Gateway JUG

Jeff Heaton

Jeff Heaton (http://www.jeffheaton.com) is a software developer for Reinsurance Group of America. He is an author, consultant, artificial intelligence (AI) researcher and former college instructor. Heaton has penned more than a dozen books on topics including AI, virtual worlds, spiders and bots. Heaton leads the Encog project, an open source initiative to provide an advanced neural network and bot framework for Java and C#. A Sun Certified Java Programmer and a Senior Member of the IEEE, he holds a Masters Degree in Information Management from Washington University in St. Louis. Heaton lives in St. Louis, Missouri.

Tomasz Mozolewski

Tomasz Mozolewski has been a regular attendee at our monthly JUG meetings. He has a Masters Degree in Computer Science and has worked for CitiMortgage for a number of years.

Tomek studied Computer Science in Poland at Politechnika Bialostocka then transferred to the University of Missouri, St Louis in 2001 and earned his Masters in Computer Science in 2003.  He has worked at CitiMortgate since then and is currently their Technical Lead.

His main responsibilities are application design, code review, proofs of concept, and best practices.  He's been interested in parallel programming since he first started coding.

Ryan Withers

Ryan has been a software engineer professionally for 10 years.  He has worked in a variety of
industries including Health Care, Defense, and Financial Services.  While he has an interest in all aspects of software development, he considers his core competency to be in Java. 

He believes that by staying on the bleeding edge of technology and leading by innovation he can provide for, not only this generation, but the generations that come after us.

Alex Miller

  Alex Miller is a Senior Engineer with Terracotta, Inc., the makers of the open-source Java clustering product Terracotta.  Prior to Terracotta, Alex worked at BEA Systems on the AquaLogic product line and was Chief Architect at MetaMatrix.

His interests include Java concurrency, distributed systems, query languages, and software design. 

Alex enjoys writing his blog at http://tech.puredanger.com and has spoken at a number of Java user group meetings and conferences.

Scott Stanlick

Scott Stanlick has worked in IT shops ranging in size from a few million to many billions of dollars in revenue for over fifteen years.  This provided him the unique opportunity to see how specialization and staffing can be both beneficial and wasteful.  He has been engaged in software projects that leveraged prevailing technologies affording me to remain on the forward edge of the industry.

He enjoys technology and stays involved at many levels. Recently, Scott co-authored a book for Manning publishing as a way to participate in the public side of technology sharing.

He is currently working at Enterprise Rent-A-Car as a software architect, designing and implementing SOA solutions integrating Alamo, National, and Enterprise Rent-A-Car systems.

Jack Frosch

Jack Frosch founded the JUG more than 10 years ago to promote Java and educate developers on new and interesting Java APIs, tips, and techniques.

He is currently on a full-tine plus assignment with IBM (Genelco) working as a senior developer and mentor. He has also supported many well known clients like MasterCard, Kuali, Monsanto, SBC (AT&T), USPS, Learjet and others.

Besides nearly 14 years of Java experience, he's passionate about programming with Groovy and Grails. He describes Groovy as "the language Java should have been from the beginning." About Grails, he says, "Once you've developed a web application in Grails, you realize just how much extra work you've been doing to accomplish the same things in Java web web frameworks."

Training and mentoring are a core aspect of Jack's belief in the responsibility of all senior developers to share what they've learned, saying, "For most of us, our legacy won't be in the applications we've helped develop. Our true legacy will be written in the minds we've helped develop."

He regularly presents on a variety of interesting Java topics targeted at beginner and intermediate Java developers. He also hosts group study classes and workshops. Recent topics have included a Beginning and Intermediate Grails class, an Introduction to Android Programming, Spring MVC/WebFlow, and JavaServer Faces.

His hobbies and interests include astronomy and cosmology, politics, and occasional meet-ups at the pub.

Jack is on contract through May 2011. Need someone to get your new project and team off to a great start? Need a mentor to get everyone on the same page? If so, you can contact Jack Frosch at jfrosch{at}objistics{dot}com.

Wenjie He

Dr. Wenjie He is an associate professor of Computer Science at the University of Missouri - St. Louis (UMSL). He has been teaching Enterprise Java at UMSL since 2005. This semeter in his Advanced Java course, they are developing a mobile web application running on iPhone and Blackberry using the Spring MVC and Hibernate for the Express-Scripts, Inc.