Aki Iskandar is an entrepreneur and software architect. He owns and operates two small software companies—one is a consultancy, specializing in Ruby on Rails and native iOS development, and the other provides an online marketing platform for small companies. This online service has been completely built using Ruby on Rails, and is hosted on the Heroku infrastructure. Aki has launched other subscription-based online services, before the days of cloud computing, claiming that he was spending more time administering the servers (load balancing, databases, replication, web servers, e-mail servers, monitoring, file syncs, and so on) than writing code for the applications. Today, he recommends that his clients take the cloud computing route over self-hosting, with very few exceptions. His favorite cloud provider is Heroku.

Prior to starting his companies, he spent 14 years as a consultant. During that time, he was a consultant for various large companies, including Microsoft, Compuware, Progressive Insurance, Allstate Insurance, KeyBank, Ernst & Young, and Charles Schwab. In his last full-time position, which was almost three years ago, he served as an enterprise architect at PNC Bank (as a core member of PNC's Enterprise Architecture team, and he also co-chaired their Architecture Review Board). You can read Aki's blog and learn more about his companies on his personal website www.iskandar.us. He lives with his son, Justin, in the suburbs of Cleveland, Ohio.

Andrea Mostosi is a passionate software developer. In 2003, he started at high school with a single-node LAMP stack and he grew up by adding more languages, components, and nodes. He graduated from Milan and worked for several web-related projects. He is currently working with data, trying to discover information hidden behind huge datasets.