Conference Team

Leah Silber

Leah is an all-around open source advocate. During the day time, she's employed as the Director of Marketing at Strobe, a company built around the open source JavaScript framework SproutCore. In her spare time, in addition to running GoGaruCo, Leah is responsible for fundraising and event management as a member of the jQuery Core Team. She previously worked as a consultant for clients in the tech sector, and was employed managing the Community Marketing and Events department at Engine Yard. She is originally from Brooklyn, NY and now lives in San Francisco, CA with her husband.

Josh Susser

Josh likes to say that Ruby is the love child of Lisp and Smalltalk, raised by Perl the eccentric nanny. At Pivotal Labs he spent the last several years developing Rails web applications for clients, and he is a high-ranked contributor to the Rails open source project. He has spoken at RailsConf, regional conferences and meetups. In past lives he's done Smalltalk VM implementation, spent too much time at Apple building the ill-fated OpenDoc, and helped design the Java VM that runs on the SIM card in your iPhone. You can find his blog at blog.hasmanythrough.com.

Jim Meyer

Jim Meyer (@purp) is a perpetual n00b who blames both Ruby and Rails for his sleep deficit dating back to May of ‘07. He's particularly delighted to join a community where agility is valued, iteration is key, and testing is cool.

With a career that's ranged from freelance graphic design to large scale distributed computing systems architecture to leading technology organizations large and small, Jim is a renaissance man, a geek of all trades, or (most likely) an advanced case of ADD in search of the next challenging distraction. Along the way, he's founded a graphic design studio, built technology groups and solutions for the likes of Disney and DreamWorks, met many interesting people and had a metric ton of fun.

Jim is the father of two and husband of one, all three of whom make him a better person on a daily basis (and none of whom speak in third person).

Program Committee

Many thanks to the team that reviewed submitted talk proposals and helped select the technical program. —Josh Susser, program committee chair

• Yehuda Katz
• Sarah Mei
• Aaron Patterson
• Tom Preston-Werner
• Tammer Saleh