Our Team

Wolfram Arnold, Ph.D. is a seasoned software professional with 17 years of experience and has been working on consumer web applications in Ruby-on-Rails since 2006. He has co-founded RubyFocus, a Ruby-on-Rails consulting and recruiting firm where he engages in his passion of championing viable, and long-term sustainable software development practices for his clients, including TDD/BDD (test-driven development), Rails best practices & conventions, performance profiling and scalability optimization.
Wolf learned the ropes on Rails while working on a project at Pivotal Labs in the winter of 2006/07 and has been an active member of the Rails community ever since. Prior to discovering Rails, Wolf was working in C++ on commercial server applications in Silicon Valley and, before that, on high-performance numerical simulations in solid state physics at Los Alamos National Lab and the University of Oregon. He holds a Ph.D. in physics and used to teach undergraduate physics classes as a graduate student.
Wolf speaks English, German, French and Spanish and currently lives in San Francisco.

| Scrum Project Management | Agile |

Gabrielle Benefield is the Sr Director of Agile Development at Yahoo! with over 170 Scrum teams worldwide. Gabrielle has been very successful in organizational change, specializing in enterprise level transformation.

She is a certified Scrum Trainer, Scrum Master and Practitioner, and holds an MA in Digital Media. She is co-author of The Scrum Primer.

| Java | XML | Apache | Tomcat | UML | C++ | C | J2EE | Ajax | XSL | JavaScript | Struts | Spring | Hibernate | Web Services | Eclipse IDE | Servlets and JSPs | Ant | CSS | HTML | OOP | Design Patterns | C# | WebSphere | SOA | SQL | AWT | Swing |

| HTML |

John Bergmans is an experienced speaker who has performed technical presentations on topics as varied as LabVIEW programming techniques, solid rocket motor control and laser-based instrumentation. Bergmans Mechatronics LLC, established in 2003, primarily develops data acquisition and control system hardware and software and specialized instrumentation. BML’s client base includes firms in the industrial, medical, scientific, and defense sectors.John’s interest in networked computing stems from the development of several TCP/IP-based data acquisition and control systems.  During the development of a prototype web-based personal scheduling application, Mr. Bergmans encountered and became proficient in the setup and development of WebSocket-based applications.

| SQL Database |

Adam Breindel brings over 10 years of successes working with cutting-edge technology for small startups as well as major players in the travel, media/entertainment, financial, productivity, and consulting industries.

In addition to web sites, GUI applications, and mobile device software, Adam has also built high-volume middleware for one of the world's largest banks, and produced a new, modern integration to a 1960s-vintage mainframe app for one of the world's largest airlines.

Adam focuses on designing and coding systems in a way that yields predictable results, leverages best practices and high-productivity tools, minimizes excess code, and is fun to do. He has also spoken at tech conferencs, written articles and skill assessments, and produced an open source tool for software development. Adam has enjoyed teaching large and small groups, covering topics from nuts-and-bolts Java programming to merging ideal process with real-world constraints in an organization.

| Java | PHP | Perl | XML | Apache | UML | C++ | C | Linux | Ajax | XSL | JavaScript | Web Services | CSS | HTML | OOP | Design Patterns | Windows | Mac OS X | MySQL | SQL |

i am a multidisciplinary teacher and consultant who has particular interest in information archives, flows and presentations. some of my favorite topics are thus natural languages, annotations and visualizations.

Jason Brittain is Software Architect at spigit (http://www.spigit.com), a social networking software company with a web 2.0 software suite that can find the best ideas, and the best reputed people in communities of users.

Jason is a co-author of Tomcat: The Definitive Guide, now in its second edition, and has written some web articles for O'Reilly's OnJava.com web site.

Before joining the team at spigit, Jason was a Senior Principal Software Engineer for Orbital Sciences Corporation, working at NASA's Ames Research Center on the Kepler Space Telescope mission (http://kepler.nasa.gov).

Jason's specialties include Java software development, building social networking web applications, Tomcat web application development and deployment, scalability and fault tolerance, and Apache Ant build systems, and Linux system administration. He has contributed to many Apache Jakarta projects, and has been an active open source software developer for several years.

After ten years teaching Computer Science in a University I left in order to apply those skills in a commercial environment. Since then I have gained wide experience in helping many large corporations add value to their IT staff resource by upskilling, cross-training and mentoring developers in the latest software technologies.
My work with some of the world's most successful corporations has given me deep insight into the effective application of appropriate software tools and techniques in today's commercial environment.
My overall strengths include excellent communication and training skills, substantial knowledge and experience of the Java platform and XML technologies, proven judgement in the selection of emerging technologies, and an intelligent, mature approach to any new challenge.
I continue to invest heavily in keeping my knowledge and skills up to date in Java and XML for the enterprise, the relevant programming techniques and libraries, system architectures, and applications. I have retained an enthusiasm for the technical subjects I teach, which has often been commented upon in course evaluations.

| Python |

Faber Fedor has been the President of Linux New Jersey, Inc. for the past nine years. He has provided training and development support to companies all across the United States including such places as NASA, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, PeopleSoft, and IBM. He was an adjunct professor at Bloomfield College for several years teaching Unix administration to college students and continuing education classes.

| Ruby |

Obie is a tech leader. He's been hacking since the '80s. More recently Obie's evangelizing Ruby and Rails online via blog posts and publications. Obie recently wrote The Rails Way book which we frequently use in Marakana Rails classes.

After graduating with a Computer Science degree from University of Cape Town, South Africa, Martin spent 13 years developing his career with WorldGroup consulting, starting as a Java programmer and ending his career there in 2005 as Chief Technical Officer of a company selling a J2EE infrastructure based product set to Fortune 500's. In 2005 Martin left his position and founded Javadojo, a company dedicated to building cutting edge delivery platform's in Java and hiring the best Java people in the business. Martin has been a freelance educator for the last 3 years teaching open source technology across the globe. Javadojo has since released the pureSolv platform, the first full RIA (Rich Internet Application) platform supporting interfaces across all mobile and desktop hardware, with a revolutionary scalable back end micro transaction manager - all with open source Java technologies. The first commercial product using pureSolv, called incaMoon, is a universal web store front for the masses, and is in Beta testing currently.

Additionally Martin has been producing electronic music for the last few years using Ableton Live. He has released two albums and has been playing his music live around the US and at festivals such as the Coachella, Shambhala and Burning Man festivals. Martin is currently working on a revolutionary open source music standard, to produce a platform for musicians to share and contribute to their art using the principals of open source software. Martin also teaches digital music production with tools such as Ableton Live and Cubase.

Martin has several real estate projects in progress in the Nicoya Peninsula in Costa Rica where he purchased large tracts of land several years ago and has begun developing infrastructure and reselling subdivisions. The ultimate goal in this project is to develop a 50 acre nature preservation around a man made reservoir, for the protection and preservation of indigenous animal and bird species that live in these coastal regions.

Aleksandar (Sa&scaron;a) Gargenta is the technology brains at Marakana. Always on top of the latest in software, Aleksandar is company's radar for technology that matters.Aleksandar is the author of Marakana's Java, Advanced Java, Spring/Hibernate, JBoss, Apache, XML/XSL, and JUnit/TestNG training courses. Phew. And if that's not enough, he's also the chief architect of Marakana Spark, the on-demand software platform that powers marakana.com and a number of other training companies. As an instructor he's taught hundreds of classes for everyone from Apple to Disney, from NASA to the Department of Defense.In his spare time Aleksandar runs the San Francisco Java and the San Francisco Android User Groups with over a thousand members between the two.Aleksandar holds a bachelor’s degree in Mathematics and Computer Science from the University of Waterloo, Canada. He is also a father, photographer, hiker, and a race-car driver.

Marko founded Marakana back in 2001 to help underprivileged youth, minorities, and inner-city kids learn web technologies and get ahead in life. So Marakana emerged with goal of helping people get better at what they do professionally, focused on open source software training.
Marko is the developer of Marakana Android Training series. He has taught Android for companies such as Sony-Ericsson, Qualcomm, Ericsson Canada, and many others. Marko is a co-founder of San Francisco Android Users Group and regularly teaches Android Bootcamp at Marakana.
In 2006 Marko Gargenta published "PHP and MySQL By Example", a collection on PHP examples. The book was published by Prentice Hall, world's largest technology publisher and has been also translated to Spanish.
Marko Gargenta obtained his Bachelor of Mathematics Degree from University of Waterloo (Canada's MIT) and has been developing in Java since 1996. He lives in San Francisco, California.
Speaking Engagements

Open Source Conference (OSCON): Android for Java Developers on July 19, 2010, Portland, OR
Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) SF Bay Area Chapter May 1, 2010
IEEE Computer Society "Android Night" on April 13, 2010
Scandinavian Developer Conference 2010: Android for Java Developers, March 16, 2010, Gotheborg, Sweden
SFAndroid: Learn about Android Internals and NDK, SF
SFAgile: Scrum Overview at Microsoft, SF
SFAndroid: Learn about Data Persistence in Android
SFAndroid: Learn how to develop for Android, beyond the HelloWorld
Software Development Forum, Mobile SIG: Android Overview
Open Source Conference (OSCON): A 30000-foot View of the Android Platform

Ruven focuses on Java, Ajax, and similar web-based development standards. Ruven has a reputation as an engaging instructor, clarifying complex topics and encouraging analytical thinking.

Zach Holt is an independent technology consultant who focuses on high-volume web sites and the infrastructure that enables them. Though he has spent much of his time since 2005 on Ruby and Rails, he is well versed in PHP, Perl, Objective-C, Java, and C++. Having been both an employee and an entrepreneur, open source and standards are particularly important to Zach, and he encourages clients to make use of them whenever applicable. He maintains multiple open-source Ruby projects and is active in his local Ruby/Rails group.

Zach lives in Santa Barbara and is working on a masters degree in theology.

| Java |

| Ruby | Rails |

Since drinking the Ruby kool-aid, Brandon has become a widely-read blogger and valuable member of the community while contributing to (and beginning) several open source projects. He is also a Rails Core contributor, and has created some very popular plugins.

In partnership with Marakana, Brandon has authored Marakana Ruby on Rails, Ruby, and Ruby on Rails Administration courses.

Prior to discovering Rails, Brandon was an Enterprise Java developer.

| Ruby | Rails |

David Lowenfels is a scientist, musician, engineer, yogi, and body worker. He holds a Master’s degree in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science from Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and a Master of Arts from CCRMA at Stanford University.

Roger Marquis is a Unix, Linux, network and security consultant based in Berkeley, CA. He was first introduced to Unix and the Internet at U.C. Berkeley in 1987, founded Roble Systems Consulting in 1995, and designed and developed the PostConf web application in 2002. He has worked with most of Silicon Valley's top tech companies as engineer, trainer, manager, and C-level officer, and continues to believe that Unix and Linux are the keys to the future of Information Technology.

Daniel is a developer currently focused on custom web application development in Ruby on Rails. He enjoys applying agile development techniques to solve real business problems.

| Scrum Project Management |

Jens Østergaard is an Agile Developer consultant who helps organizations understand the fundamentals of Scrum, argue that organizations should keep Scrum as pure as possible, until they fully understand the mechanism that drive development forward.

Having more than 20 years of experience as developer, dba, team manager, project manager and ScrumMaster, primarily in financial organizations, he has worked with all aspects of software development. Jens has managed several Scrum projects, and became a fully qualified CSM Trainer, in Copenhagen, 2004. Apart from consulting and training, Jens gives popular presentations about Scrum, at conferences and for organizations.

Jens’ base is in Copenhagen, Denmark, where he is self-employed. He holds a Bachelor of Science in Systems Analysis at Linköping University, Sweden, and one year at graduate school, business department, in Madison, Wisconsin.

You can read more about Jens Østergaard at scrum.dk.

| PHP | XML | Ajax | JavaScript | Eclipse IDE | CSS | HTML | OOP | Mac OS X | MySQL | SQL | Maps |

Robyn Overstreet is a web developer and technology trainer with a Master's degree from NYU's Interactive Telecommunications Program.

Chris is a developer and architect with over 20 years of experience. He is the author of very popular Java book POJOs in Action. Chris teaches you how to build enterprise Java applications using lightweight frameworks such as Spring and Hibernate. Chris has been a technical leader at Insignia, BEA, and elsewhere and recently was nominated a Java Champion.

His technical interests include domain-driven design, aspect-oriented programming, object/relational mapping, agile development and developer testing. Chris has spoken at various conferences including No Fluff Just Stuff Java Symposium, SD West, JavaPolis, SpringOne, the Colorado Software Summit and JavaOne. He is also the co-chair of the East Bay Java SIG. Chris has a degree in Computer Science from the University of Cambridge, England.

Roger is a senior instructor and software architect with nearly 30 years of experience in open source software. Roger specialize in enterprise solutions primarily using Java EE.

| Scrum Project Management | Agile |

Jeff Sutherland started the first Scrum at Easel Corporation in 1993 and worked with Scrum Co-Creator Ken Schwaber, to formalize the Scrum development process at OOPSLA’95. In the same year, Sutherland provided Kent Beck background information on the creation of Scrum to help him create eXtreme Programming. XP engineering practices then evolved along with SCRUM and the two leading Agile development processes work well together. Scrum and XP are the most widely used Agile processes worldwide and their creators are authors of the Agile Manifesto.

Jeff is CEO of Scrum, Inc. and Senior Advisor to OpenView Investment Partners. His venture group is run by Scrum, invests in Agile companies, and trains them in Scrum as the best business practice for software development. He has been CTO and/or VP of Engineering of 9 software companies and is Scrum coach to over 20 portfolio companies for the venture group. Jeff started up using Scrum seven years ago at PatientKeeper and involved the whole company in the Scrum process. He has helped extend the company-wide Scrum model to many companies in the U.S. and Europe.

Jeff helps to strengthen Agile software development implementation in venture funded companies by provide coaching, mentoring, and training to development teams. OpenView investments require full implementation of Scrum and/or XP with strong product ownership and highly motivated teams that can demonstrate continously improving velocity of software production and quality of end user experience.

Having managed teams of developers and architected countless web applications, Chris understands the advantages of agile development with technologies like Ruby.

Powerset was his last gig where he was a code writing Product Manager. Prior to Powerset he was the lead engineer on a large scale port of a Java Struts / MSSQL application to a Rails / MySQL stack. Currently Chris is the co-founder of a technology startup in San Francisco, Dolores Labs.

Chris is active in the Ruby community and has an unhealthy obsession with JavaScript. He tries to keep a blog at vandev.com.

Wolfram Arnold

Gabrielle Benefield

Daniel Berglund

John Bergmans

Robert Bernier

Adam Breindel

Aaron Brick

Jason Brittain

Michael Callaghan

Andrew Dalke

Julien Duquene

Faber Fedor

Obie Fernandez

Martin Folb

Aleksandar Gargenta

Marko Gargenta

Ruven Hannah

Zach Holt

Igor Ivkovich

Brandon Keepers

Andre Lewis

David Lowenfels

Roger Marquis

Alex Menendez

Daniel Morrison

Jens Ostergaard

Robyn Overstreet

Chris Richardson

Roger Sakowski

Jeff Sutherland

Chris Van Pelt