Author Biographies

Neal is Software Architect and Meme Wrangler at ThoughtWorks, a global IT consultancy with an exclusive focus on end-to-end software development and delivery. Before joining ThoughtWorks, Neal was the Chief Technology Officer at The DSW Group, Ltd., a nationally recognized training and development firm. Neal has a degree in Computer Science from Georgia State University specializing in languages and compilers and a minor in mathematics specializing in statistical analysis. He is also the designer and developer of applications, instructional materials, magazine articles, video presentations, and author of 6 books, including the most recent The Productive Programmer. His language proficiencies include Java, C#/.NET, Ruby, Groovy, functional languages, Scheme, Object Pascal, C++, and C. His primary consulting focus is the design and construction of large-scale enterprise applications. Neal has taught on-site classes nationally and internationally to all phases of the military and to many Fortune 500 companies. He is also an internationally acclaimed speaker, having spoken at over 100 developer conferences worldwide, delivering more than 600 talks. If you have an insatiable curiosity about Neal, visit his web site at http://nealford.com. He welcomes feedback and can be reached at nford@thoughtworks.com.

Neal is writing this book because he has seen too many tedious, boring presentations at conferences. He has spoken at over 200 developers conferences and presented more than 2000 talks over the last decade. If he doesn't know a bunch of stuff about presentations by now, he's either not paying attention or he's an idiot.

Matthew McCullough is an energetic 14 year veteran of enterprise software development, open source education, Vice President of Training at GitHub, and co-founder of Ambient Ideas, LLC, a Denver consultancy. Matthew currently is a member of the JCP, reviewer for technology publishers including O'Reilly, co-author of the Presentation Patterns & Anti-Patterns book, multi-year speaker on the No Fluff Just Stuff tour, author of the DZone Maven, Git & Google App Engine RefCards. He channels his teaching energy through activities as President of the Denver Open Source Users Group.

Matthew loves technology, but has always had a parallel passion for teaching technical topics. He's struggled with the same challenges that any presenter would -- assembly of slides, hardware meltdowns, venue catastrophes, audience attentiveness, and acceptance to international venues he never thought would actually say yes. Matthew is excited to share these learning experiences and concrete solutions to the challenges in both story and recipe form in this book.

Matthew resides in Denver with his beautiful wife and daughter, who are active in nearly every outdoor activity Colorado offers. He writes frequently on software and presenting at the Ambient Ideas blog.

Nathaniel T. Schutta is a senior software engineer focussed on making usable applications. A proponent of polyglot programming, Nate has written two books on Ajax and speaks regularly at various No Fluff Just Stuff symposia, universities, and Java user groups. In addition to his day job, Nate is an adjunct professor at the University of Minnesota where he teaches students to embrace dynamic languages. He blogs on his site at http://ntschutta.com/.