Guido van Rossum

Guido van Rossum is the creator of Python, one of the major programming languages on and off the web. The Python community refers to him as the BDFL (Benevolent Dictator For Life), a title straight from a Monty Python skit.

He moved from the Netherlands to the USA in 1995, where he met his wife. Until July 2003 they lived in the northern Virginia suburbs of Washington, DC with their son Orlijn, who was born in 2001. They then moved to Silicon Valley where Guido now works for Google (spending 50% of his time on Python!).

Topic: Python 3000 And You ("Hear all about what Python 3000 means for your code, what tools will be available to help you in the transition, and how to be prepared for the next millennium.")

Van Lindberg

Van Lindberg is a software engineer and practicing attorney at Haynes and Boone. What he does most, though, is translate - from "lawyer" to "engineer" and back. He likes working with both computer code and legal code to get things done.

Before becoming a lawyer, Van was a research and development engineer at NTT/Verio, building automation tools and distributed systems, mostly in Python. He has been involved with open source since 1994, when a friend introduced him to Linux.

Van's current work touches both traditional intellectual property and the emerging field of open source law, where he spends time helping businesses with IP concerns and advising the Python Software Foundation on IP issues. Van is the author of an upcoming O'Reilly book on intellectual property for developers.

Van has a B.S. in Computer Engineering/History (Double Major) and a J.D., both from Brigham Young University.

Topic: Intellectual Property and Open Source

Mark Hammond

Mark has been involved in the Python community since 1994 and helped create the first 32bit Windows port of Python. He currently maintains the Python for Windows (pywin32) extensions and the Mozilla Python related extensions. He is based in Melbourne, Australia, and is currently is working part-time with Enfold Systems (a vendor of Plone related technologies) and various others in the Python and Open Source worlds.

Topic: Snake Charming the Dragon: the past, present and future of Python and Mozilla.

Chris Hagner

Chris Hagner is a Senior Software Engineer and a member of the management team at White Oak Technologies, Inc. (WOTI). WOTI provides the next generation of solutions to massive, information-intensive, strategic intelligence challenges. Chris manages WOTI's largest client engagement, which includes a large and diverse group of computer scientists and data analysts.

Besides being one of the company's more outspoken "Pythonistas," he is also the architect of the company's Python web framework. Chris was first exposed to Python while heading up the software development team at The Motley Fool. In that role, he led the development of a number of Python solutions that were later open-sourced. His work at WOTI has involved the wide use of Python for custom web harvesting, distributed process management, text mining and image analysis.

Chris received his Bachelors of Science Degree in Mechanical Engineering from Washington University in St. Louis and his MBA from George Mason University.

Brian 'Fitz' Fitzpatrick

Brian Fitzpatrick started his career at Google in 2005 as the first software engineer hired in the Chicago office. Brian leads Google's Chicago engineering efforts and also serves as engineering manager for Google Code and internal advisor for Google's open source efforts. Prior to joining Google, Brian was a senior software engineer on the version control team at CollabNet, working on Subversion, cvs2svn, and CVS. He has also worked at Apple Computer as a senior engineer in their professional services division, developing both client and web applications for Apple's largest corporate customers.

Brian has been an active open source contributor for over ten years. After years of writing small open source programs and bugfixes, he became a core Subversion developer in 2000, and then the lead developer of the cvs2svn utility. He was nominated as a member of the Apache Software Foundation in 2002 and spent two years as the ASF's VP of Public Relations. Brian has written numerous articles and given many presentations on a wide variety of subjects from version control to software development, including co-writing "Version Control with Subversion" as well as chapters for "Unix in a Nutshell" and "Linux in a Nutshell."

Brian has an A.B. in Classics from Loyola University Chicago with a major in Latin, a minor in Greek, and a concentration in Fine Arts and Ceramics. Despite growing up in New Orleans and working for Silicon Valley companies for most of his career, he decided years ago that Chicago was his home and stubbornly refuses to move to California.