Damir Bersinic
Damir is a Senior Platform Advisor with Microsoft Canada based in Mississauga, Ontario. He is passionate about technology and how it can help to change the world. He does this by engaging with developers, IT professionals, architects, and technical decision makers via in person events, through Twitter, blogging, or any other means available - including sitting down for a coffee or pint when asked.
As the TechDays Canada Programs and Skills Manager, Damir has overall responsibility for the content and delivery of the TechDays Canada program through its in-person events, community and Partner engagement, and online. He works with others, both inside and outside of Microsoft Canada, to help ensure that Canadian technical professionals gains the skills in Microsoft-based technologies they need in order to grow in their career and provide the technical expertise their organizations require.
Ruth Morton
Ruth Morton is a Technology Advisor for Microsoft Canada. Based in Guelph, Ontario, Ruth travels across Canada building relationships with IT managers and professionals, and talking about the latest in technology. She is the host for the AlignIT IT Manager Podcast Series (www.microsoft.ca/itpodcast) and writes on the Canadian IT Manager blog (blogs.technet.com/cdnitmanagers). Before joining Microsoft, Ruth worked as an IT professional for over 12 years implementing enterprise technologies and formulating IT strategies for organizations in Canada, Europe and the US.
Rick Claus
Richard Claus engages with the Technical Community on behalf of Microsoft Canada. Based in Ottawa, Ontario, Rick's role is to support platform awareness and skills development through special events targeting the broad community. Technical areas of expertise from his 20+ years of experience in the IT Industry include: core infrastructure services, Virtualization technologies of all kinds, and systems management. Unofficially, Rick is focused on spreading his enthusiasm, passion and excitement on all things technical to anyone who has the time for a coffee (or pint) and a chat (in English or français - naturellement).
John Bristowe
John Bristowe is a Senior Developer Evangelist with Microsoft Canada and is based in Calgary, Alberta, Canada. John is an experienced speaker and frequently presents at developer conferences and events. Prior to joining Microsoft, John was a member of the Microsoft Regional Director program and was awarded a Microsoft MVP award for his work in the developer community on technologies such as ASP, ASP.NET, and the Microsoft Web services stack.
John has many years of experience developing software for operating systems such as the BeOS, variants of Linux and UNIX and, of course, Windows. He has also spent a great deal of time building Web and rich client applications. John is passionate about assisting the technical community in Canada and spends much of his time talking to students, teachers, and professionals in the industry.
John is a passionate guy and loves helping developers. Borrowing from Star Trek, his “continuing mission” is to showcase awesome development tools and platforms, support the developer community and help developers realize their full potential through the solutions they build for the client, phone, web and cloud. In other words, to help developers “boldly go where no one has gone before”.
Fred Harper
Frederic Harper, also known as Fred, is a developer evangelist based in Montreal. He has varied experience in the IT world, but has mostly focused on web and mobile development on numerous different platforms. If you want to talk about Web technologies, Open Source, Open Standards and Interoperability, Fred is your man. Even if he looks like a bad guy, don’t be afraid to get in touch with him. He is a kind of social beast. As a social media aficionado, he will be more than happy to connect with you on LinkedIn, Twitter or Facebook. If you want to read what he thinks about any day-to-day subjects, please go read his personal blog (mostly in French).
Jonathan Rozenblit
Jonathan is a developer evangelist that comes to Microsoft from the corporate world. Having managed both small and large development teams, Jonathan has experience in corporate development and a passion for helping developers and companies improve their application development practices. In his previous roles, he is known as the person that brings others along, showing developers how they can improve their skills and careers, and most importantly, showing them what's possible. He is an active member of the developer community and brings a wealth of technical experience across Microsoft technologies such as .NET, SharePoint, Dynamics CRM, and Windows Azure, and interoperability across many others. You can catch him on the Canadian Solutions Developers' Blog, Canadian Developer Connection, Twitter, LinkedIn, and live events throughout Canada.
Susan Ibach
Susan Ibach is a developer evangelist. She comes to the team from the Microsoft Certified Trainer community where she taught .NET, SQL Server, and SQL Server Business Intelligence. She has also worked as a consultant, programming, testing, doing data conversions and performing roll-outs. A big believer in re-usable code, she is all pumped up about HTML5 on all platforms. As a developer evangelist, she channels her inner trainer through blogs on the Canadian Developer Connection or Canadian Solution Developers blog, webcasts, in person events, or informal one on one conversations with members of the IT community. When she is not staring at an LCD screen, she is either watching hockey, doing martial arts with her kids, out running, or enjoying her husband's cooking.
Paul Laberge
Paul is a Developer Advisor with Microsoft Canada, based in Mississauga, Ontario. Paul brings over 12 years of technical experience working with some of the largest North American Fortune 500 companies to the role and has been with Microsoft for almost 5 years. His experience includes being a lead developer, development manager, lead application architect and IT management for a wide variety of technical solutions.
Currently, Paul leads Microsoft’s developer engagement around Windows Phone 7 and in that role, he can be found working with mobile developers of all walks of life, speaking at events, providing information on various social networks and, of course, driving the great Canadian developer ecosystem to building amazing Windows Phone apps. Paul is also passionate about Microsoft’s cloud computing strategy and HTML5 as a way to drive great cross-platform experiences. In other words, if you have a question about Microsoft’s leading edge platforms, Paul is someone you can talk to.
Jeff Woolsey - Toronto Keynote Speaker
Jeff Woolsey is a Principal Program Manager Lead for Windows Virtualization in the Windows Server and Cloud Division. Jeff has over ten year’s virtualization experience in the development of numerous virtualization products including Virtual PC 2004, VPC 2007, Virtual Server 2005/2005R2 and Microsoft’s hypervisor-based virtualization technology, Windows Server Hyper-V. In addition, Jeff’s team led the development and release of the free standalone Microsoft Hyper-V Server 2008 and the Hyper-V Server R2 products. Jeff’s team is also active in the industry promoting interoperability and the development of the Microsoft FastTrack private cloud solutions. Jeff is a sought after virtualization expert presenting in numerous keynotes and conferences worldwide with Bill Gates, Steve Ballmer, Bob Muglia & Satya Nadella.
Scott Hanselman - Vancouver Keynote Speaker
Scott Hanselman works for Microsoft as Principal Community Architect for Web Platform and Tools, aiming to spread the good word about developing software, most often on the Microsoft stack. Before this he was the Chief Architect at Corillian Corporation, now a part of Checkfree, for 6+ years and before that he was a Principal Consultant at STEP Technology for nearly 7 years. He was also involved in a few things Microsoft-related like the MVP and RD programs and will speak about computers (and other passions) whenever someone will listen to him. He's written a few books, most recently with Bill Evjen and Devin Rader on Professional ASP.NET. He blogs at http://www.hanselman.com for the last 8 years and podcasts weekly at http://www.hanselminutes.com and http://www.thisdeveloperslife.com.
