Tristan Bergh

Tristan was born, raised and conditioned in Johannesburg, South Africa.
He knew at an early age he wanted to find out what made the human world work, so he studied aeronautical engineering at Wits University. Finding out what the world paid engineers, he "moved into IT".
He completed stints of OO design for startups and government ministries before a newspaper classified ad got him an interview with a draconian project manager on the HANIS project, which we delivered for Home Affairs in 2001.
Tristan learned much about the software architecture process during his tenure as architect on the ex-largest civil Fingerprint System that now watches over us. He also learned much about the human factors in software.
Tristan then went on to work on the world's first combined civil and criminal fingerprint system, with a surreal training effort in Tokyo thrown in.
More recently, he was chosen one of a select team of global project evaluators by Unisys Inc., a position that involved crashing head on into the people-centric issues facing all organisations involved in software manufacture. He now does this daily as a contractor designing middleware and advising on issues like SOA, Messaging-oriented middleware and where to find the best espresso.

Garren Smith

(Driven Software, www.drivensoftware.co.za)

After qualifying as an electrical engineer, Garren entered the world of embedded development and .Net solutions. Garren soon started exploring other development platforms and environments. He has developed a passion for Ruby and server-side JavaScript using node.js. Garren spends his days working with teams implementing agile methodologies to improve their efficiency. At night the gloves come off as he programs on his favorite open source projects.

Marc Heiligers

(Chief of Technology, Mad Mimi, www.madmimi.com)

Marc Heiligers has been programming ever since his grandfather got him that Commodore 64 when he was just 10 years old. Since then he's studied Computer Science, worked in desktop and web development using .Net and built web-based GIS applications used by companies such as ACSA. He made the switch to Ruby two years ago coming to it via the Prototype.js JavaScript library, which he thinks is an unusual route.
He is now the Chief of Technology at Mad Mimi, where he spends his time solving scaling issues and developing new features. In the past he has developed a whole series of Prototype-based widgets, the most downloaded of which is still Widget.Fader, much to his dismay.

Brendon McLean

(Intellection Software)

Brendon's Olympic sprinting aspirations were brought to grinding halt with the arrival of his first ZX spectrum. It's soft, rubbery keys proved too much of a temptation for him and he's been sitting in front a computer screen ever since.

After joining a bank on condition he never work on user interfaces, he promptly discovered that he had a passion for them.
He's been working on user interfaces ever since, moving from Swing to Javascript and Rails last year.

Currently he is doing something important them at Intellection Software, a start up doing market data visualisation using Raphael, SVG, Canvas and anything else with shex appeal.

Jarrod Hermer

(CTO, MyBeat Interactive, www.mybeat.net)

Jarrod has been involved with computers since before the Internet, cutting his teeth on the ZX Spectrum.
Today he holds a BSc in Electrical Engineering and is the CTO of Mybeat Interactive a company specialising in mobile marketing promotions. Mybeat has also developed a wildly successful mobile dating site.

Jarrod has a passion for his bicycle and all things geeky, he enjoys creating awesome services using his coding powers.

Hendrik Louw

(devthe.net, devthe.net)

I developed an interest in computers at a very early age. It started when i broke my father's config.sys before i could spell. While in primary school I started programming in Pascal and later moved on to what some would consider "real" languages, namely C++ and Java.
While studying towards a Bsc(I.T) degree at UJ I began working at an ISP where I took an interest in Ruby on Rails. After learning from one of the top mentors in the country I joined a leading SA design agency with my new found skills.

I initially used jQuery and Mootools to develop solutions that met the designers increasing apetite for pretty effects. I quickly developed a new respect for Javascript as a language of substance.

I'm now lead developer at iSigned.com and use Javascript daily to create next level user interfaces. I'm also co-founder at devthe.net.

Sergey Ilinsky

(ilinsky.com)

Having started with client-side web-development back in 2001, Sergey followed evolution of relevant technologies and had also been involved in creation of several standards at W3C. Meanwhile he worked in Saint-Petersburg and in Amsterdam helping out companies with their front-end development. In the past years Sergey was heavily involved in JavaScript community in Amsterdam and now he is looking forward to starting an active JavaScript community in Johannesburg where he moved just about a month ago.

Peter Munnings

(Architect/Developer, Synerics, www.synerics.com)

Peter has been happily married to the same awesome lady for 15 years. He is the proud father of the most energetic little boy in the world and lists programming and studying New Testament Greek as two of his favourite hobbies.
Peter first started programming back in 1982 on a BBC Acorn and has been programming on and off ever since. After completing a BSc Eng at UCT, he spent 6 years at Eskom learning that building enterprise systems was different in many ways to writing games in gw-basic for the BBC Acorn, and similar in other ways.
After a brief stint at Training Connection (which became Torque-IT) it was time to create a real software development company. NewSolutions was formed by a bunch of friends who didn't know much but had great aspirations and were determined to have fun together. Mostly the latter happened. After many other great adventures (too numerous to mention in this bio) Peter ended up at Synerics where he is surrounded by programming geniuses and manages to keep a low profile.
He has spent the last 3 or 4 years designing and implementing really cool solutions in the Insurance industry, exploring the nuances of jQuery, MVC, Domain Driven Design and a host of other tools, patterns and frameworks that are as much fun to explore as they are to implement in real world applications.

Joshua Freislich

(Chase Software, www.chasesoftware.co.za)

After creating a stained glass startup that he ran successfully for almost 5 years, there where few windows and shops in Cape Town left that didn't have Josh's art on display. It was time to seek new challenges and he decided to take his then stealth mode programming skills to the next level. Over the past 10 years, he's been the lead developer on several web based applications that are still in active circulation. From human resources and trucking & logistics apps to financial management systems, the one constant has been his growing appreciation for how powerful javascript is. Over the past couple of years, growth has been fueled by working with ExtJs, following Douglas Crockford and John Resig and working with a group of chaps that don't need to be told anything twice at Chase Software.

Simon Stewart

(Chief Architect, Broken Keyboards Software, www.brokenkeyboards.com)

Founder: @BrowseThisForMe, @MonitorMyURL + others in stealth mode

I run Broken Keyboards Software.

In my spare time, I organise this conference which sets out to change the landscape for tech conferences.