Below you can find a list of just a few of the speakers for Erlang eXchange, we are currently finalising the list and will updating the site shortly.

Joe Armstrong designed and implemented the first version of Erlang in 1986. He has written several Erlang books including Programming Erlang Software for a Concurrent World. Joe held the first ever Erlang course and has taught Erlang to hundreds of programmers and held many lectures and keynotes describing the technology.

Joe has a PhD in computer science from the Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm, Sweden and is an expert in the construction of fault tolerant systems. Joe was the chief software architect of the project which produced the Erlang OTP system. He has worked as an entrepreneur in one of the first Erlang startups (Bluetail) and has worked for 30 years in industry and research.

Claes Wikström has been involved in the Erlang community from the very early days, the beginning of the 1990s. He has contributed several significant pieces of softwareto the Erlang community, such as; The ASN.1 compiler, Distributed Erlang,Mnesia and the ets/dets libraries, the ERTS garbage collector and the bit syntax.

More recently, Claes has been authoring the Yaws web server. He has also been a pioneer in capitalising on Erlang technology and has been the founder of several successful Erlang based companies such as, Bluetail, Kreditor and now, Tail-f.

During Erlang eXchange Claes will discuss the successes Tail-f has had in using Erlang.


Dennis Byrne works for ThoughtWorks, a global consultancy with a focus on end-to-end agile software development of mission critical systems. He has delivered as a tech lead and an iteration manager. He is both an Apache and JBoss committer, and has worked on integrating Java systems with the Erlang platform. Dennis has two bachelors degrees. In his spare time he enjoys writing and weight lifting.

Dennis's talk at Erlang eXchange will focus on using Jinterface to bridge Erlang and Java.



Corrado's bio will follow soon!









Eric Merritt is a Software Engineer who specializes in concurrent languages and distributed systems. For the last seven years he has been coding Erlang and has also been heavily involved in the Erlang community. Currently, Eric is a core developer for the Erlware family of open source products and is the primary developer for the Sinan build system.

Eric has been involved in both professional and Open Source development for the last ten years. He started his career developing applications in C and Java on IBM Mainframe and Midrange hardware. He also provided training and consulting in object-oriented principles and concepts. However, his interest in languages, concurrency and distributed systems quickly drove him to greener fields. Today he works on both large-scale distributed systems and interesting Erlang projects, sometimes at the same time.

Eric's talk at Erlang eXchange will focus on Faxien and Sinan, Build and Distribution Systems In Erlang.

Erik Stenman has been programming for fun since 1980, and for profit since 1989 when he started his first company. He received his Master of Science in Computer Science in 1996 from Uppsala University. Erik was one of the driving forces behind the the High Performance Erlang project (HiPE) from the start in 1996 until he successfully defended his Ph.D dissertation against opponent Simon Peyton-Jones. During his post-doc as a project manager in Martin Odersky's Scala group he helped bringing the project to a successful release of Scala 1.0. Before joining Kreditor he worked at Virtutech with low-level optimizations of Virtutech Simics.

Erik's talk at Erlang eXchange will focus on Erlang in e-commerce and banking.

Gordon Guthrie is the CEO/CTO of hypernumbers an early stage start-up. He has previously worked at senior positions in retail financial services, having been Chief Technical Architect at Intelligent Finance during its launch when it secured 10.4% of the UK retail mortgage market and IT Strategist at Direct Line Financial Services. He has also had senior positions in professional services, including BT Global Professional Services.


Gordon's talk at Erlang eXchange will focus on Hypernumbers and Erlang.


John Hughes is co-founder and CEO of Quviq AB, and the originator of Quviq QuickCheck. From 2002-2005 he led a major research project in software verification, funded by the Swedish Strategic Research Foundation. This led to the development of Quviq QuickCheck in Erlang. Before John's involvement with Erlang, he was deeply involved with the design of Haskell from the start, and co-chaired the committee that defined the current language standard. At the Erlang eXchange, John will talk about Quick Check for Erlang.

John's talk at Erlang eXchange will focus on Quick Check for Erlang.


Martin Logan has been heavily involved with the Erlang community since 1999. Since that time he has had the privilege to work on Erlang full time for over 5 years. Martin’s great interest in distributed systems and service based design has led him to spend much of his career to studying and solving problems in that space. Wherever possible he tries to implement his solutions with Erlang.
Currently Martin brings his expertise to Orbitz Worldwide, one of the largest online travel companies in the world. There he leads the technical travel business services group developing solutions for their large scale distributed service based infrastructure. Most recently Martin has taken a leadership role with Erlware where he is a core developer and the primary developer of the Faxien package management system.

Martin's talk at Erlang eXchange will focus on Faxien and Sinan, build and distribution systems In Erlang.

Matthias has a Ph.D. and M.Eng. in Software Engineering from Imperial College and is the author of several papers in international journals on distributed system coordination and programming languages. His commercial experience during the past decade includes directorships and senior technical roles in several Internet technology companies.

Matthias's talk at Erlang eXchange will focus on will focus on and Erlang based implementation of AMPQ.



A Senior Software Consultant at Erlang Training and Consulting, Michal Slaski started programming in Erlang on the AGH University of Science and Technology in Krakow, Poland, when working on his Masters prototyping massively multiplayer online games. After graduating, he joined Erlang Training and Consulting on key projects around the world. He is currently heading Erlang Training and Consulting's new Krakow office in Poland, keeping the Erlang flag up high.

Michal's talks at Erlang eXchange will focus on building web apps in Erlang.


Nicholas Gunder is a Software Engineering Manager at Motorola Denmark. He is originally from the USA, but was transferred from Chicago to Copenhagen in the fall of 2002. He has been working on Motorola’s telecom infrastructure development since 2001.

Nicholas was introduced to Erlang for the first time in 2003 through a prototype project sponsored by Motorola Labs. After being impressed by the prototype, he was able to secure project funding, and push Erlang to be used outside of Motorola labs. He is currently working on his third, and by far largest, technology project using Erlang/OTP.

Nicholas's talk at Erlang eXchange will focus on Erlang at Motorola Denmark.

Creator of Erlang's popular Refactoring tool Wrangler, Simon Thompson is Professor of Logic and Computation at the University of Kent and a well-known expert on Functional languages. A long-term contributor to the Haskel and Erlang communities and author of many popular books, including "Haskell: The Craft of Functional Programming", his work covers many aspects of functional programming and logic in computer science (you can find out more details here) for Erlang and also for Haskel.

Simon's talk at Erlang eXchange will focus on Wrangerl, The Erlang Refactoring Tool.


Tony has a BSc in Computer Science with a minor in Biological Science. His main professional experience has been in telephony, despite a strong interest in cognitive science and other bleeding-edge topics within computing. In his spare time he has contributed to open-source projects in audio processing, programming languages and web tools.

Tony's talk at Erlang eXchange will focus on an Erlang based implementation of AMQP.

Xingdong started working with Erlang last summer as a result of his passion for functional programming. He is currently working on the Erlang web-platform developing reusable components with Wrangler, the refactoring tool from University of Kent, to make the components of the web-platform generic and reusable.

Xingdong's talks at Erlang eXchange will focus on building web applications in Erlang.



Jan Lehnardt is an Open Source software consultant spcialising in internet technologies. Jan is the co-founder of Freisatz, a company bringing typographic bliss to everyone and a contributor to the CouchDB project. He has years of experience with building small and big-scale database backed applications and has a keen eye for user experience and typography.

Jan's talk at Erlang eXchange will focus on Couch DB.



Dr. Thomas Arts is the co-founder and CTO of Quviq, a small company that produced Quick Check, as testing tool for Erlang. Thomas has over 30 publications in various industry journals and has experience refereeing conferences and workshops. He has successfully introduced some new technologies to the industry, the latest being QuickCheck, a tool for property based testing and aims to support test driven development. Thomas is also an associate professor at the IT University of Göteborg in the area of Software Engineering and Management. He holds a PhD in computer science and after his PhD has been employed at the Ericsson Computer Science Lab (Where they invented Erlang), where he worked on program verification and the development of the Erlang programming language. He has also worked in the broad spectrum theoretical computer science, formal methods and industrial case-study research, mainly applying all kind of techniques to systems written in Erlang.

Thomas' talk at Erlang eXchange will focus on testing Erlang using QuickCheck.

Alexander Reinefeld is the head of the Computer Science department of the Zuse Institute Berlin and a professor for parallel and distributed systems at the Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin. He received a Faculty Award on grid computing in 2002, a Sir Izaak Walton Killam Memorial Post-Doctoral Fellowship in 1987, and a PhD scholarship by the German Academic Exchange Service in 1984. In 1987 and 1984 he spent two years abroad at the University of Alberta in Edmonton, Canada, and before he worked as an assistant professor and free-lance software consultant in Hamburg. His research interests include grid and peer-to-peer computing, distributed data management and high-performance computer architecture.

More on Alexander

Steve Vinoski, is the author of a regular column entitled, "Toward Integration" for IEEE Internet Computing, he has authored and co-authored approximately 80 highly-regarded publications on distributed computing and enterprise integration for magazines such as, IEEE Internet Computing, C/C++ Users Jounral and C++ Report and is the co-author of Advanced CORBA Programming with C++ (APC) with Michi Henning.

Steve is currently a member of technical staff at Verivue, a startup in Westford, Massachusetts, USA. He was previously chief architect and Fellow at IONA Technologies for a decade, prior to that he held various software and hardware engineering positions at Hewlett-Packard, Apollo Computer and Texas Instruments.

Steve's talk at Erlang eXchange will focus on Enterprise Integration.

Karthik Ramachandra is a consultant and an application developer at ThoughtWorks Inc. for about 4 years now. He has designed and developed many complex applications in various technologies(Java, Ruby/ROR, C/C++). He has been programming in Erlang for almost a year now and is passionate about functional programming which got him introduced to Erlang. He has a Bachelors’ degree in Computer Science & Information Technology and a few opensource tools to his credit.

Karthik's talk at Erlang eXchange will focus on load testing of web applications.

Roberto Saccon, is currently working on soon-to-be-launched Erlang based products and services targeted to Web application development and deployment. Previously, Roberto has played key roles in setting up and maintaining e-banking websites at Major Swiss financial institution, has experience as an application engineer for telecoms and as an independant consultant has provided OS and DB administration, Java development and project management services. Since these roles, Roberto has been looking for ways to improve performance, stability and most of all, the workflow of creating, deploying and scaling web applications and has recently founded Skast, LLC, a Micro-ISV. Roberto regularly writes on his blog rsaccon.com and occaisionally on cometdaily.com about the Web and Erlang related Open Source projects.

Roberto's talk at Erlang eXchange will focus on Ajax and Erlang.

More on Torben Hoffman soon!







Stephen McCrory is Director Of Product Development at Hypernumbers. Stepehen's previous roles include Director Of Design And Innovation at Intelligent Finance (if.com) and Head of Management Information and Credit Risk at Direct Line Financial Services. He has recently contracted with Nationwide Building Society working on Basel II.

Stephen's talk with Gordon Guthrie will focus on Hypernumbers

More on Mark Melling soon!

More on Jay Fenton soon!