985 in Rodewisch Germany and went there to school. Right now I am a computer science student at the Technical University of Chemnitz. As part of a student job on the university I came in touch with Python. In the last year I worked for the Coremountains GmbH to develop Python Byte Coat.
Orestis Markou
My name is Orestis Markou, and I've been a Python programmer for the past 2.5 years.
My recent projects include PySmell, an autocompletion library for Python. I've also worked on Resolver One, a pythonic spreadsheet.
For the past few months I've working exclusively with PyObjC as a contractor.
Harald Armin Massa (GHUM Harald Massa)
Born. Education in Data Processing and a lot of economics. Own company GHUM Harald Massa since 1999. Doing Python development, PostgreSQL and Oracle databasing, giving seminars and being a speaker. Initiator of ncc1701 project, making Python ready for the Enterprise. Translator for pgadmin and pginstaller projects. Chairing some lightning talks @ EuroPython
Chris McCormick
Chris McCormick has been using computers to make music, video games, and art for most of his life. An engaging speaker, he has presented on these topics at conferences such as Linux.conf.au, Freeplay Independent Game Developer's Conference, and Electrofringe. He has a severe Python dependency.
Stani Michiels
Stani is both a visual artist and architect. In his photos, videos and installations, which are often created with self-designed software, he concentrates on the way architecture functions, particularly as a metaphor for contemporary society. His work has been exhibited in Palais de Tokyo (Paris), MUHKA (Antwerp), OK Video Festival (Jakarta), Galerie Air de Paris (Paris), CEAC (Xiamen, China), the Lyon Biennale 2005 and elsewhere.
Stani has been involved with the Python community for quite a while. He is the author of Phatch, sdxf and SPE, which is a popular python IDE (http://pythonide.stani.be). I have spoken several times at Dutch python conferences and have organized one myself last year.
Trent Nelson
I've structured my professional career with one aim: maximise my ability to collect frequent flyer and hotel loyalty points. My next goal is to figure out how I can leverage diamond level memberships with regards to attracting members of the opposite sex. When not distracted by creative ways to increase my carbon footprint, I enjoy charging ludicrous day rates to oil companies and wealth management banks.
Kevin Noonan (Calbane Ltd)
Kevin Noonan is a professional software developer with over a decade of commercial experience. He has worked on system and server software for two NASDAQ-quoted technology companies; as well as stints with four brand-name financial institutions in Ireland. As an independent observer and enthusiast for cloud-computing, he has made four presentations on the subject in the year to date.
Samuele Pedroni (OpenEnd AB)
Samuele Pedroni has been a PyPy core developer from its earliest days. His interests span across language implementation to software quality. He works at Open End AB in Sweden where he helped design and implement an innovative UI for _Eutaxia_, the just-released company web application. This involved heavily using JavaScript. In that context effectively testing JavaScript became an interest of his.
Fabien Pinckaers (Tiny sprl)
Fabien Pinckaers was only eighteen years old when he started his first company. Today, over ten years later, he has founded and managed several new technology companies, all based on Free / Open Source software.
He originated Tiny ERP, now Open ERP, and is the director of two companies including Tiny sprl, the editor of Open ERP. In three years he has grown the Tiny group from one to sixty-five employees without loans or external fund-raising, and while making a profit.
He has also developed several large scale projects, such as Auction-in-Europe.com, which become the leader in the art market in Belgium. Even today people sell more art works there than on ebay.be.
He is also the founder of the LUG (Linux User Group) of Louvain-la-Neuve, and of several free projects like OpenReport, OpenStuff and Tiny Report. Educated as a civil engineer (polytechnic), he has won several IT prizes in Europe such as Wired and l’Inscene.
John Pinner (Clockwork Software Systems)
John Pinner has been using Unix and then Linux for more years than he cares to remember. He and his company, Clockwork Software Systems, have been using Python as their main development language since 1999 for applications as diverse as electromagnetic compatibility testing and payroll. Through the Linux Emporium they offer both scheduled and bespoke Python training courses, and have provided tutorials at Free Software conferences.
Mark Ramm (SourceForge)
Mark Ramm is the TurboGears 2 leader, and author of a book on TurboGears 1. He's also an all around web guy, and a fan of Python.
William Reade
William studied maths at university but somehow ended up becoming a programmer; he has done a surprisingly wide range of work in a few short years, from writing games and device drivers in C/C++ on Mac OS X to writing Windows business software in IronPython.
He lives in London, works for Resolver Systems, and enjoys sleeping. He vaguely recalls that he once had interests beyond his work and his infant daughter, but can't remember what they actually were.
Armin Rigo
Armin Rigo is the author of the Psyco JIT, as well as the key person behind many of PyPy's advanced details. He is one of the main implementors of PyPy's GCs.
Mikeal Rogers
Mikeal Rogers and Adam Christian are the creators and core developers of Windmill. You can find out more about them on http://www.mikealrogers.com and http://www.adamchristian.com .
Tobias Rundström (Purple Scout)
I am working at Purple Scout AB as a Project Manager and Open Source coordinator since 2009. Purple Scout's focus is integration around Open Source, like Eclipse and Python. Before that I worked with python integration at a telecom company.
I have been active in the Open Source community since 2003 as release manager and now project leader of XMMS2 and been Google summer of code administrator 3 years in a row now.
Andreas Schreiber (German Aerospace Center (DLR))
Andreas Schreiber is head of the Department for Distributed Systems and Component Software of the German Aerospace Center's (DLR) Simulation and Software Technology division. He received a degree in industrial mathematics from Technical University Clausthal. His research fields include grid computing, cloud computing, modern software architectures, user interfaces, and software engineering. He has an over 15-year history of Python development in the field of scientific and industrial applications and has convinced many engineers in the aerospace industry to use Python.
Mark Shannon
Mark Shannon is a final year PhD student at the University of Glasgow.
Michael Sparks (BBC Research)
Michael started writing code many many years ago, starting with those Usborne books with pictures of little robots back in the 80s on a ZX81. Over the years he's coded with a variety of stuff as a result, moving through 8 bit micros, to Amigas then to PCs, skipping to Linux over 10 years ago before it became fashionable. He settled on Python after years of BASIC, 6502 & 68000 machine code, C, Amiga E, perl, C++, Java and a smattering of other languages, and rarely feels the need to make his life hard by using a different language, though he does when a clear need arises.
Michael currently works at BBC Research as a Senior Research Engineer. His work there has involved all sorts of stuff from large scale network systems through digital TV transcode & archive systems, through user participation toolsets, web, mobile & TV, almost exclusively in Python for the past several years.
Ville Säävuori
Ville Säävuori, aka Uninen, is a Finnish Web Developer, currently working as a consultant on Web based information systems.
Ville has been working on Web-related stuff since 1999. He fell in love with Python after discovering Django in late 2005. You can read his thoughts on Web development at http://www.unessa.net/en/
Christian Theune (Gocept)
I'm a software developer and co-founder of gocept, a Zope-Consulting/-Development/-Hosting company based in Germany.
I work on the Zope Framework, the ZODB and various other packages and have formal roles in the German Zope Users Group and the Zope Foundation.
Ivo Timmermans
Ivo Timmermans is a long time Python enthusiast and professional Python user living in Rotterdam. Has a background in applied mathematics and server application development: after having worked on in workflow management software, he is now the architect and lead developer for high performance data mining software. After coding for work, he does more coding, reading, walking, visiting one of Rotterdams many museums or rowing on its many canals and lakes.
Christian Tismer
Christian Tismer is known as the inventor of Stackless Python, and one of the original members of the PyPy project. Psyco is a bit similar to Stackless Python in terms of feeling lonely as a developer. It is just 20 times harder and lonelier.
Tommi Virtanen
Tv's a software developer who's interested in file systems, networks, finding neat solutions to difficult problems, and shiny bits. He's been using computers since 1982, Linux since 1993 and Python since 2000. You can read his writings at http://eagain.net/
Frank Wierzbicki (Sun Microsystems)
Frank Wierzbicki is the lead of the Jython project. He has presented at PyCon, JavaOne and EuroPython. He is employed by Sun Microsystems where he works on Jython full-time.
Niko Wilbert
Currently I am working on my PhD in Computational Neuroscience at the Humboldt University in Berlin. Before that I studied Physics. My work involves simulations with large scale networks for visual data processing. I joined the MDP open source project to extend it with the required capabilities like hierarchical networks and parallelization.
Simon Willison (Guardian News and Media)
Simon Willison is a co-creator of the Django web framework and an all-round web technology enthusiast. Simon works for Guardian News and Media as a software architect for both guardian.co.uk and the recently launched Guardian Developer Network. Before joining the Guardian Simon worked as a consultant for clients that included the BBC, Automattic and GCap Media. He maintains a popular Web development weblog at http://simonwillison.net/
Alex Willmer
Alex Willmer is a GIS and application administrator with 5 years experience. He has spoken at PyCon UK, UKUUG, and to local groups on GIS and data loading.
He uses Python for scripting, monitoring, loading and system administration. His interests include mapping, lasagne and electric vehicles.
Russel Winder (Concertant LLP)
Originally a theoretical physicist (QCD and stuff). Then a Unix systems programmer. Then a Reader in Software Engineering. Then Professor of Computing Science, not to mention being Head of Department. Escaped academia to be CTO of a startup, but the accountants caused failure. Now a consultant, analyst, author and trainer in all things parallel, Java, Python, Groovy and C++, and a founding partner of Concertant LLP.
Chris Withers (Simplistix)
Chris has been wrestling snakes for almost a decade now. This has predominantly been with Zope but has branched out into the wider world of Python web frameworks and general Python programming as Zope has slowly tried to relinquish its status as the pariah of the Python world.