Expert Panel

Our team of expert panel members will pre-qualify completed applications prior to public judging this year, in order to streamline the voting process. The highest rated applications, as determined by our panelists, will move on to the next round of judging, in which end users will decide the ultimate winners. In addition to rating entries, panelists will also leave personal comments for each application that they review; this means that each competing team will receive notes or advice from a minimum of 3 panel members, whether they go on to public voting or not.

Rails Rumble Expert Panelists include people that do great stuff from all parts of the web development and startup ecosystem: web developers, programmers, designers, user experience experts, startup and venture business folks, and media people. The panel also includes a number of influential Ruby community leaders.

Panelists for the 2010 Contest

Phil Harnish (YouTube)

Phil’s been working on the play button at YouTube for a couple years now. He enjoys continuous deployment and long stretches of behavior driven development. Between the years of keyboard playing cat videos he’s learned a lot about the strain scale has on design and usability [talk here: http://youtu.be/GcaRLNf5cac]. If he ever escape the clutches of a cushy corporate day job, you’ll find him hacking on yet another casual-social-game without a business model.

Brian P. Hogan (New Auburn Personal Computer Services LLC)

Brian Hogan is an author, editor, web developer, and trainer who enjoys teaching and learning about web development. He has 15 years of application development experience and is the author of “HTML5 and CSS3” and “Web Design For Developers. He is the creator and maintainer of the RailsMentors project and is an advocate for accessibility for the disabled. He is currently a Development Editor for the Pragmatic Bookshelf.

Jackson Fox (MoreBetterLabs)

Jackson Fox is Principal Interaction Designer at MoreBetterLabs, the company behind Ruzuku.com. Since building his first site in 1997, Jackson has designed engaging and usable websites for organizations such as Lulu.com, Choice Hotels International, Rate it All, Ogilvy, and KaBOOM!. He loves to sketch and enjoys long, academic discussions about the application of social and cognitive psychology to design.

Brian Del Vecchio (Digital Lumens)

Brian is a software engineer with over 20 years of experience in distributed systems, network equipment, and social web software. He has been working Ruby on Rails full time since porting a consumer web app from Java/Spring in 2006. His current project is to build a dashboard and control app for intelligent LED lighting systems at Digital Lumens in Boston.

Seth Kravitz (CEO, InsuranceAgents.com)

Seth is a serial entrepreneur who first started off in 2002 with a web design company in his dorm room. From there he met his future business partner at Ohio State and launched InsuranceAgents.com in 2004. Growing from a three person startup in a basement to 50 employees in two cities with $14mm in revenue, he has been heavily involved in every aspect of growing a small business.

TJ Holowaychuk (LearnBoost)

TJ is a Ruby lover turned JavaScript enthusiast, leading several important Ruby-esque frameworks for NodeJS such as the Sinatra inspired ExpressJS, Haml inspired “Jade”, and many more.

Chris Selmer (Intridea)

One of Intridea’s cofounders and senior partners, Chris leads up the client services division. Chris has spoken at a number of national and international Ruby conferences, curates the DC [Startup Digest], is very active in the DC tech/startup scene, and helps run the Washington DC Ruby User Group.

David Cohen (TechStars)

David Cohen is the founder and CEO of TechStars. David is a active startup advocate, advisor, board member, and technology advisor who comments on these topics on his blog at DavidGCohen.com

Laura Fitton (oneforty)

Laura “@Pistachio” Fitton founded oneforty.com (@oneforty) to help people understand Twitter and the exploding ecosystem of applications and services built on it. Called “the app store for Twitter” by TechCrunch, oneforty serves as a robust directory with thousands of apps and leads a knowledgeable community that helps Twitter users get more value out of Twitter. She is also the co-author of Twitter for Dummies (@dummies). Once dubbed the “Queen of Twitter,” she is credited with explaining Twitter’s value to Guy Kawasaki and dozens of other tech leaders. She founded the first Twitter for Business consultancy, Pistachio Consulting in 2008 and has been speaking professionally about the business use of Twitter since 2007. She has been quoted in dozens of national publications on the topic of Twitter, including Businessweek, Forbes, Fortune, Newsweek and the Wall Street Journal. Laura lives in the Boston area with her two daughters and two dogs.

Cyril Ebersweiler (SOSventures)

Cyril built and headed several Asian-based businesses in the past 10 years and is a startup enthusiast who lives between continents. He is investing/helping/advising companies at early stage, and founder of @Chinaccelerator, a mentorship-driven seed funding program based in the Middle Kingdom.”

Alan Northam (Breaking Development Inc)

Alan Northam is a .Net consultant by day, Ruby enthusiast by night in Birmingham, AL. Alan specializes in architecture and framework development, data modelling, code and data performance tuning. His spare time is spent with his daughter playing guitar, video games, and watching MST3K/Rifftrax.

Michael Parenteau (Relevance, Inc)

Michael is a designer at Relevance, Inc., artist, home brewer, husband & father, currently living in North Carolina. He has walked barefoot across the country in search of strange and different experiences. His passion is in making really cool things that people will interact with and whether it is in that something’s form or function, they will get something beautiful and useful out of it. “I believe that creativity is one of humanity’s greatest gifts. We are often faced with difficult problems with really tight constraints…and it is in those adverse situations that we discover some of the best ideas ever!”

Yoshi Maisami (Intridea)

As a Co-Founder and Senior Partner of Intridea, and the head of Business Development, Yoshi is the driving force behind the company’s comprehensive growth strategy. A serial entrepreneur and consummate inventor, Yoshi’s ‘Win-Win’ philosophy and ‘Result-Oriented’ leadership style has generated over $1 Billion in cumulative revenues for his partners, clients, and affiliates.

David A. Black (Cyrus Innovation, Inc)

David A. Black has been programming in Ruby for ten years, and is the author of The Well-Grounded Rubyist (Manning, 2009). He’s one of the founding directors of Ruby Central, Inc., the parent organization of the International Ruby Conference (RubyConf). David is also one of the most experienced Ruby and Rails trainers in the the business. One of his current projects is The Compleat Rubyist, a training event taught by David, Gregory Brown, and Jeremy McAnally. David is a frequent invited speaker and keynoter at Ruby and Rails conferences, as well as users groups, in the U.S. and abroad.

David Hauser (Grasshopper)

David Hauser is a young entrepreneur based out of Boston, MA. Having launched more than five start-ups, entrepreneurship is his passion, and empowering entrepreneurs to succeed is what he does every day. As founder of Grasshopper Group, Grasshopper Labs, Chargify (and more to come) he has experienced the many highs and lows of the rollercoaster ride that is being an entrepreneur, and will certainly experience more in the future. Come along with him for the ride.

Coach Wei (Yottaa)

Coach is CEO of Yottaa, a cloud service company focused on web performance. Coach is also Chairman of Nexaweb Technologies, a Boston based company he founded in 2000 that pioneered Rich Internet Applications and enterprise web 2.0. Before Nexaweb, Coach designed software for managing storage networks at EMC Corporation. Coach obtained his master’s degree from MIT, holds six patents and maintains a blog on startups, web 2.0 and entrepreneurship at http://www.coachwei.com.

John Herman (John Herman)

John Herman is an artist, writer, and producer. Past projects include comedy appearances in New York and Japan, a steampunk and robot theatre night that raised thousands for charity, an interactive web soap opera, and more. He serves as an emerging media trainer and consultant, covering the wide range of topics in the intersection of technology and culture. He is currently working on a young adult novel involving time travel and dreams.

Nick Quaranto (Thoughtbot)

Nick is a firm believer in open source software, a proud member of Ruby community, and has been doing web development for as long as he can remember. He cut his teeth on classic ASP and ASP.NET at first, but discovered Ruby on Rails through his university and dove in head first. Nick pretends he’s a bassist with famous prog rock bands when not coding.

Dan Sullivan (Founder, Appswell)

Founder of mobile crowdsourcing platform Appswell. Serial entrepreneur, interested in social application of technology to utilize the strength and engagement of networked communities and audiences. He’s been working on building smarter, better, more useful communities for over ten years. Past: Founder and President Speakwithageek, Sr. Consultant at Dell, Community Manager at CollegeClub.com, Techstars Boston 2010.

Nate Westheimer (Executive Director, NY Tech Meetup)

Nate Westheimer is a serial entrepreneur, community organizer, and beginner Rails hacker. He was the co-founder of BricaBox, was the EIR at Rose Tech Ventures, and co-founder and head of product and technology at AnyClip. Today, while he’s putting a band together to start his next great company, he serves as an Advisor to Flybridge Capital Partners and volunteers as the Executive Director of the NY Tech Meetup. For his blog, visit: innonate.com

Alex Payne (CTO, BankSimple)

Alex Payne is a cofounder of BankSimple, a startup combining modern technology with extraordinary customer service to create a seamless, worry-free banking experience. Previously, he was one of the first engineers at Twitter. Alex is the coauthor of “Programming Scala” (O’Reilly, 2009), and has been writing online for about a decade. He’s a recent transplant to Portland, Oregon.

Sachin Agarwal (Blueleaf)

Sachin is the founder of Dawdle and the Director of Marketing at Blueleaf, having recovered from his experiences in venture capital and investment banking. He consults with companies on product management, marketing, pricing, and other questions that founders have. His blog writing has been featured on Daring Fireball and ReadWriteWeb, among others.

Andy Brett (TechCrunch)

Andy is the lead developer at TechCrunch, so he wears a few different hats to ensure that all of the servers, code bases, and writers are kept well-fed and happy. His primary focus is Ruby on Rails and CrunchBase but he’s no stranger to PHP and WordPress at this point either - whatever it takes to build new things. When he’s not coding he can be found running or hiking on the myriad trails around the Bay Area, or brewing his own beer.

Tom Preston-Werner (GitHub)

Tom is a physics major turned coder/entrepreneur and is responsible for inventing Gravatars and cofounding GitHub. Though he fears that he is slowly morphing into a manager, he still writes enough Ruby and Erlang and to keep him firmly planted on the programmer side of that line. On sunny days you can find Tom tearing through the redwood forests south of San Francisco on his mountain bike or roaming around foreign countries snapping photos like an idiot tourist.

Kevin Menard (Mogotest)

Kevin founded Mogotest with the goal of doing for front-end Web testing what jUnit and friends did for software in general. He is devoted to improving the state of Web development tools and practices. As an Apache Software Foundation member and part of the core Selenium team, he’s also deeply committed to open source software and giving back to the community.

Nick Tommarello

Nick is a serial entrepreneur and Rails hacker. He founded Urban Interactive in 2003, a mobile game company that creates ‘Amazing Race’ type tour adventures. Next, Nick developed a Loopt-style social network with 100,000 users (unfortunately, the primary use: facilitating horny teenager’s efforts to more efficiently hook up). He’s now working on a travel and adventure game that encourages people to complete challenges around the world.

Bryan Liles

Bryan does a myriad of Ruby related tasks for his daytime job in a quaint little town near Baltimore, Maryland. He hasn’t written any books, and doesn’t maintain any major open source projects. Most of his time is spent helping others level up their awesomeness; trying to cause chaos with writings on his blog; or just being a great dad and husband. Some came to lead. Some come to be lead. Bryan comes to smash the status quo.

Jason Johnson

As a technology entrepreneur in Silicon Valley, Jason Johnson has been a part of five venture backed companies with IPOs, acquisitions, as well as less glorious results. Currently he is co-founder of Rethink Books, a software change agent for authors and consumers to redefine book reading. He is also a managing partner of Founders Den, a private coworking space in San Francisco for serial entrepreneurs.

Nicole Cifani (Yahoo! Music)

Nicole is a new media producer, content curator, DJ, geek, travel addict, and general instigator-at-large. She works at Yahoo! Music as Interactive Director of Partner Relations, where she works to secure features and exclusive content for the site. She also helps to program audio & video content for the site’s 300+ music channels. Prior to that, she was Senior Interactive Producer at KCRW, a world-renowned radio station broadcasting at kcrw.com and from 89.9 fm in Los Angeles, CA. While at KCRW, Nicole handled content management and page buildouts at kcrw.com. She oversaw social media initiatives leading to over 30,000 friends, followers, and fans of the station.

Zed Shaw (learnpythonthehardway.org)

Zed Shaw is a hacker, writer, and probably a musician who spends his days working on Mongrel2 (the successor to Mongrel), playing guitar, writing rants, teaching people to code, and enjoying life. He can currently be found in San Francisco’s Union Square practicing scales while fighting off meth addicts who try to steal his gear.

Dan Brown (EightShapes, LLC)

Dan co-founded EightShapes, a user experience design firm based in Washington, DC. His clients include National Geographic, Cisco, WebEx, US Department of Energy, US Department of Education. Dan has written numerous articles on information architecture and design, and had a regular column in BoxesandArrows.com. In 2006, he published Communicating Design, widely considered part of the “UX canon.” Newly updated, the second edition (New Riders, 2010) expands on principles for creating create user experience documentation. Dan’s next speaking engagement is at UX Lisbon, in May 2011.

Josh Nichols (Rails Machine)

Josh Nichols, a.k.a. technicalpickles, is in diamonds. It’s unclear what that means really, but he finds himself working on web development, web operations, scaling, support, and many other awesome things. He deeply believes that reading and writing open source projects and engaging in online and offline user groups and other communites are stops along the the path to true enlightenment. In that pursuit, he organized the illustrious Boston Ruby Group for three years and has authored and contributed several open source projects, most notably jeweler. Most recently, he’s taking it easy in Savannah, GA while trying to live up to the title Awesomeness Engineer of Supreme Versatility II at Rails Machine.

Ian Hunter

Ian’s formerly been associated with or helped found eStara (acquired 47M), Transactis (founder), Plaxo (acquired 170M), ePublishing, Rollstream and Cocodot. Currently he is on the road as a programming nomad, seeing the varying minority technology communities outside of SF and NYC. He is a teacher of Ruby/Rails, speaker, advisor and founder of Cohesive, a web consultancy, and a few yet-to-be-named startups.

Marcus Nelson (Salesforce.com)

Marcus Nelson is a recovering entrepreneur, adviser to startups, and Director of Marketing for Salesforce.com. His many hats at the company include corporate communications, social media engagement & training, strategic partnerships, and brand evangelism. In his spare time, Marcus rummages through Radian6 and Omniture, massages test & target variances, and occasionally looks for lift in form completes & sales conversion. Marcus is very active on Twitter, prefers Gowalla for its pretty pictures, and loves to tell stories. He holds a piece of paper saying he studied Theology, and is a double drop-out from two Universities. http://marcus-nelson.com

John Shiple

John Shiple invented POP-UPS. You can hate him later. For now, we’re in awe of his track record as a veteran of 16 startups including the Internet’s first commercial website, HOTWIRED (by WIRED MAGAZINE), and the fact that he re-architected GEOCITIES (the world’s 4th largest Website at the time). An MIT Computer Science and Computer Engineering graduate, his desire to help new-comers enter the tech field inspired him to recently co-found Students4Startups. Check it out!: http://www.students4startups.com/

Jonathan Bell

When Jonathan Bell isn’t ballroom dancing, skydiving, horseback riding or practicing his martial arts… he’s working to solve global poverty. As the tech lead at GlobalFast he believes the charitable world needs transparency and innovation just as much as technology does. Participants give up one meal each month to change lives without changing their budgets as they give off their plate, not out of their wallets. 100% of funds raised go straight to poverty partners on the ground where it’s needed. Admin costs are funded by generous and visionary friends of Globalfast. Check them out at http://www.globalfast.org/why_us to get involved.

“This is an opportunity to transform ourselves—through sacrifice for others, we become courageous and committed agents of global change.”

Dr. Rick Warren

Pastors can be tech stars too! You’ve probably heard heaps about his global 2 year best seller “The Purpose Driven Life,” but what you probably didn’t know is that his tech-savvy church, Saddleback, was the first church on the Internet, way back in 1992. That’s before IE or Netscape - and using Mosaic, Gopher, & FTP! THE NEW YORKER says, “Like Ray Kroc and Sam Walton, he pioneered new delivery systems,” and FORTUNE MAGAZINE says, “America’s pastor has a plan to mobilize millions to fight poverty, illiteracy, and AIDS in Africa, and he’s got the management genius to do it.” It’s a lot for a Ruby hacker to look up to and be proud of, and Rumble 2010 is stoked to have Dr. Rick Warren on our panel of experts.

Christian Gammill (SocialGuides)

Christian is a chemist turned strategist turned entrepreneur. As co-founder and president of SocialGuides he helps local businesses build better customer relationships through the social web. He previously led customer experience globally for IBM, and also built web, mobile and pharma startups. He loves all things customer facing/focused (including customer development) and is a passionate product guy. He loves helping other startups in the marketing technology and social data space shape their ideas into products and those products into businesses.

Zach Holt (Hulu)

Zach is a lead developer at Hulu and has over ten years experience in the software industry. At Hulu, he leads the mobile development efforts on the company’s new subscription service, Hulu Plus. Zach has a computer science degree from Dartmouth and is a Ruby maniac suffering withdrawals in an Objective-C world.

Paige Craig

Paige is Southern California’s most active angel investor… but don’t get your pitches out yet. He’s taking a break from investing to build his own startup: BetterWorks — looking to impact the lives of 6 Million small and medium business owners and their employees and fundamentally change the nature of the workforce. He has an eclectic interest in national security, technology, information science and adrenaline fueled adventure.

Avesta Rasouli (Coloft)

Avesta Rasouli is the founder and CEO of Coloft, a successful community based workspace concept for startups, entrepreneurs, and freelancers located in Santa Monica, CA. In addition to Coloft, Avesta founded AppShows.com, a company focused on marketing and promoting mobile applications. At Coloft Avesta spends time helping startups formulate and execute marketing and sales strategies. He’s also an investor in Ming.ly, a Santa Monica based personal relationship management service.

Patrick Vlaskovits (Twiistup.com)

Entrepreneur + author. Founded two startups. Both dead-pooled. Wrote a book called The Entrepreneur’s Guide to Customer Development. Working on a few startup projects right now, and am also a co-organizer of the Los Angeles Lean Startup Circle. Contact me or view my LinkedIn profile or Twitter stream.

Kevin Kelly (WIRED Magazine)

Kevin Kelly is one of the most influential voices in the technology world. Currently “Senior Maverick” at Wired magazine, he co-founded Wired in 1993, and served as its Executive Editor from its inception until 1999. He has just completed a new book, What Technology Wants where he explores the evolution of technology as an “extension of life” or “technium.” He is a frequent speaker at conferences such as TED and has written for Time, New York Times, Esquire, The Economist, The Wall Street Journal and many others. His book Out of Control: The New Biology of Machines, Social Systems, and the Economic World was one of the key books that inspired The Matrix and was required reading for the cast. What technology products will drive the world of the future? Ask Kevin Kelly.

Jim Krueger

Jim Krueger is a screenwriter, comic book writer and filmmaker and was named as one of the top ten writers in comics and an innovator in the field by Wizard magazine. As one of the best storytellers in the world of heros he has been entrusted with some of the world’s top hero brands. From the award-winning Earth X trilogy with Alex Ross to the X-Men, Avengers, Star Wars, The Matrix Comics, Micronauts, Galactic, Batman, Justice League and more. He has served as the creative director for Marvel Comics and in 2010 Jim won the Eisner award, the Academy Award of comic books.
Jim believes products, like great stories, should inspire and bring out the hero in each of us in order for people to follow them and join them.