Tim Berglund
Tim is a full-stack generalist and passionate teacher who loves coding, presenting, and working with people. He believes the best developer is one who is well-informed of specifics and can also make deep connections between software development and the broader world. He has recently been exploring non-relational data stores, build systems, and how software architecture should resemble an ant colony. His firm, the [August Technology Group](http://augusttechgroup.com), helps clients with product development, technology consulting, and technology upgrade projects atop the JVM. The August Group's technology preferences reflect the generalist sensibilities of its founder, and its development practices are always lightweight, self-improving, and humanizing by design. Tim is a speaker internationally and on the [No Fluff Just Stuff](http://nofluffjuststuff.com) tour in the United States, and is co-president of the [Denver Open Source User Group](http://denveropensource.org), author of the open-source [Groovy Liquibase DSL](http://github.com/tlberglund/groovy-liquibase), co-author of the [DZone Clojure RefCard](http://refcardz.dzone.com/refcardz/functional-programming-clojure), co-presenter of the best-selling [O'Reilly Git Master Class](http://bit.ly/ogitvid), co-author of [Building and Testing with Gradle](http://www.amazon.com/dp/144930463X), and a member of the [O'Reilly Expert Network](http://oreilly.com/pub/expert/timberglund). He lives in Littleton, CO with the wife of his youth and their three children.
Track abstract - Java - H1
Lightweight Web Apps with Ratpack
Ratpack is a Groovy-based web framework based on the ideas of Ruby's Sinatra. It uses a very simple DSL to map web requests to the logic that processes them, drawing on the power of the Groovy API and the entire Java ecosystem in the process. It uses Groovy's SimpleTemplateEngine for an ultra-easy view layer.
Of course a lightweight web app is no good if it's not deployed! Ratpack is ideally suited to cloud deployments in emerging Java cloud platforms like Heroku, Cloud Foundry, and Amazon Elastic Beanstalk. The dream of simple, portable, automated web apps in a high-productivity JVM language is a promising one. Come see how Ratpack is making it a reality.
Track abstract - Big Data - J2
Radical NoSQL Scalability with Cassandra
In this session, we'll talk about Cassandra's data model, talk about how to deploy it, and look at use cases in which it is an appropriate data storage solution. We'll study its origins in the Amazon Dynamo project and Google's BigTable, and learn how its architecture helps us achieve the gold standard of scalability: horizontal scalability on commodity hardware. You'll leave prepared to begin experimenting with Cassandra immediately and planning its adoption in your next project.
