Speaker Feature: Mark Smith, Roan Kattouw, Mike Tarantino

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Mark Smith

Mark Smith

Building Services in Go!

1:20pm Friday 15th January 2015

Mark is a little bit of everything. He's done time as a software engineer, a MySQL DBA, a sysadmin, and even managed an operations team. He's worked for the likes of Google and Mozilla, started a successful open source project (Dreamwidth Studios).

In his free time, he likes to write code in Perl, Go, and Python as well as fly small aircraft. He believes strongly in the Oxford comma and wishes to move back to Iceland one day.

For more information on Mark and his presentation, see here.


Roan Kattouw

Roan

Tails from the Trenches: Battling Browser Bugs for “Fun” and (Non-)Profit

10:40am Thursday 15th January 2015

Roan has been hacking on MediaWiki since 2007. In 2009, he crossed over to the dark side and became a front-end developer (he’s one of those “children” who started front-end development when jQuery already existed).

Since then, he has attempted to make the dark side a little bit less evil by working on ResourceLoader (a JS/CSS loading system for MediaWiki) and VisualEditor (a next-generation editor for wiki pages).

For more information on Roan and his presentation, see here.


Mike Tarantino

Mike Tarantino

Mixing In The Free World

2:15pm Friday 16th January 2015

Mike is a Grammy-nominated recording engineer with 13 years of professional experience, working with artists such as James Blunt, Pete Murray, Badly Drawn Boy, Sloan and Michael Jackson. As a songwriter and musician, his songs have been used in a variety of places from popular TV shows to the sleaziest burlesque halls in Brooklyn.

He was the composer of a neo-swing musical, Buddy Cianci the Musical, performed in New York. He takes inspiration from his cyborg lawyer wife to find free and open solutions wherever he can, as proved by writing the popular theme song of the free software oggcast, Free as in Freedom.

For more information on Mike and his presentation, see here.