James Cox has been developing and interacting with the web for the last six years, building apps small and big. Having worked on projects as diverse as editorially driven content management through e-commerce, he has a wide range of scenarios to draw from.

Having not only developed small projects, James has experience managing high scalability situations too. Starting with PHP's website, php.net, he spent many years managing the various services within the infrastructure team, learning the tricks of the trade and experimenting with new techniques.

Since, then James has solved the scalability and uptime issues of a major Mid-East online news source, and is currently working with a massively popular webzine serving over 10 million hits a day.

Within the community James has worked on testing new availability scenarios with other leading scalability evangelists and continues to research new ways to attain high performance webapps.

Justin Gehtland is President and co-founder of Relevance, Inc., a development, consulting and training organization based in Chapel Hill, North Carolina.

He has written commercial applications in Ruby, Java, C#, VB, Perl and other languages, and is the author or co-author of eight different technical books, including "Pragmatic Ajax", "Rails for Java Developers", and the Jolt(tm) award winning "Better, Faster, Lighter Java". He is a well-traveled speaker, appearing at RailsConf, RubyConf, RailsEdge, JAOO, and the No Fluff, Just Stuff tour.

He is particularly proud to be involved in the continuing development of the Streamlined open source framework (streamlinedframework.org).

He currently lives in Durham, NC, with his wife, 2 kids, 2 dogs and 2 cats.

Jay Fields is a software developer at ThoughtWorks. He is a early adopter who is constantly looking for new exciting technologies.

His most recent work has been in the Domain Specific Language space where he delivered applications that empowered subject matter experts to write the business rules of the applications.

Josh Susser is a freelance developer specializing in Ruby on Rails web applications. He got started with object-oriented programming doing Smalltalk at Xerox back in the glory days. His Smalltalk work ranged from application and system programming in Smalltalk to virtual machine development in microcode. At Apple he was a principle designer of the long-lamented OpenDoc, and at Sun Microsystems he was a principle designer and author of the Java Card 2.0 Virtual Machine Specification.

Working in Ruby has let Josh escape the tedium of hybrid OOP languages and get back to his dynamic language roots. In the Rails community, Josh is a frequent contributor to the Rails open source project and keeps a popular Rails programming blog.

Obie Fernandez is a recognized tech industry leader and independent consultant, specializing in the marketing and development of large-scale, web-based applications.

He is based out of Atlanta, Georgia and has two children: Taylor Anne, 10 and Liam, 8 years old. Obie is an accomplished blogger and author. He is Series Editor of the Professional Ruby Series for prestigious tech publishing house Addison-Wesley.

His own book for the series is titled The Rails Way. Obie also manages the Ruby content and a team of volunteer reporters as editor of the popular technology portal InfoQ.com, with over 135,000 unique visitors in May 2007.