One of the many great reasons to attend the Tcl conference is the
tutorials presented by renowned leaders and experts in the Tcl
community. They will be sharing with you their knowledge of Tcl/Tk
and its extensions, and experience in developing large, versatile and
robust applications - information and techniques which will assist you
in your day-to-day Tcl programming needs.
With a background in programming, Colin Walker somehow ended up working for a networking
company, and has never looked back. Having joined F5 Networks in December of 2004, he
quickly fell in line with the application aware scripting capabilities (iRules) that help
make F5 devices as flexible as they are. As an iRules zealot Colin works to further the
technology, guide Product Development on potential roadmap decisions and evangelize to
the community and, frankly, anyone that will listen about how you can use the power of
the network to better applications everywhere.
Starting first in Unix (BSDi/FreeBSD) technical support for a shared web hosting company
and working up through sys-admin and eventual to software engineer, Colin has been
steeped in applications and automation but also in the importance of making good on
commitments to end users, implied or otherwise for nearly 15 years now. Approaching every
project, whether it be deployment design, application troubleshooting, network
optimization or the like, he does so with a mind towards the end goal: delivering
applications to users as effectively and efficiently as possible.
Tutorial Presenters
D. Richard Hipp has developed many Tcl tools including a table widget,
html display widget, mkTclApp, and TOBE. He's been a member of the
Core Team since its creation.
Richard's latest activities revolve around sqlite and tools like fossil
that are developed using sqlite (frequently with Tcl).
Clif Flynt has been a professional programmer since 1978, and a Tcl
advocate since 1993. His dual interests in programming and teaching
have led him to developing both scientific and business software,
teaching at Grinnell College and Eastern Michigan University,
writing about Tcl/Tk and delivering Tcl/Tk corporate training.
Clif's Tcl projects include TclTutor, a computer based instruction
package, The book Tcl/Tk:A Developer's Guide from Morgan Kauffman,
and regular Tclsh Spot articles for ;login: magazine.
Kim has been using Tcl since the late 20'th century.
Kim was one of the trainers and developers at CPU where he developed
control software for off-shore oil rigs as well as Tcl and Expect
training classes. He helped run the second and 11'th Tcl/Tk Conferences
in New Orleans. Kim is currently working with Visiprise, developing
and supporting Tcl applications for NASA and the Space Shuttle.
Jeff Hobbs (Mr. Tclguy) is the Core Release Manager for the Tcl
language. He has maintained the TK Usage FAQ since 1996. Jeff is the
technical lead for Tcl technologies at ActiveState. Previously, he was the
Tcl Ambassador at Scriptics, maintaining communications between the Tcl
community and Scriptics and managing development of the Tcl core.
Jeff is probably responsible for more Tcl bug fixes than anyone else and
is a co-author of Practical Programming in Tcl and Tk (Fourth
Edition), published by Prentice Hall.
Gerald Lester has been giving tutorials at conferences for over 20 years.
Gerald is President of KNG Consulting , LLC. Prior to setting out on his
own, he was Directory of Technology at TicketSwitch USA. He had also worked
for Computerized Processes Unlimited for over 15 years where he was one of
the early adapters of Tcl/Tk and presented a paper at first Tcl/Tk
Conference (then called the Tcl/Tk Workshop) about the first "large" Tcl/Tk
application (~300,000 lines of Tcl/Tk code). Gerald has been on the Tcl/Tk
Conference Committee numerous times and has chaired the conference three
times.
Gerald is one of the maintainers for both TclHttpd and TclLib and author of
the popular "Web Services for Tcl" package.
Ken Jones, President of Avia Training and Consulting, has hundreds of
in-class hours teaching advanced technical topics, and almost 20 years
experience in technical training and documentation targeted towards software
developers.
Prior to founding Avia, Ken was lead instructor at Ajuba Solutions (formerly
Scriptics), which provided advanced business-to-business e-commerce
solutions based on XML and Tcl. While at Ajuba Solutions, Ken worked with
John Ousterhout, the creator of Tcl, Brent Welch, author of Practical
Programming in Tcl and Tk, and other key developers of the Tcl language. Ken
also has worked for companies including Borland, Silicon Graphics, and
Sybase where he specialized in products for creating graphical user
interfaces and for providing database connectivity.
Steve Landers is the Senior Consultant at Digital Smarties. He is
active within the Tcl/Tk community, where he regularly contributes both
software and expertise. He has a particular interest in the development
of cross-platform scripted applications, and is a leading proponent of
Tclkit, Starkit, Starpacks and Metakit for developing complex and robust
cross-platform applications.
Steve has over twenty years experience in the Open Software marketplace,
being a founding member of both AUUG (the Australian Open Systems User
Group) and SAGE-AU (the Systems Administrators Guild of Australia). He
was a pioneer of the commercial application of the UNIX operating system
and relational database technology in Australia during the early 1980's
implementing the first commercial Unix/Oracle installation in the
country.
He was a founder and technical director of Functional Software - one
of Australia's most successful software development companies, whose
COSMOS products and technology are used worldwide in the management of
large IT installations.
Steve regularly speaks at conferences, both in Australia and
internationally. He has spoken at a number of SAGE-AU and AUUG annual
conferences, and was a speaker at the Tcl2001 And Tcl2002 conferences.
Will Duquette is the author of the well-known "Will's Guide
to Namespaces and Packages" and "Will's Guide to Object Commands",
the Notebook personal wiki application, and the Snit object
and widget framework. When not working on Snit, Notebook, and
suchlike projects, he's a software engineer responsible for more
projects than are easily mentioned.
Joe Mistachkin (pronounced "miss-tash-kin") is a software engineer and one of the
maintainers of Tcl/Tk. He is also the author of the TclBridge component and the Eagle
scripting language. He has been working in the software industry since 1994.
Contact Information
fox@nscl.msu.edu
