Dr. Michael Galloy is a software developer focusing on high-performance computing and visualization in scientific programming. He works mostly in IDL, but occasionally uses Python, C, and CUDA. Michael currently works for the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) at the Mauna Loa Solar Observatory. Previously, he worked for Tech-X Corporation, where he was the main developer of GPULib, a library of IDL bindings for GPU-accelerated computation routines. He is the creator and main developer for IDLdoc, mgunit, and rIDL, all of which are open source projects, as well as the author of Modern IDL.

Richard Marsden has 25 years of professional software development experience. After starting in the field of geophysical surveying for the oil industry, he has spent the last 15 years running the Winwaed Software Technology LLC, an independent software vendor. Winwaed specializes in geospatial tools and applications including web applications and operates the Mapping-Tools website for tools and add-ins for geospatial applications such as Caliper Maptitude, Microsoft MapPoint, Android, and Ultra Mileage.

Richard has been a technical reviewer for a number of Packt publications, including Python Geospatial Development and Python Geospatial Analysis Essentials, both by Erik Westra; and Python Geospatial Analysis Cookbook, by Michael Diener.