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Community Tcl2012 Bios

Sponsored by the Tcl Association We are pleased to announce the 19'th Annual Tcl/Tk Conference (Tcl'2012), sponsored by The Tcl Association, with help from:
Noumena Corporation , SR Technology, Buonacorsi Foundation, Mentor Graphics, and ActiveState .

One of the many great reasons to attend the Tcl conference is the tutorials presented by renowned leaders and experts in the Tcl community. They will be sharing with you their knowledge of Tcl/Tk and its extensions, and experience in developing large, versatile and robust applications - information and techniques which will assist you in your day-to-day Tcl programming needs.

Keynote Speaker

Colin Walker


With a background in programming, Colin Walker somehow ended up working for a networking company, and has never looked back. Having joined F5 Networks in December of 2004, he quickly fell in line with the application aware scripting capabilities (iRules) that help make F5 devices as flexible as they are. As an iRules zealot Colin works to further the technology, guide Product Development on potential roadmap decisions and evangelize to the community and, frankly, anyone that will listen about how you can use the power of the network to better applications everywhere.

Starting first in Unix (BSDi/FreeBSD) technical support for a shared web hosting company and working up through sys-admin and eventual to software engineer, Colin has been steeped in applications and automation but also in the importance of making good on commitments to end users, implied or otherwise for nearly 15 years now. Approaching every project, whether it be deployment design, application troubleshooting, network optimization or the like, he does so with a mind towards the end goal: delivering applications to users as effectively and efficiently as possible.

Tutorial Presenters

Richard Hipp


D. Richard Hipp has developed many Tcl tools including a table widget, html display widget, mkTclApp, and TOBE. He's been a member of the Core Team since its creation.

Richard's latest activities revolve around sqlite and tools like fossil that are developed using sqlite (frequently with Tcl).

Clif Flynt


Clif Flynt has been a professional programmer since 1978, and a Tcl advocate since 1993. His dual interests in programming and teaching have led him to developing both scientific and business software, teaching at Grinnell College and Eastern Michigan University, writing about Tcl/Tk and delivering Tcl/Tk corporate training.

Clif's Tcl projects include TclTutor, a computer based instruction package, The book Tcl/Tk:A Developer's Guide from Morgan Kauffman, and regular Tclsh Spot articles for ;login: magazine.

Kim Richert


Kim has been using Tcl since the late 20'th century.

Kim was one of the trainers and developers at CPU where he developed control software for off-shore oil rigs as well as Tcl and Expect training classes. He helped run the second and 11'th Tcl/Tk Conferences in New Orleans. Kim is currently working with Visiprise, developing and supporting Tcl applications for NASA and the Space Shuttle.

Jeff Hobbs


Jeff Hobbs (Mr. Tclguy) is the Core Release Manager for the Tcl language. He has maintained the TK Usage FAQ since 1996. Jeff is the technical lead for Tcl technologies at ActiveState. Previously, he was the Tcl Ambassador at Scriptics, maintaining communications between the Tcl community and Scriptics and managing development of the Tcl core.

Jeff is probably responsible for more Tcl bug fixes than anyone else and is a co-author of Practical Programming in Tcl and Tk (Fourth Edition), published by Prentice Hall.

Gerald Lester


Gerald Lester has been giving tutorials at conferences for over 20 years. Gerald is President of KNG Consulting , LLC. Prior to setting out on his own, he was Directory of Technology at TicketSwitch USA. He had also worked for Computerized Processes Unlimited for over 15 years where he was one of the early adapters of Tcl/Tk and presented a paper at first Tcl/Tk Conference (then called the Tcl/Tk Workshop) about the first "large" Tcl/Tk application (~300,000 lines of Tcl/Tk code). Gerald has been on the Tcl/Tk Conference Committee numerous times and has chaired the conference three times. Gerald is one of the maintainers for both TclHttpd and TclLib and author of the popular "Web Services for Tcl" package.

Ken Jones


Ken Jones, President of Avia Training and Consulting, has hundreds of in-class hours teaching advanced technical topics, and almost 20 years experience in technical training and documentation targeted towards software developers.

Prior to founding Avia, Ken was lead instructor at Ajuba Solutions (formerly Scriptics), which provided advanced business-to-business e-commerce solutions based on XML and Tcl. While at Ajuba Solutions, Ken worked with John Ousterhout, the creator of Tcl, Brent Welch, author of Practical Programming in Tcl and Tk, and other key developers of the Tcl language. Ken also has worked for companies including Borland, Silicon Graphics, and Sybase where he specialized in products for creating graphical user interfaces and for providing database connectivity.

Steve Landers


Steve Landers is the Senior Consultant at Digital Smarties. He is active within the Tcl/Tk community, where he regularly contributes both software and expertise. He has a particular interest in the development of cross-platform scripted applications, and is a leading proponent of Tclkit, Starkit, Starpacks and Metakit for developing complex and robust cross-platform applications.

Steve has over twenty years experience in the Open Software marketplace, being a founding member of both AUUG (the Australian Open Systems User Group) and SAGE-AU (the Systems Administrators Guild of Australia). He was a pioneer of the commercial application of the UNIX operating system and relational database technology in Australia during the early 1980's implementing the first commercial Unix/Oracle installation in the country.

He was a founder and technical director of Functional Software - one of Australia's most successful software development companies, whose COSMOS products and technology are used worldwide in the management of large IT installations.

Steve regularly speaks at conferences, both in Australia and internationally. He has spoken at a number of SAGE-AU and AUUG annual conferences, and was a speaker at the Tcl2001 And Tcl2002 conferences.

Will Duquette


Will Duquette is the author of the well-known "Will's Guide to Namespaces and Packages" and "Will's Guide to Object Commands", the Notebook personal wiki application, and the Snit object and widget framework. When not working on Snit, Notebook, and suchlike projects, he's a software engineer responsible for more projects than are easily mentioned.

Joe Mistachkin


Joe Mistachkin (pronounced "miss-tash-kin") is a software engineer and one of the maintainers of Tcl/Tk. He is also the author of the TclBridge component and the Eagle scripting language. He has been working in the software industry since 1994.

Contact Information

fox@nscl.msu.edu