Alef Arendsen is an architect with over 7 years' experience in the field of enterprise Java. He has worked for several Dutch start-ups, including SmartHaven, where he he was responsible for introducing a cutting-edge agile development process for a team of 30 developers. Furthermore, Alef has served as a mentor/coach for many development teams. Alef has been involved with the development of the Spring Framework since early 2003. Alef has been responsible for parts of the MVC framework as well supporting services such as mail. Together with five others, Alef runs the Dutch operation of Interface21.

Recently, Alef co-authored 'Professional Java Development with the Spring Framework' together with Rod Johnson, Juergen Hoeller, Thomas Risberg and Colin Sampaleanu.