Dave Troy

Dave Troy has been a serial technology entrepreneur since 1986 when he started a computer mail order business at age 14. Since that time he has founded multiple companies, including an early Internet service provider, ToadNet, which he sold in 2004. Since then he has been working on software development and in building the technology community in his hometown, Baltimore, Maryland. He was the force behind many tech-community initiatives including SocialDevCamp East, Barcamp Baltimore, Beehive Baltimore (a coworking facility), Baltimore Angels (an angel investment group), TEDxMidAtlantic, and BmoreFiber. He also serves on the board of two regional technology councils and is president of the Friends of the Maryland State Archives. He resides in Baltimore, Maryland with his wife and two children and is a certificated private pilot.

Blake Walters

Blake Walters, Senior Front-End Developer, started programming at age eight. After mastering the wisdom of the book "Creating Websites with Microsoft Word" from Sam's Club when he was twelve, Blake went on to get a degree in Computer Science from the University of Missouri. He has since become an accomplished leader of standards-based development. At Viget, Blake is responsible for doing awesome front-end development and for helping to define our standards for semantic markup, clean CSS, and unobtrusive JavaScript. His work day starts and ends with scripts he's written to maximize efficiency and reduce redundancy -- oh, and to leave more time for video games.

Away from work, you can find Blake playing 2d fighter games and following international auto racing. He occasionally ponders the question, "If the internet didn't exist, what kind of work would I choose to do?" but has yet to come up with an answer.

Steve Chipman

Owning a cat named Javascript puts a heavy responsiblity on a person to know their way around the language, and so Steve Chipman has been using Javascript (the language, not the cat) to bend the web to his will and coerce the DOM to dance since the nineties. An AS3 geek as well, Steve has loads of fun writing web apps in his role as a Lead Software Engineer at AOL, working on AIM Express and the AOL Lifestream desktop app. He lives in Virginia with his wife, two kids and, of course - a cat named Javascript.

Tony Pitale

Web Developer Tony Pitale, having been influenced by his parents' computer business from the womb, took up building websites from the time he was in middle school (despite his father's refusal to get Prodigy in the early days of the Internet). He worked his way through high school and college at Virginia Tech making websites and software, refining his skills by staying current with the latest technologies.

Luis de la Rosa

Luis de la Rosa makes iPhone, iPad and Mac apps for companies as the Founder of Happy Apps LLC. He is located in Falls Church, Virginia. He has organized two local iOS conferences: iPhone Dev Camp DC and iPad Dev Camp DC. Luis is a former Smalltalker, Java developer and Rails guy who still uses Ruby for many things alongside Objective-C and iOS.

Aaron Bedra

Aaron brings the ability to quickly ninja any application. His passion for spreading the security word via his blog is kicking off a new wave of security consciousness throughout the Ruby community and creating an avalanche of better development practices. His passion for exploring new technologies and traveling new roads has quickly shot him up through the Ruby industry and on to the Relevance team.

Dave Bock

In a past life, I spent several years working for a company that struggled to implement the CMMi, a "maturity model" for software engineering practices promoted by Carnegie Melon, and favored in some Government contracting circles. While the CMMi doesn't have a good reputation in the context of agile methodologies, some of the ideas have merit... in particular, the visibility and self-reflection offered by the introspection process should seem like a formalized retrospective to agile practitioners. Can we 'steal' some of the ideas from formal models like the CMMi and ISO 9000 to come up with an 'agile proficiency model' that can help guide a company's process improvement efforts? While the idea might be controversial, There are several compelling reasons to try.