The following people are currently expected at the NeedForSpeed sprint. Each delegate has been asked to provide a small amount of biographical data and information about their approach to the sprint, which has been added where available

John Benediktsson

• John Benediktsson is a senior developer at EWT. For several years now, John has been involved with the creation of electronic trading strategies as well as much of the core trading technology at EWT.

Martin Blais

• Martin Blais from Montreal, Canada, has a background in high-end

  computer graphics. After completing his graduate studies, he went on to work for graphics companies on global illumination problems and post-production software. He has been a heavy user of the Python language since 1999. Occasionally providing independent consulting services, he now offers a professional training course on Python. Martin is also currently involved in an independent venture related to the web. You can find many of his public bits of code at http://furius.ca

Georg Brandl

• Georg Brandl from Augsburg, Germany is a Physics student and Computer Science addict. He is probably the only one not exactly knowing why he has been invited to the sprint in the first place, but nevertheless very thankful to have been offered this opportunity. He hopes to learn a lot from all the experienced attendants and contribute a bit to Python development.
• [Comment from Raymond] Georg is a core Python developer and active participant on the python-dev and python-3000 maillists. He is completely up-to-date on Py2.5's novelties and Guido's intentions for the future. Hopefully this sprint will give him a chance to show-off his skills, learn from the pros, and continue to be a rising star.

Andrew Dalke

• No bio yet

Jack Diederich

• Jack is a serial dotcomer currently living in Boston, Massachusetts. He is the Chief Technologist and a partner at Psynchronous Communications, Inc. He will be sprinting on whatever needs a hand or on a specialized symbol dictionary if he can get the first draft finished before the sprint.

Richard Emslie

• Richard Emslie is a developer at EWT. He has contributed to the PyPy project, mainly in the LLVM backend.

Raymond Hettinger

• PSF member and core python developer (sets, itertools, peephole optimizer, decimals, deques and such). Former CPA, former fashion photographer, recently hired by EWT as Chief Visualization Officer. Personal interests include language design and [http://www.knowyourboston.com/events/testphp.php?page=1 photography].

Steve Holden

• Steve Holden from Linlithgow in Scotland is the author of "Python Web Programming" and a director of the Python Software Foundation, chaired the first three PyCon conferences and now manages a transatlantic training and consulting practice. He hopes to be able to use his knowledge of Python, conference organisation, the software industry and open source to make this sprint both productive and enjoyable for all concerned, possibly even in that order.

Bob Ippolito

• Bob Ippolito from San Francisco, CA is an avid Python developer and open source contributor, particularly in the Mac OS X arena. He hopes to leverage his low-level programming experience and persistence to improve the usability and performance of the PyPy LLVM back end during this sprint. He's also interested in enjoying some Icelandic beer and discussing crazy ideas with the other sprint attendees.

Kristján Valur Jónsson

• Kristján Valur Jónsson was born in 1970 and grew up in Reykjavík, Iceland. He graduated with an CSc of Mechanical Engineering from the University of Iceland in 1997. Kristján has been involved in computers from an early age. He has worked at various companies mostly involving graphics and internet technology. He is currently employed at CCP Inc, where he is core systems engineer and responsible for the integration of Stackless Python in the game engine of EVE, a massively multiplayer online role playing game.

Richard Jones

• Richard is from Melbourne, Australia and has been developing with Python for about a decade. Given his interest in video games (he sometimes writes them in his spare time), he'll happily do whatever CCP ask. He'd also be happy to work with other groups too, as there's some interesting ideas on the Goals page. Those Icelandic beers and crazy ideas sound good too.

Fredrik Lundh

• Fredrik Lundh is a principal of Secret Labs, Inc., the creators of PythonWorks, an integrated development environment (IDE) for Python. He is an expert on the use of Python with images and graphics and is also the creator of the Python Imaging Library (PIL). He is an active member of the Python community and a frequent contributor to the Python newsgroups. His website and blog are at http://effbot.org/ He appreciates that someone posted a short bio for him, and hopes to find some time to make it a little more up to date before his current boss sees it.

Tim Peters

• Uncle Timmy is a notorious Python old-timer, widely despised for his uncanny ability to channel Guido's secret thoughts. In a computer career spanning more than 25 years, he single-handedly destroyed several domestic computer industries, including American supercomputing (Cray Research, Kendall Square Research), computer speech recognition (Dragon Systems), and the dot-com boom of the late 90's (BeOpen.com). Growing kinder with age, or perhaps just forgetful, he recently left Zope Corporation before destroying it.

Runar Petursson

• Runar has been an avid Python user/advocate for over five years. His focus has been on database integration tools and networked applications. Runar recently joined EWT to work on the trading strategies. Runar is looking forward to learning from the experience gatherd at the sprint and getting more familiar with CPython's internals.

Sean Reifschneider

• Sean Reifschneider, from Fort Collins, Colorado, is a founder and member of technical staff of tummy.com, ltd. He's been a Python user and advocate since 1997. The primary area he expects to be working on relate to performance improvements via re-implementation of code in C and other C Python or python library work. He expects to make use of unit tests to ensure quality of resulting code and quantify performance improvements. He looks forward to a successful sprint, in part, for selfish reasons. If the sprint outcome is positive, hopefully we all will be invited to and sponsored for attendance at future sprints.

Richard M Tew

• Richard is a New Zealander who moved to Iceland to live so that he could work for CCP on EVE Online. His job involves writing game logic for EVE in Python, and CCP also allows him to do the odd bit for Stackless Python to help out Christian. He doesn't know much about this PyPy thing, but he knows he will be getting a week away from space pirates, space ships, spacious offices and will hopefully be doing something that makes his job easier and/or funner.

Christian Tismer

• Major contributor to the PyPy project and creator of StacklessPython.