Date: 3/31/2010 Wed
Time: 6:00pm-9:00pm
Location: Google Campus
Address: Maxwell Tech Talk at 1300 Crittenden Lane, Mountain View, CA 94043
Food & Drink: Sponsored by Google

Discussion Panel
Moderator:
Kevin Nilson, Principal Software Architect
Speakers:
Ben Galbraith, Co-founder at Ajaxian.com Brad Neuberg, Developer at Google Chet Haase, Adobe Flex SDK team member Michael Carter, Founder at Orbited Project & Official Contributor for W3C HTML5

Ben Galbraith
Co-founder at Ajaxian.com
Ben Galbraith is the co-director of Developer Tools at Mozilla and the co-founder of Ajaxian.com. Ben has long juggled interests in both business and tech, having written his first computer program at six years old, started his first business at ten, and entered the IT workforce at twelve.

He has delivered hundreds of technical presentations world-wide, produced several technical conferences, and co-authored over a half-dozen books. He has enjoyed a variety of business and technical roles throughout his career, including CEO, CIO, CTO, and Chief Software Architect roles in medical, publishing, media, manufacturing, advertising, and software industries. He lives in Palo Alto with his wife and five children.


Michael has always been driven to understand what makes scalable systems tick, particularly real-time, browser-facing systems. He is especially focused on standardizing a protocol for Comet (HTTP Push) to ensure that all developers can benefit from his research on Comet and real-time Web infrastructures.
Michael spends his time consulting, js.io, csp, and organizing Silicon Valley-based JavaScript interests groups (http://javascript.meetup.com/9/ & http://www.meetup.com/bayjax/ )

Beginning in 2006, Michael founded and led the development of Orbited, the Open Source Comet daemon, for two years. In his work with Orbited he has made significant advances not only in backporting future standards to today's browsers, but also in experimenting with various server architectures for real-time applications. Much of his involvement with the project has centered on creating scalable Comet technology and providing solid integration points with today's synchronous, request/response-based technologies.
Michael frequently speaks at conferences, participates in drafting standards, and interacts closely with Open Source communities. His recent speaking engagements include OSCON, Pycon, and AjaxExperience. Michael is also an active CometDaily blogger where he has written several articles on topics related to scaling Comet and Web frameworks.

Chet Haase
Computer Scientist at Adobe
Chet Haase is a senior computer scientist on the Flex SDK team at Adobe, focusing on graphics issues and features. In a former life, he worked for Sun Microsystems as a client architect in the Desktop Java group, working with client technologies such as Java 2D, Swing, AWT, and deployment. He is coauthor with Romain Guy of the book Filthy Rich Clients: Developing Animated and Graphical Effects for Desktop Java Applications. He and Guy are presenting a session on filthy rich clients, beyond Java.

Brad Neuberg



Kevin Nilson is currently a Principal Software Architect for a Large Financial Firm in Silicon Valley. He is the co-lead of the Silicon Valley Web Developer JUG. He is also the co-lead of the Silicon Valley Google Technology User Group and Assistant Organizer of the Silicon Valley JavaScript Meetup. Prior to his current work, Kevin had extensive industry software engineering and consulting experience with companies such as: Pfizer, Northrop Grumman, and AT&T Corporation. He also worked part-time as an adjunct professor at the College of San Mateo. He is also a core contributer for confetto.org, a web based real-time open source conference collaboration tool used at conferences such as: Silicon Valley Code Camp and Devoxx. He is a Sun Certified Java Programmer and Sun Certified Web Component Developer.