Technical reviewer bio from Mastering Gradle (2015, Packt Publishing)

Alexander Barnes has been a professional software engineer for over 5 years after graduating summa from the Texas A&M class of '09 with a BS in computer engineering and a minor in Mathematics. He started his career at Cisco Systems, working with a variety of Java web technologies and tools. At Cisco, he played a leading role in developing the RESTful User Data Services (UDS) for the CallManager product and helped develop and maintain the administration and user portals. He pioneered the transformation of his team's build system from Ant to Gradle for the numerous project tools and utilities maintained by the team and became a subject-matter expert on Git, Gradle, and Linux in particular.

Alex decided to move closer to his family recently joining Novo Dia Group in Austin as a senior Java developer. He is an avid advocate of the following best software practices and the usage of the right tools for the job. Some of his favorite tools include Git, Gerrit, Jenkins, Sonar, Gradle, Java, and Linux. He strives to design and develop freely first, refactor to consistent design patterns as appropriate, and focus on reducing mutable states.

Alex occasionally blogs about technologies and other interests on his website http://toastedbits.com/. Alex enjoys pursuing other creative hobbies in his spare time, playing his guitar, and listening to a lot of rock, metal, and electronic music. He also wishes to pick up piano and music production techniques to create his own electronic tracks in the future. He is also an enthusiast of craft beers and playing board games and poker with friends.

I would like to thank my friends and family for giving me their love and encouragement to achieve my dreams. Also, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, GNU, and Apache Software Foundation for making our software world a much more respectful community.

Unfortunately reviewer bios' only appear in the paperback edition of this book