Toronto Agile Community Growing Agile locally

Gino Marckx

In 2002, Gino started working with some of Belgium's most prominent Agile promoters. Very soon after that, he joined the Belgian XP/Agile User Group and became actively involved in promoting Agile techniques and practices, because he believes in their effectiveness. As a consultant he has shifted his practice to coaching individuals and organizations as they embrace Agile. Gino strongly relies on his passion for team dynamics, his experience in leadership positions, and his technical expertise. Gino is co-organizer of XPDays Benelux, and is actively involved as a participant and speaker in a number of Agile user groups in Belgium and Canada. He likes to spend his spare time with family and friends enjoying cycling, travel, art, music, poetry and bragging about the supreme quality of Belgian beer.

Lawrence Ludlow

Lawrence has been using Agile techniques since 2000 to help development teams deliver successful software solutions. Day to day he focuses both on helping project teams deliver better software faster and also project definition and planning. Lawrence’s specialty is using Stories for scoping and developing strategic development plans for projects of all types and sizes. Lawrence is a Professional Engineer with over 20 years experience in project management and delivery in multiple technical fields. Lawrence is very active in the local Agile Community, for the last 6 years he has run the XP/Agile Toronto Community Group and has presented at a number of meetings.

Michael Sahota

Michael has 15 years experience in software development and 10 years of proven leadership skills including leadership roles such as V.P., Director and team lead. Over the last 9 years, Michael has been helping companies adopt Agile and Lean practices.

Michael became a Certified Scrum Master (CSM) in 2004 and is huge advocate of better (XP) engineering practices since discovering unit testing in 2001. He is a fan of Lean practices such as A3, Value Stream Mapping, and Kanban. Michael has a B.A.Sc. from University of Toronto in Engineering Science and a M.Sc. from U.B.C. in Computer Science.

Michael lives and works in Toronto as an independent Agile and Lean coach, consultant and trainer at Agilitrix.

Thanou Thirakul

Thanou was introduced to Agile over 9 years ago, and quickly embraced it as a great way to meet clients' needs more easily. More personally, he saw how it could help him become a more productive developer and better communicator. It must have had some effect, as he has since created and facilitates a full-day Agile workshop for all new developers at Intelliware Development Inc. (where he also works as a senior developer). He is also a regular presenter at the XP Toronto Group's monthly meetings. Outside of the Agile world, his passions include helping children through the education charity he co-founded--Jai Dee Children's Fund--and helping the environment, as both a High Park steward and as lead for Intelliware's "Green Team."

Tom Alexandrowicz

Tom has been writing software for over three quarters of his life and became interested in Agile techniques as a way of improving the success rate and quality of the projects he works on. He's currently working in Toronto writing ERP software for large general contractors. He looks forward to a day when more companies in Toronto embrace Agile methodologies.

Farooq Ali

Farooq brings a broad mix of experiences building lean and Agile solutions at ThoughtWorks. As an Agile consultant, he has helped organizations in the US, UK, Canada and South Asia successfully adopt Agile and maximize business value quickly and consistently from their projects. More recently, Farooq has been involved in coaching ThoughtWorks' clients in Eastern Canada, leading their teams from project inception to release, and delivering innovative software solutions to their challenging business problems.

Farooq is particularly interested in innovative requirements collaboration techniques, bridging companies' business and IT departments and implementing just-in-time solutions.

Robert Chan

Robert was first introduced to Agile methodologies when he was studying Software Engineering at the University of Waterloo. A skeptic in the beginning, Robert questioned whether Agile is actually applied in the real world and how successful it can be. He got his answer when he started working as a software developer at Intelliware Development Inc., a major proponent and a leading practitioner of Agile in Toronto. He can now testify that Agile is not only widely adopted by companies and well accepted by customers, the methodologies are constantly evolving to accommodate the ever increasing complexity of software development.