ACCU 2007 Speakers

Conference 2007

Andrei Alexandrescu

Andrei Alexandrescu is a Ph.D. candidate at University of Washington, specializing in natural language processing. He is known in the C++ community for his award-winning books Modern C++ Design and C++ Coding Standards (the latter written together with Herb Sutter) and for his popular Generic<Programming> column in the C++ Users Journal magazine.

Giovanni Asproni

Giovanni Asproni is an independent consultant and contractor who specialises in agile software development, software architecture and design, project management, with a strong passion for writing simple code (especially in C++, Python, and Java). He is a member of the ACCU, the AgileAlliance and the chair of the London XPDay6 conference.

Tony Barrett-Powell

Tony Barrett-Powell has been involved in software development since 1990, mainly working as a practitioner in C, C++ and Java languages focused on object orientated techniques. More recently Tony has become more focused on the process of software development as his experience has shown him agile processes are a factor in project success.

With his free time, which is minimal nowadays, he enjoys composing music, reading and watching films.

Hans Boehm

Hans Boehm is the primary author of a widely used multithreaded garbage collector library. He was HPs representative to the JSR 133 effort to repair the Java "memory model", and is driving an ongoing effort to extend the C++ standard with clean semantics for threads, and particularly shared variable accesses.

He holds a Ph.D. from Cornell University. He is a past Chair of ACM SIGPLAN, and of the POPL, ISMM and VEE research symposia. He won the 2003 PLDI most influential paper award, and the 2006 SIGPLAN Distinguished Service Award. He works for HP Laboratories.

Walter Brown

A C++ programmer for over half of his 40 years in computing, Walter Brown earned a B.A. in mathematics and M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in computer science. His professional career has encompassed academic, industrial, and research environments. He is currently in the Scientific Tools group at Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory near Chicago, Illinois, where he functions as an in-house C++ consultant and educator.

Dr. Brown is also an active member of the ANSI C++ Standards Committee. His efforts to improve the usefulness of C++ in the scientific and mathematical user communities include "A Proposal to Add Mathematical Special Functions to the C++ Standard Library" (accepted for TR1) and "Random Number Generation in C++0X: A Comprehensive Proposal" (accepted for C++0X)

James O. Coplien

James O. Coplien is a Senior Agile Coach and Senior Systems Architect at Nordija A/S in Denmark. He has been a software professional for more than 30 years. His career spans areas as broad as telecommunication software development (at AT&T), software research (Bell Laboratories), academia (at Vrije Universiteit Brussel, where he held the 2003-2004 Vloebergh Lehrstuhl), EDA (at DAFCA, Inc.), and international consulting and lecturing. His book Advanced C++ shaped a generation of developers, and his two subsequent books have set new standards in software design and development. He is a founding member and Member Emeritus of the Hillside Group, which founded software patterns. Nordija A/S is the premier software development house in Denmark offering consulting on Agile development, with eight years of experience using Agile development methods.

Schalk Cronje

Schalk Cronjé has been around computers ever since learning ZX81 BASIC in 1982 and typing in bytes of Z80 machine code by hand. After that humble start he has subsequent engineering degree he worked in industry on Windows, OS/2, Linux, Solaris and some embedded platforms mostly in C and C++. He can sometimes be found working on FLOSS projects, especially projects related to the localisation of software into African languages.

He currently works in the UK office of one of the world's leading internet security and antivirus companies, where he has introduced advanced generative programming techniques as part of product development. He continually strives to improve the effectiveness of software development processes at all levels. Nowadays he leads advanced anti-spam technology research and provides thought leadership.

Lawrence Crowl

Dr Lawrence Crowl has been mixing threads and C++ off and on since 1985. Along the way, he has published work on parallel programming, taught computer science, worked on a major C++ compiler, and contributed to the C++ standard.

Rachel Davies

Rachel Davies is a consultant and facilitator. She coaches teams in XP and Scrum and advocates the use of frequent retrospectives to help teams adapt their process to their context. Rachel has presented at many agile conferences and is chair of the AgileAlliance.

Jutta Eckstein

Jutta Eckstein, a partner of IT communication, is an independent consultant and trainer from Braunschweig, Germany. Her know-how in agile processes is based on over ten years experience in developing object-oriented applications. She has a unique experience in applying agile processes within medium-sized to large mission-critical projects. This is also the topic of her book 'Agile Software Development in the Large'. Besides engineering software she has been designing and teaching OT courses in industry. Having completed a course of teacher training and led many 'train the trainer' programs in industry, she focuses also on techniques which help teach OT and is a main lead in the pedagogical patterns project. She has presented work in her main areas at ACCU (UK), JAOO (Denmark), OOPSLA (USA), XP (Europe) and Agile (USA).

She is a member of the board of the AgileAlliance and a member of the program committee of many different European and American conferences in the area of agile development, object-orientation and patterns.

Michael Feathers

Michael Feathers is a consultant with Object Mentor. He has been active in the Agile community for the past seven years, balancing his time between working with, training and coaching various teams around the world. Michael developed CppUnit and CppFit, the initial ports of JUnit and FIT to C++. He is a member of the ACM and the IEEE and the author of /Working Effectively with Legacy Code/. When he isn't engaged with a team, he spends most of this time investigating ways of altering design over time in codebases.

Steve Freeman

Steve Freeman is an independent consultant, and has worked in a wide range of situations from research to developing shrink-wrap software. He was a pioneer of the agile community in the UK: an early member of the eXtreme Tuesday Club and chair of the first XpDay, he led a project that, briefly, was the largest XP project in the UK. Since then, he helped to introduce Agile methods at Thomson Financial, and worked for ThoughtWorks.

Steve has a PhD in Computer Science and degrees in Statistics and Music.

Lois Goldthwaite

Lois Goldthwaite began programming professionally in 1983, starting from a foundation of abject ignorance. Since then, she has learned everything the hard way. Unable to find a bigger muggins, she serves as ACCU Standards Officer and convenor of the C++ panel which represents the UK at meetings of WG21, the international C++ Standard committee.

Pete Goodliffe

Pete Goodliffe is a programmer, a software development columnist, and author. He never stays at the same place in the software food chain. He has a passion for curry and doesn't wear shoes.

Doug Gregor

Doug Gregor is a post-doctoral researcher in the Open Systems Laboratory at Indiana University. As a member of the ISO C++ standards committee, Doug is active in both the library and evolution working groups and is leading the effort specify and implement concepts for the upcoming C++ standard, C++0x. Doug is also a long-time contributor to Boost, a collection of free, peer-reviewed C++ libraries, for which he serves as a moderator, maintainer, and library developer.

Alan Griffiths

Alan Griffiths is an independent software development practitioner. He is a long-standing contributor to the ACCU journals, mailing lists and conferences. He is editor of ACCU's journal Overload. For many of Alan's technical articles, presentations and various other goodies see his website.

Peter Hammond

Peter Hammond started out as a materials scientist, before changing career direction and joining BAE Systems in the late 1990s. Since then he has worked on a number of defence related systems, large and small, with particular interests in component architectures, real-time systems, and agile methods.

Richard Harris

Richard Harris has been developing C++ software for financial regulation for the last 8 years. He has yet to find any practical use for his prior 7 years of Artificial Intelligence research and C/C++ software development.

Kevlin Henney

Kevlin Henney is an independent consultant and trainer who specialises in programming languages and techniques, OO design, patterns, software architecture and agile development. He has been a columnist and contributor for various magazines, including Application Development Advisor, Java Report, C++ Report, C/C++ Users Journal and EXE, all of which appear (coincidentally) to have folded. He is currently a columnist for The Register's Reg Developer. Kevlin is coauthor of two recent volumes in the Pattern-Oriented Software Architecture series. He is a long-time member of the ACCU and has found himself drawn into various committees, including the one for the C++ standard, the one for The C++ Source and, formerly, the one for this conference.

Jez Higgins

Jez sits in his attic and types for a living. He's let out to walk the dog and go swimming occasionally.

He describes himself as a C++ programmer, but also spends a reasonable amount of time working in Java and C#. Over the last several years, everything he has done has had some type of XML data flying around somewhere. Without really meaning to he's become really pretty comfortable with XML processing, particular with some kind of publishing slant.

Howard Hinnant

Currently employed with Apple as a software engineer. Previously with Metrowerks/Motorola/Freescale and author of the CodeWarrior C++ standard library. C++ committee member currently serving as Library Working Group Chairman. Co-author/co-inventor and head cheerleader of the rvalue reference proposal for C++0x.

Richard Howells

Richard Howells - www.dynamisys.co.uk - is an independent consultant, instructor and mentor specializing in .Net Application Architecture and Development. Richard's career has followed the evolution of the computer industry working initially on mainframes, later on mid-range, and currently on micro-computers, probably moving to more powerful equipment at every stage. His experience ranges from single user systems to applications with thousands of users. When not computing he drives a taxi for his two children and plays Volleyball.

Jon Jagger

Hi, I'm Jon Jagger, an independent software consultant/trainer/mentor specialising in C#, C++, Java, OO, design, patterns, and process improvement. I am a lapsed UK C++, and C standards panel member and a regular contributor to the ACCU Overload journal. My interests include training excellence, design, problem solving, reading, and monty python (required knowledge for all software developers).

Career highlights:

  • marrying my wife Natalie and being Dad to our three children
  • serving as the ECMA TG2 C# convenor and helping to improve the quality and accuracy of the C# specification
  • writing most of a 5 day instructor led training course on C# that now forms part of the official Microsoft curriculum (Introduction to C# Programming, course 2124)
  • co-authoring (with John Sharp) the Microsoft Press book Visual C#.NET Step by Step
  • converting the ECMA C# 1.0 language specification into a hyperlinked HTML presentation using PERL, XML, and XSL (I will repeat this for the C# 2.0 specification sometime in 2007)
  • building a car (when I was 21)

My new book, the Annotated C# 2.0 Specification (jointly authored with Peter Sestoft and Nigel Perry) will soon hit the shelves.

Nico Josuttis

Nicolai Josuttis (www.josuttis.com, nj@it-communication.com) is an independent systems architect, technical manager, author, and consultant. He designs mid-sized and large software systems for the telecommunication, traffic, finance, and manufacturing industries. He is well known both in the C++ Community and to attendees at ACCU Conferences. He not only speaks and writes with authority about C++ (being the author of 'The C++ Standard Library' and 'C++ Templates') but is also an innovative presenter. He has also written other books and articles about object-oriented software development and programming in general. He is a partner of IT-communication.com.

Allan Kelly

Allan Kelly is a regular contributor to ACCU journals and conferences. After several years at the code face he became convinced that many of the challengers we face are in our organizations not our code. To this end he is now more interested in software practice, learning and change.

Jan-Klaas Kollhof

Jan-Klaas is a 30 year old professional developer, working in London, UK.

He studied Business Informatics at the University of Rostock, Germany for (too) many years. He enjoyed giving courses in computer science and working with the students on software projects at the department of Business Informatics.

His main interest in software development is client-server communication for webapplications and making JavaScript more usable by building jsolait. He very much enjoys giving courses and presentation on these subjects.

John Lakos

John Lakos, author of "Large Scale C++ Software Design.", serves at Bloomberg LP in New York City as meta architect and mentor for C++ Software Development world-wide. Previously, Dr. Lakos directed the design and development of infrastructure libraries for proprietary analytic financial applications and later for Global Information Technologies at Bear Stearns. For 12 years prior, Dr. Lakos developed large frameworks and advanced ICCAD applications at Mentor Graphics, for which he holds multiple software patents. His academic qualifications include a Ph.D. in Computer Science ('97) and an Sc.D. in Electrical Engineering ('89) from Columbia University. Dr. Lakos received his undergraduate degrees from MIT in Mathematics ('82) and Computer Science ('81). His next book "Large-Scale C++ Process and Architecture" is anticipated in 2007.

Angelika Langer

Angelika Langer is a freelance trainer/consultant working and teaching in the area of object-oriented development in C++ and Java. She is a recognized speaker at conferences world-wide among them JavaOne, OOPSLA, ECOOP, JAX, and many more. She is co-author of the book "Standard C++ IOStreams and Locales" and author of numerous articles about C++ and Java, including the popular column "Effective Java" in the German magazine JavaSpektrum and author of the widely appreciated online "Java Generics FAQ". More information can be found at www.AngelikaLanger.com.

Alan Lenton

Alan Lenton is the infrastructure designer at Skill Gaming Ltd, a UK startup which will be launching a new concept in massively multi-player games in the coming autumn.

With 20 years' experience of multi-player game design and programming, Alan is uniquely placed to discuss the problems facing programmers struggling to deal with applications strewn over multiple networks.

In his 'copious' spare time Alan still maintains, designs and codes 'Federation', probably the longest running multi-player game in the world, and is a member of the British Standards Institute's C++ panel, as well as being involved in a number of local voluntary activities. More details at www.ibgames.net/alan

Steve Love

Steve Love is a software developer with several years' experience in C++ and C#. Currently working in C# for the .Net Compact Framework v2, he has previously developed applications for embedded and desktop environments, because he likes to see many sides of the same coin. He can be contacted at steve.love@essennell.co.uk

Klaus Marquardt

Klaus Marquardt is a technical manager and system architect for Dräger Medical in Lübeck, Germany. His experiences include life supporting systems, and large international projects. Klaus is particularly interested in the relations between technology, organization, people, and process. He has contributed numerous patterns and sessions at various conferences including ACCU, SPA, and OOPSLA.

Hubert Matthews

Hubert Matthews is a freelance consultant specialising in system architecture and design as well as training programmers in C++, UML and Java. His clients range from large companies such as DHL and Orange to small companies and startups. He also is technical director or advisor to a number of startup companies. Hubert is a regular speaker at ACCU conferences and has been an ACCU member for 9 years.

Hubert lives in Oxford and in his abundant spare time he likes to pretend that he coaches rowing, dances salsa, dabbles with martial arts and drives too fast.

Jens Maurer

Jens Maurer studied Computer Science at the University of Kaiserslautern, Germany. He worked for a web design company programming Internet banking software and for German Railways implementing their discount ticket system. He is currently employed by Interactive Data Managed Solutions AG designing and implementing custom software to handle the daily flood of the world's stock market data. He has participated in the C++ committee since late 2000, usually joining the core working group in their nitpicking. He also designed TR1's random number facility.

Alisdair Meredith

Alisdair Meredith is a software architect with the Renault Formula 1 Team, where he has worked for the last 10 years. As an active member of the Library Working Group of the C++ committee for the last 4 years he has contributed to the development of TR1 and the revision of the Standard Library for C++0x. He is also an occasional contributor to boost and a member of TeamB, the peer-support group for CodeGear.

Bernhard Merkle

Bernhard Merkle works as a Software Architect and Engineer in Research & Development at one of the world’s leading producers of sensors and sensor solutions. He serves as internal consultant for the complete Software Development Cycle and is responsible for Methods-Selection, Tool-Evaluation and Introduction.

In his previous job, he worked at a major MDA-Tool vendor where he accomplished Client projects using MDA and Modelling-Languages and gave trainings about MDA, J2EE, CORBA, Java and C++.

He regularly writes technical Articles about those and new technologies in IT-magazines and also gave sessions at various conferences (e.g. IX and OOP).

Ivan Moore

Ivan Moore has been programming for over 20 years and yet he still regularly makes mistakes. That's why he's interested in test driven development, refactoring, iterative and incremental development, continuous integration, and drinking tea. He has a PhD in automated refactoring (1996), and has presented papers, tutorials and workshops at numerous international conferences, such as OOPSLA, XP, XPDay, ACCU, TOOLS and ECOOP. He works for Team Optimization as a coach, developer and tea boy, helping teams to "get agile".

Phil Nash

Phil Nash has worked in the software industry for over fourteen years, variably as developer, architect and support engineer in areas from servers and grids to desktop applications to embedded devices, on projects from a one man team to a team of over twenty in size and for organizations from five persons to internationally recognised names and has worked in numerous countries across three continents. Whilst having tried his hand at many areas of application he has always come back to and specialized in the C++ language (and its kin) and, more recently, the development process itself. He's also a bit strange at times but has plenty of stories to tell if you buy him a pint.

Dan North

Dan North has been writing enterprise software for 15 years, starting with C on SunOS, through the heady days of C++ and Perl on Solaris to Enterprise Java. For the last five years he has been a passionate advocate of Agile software delivery, and is currently working with software consultancy ThoughtWorks.

Gail Ollis

Gail Ollis is a software engineer with two decades of experience across a range of applications, among them digital video effects and porting the Java VM to a cash register as well as more respectable telecoms work and embedded software for radar. The number of languages she has used is in double figures but she would rather talk about Python, which has made programming fun again. She suspects we will never really master the art of software without psychological research to better understand individuals and interactions.

Roger Orr

Roger has over 20 years experience in IT, using a variety of languages and platforms and during that time has spent much time removing bugs (both his own and other people's) from a variety of computer programs. In 1989 he became a contract computer programmer and has managed to remain at the technical end of IT ever since; his recent work has been in C++ and Java, mostly on Windows and Linux. He has been a member of the BSI C++ panel since 2002. He currently runs the Student Code Critique section of CVu and also writes the occasional article for CVu and Overload.

John Pagonis

John Pagonis has been working for more than 8 years in the mobile telecoms industry, engineering the software that powers modern advanced mobile phones. In the domain of mobile phones John's experience ranges from communication protocols and infrastructure, security, location based services, operating systems and middleware design, to software engineering methodologies, developer consulting, team coaching and organisational improvements. John is a visiting lecturer at City University in London and a PhD candidate at the University of Essex, from where he holds an MSc(Hons.) in Computer and Information Networks as well as a BEng(Hons.) in Computer and Networks.

Ric Parkin

Ric originally learnt BASIC on a teletype attached to a mainframe in 1980, and has been programming professionally since 1991, mainly using C++. A believer that programmers should continually strive to be lazy, he's always on the lookout for ways to get the computer to do the work for him.

Tim Penhey

  • ICE (Sat 11:00, Cherwell)

Duncan Pierce

Duncan Pierce has been helping companies and teams improve their software development using agile techniques for the last 3 years. He first heard about extreme programming (XP) in 1998 and began doing it for real in 2000 when he joined Connextra. Since then he has helped companies including Egg and British Telecom.

Mary Poppendieck

Mary Poppendieck has been in the Information Technology industry for thirty years. She has managed solutions for companies in several disciplines, including supply chain management, manufacturing systems, and digital media. As a seasoned leader in both operations and new product development, she brings a practical, customer-focused approach to software development problems.

As Information Systems Manager at the 3M Hutchinson plant, Mary first encountered the Toyota Production System, which later became known as Lean Production. She was instrumental in implementing one of the early Just-in-Time systems in 3M, which resulted in dramatic improvements in the plant's performance. She subsequently led new product development teams, commercializing products ranging from digital controllers to 3M Light Fiber.

A popular writer and speaker, Mary's classes on managing software development offer a fresh perspective on project management. Her book Lean Software Development: An Agile Toolkit, was published in 2003 and won the Software Development Productivity Award in 2004. A sequel, Implementing Lean Software Development: From Concept to Cash, was published in 2006.

Tom Poppendieck

Tom Poppendieck has 25 years of experience in computing including eight years of work with object technology. His modelling and mentoring skills are rooted in his experience as a physics professor. His early work was in IT infrastructure, product development, and manufacturing support, and evolved to consulting project assignments in healthcare, logistics, mortgage banking, and travel services.

Tom is an enterprise analyst and architect, and an agile process mentor. He focuses on identifying real business value and enabling product teams to realize that value. Tom specializes in understanding customer processes and in effective collaboration of customer, development and support specialists to maximize development efficiency, system flexibility, and business value.

Tom is co-author of the book Lean Software Development: An Agile Toolkit, published in 2003, and its sequel, Implementing Lean Software Development: From Concept to Cash, published in 2006.

Nat Pryce

Nat Pryce is an independent consultant with expertise in software design, software development process & practices. He is also a research fellow at Imperial College where he currently works on the Cityware project which explores the interplay between urban design and pervasive computing.

He is a developer of the jMock and nMock libraries for test-driven development. He was a co-organiser of the first XpDay conference and joint programme chair of XpDay 2004 and 2005.

Seb Rose

Seb is a software contractor specialising in getting the job done in some of the most hostile working environments, including banks, pension providers and manufacturers. He works with whatever technology is prescribed by the client, which has recently been mainly C# and Java, and have been doing so (on and off) since 1985. He has written for Overload, presented sessions at OT2003 and accu2006 and has spoken passionately about the benefits of organic agriculture at nurseries, primary schools, WI meetings and public houses.

Dan Saks

Dan Saks is the president of Saks & Associates, a training and consulting company based in Springfield, OH (USA) specializing in C and C++, and their use in developing embedded systems. He is a contributing editor for Embedded Systems Design magazine and a member of the advisory board for The Software Development Conference. He has also written columns for The C/C++ Users Journal, The C++ Report, Software Development magazine (US) and the Windows Developer's Journal. He is co-author of "C++ Programming Guidelines" and co-developer of "Suite++: The Plum Hall Validation Suite for C++". Dan served for many years as secretary of the ANSI and ISO C++ standards committee, and continues to follow the committees' activities.

Mark Shuttleworth

Mark studied finance and information technology at the University of Cape Town, and went on to found Thawte, a company specialising in digital certificates and internet privacy. He sold Thawte to US company VeriSign in 1999, and founded HBD Venture Capital and The Shuttleworth Foundation. He moved to London in 2001, and began preparing for the First African in Space mission, training in Star City and Khazakstan. In April 2002 Mark flew in space, as a cosmonaut member of the crew of Soyuz mission TM34 to the International Space Station. In early 2004 he founded the Ubuntu project, which aims to produce a free, high quality desktop OS for everybody.

Bjarne Stroustrup

Bjarne Stroustrup is the designer and original implementer of C++ and the author of "The C++ Programming Language". His research interests include distributed systems, design, programming techniques, software development tools, and programming languages. He is actively involved in the ANSI/ISO standardization of C++. He is the College of Engineering Chair Professor in Computer Science at Texas A&M University. Member of The National Academy of Engineering. ACM fellow. IEEE Fellow. He is an AT&T Bell Laboratories Fellow and an AT&T Fellow.

Peter Sommerlad

Peter Sommerlad is professor and head of Institute for Software at HSR Hochschule für Technik, Rapperswil. He is a well-known Patterns author (POSA, Security Patterns) and feels guilty allowing developers create more complex designs by leveraging his patterns.

Jo Stichbury

Jo Stichbury was educated at Magdalene College, Cambridge, where she held the Stothert Bye-Fellowship. She has worked within the Symbian ecosystem since 1997 for Symbian, Advansys, Sony Ericsson and, currently, Nokia. She is the sole author of "Symbian OS Explained: Effective C++ Programming for Smartphones" which was published by Symbian Press in 2004 and co-author of "The Accredited Symbian Developer Primer: Fundamentals of Symbian OS", published by Symbian Press in 2006. Jo became an Accredited Symbian Developer in 2005 and a Forum Nokia Champion in 2006.

Herb Sutter

Herb is an architect in Microsoft's Developer Division, where he is currently the designer of the Concur concurrency extensions for existing programming languages. He also chairs the ISO C++ standards committee, and is the author of four acclaimed books and hundreds of technical papers, including the widely-cited essay "The Free Lunch Is Over" that coined both that term and "concurrency revolution" to describe the software sea change now in progress to exploit increasingly parallel hardware.

Ed Sykes

Following a degree in artificial intelligence Ed stumbled into software engineering and was privileged enough to start his career on a software project that was a colossal failure. Having learnt a lot about software engineering in practice he found that he had an interest in the field and has been trying to be less ignorant about the craft ever since. Ed is interested in getting computers to do the things that computers are good at doing and improving humans so they can better pick the things that computers should be doing. He's still working on building a piece of software that's better than him at both of these things so that he can spend more time playing in his band and DJing.

David Vandevoorde

David Vandevoorde is an engineer at the Edison Design Group, where he codeveloped the first fully ISO-standard C++ compiler. He is an active member of the ANSI C++ Standards Committee, and a cofounder of the newsgroup comp.lang.c++.moderated. He is the author (with Nicolai M. Josuttis) of "C++ Templates -- The Complete Guide". A graduate of the Brussels Free University and the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, his interests include algorithm development, programming languages, and teaching. (See www.vandevoorde.com).

Charles Weir

Charles Weir is managing director of Penrillian, a software house specialising in porting software to mobile devices based on Symbian OS. Charles has more than fifteen years' experience as a software engineer and consultant in OO techniques. He was Symbian technical lead for the Ericsson R380 communicator project, and software architect for the Psion Series 5 Web Browser. He is co-author of the book Small Memory Software, and has led many courses and workshops on OO design and implementation.

Russel Winder

I used to be a Theoretical Physicist but after getting my PhD in 1980, I recovered. My path into the real world was by becoming a UNIX systems programmer (OK, UNIX and systems programming isn't entirely the Real World) and I have been fascinated by operating systems ever since which I guess could be classified as an illness. However, academia, in the form of UCL Computer Science Department, pulled me back in, mostly so I could research into programming and programming languages with emphasis on object orientation, concurrency, parallelism and human factors. I spent some fun time teaching programming and software engineering, researching and climbing the academic ladder.

In 1996 I became Professor of Computing Science at KCL. This was fun. Well until I had to become Head of Department when it became Administration. Having created a sensible work--life balance (yeah, sure!) I seemed to be headed towards a cushy life until retirement when an old friend approached me and said "Oi, you, why don't you take this really serious challenge" which led me leaving academia, becoming Chief Technology Officer at OneEighty Software Ltd and bringing the ORIGIN technology into the world. OneEighty Software Ltd was an IP generating company whose principle product was ORIGIN-J a virtual machine for the Java 2 Platform. We did a lot of our work on smartcards which have to be the most brain damaged computing platforms ever conceived. Unfortunately, one of the funders of the company got cold feet (or got nobbled by our competitors) and pulled the financial plug so the company went into liquidation.

I am now an independent consultant and technical author. Wiley's seem to have confidence in me as an author as they have published:

  • Russel Winder (1991) Developing C++ Software, John Wiley & Sons.
  • Russel Winder (1993) Developing C++ Software, second edition, John Wiley & Sons.
  • Russel Winder & Graham Roberts (1998) Developing Java Software, John Wiley & Sons.
  • Russel Winder & Graham Roberts (2000) Developing Java Software, second edition, John Wiley & Sons.
  • Russel Winder & Graham Roberts (2007) Developing Java Software, third edition, John Wiley & Sons.
I am also writing books Python, Ruby and Groovy for Thompson Learning.

Chris Withers

Chris Withers has been one of the UK's leading Zope consultants over the last few years. Until September 2003 he worked for New Information Paradigms, before founding his own consultancy Simplistix. Chris is an active contributor to both the Zope and Python communities.

David Wood

David Wood joined Psion as a software engineer in June 1988, and gradually moved into roles involving software architecture and system integration. He was an early adopter of object-oriented technology within Psion in the late 1980s and saw this come to fruition in popular handheld devices such as the Series 3 and Series 3a. From 1994 to 1997 he oversaw the development of the upper layers of the software system that eventually became known as Symbian OS. He was a founding director of Symbian on its formation in 1998. From 1998 to 2002 he headed Symbian's Technical Consulting department, building and directing teams that worked with Symbian's customers to create the world's first smartphones. From 2002 to 2004 he was EVP of Partnering at Symbian, creating partner programs to foster sustained commercial success for companies in the Symbian ecosystem. As EVP of Research, David is now responsible for understanding and guiding Symbian's response to disruptive trends in technology, business, and society. David has an MA in Mathematics from Cambridge University and an honorary doctorate in science from the University of Westminster


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