Speakers

Cal Evans

Cal Evans has been been programming professionally for 25 years. He worked with PHP and MySQL on Linux OSX, and when necessary, Windows for the past eight years. He has built a variety of projects ranging in size from simple web pages to multi-million dollar web applications. He is the author of the Zend Framework book from php|architect, a writer, a people person, a community spokesperson and a blogger.

Chris Shiflett

Chris Shiflett is a web developer from Brooklyn, NY, and a founding member of Analog, a web design and development co-operative.

When inspiration strikes, he can be found scribbling on his blog at shiflett.org, or on Twitter as @shiflett. In 2007, he started PHP Advent, an Advent calendar for the PHP community.

He has authored and co-authored a few books — most notably Essential PHP Security and HTTP Developer's Handbook — and he occasionally writes articles for publications like Smashing Magazine, where he also serves on the editorial panel.

His passion for sharing ideas has brought him to a few conferences — including OSCON, Webstock, South by Southwest, and the Future of Web Apps — and events like Foo Camp, Kiwi Foo Camp, and the Microsoft Web Dev Summit.

When not in front of a computer, he can usually be found playing soccer in Prospect Park or riding his single-speed bicycle around Brooklyn.

David Soria Parra

David Soria Parra is a developer at Mayflower GmbH. With more than three
years of experience working with decentralized version control systems,
he occasionally gives Git and Mercurial trainings and talks. He is a
contributor to the Git and Mercurial SCM and maintainer of the official
Git mirrors of the PHP Subversion repository.

David Zuelke

David Zuelke is the lead developer of the Agavi project, an open source MVC framework for PHP, and managing director at Bitextender GmbH, a Munich, Germany based software company. He has been doing PHP development for more than ten years and regularly speaks at conferences around the world.

Derick Rethans

Derick Rethans has contributed in a number of ways to the PHP project, including the Xdebug debugging tool, the mcrypt, date and input-filter extensions, bug fixes, additions and leading the QA team. He's a frequent lecturer at conferences, the author of php|architect's Guide to Date and Time Programming, and the co-author of PHP 5 Power Programming. Derick works as an independent contractor doing various PHP related jobs while focussing on internals and extensions. In his spare time he likes to travel, hike, ski and practise photography.

Elizabeth Naramore

Elizabeth Naramore is a PHP enthusiast that has been working with PHP since 2002. She is President and co-founder of PHP Women.org, and an active member of the PHP Community and her local PHP User Group (OINK-PUG). Her day job consists of working with PHP in e-commerce via Gifts for Engineers, and she also acts as a Consulting Editor for Wrox/Wiley Publishing.

Previously, she was the Director of Business Development for Marco Tabini and Associates, publishers of php|architect, where she assisted with organizing PHP events such as php|works, php|tek, and CodeWorks. She has also been seen coordinating events such as PHP Appalachia and the PHP Throwdown. You can also see her at PHPBuilder where she is a moderator.

Elizabeth was also a regular contributor to International PHP Magazine and is co-author of a few titles published by Wrox/Wiley. In addition, she has been a speaker at ZendCon and has taught e-commerce here in the Cincinnati area.

Harrie Verveer

Harrie Verveer is a PHP developer and trainer at ibuildings. He has been working with PHP as a professional since 2004, helping ibuildings to become the company that it is today. He is a regular speaker at user group events in Europe, where he shares his experience and knowledge gained from working with a wide variety of technologies. In his spare time Harrie enjoys photography, playing guitar and writing reviews of gigs and CDs for the popular 3voor12 website.

Helgi Þormar Þorbjörnsson

Helgi is a long term open source & PEAR contributor, in PEAR he has had his fingers in everything from the website maintenance, QA, package maintenance, board member and beyond. Currently he's heading up the Pyrus project which is the new PEAR installer. Helgi is a partner and lead developer at echolibre where he has the fun of tackling some of the webs most interesting & fun problems. The most current project Helgi heads up at echolibre is the CloudSplit platform.

Ian Barber

Ian is a professional services consultant at Ibuildings in the UK, where he leads development teams for a variety of large enterprise clients. He blogs regularly at phpir.com, covering information retrieval, text mining, natural language processing and other interesting topics.

Ilia Alshanetsky

Ilia Alshanetsky is a CIO at Centah Inc., a company specializing in providing solutions to retail and construction industries. He is the author of FUDforum (http://fudforum.org), a highly popular, Open Source bulletin board focused on providing the maximum functionality at the highest level of security and performance. Ilia is also Core PHP Developer, an active member of PHP’s Q&A team and a Release Master for PHP 5.2. He authored and co-authored a number of extensions with notables such as SHMOP, PDO, SQLite and GD and is responsible for large number of bug fixes and performance tweaks in the language. A prolific lecturer and writer, Ilia can found speaking at international conferences and is frequently published in print and online magazines on a variety of PHP topics. He is also the author of a book on PHP security. Ilia can be reached at ilia@ilia.ws

Johannes Schlüter

Johannes Schlüter is working for the MySQL Group at Sun Microsystems, a wholly owned subsidiary of Oracle Corporation. In the PHP community he is, among other things, known for PHP's interactive mode or parts of the reflection API as well as implementing a simple proof-of-concept BASIC-like language on top of the Zend VM, the virtual machine behind PHP, and is responsible for the release management of the PHP 5.3 series. He works and lives in Munich, Germany.

Kevlin Henney

Kevlin is an independent consultant and trainer based in the UK. His development interests are in patterns, programming, practice and process. He has been a columnist for various magazines and web sites, including Better Software, The Register, Application Development Advisor, Java Report and the C/C++ Users Journal. Kevlin is co-author of A Pattern Language for Distributed Computing and On Patterns and Pattern Languages, two volumes in the Pattern-Oriented Software Architecture series. He is also editor of the 97 Things Every Programmer Should Know site and book.

Lorenzo Alberton

Lorenzo has a M.Sc. degree in Software Engineering and has been working with PHP and other languages for over 10 years. He's the lead maintainer of several PEAR packages (MDB2, Pager, Translation2...) and is a long time contributor to open source projects. He's also a researcher in the machine learning / NLP fields, and is generally interested in databases, algorithms and data structures. Currently he works as a Software Engineer at Ibuildings UK, helping high profile companies developing critical web applications. You can read his articles on his personal site or on the Ibuildings techPortal.

Marcus Deglos

Marcus is a software engineer based in the UK, with interests ranging from UX and agile to GIS, web services and scalability. As an experienced Drupalist, he currently works as a Drupal trainer, architect, and developer. Outside of work, Marcus likes to explore deep wrecks and is a scuba-diving instructor.

Matthew Weier O'Phinney

Matthew Weier O'Phinney is project lead for Zend Framework, in which role he serves as both architect and community liaison. He is a vocal advocate of open source, standards, and development best practices. He blogs regularly at http://weierophinney.net/matthew/, contributes periodically to Zend's Developer Zone, and has been published both in php|architect as well as Sitepoint's second edition of "The PHP Anthology." He makes his home in Vermont, USA, with his wife, two children, and aging Basset Hound.

Melanie Rhianna Lewis

Melanie Rhianna Lewis has been developing software for longer that she would like to admit. She has worked on numerous projects, including an online software store and broadband content download for a set top box, using a variety of languages. Melanie currently works for an international consultancy based in Shipley, Yorkshire in the north of England which specialises in software for consumer devices. She is an active member of the open source and PHP communities and a member of PHP Women. Melanie is a PECL maintainer looking after the DIO extension. When not in front of the computer or playing with Arduinos, Melanie can be found knitting, climbing or belly-dancing.

Michael Maclean

Michael has been a PHP user since 2001 and has recently got more involved with the project, starting with the documentation team and then moving to doing more work on some PECL extensions. He is based in the north west of Scotland and works for Enterprise Management Consulting as a developer. His personal website is at mgdm.net. Aside from computing, he also spends a lot of time learning to sail and doing photography.

Rob Allen

Rob Allen has been programming with PHP since 1999 and is a member of the PHP community. He is the lead author of Zend Framework in Action and is a contributor to Zend Framework, developing the Zend_Config component. Rob holds a Masters degree in Electronic Engineering from the University of Birmingham in the UK and started out writing C++ Windows applications. He now concentrates solely on web-based applications in PHP. Rob is the Technical Director of Big Room Internet in the UK, focussing on project management and the company’s future technologies.

Sam de Freyssinet

Sam de Freyssinet is a technical lead engineer at Ibuildings, specialising in system architecture and data modelling. Sam is also a core developer and evangelist for the Kohana PHP framework, usually found lurking on the Kohana forum and IRC channel. Away from the computer, Sam regularly attends Pub Standards in London and helps organise a local Kohana PHP user group.

Scott MacVicar

Scott MacVicar has contributed various extensions and improvements to the PHP core over the past few years. If something is wrong with fileinfo, JSON or SQLite3 it's likely something he did. Currently he works for Facebook on anything Open Source related most recently HipHop for PHP. Scott is also the admin for the Google Summer of Code program and has written numerous PHP articles. When not connected to the internet, Scott runs marathons and cooks!

Sebastian Bergmann

Sebastian Bergmann holds a degree in Computer Science and is a pioneer in the field of quality assurance in PHP projects. His test framework PHPUnit is a de-facto standard. He is actively involved in the development of PHP and creator of various development tools. Sebastian Bergmann is an internationally sought-after expert. As an author he shares his long-standing experience in books and articles. He is a frequent speaker at conferences around the world. As a Co-Founder and Principal Consultant with thePHP.cc, Sebastian Bergmann offers consulting, training, and coaching services to help enterprises improve the quality assurance process for their PHP-based software projects. In his free time, Sebastian likes to hack on Open Source software and to take photographs, preferably while travelling the world.

Sebastian Schürmann

Sebastian is a team lead and developer working on a price comparison site for one of the most frequented tech websites in Germany at Chip Xonio Online GmbH. Focusing on PHP and Javascript in a high performance and concurrency environment. He presses the "I like" button on: Agile methodology, aesthetic code, the agile manifesto and recently everything asynchronous.

Stephan Hochdoerfer

Stephan Hochdörfer is co-founder and department manager of Research Labs at bitExpert AG in Mannheim, Germany. Besides being the project lead for the bitExpert PHP application framework he is responsible for managing the generative programming (GP) approach used by bitExpert for creating and maintaining multi-tenant web applications.

Thijs Feryn

Thijs has been working with PHP for over 6 years and is a board member at PHPBenelux who organised their very first conference a couple of weeks ago. Thijs works at Combell, the largest independent hosting company in Belgium, where he's in charge of customer support. He also does some hosting and open source evangelism and is Combell's main community guy. Thijs blogs about the LAMP stack at http://blog.feryn.eu and does modest contributions to various open source projects such as Zend Framework, Symfony and PHP. In his spare time he enjoys attending concerts, listening to loud heavy metal/hardcore music and hanging out in his lovely hometown Bruges.

Thorsten Rinne

Thorsten Rinne, graduated in Computer Science, is working as senior developer / team lead for Mayflower GmbH in Munich, Germany. His main focuses are business critical reporting and Basel-II-compliant rating applications based on PHP, MySQL and PostgreSQL. He is the founder and maintainer of the open source FAQ management software phpMyFAQ. He is also a speaker at conferences around the world.