Alexander Barnes has been a professional software engineer for over 5 years after graduating summa from the Texas A&M class of '09 with a BS in computer engineering and a minor in mathematics. He started his career at Cisco Systems, working with a variety of Java web technologies and tools. At Cisco, he played a leading role in developing the RESTful User Data Services (UDS) for the CallManager product and helped develop and maintain the administration and user portals. He pioneered the transformation of his team's build system from Ant to Gradle for the numerous project tools and utilities maintained by the team and became a subject-matter expert on Git, Gradle, and Linux in particular.
Alex decided to move closer to his family, recently joining Novo Dia Group in Austin as a senior Java developer. He is an avid advocate of best software practices and the usage of the right tools for the job. Some of his favorite tools include Git, Gerrit, Jenkins, Sonar, Gradle, Java, and Linux. He strives to design and develop freely, refactor to consistent design patterns as appropriate, and focus on reducing mutable states. Alex occasionally blogs about technologies and other interests on his website at http://toastedbits.com/.
Alex enjoys pursuing other creative hobbies in his spare time; playing his guitar and listening to a lot of rock, metal, and electronic music. He also wishes to pick up piano and music production techniques to create his own electronic tracks in the future. He is also an enthusiast of craft beers and playing board games and poker with friends.
Scott Battaglia is a senior software development engineer for Audible Inc. (an Amazon.com, Inc. company), the leading provider of premium digital spoken audio information. He currently leads the shared Android platform team and coaches on a variety of topics, including open source, interviewing, and scrum. Prior to this, he was an identity management architect and senior application developer with Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey.
He has actively contributed to various open source projects, including Apereo Central Authentication Service and Inspektr, and has previously contributed to Spring Security, Apereo OpenRegistry, and Apereo uPortal. He has spoken at a variety of conferences, including Jasig, EDUCAUSE, and Spring Forward on topics such as CAS, Identity Management, Spring Security, and software development practices.
Michael Putters has been working with various technologies for the past 15 years, from low-level assembler projects to Angular websites, his main interests being compiler and graphics development. More recently, he's been involved with the Gradle project as it is the only build system capable of handling any type of project, Java-based applications, native C++ software, mobile applications on iOS and Android, and even JavaScript and TypeScript websites. Currently, he's acting as the CTO at a number of tech companies in Paris, France.
Andreas Schmid was born in 1985 and started working as a technology consultant in Munich in 2009 after an apprenticeship as an IT specialist and business informatics studies. His passion is creating software and solving difficult IT problems.
In his career, he has participated in Java enterprise projects, contributing to database migrations, expediting the automation of various topics, as well as introducing and coaching new software engineering techniques such as agile software development and test-driven development. It's been over 7 years since he started using it and the relies on continuous integration and delivery as much as possible.
Further, he believes in the advantages of open source software and likes to immerse himself into these tools to get the most out of them. This deep understanding also enables him to contribute by providing patches and fixes in his spare time to further improve these tools.
While being a software engineer and doing things right, he also had the pleasure of being a product owner. In this area, the important question he had to answer was, "Do we do the right things?" So, he also gets his teeth into validated learning for shorter product development cycles.
He likes to be where state-of-the-art software engineering practices and reality collide.