YOW!Tube with Erik Meijer & Mads Torgersen

Dave Thomas

Dave Thomas, Chief Scientist/CSO, Kx Systems, Co-Founder and past Chairman of Bedarra Research Labs (BRL), creators of the Analyst visual analytics workbench and an ACM Distinguished Engineer. Founder and past CEO of Object Technology International (OTI), becoming CEO of IBM OTI Labs after its sale to IBM. With a unique ability to see the future and translate research into competitive products, he is known for his contributions to Object Technology including IBM VisualAge and Eclipse IDEs, and their Smalltalk and Java virtual machines. Dave is a popular, humorous, albeit opinionated keynote speaker with an impressive breadth of business experience and technical depth. He is a thought leader in large-scale software engineering and a founding director of the Agile Alliance. With close links the R&D community Dave is an adjunct research professor at Carleton University in Canada and held past positions at UQ and QUT in Australia. He has been a business and technical advisor to many technology companies. Dave is founder and chairman of the YOW! conferences, and a GOTO Conference Fellow.

Mads Torgersen

Mads Torgersen is the language PM for C# at Microsoft, where he runs the C# language design process and maintains the language specification. He is also on the design team for TypeScript and Visual Basic, and he contributes to the Roslyn project, which has reinvented the C# and VB compilers and taken them open source.

Many years ago Mads was a professor, and also contributed to a language starting with J.

Erik Meijer

Erik Meijer is a Dutch computer scientist and entrepreneur. He received his Ph.D. from Nijmegen University in 1992 and has contributed to both academic institutions and major technology corporations.

Erik's research has included the areas of functional programming (particularly Haskell) compiler implementation, parsing, programming language design, XML, and foreign function interfaces. He has worked as an associate professor at Utrecht University, adjunct professor at the Oregon Graduate Institute, part-time professor of Cloud Programming within the Software Engineering Research Group at Delft University of Technology, and Honorary Professor of Programming Language Design at the School of Computer Science of the University of Nottingham, associated with the Functional Programming Laboratory.

From 2000 to early 2013 Erik was a software architect for Microsoft where he headed the Cloud Programmability Team. His work at Microsoft included C#, Visual Basic, LINQ, Volta, and the reactive programming framework (Reactive Extensions) for .NET. He founded Applied Duality Inc. in 2013 and since 2015 has been a Director of Engineering at Facebook.