Chicago

Bob Tierney has been with Adobe for 4 1/2 years, having started with Macromedia during the Flex 1.0 days. He is currently a Senior Product Specialist for Flex / LiveCycle Data Services in the North American Sales organization. Prior to Adobe, he was the Evangelist for SilverStream Software, one of the very first Java Application Server vendors. Before SilverStream, he was the PowerBuilder Technology Evangelist for Powersoft Inc, a very successful GUI based client server development tool. That accounts for the second half of his career. In his previous career, Bob was an Electical Engineer specializing in the area Digital Simulation and Fault Analysis for VLSI Devices - which explains the jump into IT software development <g>.

Michael Labriola has been developing Internet applications since 1995 and has been working with Flex since its 1.0 beta program. He specializes in developing applications with high business impact using emerging technologies. Michael worked as an author and technical editor on Adobe Flex 2: Training from the Source and has published a series of articles on Adobe’s Developer Center teaching others to integrate Flex client and server technologies. As a frequent speaker on Flex topics and contributor to Flex mailing lists, he is known throughout the developer community. Michael also speaks Spanish and Italian, and pretends to speak more Japanese than he actually knows. (Michael's Blog)

Jeff Tapper has over a decade of experience developing Internet applications for a myriad of clients, including Harley Davidson, Toys "R" Us, IBM, Dow Jones, American Express, and Morgan Stanley. As an instructor, he is certified to teach all of Adobe's courses on Flex, ColdFusion, and Flash development. He has been working with Flex since the earliest alphas of Flex 1.0. Jeff has worked as author and technical editor for several books, including Adobe Flex 2: Training from the Source and Object-Oriented Programming with ActionScript 2.0, and sits on the editorial board of Web Developers & Designers Journal. (Jeff's Blog)

Mike Nimer is a former member of the Adobe ColdFusion engineering team. There he was responsible for the integration of Flex 2 with ColdFusion Server as well as many other current features of ColdFusion. Before joining the Adobe engineering team he worked for three years as a senior consultant with the Macromedia consulting group, assisting clients on-site with their architectural planning, code reviews, and performance tuning. He has spoken at every Allaire & Macromedia DevCon/Adobe MAX since they began 1998. (Mike's Blog)

Shashank Tiwari is the Chief Technologist at Saven Technologies, a technology driven business solutions company headquartered in Chicago, IL. As an experienced software developer and architect, he is adept in a multitude of technologies. He is an expert group member on a number of JCP (Java Community Process) specifications, JSRs 274, 283, 299, 301 & 312, and is an Adobe Flex Champion. Currently, he passionately builds rich high performance applications and advises many on RIA and SOA adoption. Many of his clients are banking, money management, and financial service companies that he has helped build robust, quantitative, data-intensive, highly interactive, and scalable applications. He writes regularly in many technical magazines, presents in seminars and mentors developers and architects. He has a popular blog on the O'Reilly Network. He is an ardent supporter of and contributor to open source software. He lives with his wife and two sons in New York. More information about him can be accessed at his website.