Jon Manning is the cofounder of Secret Lab, and has worked on apps of all sorts, ranging from iPad games for children to instant messaging clients. He frequently finds himself gesticulating wildly in front of classes full of eager-to-learn developers. Jon has written a whole bunch of books for O’Reilly Media (and previously Wiley) about iOS development and game development. He recently completed his PhD, in which he studied how people manipulate the ranking systems of social media sites; this means that he literally has a doctorate about jerks on the internet. He wrote Yarn Spinner, an interactive dialogue system, which was used in the 2016 indie game Night in the Woods. Jon can be found as @desplesda on Twitter.
Tim Nugent pretends to be a mobile app developer, game designer, and PhD student, and now he’s even pretending to be an author. When he isn’t busy avoiding being found out as a fraud, Tim spends most of his time designing and creating little apps and games he won’t let anyone see. He also spent a disproportionately long time writing this tiny little bio, most of which was taken up trying to stick a witty sci-fi reference in, before he simply gave up. Tim can be found as @The_McJones on Twitter.
Paul Fenwick is the managing director of Perl Training Australia and has been teaching computer science for over a decade. Paul is an internationally acclaimed public speaker, developer, and science educator. He is well known for presenting on a diverse range of topics including privacy, neuroscience and neuroethics, Klingon programming, open source, depression and mental health, advancements in science, diversity, autonomous agents, and minesweeper automation. His dynamic presentation style and quirky humor has delighted audiences worldwide. Paul was awarded the 2013 O’Reilly Open Source award and the 2010 White Camel award, both for outstanding contributions to the open source community. As a Freedom-Loving Scientist, Paul’s goal is to learn everything he can, do amazing things with that knowledge, and give them away for free. Paul can be found on Twitter as @pjf.
Alasdair Allan is a scientist, author, hacker, tinkerer, and journalist who has recently been spending a lot of time thinking about the Internet of Things, which he thinks is broken. He is the author of a number of books and sometimes also stands in front of cameras. You can often find him at conferences talking about interesting things or deploying sensors to measure them. A couple of years ago he rolled out a mesh network of five hundred sensor motes covering the entirety of Moscone West during Google I/O. He’s still recovering. A few years before that, he caused a privacy scandal by uncovering that your iPhone was recording your location all the time, which caused several class-action lawsuits and a US Senate hearing. Some years on, he still isn’t sure what to think about that.Alasdair sporadically writes blog posts about things that interest him or, more frequently, provides commentary in 140 characters or less. He is a contributing editor for Make magazine and a contributor to O’Reilly Radar. Alasdair is a former academic. As part of his work, he built a distributed peer-to-peer network of telescopes that, acting autonomously, reactively scheduled observations of time-critical events. Notable successes included contributing to the detection of what was — at the time — the most distant object yet discovered, a gamma-ray burster at a redshift of 8.2. Alasdair can be found on Twitter as @aallan.
Paris Buttfield-Addison is a producer and cofounder at Secret Lab, a mobile development studio based in beautiful Hobart, Australia. Secret Lab builds games for mobile devices, primarily for children, such as the 2014 AIMIA-winning ABC Play School apps for the iPad. Paris formerly worked with Meebo (which was acquired by Google) as mobile product manager. He sits on the board of the Australian Computing Society (ACS) in Tasmania and the Apple University Consortium (AUC). Paris has written nearly 10 technical, game design, and mobile development books, mostly for O’Reilly Media. He has a BA in history and a PhD in computing/HCI; his PhD research at the University of Tasmania (UTAS) explored the design, UX, and feature considerations for mobile personal information management technologies. Paris can be found on Twitter as @parisba. He still thinks digital watches are a pretty neat idea.