Aaron was born and raised on the mean streets of Salt Lake City. His only hope for survival was to join the local gang of undercover street ballet performers known as the Tender Tights. As a Tender Tights member, Aaron learned to perfect the technique of self-defense pirouettes so that nobody, not even the Parkour Posse could catch him. Between vicious street dance-offs, Aaron taught himself to program. He learned to combine the art of street ballet with the craft of software engineering. Using these unique skills, he was able to leave his life on the streets and become a professional software engineer. He is currently Pirouetting through Processes, and Couruing through code for AT&T. Sometimes he thinks back fondly on his life in the Tender Tights, but then he remembers that it is better to have Tender Loved and Lost than to never have Tender Taught at all.

Avdi Grimm has been hacking Ruby code for over 10 years, and is still loving it. He is chief aeronaut at ShipRise, head chef at RubyTapas, and a Ruby Rogue. He lives in southern Pennsylvania with his wife and five children, and in his copious spare time blogs and podcasts at Virtuous Code and Wide Teams.

Brian Sam-Bodden is an author, instructor, speaker and hacker that has spent most of his life (adult and otherwise) crafting software. He is well versed in several programming languages but his weapon of choice for the last six years has been Ruby. Although he spends most of his time writing “serious” applications, he has a soft spot for game programming and is rekindling that fire with Ruby.

Brian leads Integrallis, a Polyglot Consultancy out of beautiful Scottsdale, Arizona.

Bryan is the founder of Code Climate, an automated code review tool for Ruby apps, and the lead organizer of the Gotham Ruby Conference in NYC. For the last seven years, he’s been an active in the Ruby community as an acclaimed speaker, author and open source contributor. In 2009, he received a Ruby Hero Award for his efforts.

Charles works on JVM languages at Red Hat, focusing on Ruby but expanding to other languages soon. He has worked on JRuby for the past eight years and has been a JVM enthusiast since Java 1.0. Charles hopes to make JRuby the best Ruby implementation for high performance, big data, and heavy loads, and to use lessons learned from JRuby to help the JVM and other languages that run on it meet their potential.

Like the ancient civilizations uncovered by anthropologists, the tools we use say something about who we are. Chris joyfully uses Ruby every day. He believes that flourishing is the key to happiness, servers are an anachronism, and the person that will create SkyNet has already been born. At New Relic he is a Happiness Engineer, where they let him work on things that makes someone’s day better. His stuff lives in San Francisco where he visits it from time to time. Chris tweets occasionally, speaks often, and drinks coffee in between.

Corey loves to code. He also loves to speak. This is an opportunity to mix these two passions. Best known for his journeyman tour and co-founding the coderetreat community, Corey now travels the world helping developers discover ways to continue on the path of awesome development. Lately, he has been focused on effective, maintainable design and architectural patterns in Rails applications.

David develops and maintains trading systems at DRW Trading Group in Chicago, USA. He is a co-author of The RSpec Book, was the lead developer/maintainer of RSpec from 2006 to 2012, and has contributed to several other open source projects including Cucumber, Aruba, and Rails.

Of late, David has been learning and using Clojure in his daily work. In addition to learning about Clojure, and functional programming in general, David spends his spare time traveling and studying music (most recently on his newly acquired cavaquinho) and Portuguese.

Jeremy is a software developer from Birmingham, England, who has been programming for longer than he can remember. In 2008, he co-founded Meducation - a social educational network for medical professionals, which now absorbs most of his life. He wants to make the world a better place.

Katrina ran away from the circus and found her true home in the land of computers and code. She enjoys optimizing and automating, taking busywork away from smart people and putting it into code where it belongs.

She is the problem solver you want on your side. She is driven by an inexplicable urge to refactor, and has for the past 6 years volunteered as a nitpicker at the javaranch.com Cattle Drive, where she attempts to brainwash others to write clean code. She appreciates a good steak, and admits to enjoying a nice stick fight.

Matt likes tea, he likes solving problems and he likes making things. He’s looking for ways to make software development more fun for everyone involved.

Paolo Perrotta wrote the “Metaprogramming Ruby” book. He has thirteen years of experience as a developer, ranging from embedded to enterprise software, computer games and web applications. These days, Paolo lives a nomadic life, mentoring agile teams throughout Europe. He has a base camp in Bologna, Italy. He loves Ruby.

Reginald Braithwaite is a software developer at Leanpub, where he and his colleagues take the friction out of writing and selling books. He has more than twenty years of hands-on experience creating software products and leading software teams. He currently applies extremely deep Ruby, JavaScript, CoffeeScript and advanced programming expertise to crafting well-factored, maintainable code. He is the author of “Kestrels, Quirky Birds, and Hopeless Egocentricity” a book about Ruby metaprogramming using combinators.

Richard writes Ruby at Heroku and teaches Rails at the University of Texas. When he isn’t obsessively compulsively playing Starcraft 2 he writes such gems as Wicked, Sextant, and oPRO. Richard is a proud graduate of Space Camp and an advocate of home brewed beer.

Sandi Metz has 30 years of experience working on projects that survived to grow and change. She’s the author of the recently published Practical Object-Oriented Design in Ruby and (as all who read the book know) an avid cyclist. Fundamentally, however, she is someone who writes object-oriented code.

Vicent Martí used to make videogames, but he sold out because he likes to wear expensive clothes. Or any clothes at all. He now works full time as a systems engineer at GitHub, focusing on security and performance issues on the backend. He’s also the maintainer of libgit2, the Git library that powers GitHub’s backend and native clients. He takes long showers because he enjoys smelling nice.

Yukihiro “Matz” Matsumoto is the creator of Ruby programming language. He started development of Ruby in 1993. Now he works for Heroku which has sponsored Ruby development since 2011. He also serves as a chairman at Ruby Association, a non-profit organization for supporting Ruby.