RailsConf 2012 speakers

Richard Huang is a senior engineer, a passionate rubyist and open source advocate, he created rails_best_practices gem, and also built the websites rails-bestpractices.com and railsbp.com

Ryan Stout has also been doing web development for fifteen years and has been working with Rails for the last six. He runs a small web-consulting agency and has been involved in startups ranging from social gaming to online dating and domain search. He spent the last year developing a stealth startup that uses both natural language processing systems and modern machine learning techniques.

Sarah Mei is a Ruby and JavaScript developer from San Francisco. She has been programming since the days when Java was the new hotness, and for the last two years she's been at Pivotal Labs. She's on the core team for Diaspora and Pie, and contributes code to many other open source projects. She also co-founded RailsBridge, a non-profit that has taught more than 600 people how to program in the last three years.

Steve Jang is a software engineer with experience building embedded systems, communication protocols, web services, and Rails and database applications over the last 18 years. After working at Geoworks, Microsoft, and a string of start up companies in Seattle area, he joined Hulu about 6 months ago, and is currently working on device automation framework for Hulu TV devices.

Steve is a Ruby Hero, software craftsman, and an aspiring digital humanities scholar. He spends most of his time contributing to Open Source projects, and maintains both Hackety Hack and Shoes. He also teaches classes with Jumpstart Lab.

Terence works at Heroku, maintaining the Ruby stack and some OSS projects such as Bundler and Resque. When he’s not going to an awesome Heroku or Ruby event, he lives in Austin, TX, the taco capital of America.

Thomas is CTO at Mint Digital where he has worked since the very beginning after acing the interview almost purely on the back of a sharp suit. Having been involved in all of Mint's major projects he has great real world experience in developing mass participation web sites quickly and effectively along with some hard lessons learnt on how to make them stay up. He mainly hacks in ruby although has a growing love for erlang.

Past speaking gigs include Scotland on Rails, London Ruby Users Group and Kings of Code.

As a member of Heroku's incomparable Department of Data, Will runs the world's largest Postgres service. He enjoys improving experiences, pushing boundaries, and simplifying everything.

Xavier Shay recently emigrated from Australia to San Francisco to work on the engineering team at Square. Prior, he worked on large Ruby on Rails projects at The Conversation, NZX, Redbubble, and mentored many more. In 2010 he presented a world tour of a training course titled "Your Database Is Your Friend". He has been working with Ruby on Rails for half a decade, and has published and contributed to over 80 open source projects according to GitHub.

Yehuda Katz is a member of the Ember.js, Ruby on Rails and jQuery Core Teams; he spends his daytime hours at the startup he founded, Tilde Inc.. Yehuda is the co-author of the best-selling jQuery in Action, Rails 3 in Action, and is a contributor to Ruby in Practice. He spends most of his time hacking on open source--his main projects, along with others, like Thor, Handlebars and Janus--or traveling the world doing evangelism work. He blogs at http://yehudakatz.com and can be found on Twitter as @wycats.

Zach Dennis is a Software Craftsman/Partner at Mutually Human Software in Grand Rapids, MI. He's a proven RSpec and Ruby guru, founder of the Michigan Ruby User Group and co-author of The RSpec Book. He's contributed to several projects such as Ruby's standard library documentation, Ruby on Rails, and RSpec as well as many of his own. He's been leading and mentoring teams for almost an entire decade. In his spare time he reads copiously and plays the guitar. You can find him as @zachdennis on Twitter and @zdennis on Github.