Speaker Feature: Michael Homer, Andrew Cowie, Beau Johnson

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Michael Homer

Michael Homer

Grace: an open-source educational programming language

3:40pm Friday 16th January 2015

Michael has a long-standing interest in programming languages and language features that help programmers say what they mean. He has spent the last three years designing and building a compiler for the Grace language, and participating in the design and evaluation of the language itself. He has worked on the GoboLinux distribution and is also interested in education, package management, JavaScript, the web, and data storage.

For more information on Michael and his presentation, see here. You can follow him as @michaelhomer and don’t forget to mention #lca2015.


Andrew Cowie

Andrew

Vaultaire: a data vault for system metrics, backed onto Ceph

3:40pm Thursday 15th January 2015

Somewhat unusually for a free software hacker, Andrew Cowie was an infantry officer in the Canadian army, having graduated from Royal Military College with a degree in engineering physics. He saw service across North America and a peacekeeping tour in Bosnia. He later ran operations for a new media company in Manhattan and was a part of recovering the firm after the Sept 11 attacks. He regularly consults on crisis resolution, change management, robust architectures, and (more interestingly) leveraging Open Source to achieve these ends.

Andrew currently looks after the engineering group at Anchor Systems, where lately he's been working on scalable distributed systems, building server side code in Haskell and doing as little JavaScript as possible.

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


Beau Johnston

Beau

Making code run fast on all the things (with OpenCL)

10:40am Wednesday 14th January 2015

Beau is a PhD Candidate at the Australian National University and freelance code-monkey. He has an interest in OpenCL, OpenGL, OpenCV, creative naming conventions and image processing. He has developed for iOS, Android, OSX, Linux and a micro-CT machine.

In his free time he likes to play boardgames, lawn bowls and badminton.

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