Brett Porter is a software developer from Sydney, Australia with a passion for development tooling, and automation. Seeking a more standardized and reproducible solution to organize, build, and deploy a number of software projects across teams, he discovered an early beta of Maven 1.0 in 2003, and has been heavily involved in the development of the project since. He is a member of the Apache Maven Project Management Committee, and has conducted presentations and training on Maven and related tooling at several conferences and events. He founded the Archiva project in 2005. Brett is also a member of the Apache Software Foundation.
Brett is currently VP, Product Development at G2iX, in charge of the Maestro division. He and his team seek to make developers more efficient by offering support and services for development and automation tools including Apache Maven, Apache Continuum, Apache Archiva, and Selenium.
Brett was co-author of the book Better Builds with Maven, the first book to be written about the Maven 2.0 release in 2005, and has been involved in reviewing Maven: A Developer's Notebook and Java Power Tools.
Maria Ching grew up in a small town called Daet, then moved to Manila when she went to college. She took up Computer Studies at De La Salle University and graduated in 2005. She started using open source tools from her first job after graduating and from then on, got interested in everything open source. When she came to work for Exist, she got assigned in a project doing a lot of development work in open source projects, specifically Maven, Continuum, and Archiva. Back then, Continuum and Archiva (formerly named Maven Repository Manager) were still sub-projects of Maven. Eventually, she became a committer, then a PMC member of Maven. In 2008, Continuum and Archiva became top-level projects at the ASF and Deng was elected as PMC Chair of Archiva. She is still currently serving as PMC Chair of the project and as PMC members of Continuum and Maven.