Speakers
Ilia Alshanetsky Centah Inc.
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 an upcoming book on PHP security. Ilia can be reached at ilia@ilia.ws
Sebastian Bergmann thePHP.cc
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.
Arne Blankerts thePHP.cc
Arne Blankerts is a co-founder and Principal Consultant with thePHP.cc and head of development at Ballyhoo advertising agency in Hamburg, Germany. Furthermore he offers security consulting and training with thePHP.cc, is a regular author writing articles for the German PHP Magazine, php|architekt and others. Arne is the inventor and lead developer of an open source site system called "fCMS" (http://fcms.de) and in the unusual case of spare time he helps maintaining the German translation of the PHP manual.
Gareth Bowles Optimal Operations
Gareth Bowles has been leading QA and technical operations at various West Coast startups since well before the dawn of the 21st century.
He's especially interested in narrowing the gaps between development and operations, as well as using the cloud for added scaling and improved efficiency.
Gareth is always looking for new ways to get the product built, tested and deployed faster while still getting a good night’s sleep.
Keith Casey Blue Parabola, LLC
Keith has served in a number of development roles ranging from Excel-row-tweaker all the way up to CTO. In his current role at Blue Parabola, he has developed large-scale PHP-based systems for organizations ranging from major news media companies to small non-profits. In his ample spare time, he serves as the Project Lead and Release Manager for web2project, a web-based project management system.
Ed Finkler Funkatron Productions
Ed Finkler is a PHP and JavaScript developer at HiiDef. He is the creator of the PHPSecInfo auditing tool and the Inspekt input filtering library for PHP. Ed is also an experienced JavaScript developer, and his application Spaz won “Best Community HTML Application” in the 2007 Adobe AIR Developer Derby. His work in web runtime platforms on the desktop and mobile currently occupies most of his free time.
Israel Ekpo Walt Disney Parks & Resorts Online
Israel Ekpo is a Senior Software Engineer with Walt Disney Parks & Resorts Online. Israel holds a bachelors degree in Computer Science from Florida Atlantic University and has over 9 years of professional software development experience. He is the author of the Solr PHP extension at PECL as well as the popular phpPaypalPro framework at Sourceforge. He resides in Orlando, Florida with his wife and son. His interests include music, soccer, cooking, data mining, information retrieval, machine learning and artificial intelligence.
Shahar Evron Zend Technologies
Shahar Evron has been developing in PHP for the last 8 years. For the last 5 years Shahar has been working in various positions at Zend Technologies, currently as the Product Manager for Zend Server.
Before joining Zend Shahar worked as a system engineer in an open-source focused ISP, gaining experience in working with many open-source technologies.
Shahar is also a core contributor to the Zend Framework, and is involved mostly with the development of the Framework's Web Services components.
Roy Ganor Zend Technologies
Roy leads the popular Eclipse PHP Development Tools project, is a commiter on several Eclipse Technology and Tools projects (DLTK,ATF and DTP). As a project lead at Zend he is the project leader of Zend Studio and works on providing the next generation tools for PHP developers. He has a computer science degree and a graduated student at the Tel Aviv University.
Susan Gantner Partner400
Susan is half of Partner400, a consulting company focused on education on modern programming techniques on the IBM i platform and a founding partner in System i Developer, a consortium of System i educators and hosts of the RPG & DB2 Summit conferences. Susan spent 10 years as an application programmers, followed by 15 years with IBM. She left IBM in 1999 to form Partner400 with Jon Paris.
Alexey Gopachenko
Alexey Gopachenko is a big believer in best practices and superior tools. At JetBrains, he contributes to TeamCity, PhpStorm and IntelliJ IDEA projects, adding to these team collaboration and individual productivity tools since 2006.
Josh Holmes Microsoft
Josh Holmes is a passionate soul who gets his kicks solving problems with deep fried awesomeness. He is currently employed by Microsoft as an Architect Evangelist. Josh is a frequent speaker and lead panelist at national and international software development conferences focusing on emerging technologies, software design and development. You can contact Josh through his blog at http://www.joshholmes.com.
Ivo Jansch
Ivo is an evangelist of PHP technology in professional and enterprise environments. He is the author of the books 'php|architect's Guide To Enterprise PHP Development' and 'php|architect's Guide to Cloud Computing' and a member of the Zend PHP 5.3 Certification Advisory Board.
When he's not writing, tweeting or coaching developers, he can be found coding on a variety of projects such as the ATK business framework, or speaking about PHP related topics at various conferences.
After a 10 year career as the CTO of Ibuildings, one of the PHP companies in Europe, Ivo is now the founder of Egeniq, a new mobile apps company.
Bill Karwin Karwin Software Solutions
Bill Karwin has been a software engineer for over twenty years, developing applications, libraries, and servers for mid-sized companies and startups. Bill’s career has focused on technologies and tools that enable the success and productivity of other software developers, for example the Zend Framework library for PHP 5 web development, the InterBase relational database, and the Enhydra Java application server. Bill is the author of “SQL Antipatterns: Avoiding the Pitfalls of Database Programming” from Pragmatic Bookshelf.
Elizabeth Naramore
Elizabeth Naramore is a PHP enthusiast that has been working with PHP since 2002. She is the OSS Outreach Coordinator for SourceForge.
In addition, she is President and Co-Founder of PHPWomen.org, and an active member of the PHP Community and her local PHP User Group (OINK-PUG).
She also acts as a Consulting Editor for Wrox/Wiley Publishing.
Mike Pavlak Zend Technologies
Mike Pavlak has been working with IBM midrange solutions since 1992 and IBM Mainframes before that. After years of developing applications using RPG, CL and PHP he managed IT development and IT for power protection manufacturer Tripp Lite. Mike joined Zend Technologies as a Solutions Consultant working with the i5 sales team in 2008 and enjoys helping IBM i customers explore PHP as a state of the art solution for application modernization.
Mike lives in suburban Chicago with his wife, five kids, two dogs, three cats, a leopard spotted gecko, Russian tortoise, two rabbits, and a half dozen fish.
Fabien Potencier Sensio
Fabien Potencier discovered the Web in 1994, at a time when connecting to the Internet was still associated with the harmful strident sounds of a modem. Being a developer by passion, he immediately started to build websites with Perl. But with the release of PHP 5, he decided to switch focus to PHP, and created the symfony framework project in 2004 to help his company leverage the power of PHP for its customers.
Fabien is a serial-entrepreneur, and among other companies, he created Sensio, a services and consulting company specialized in web technologies and Internet marketing, in 1998.
Fabien is also the creator of several other Open-Source projects, a writer, a blogger, a speaker at international conferences, and a happy father of two wonderful kids.
Stefan Priebsch thePHP.cc
Stefan Priebsch is a Co-Founder and Principal Consultant with thePHP.cc. He holds a degree in computer science and is author of various books and technical articles. As a consultant, he helps customers to improve development processes and make better use of PHP, with a focus on software architecture, OOP, design patterns, and tools and methods. Stefan is a frequent speaker at IT conferences around the world.
Ben Ramsey Moontoast
Ben Ramsey is the Senior Software Architect at Moontoast, the social commerce network. He is a prolific writer and frequent speaker, often writing and speaking about web services and HTTP. He has written for php|architect, International PHP Magazine, and Zend Developer Zone and is a co-author of php|architect's Zend PHP 5 Certification Study Guide. Ben is the founder of the Atlanta PHP user group and organizer of the Nashville PHP user group. He blogs at benramsey.com, and is on Twitter at @ramsey.
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. You can reach him at derick@derickrethans.nl
Alvin Richards
Alvin is Senior Director of Service and Enterprise Engineering for 10gen on the West Cost. He has held leadership positions at Oracle and NetApp as well as several startups in the Archiving, Web Platform and Java instrumentation spaces. With 20+ years of combined experience in these areas, what he most enjoys is building cool products and great teams and challenging the status quo. Alvin earned separate degrees in Computer Science and Photography from Thames Valley and Nottingham Trent Universities in the UK.
Philip Ross NOLOH
Philip Ross was born in Kiev, Ukraine. Currently, he is Co-Founder and VP of Engineering at NOLOH, a company dedicated to a very unique PHP Framework of the same name. Since 2005, he has played a crucial role in developing the NOLOH kernel, and among his extensive list of contributions, he was behind NOLOH’s intuitive and advanced Comet functionality. Phill, as he prefers to be called, is well-versed and experienced with numerous programming languages and paradigms, and particularly enjoys the subject of their design philosophies. Outside of development, his interests mainly lie in the foundations of mathematics, including set theory, logic, and related topics, involving himself with research of alternate systems of set theory.
Ralph Schindler Zend Technologies Inc.
Ralph Schindler is a software engineer on the Zend Framework Team at Zend Technologies. His contributions to ZF started at its initial release in March of 2006 while employed as an application developer at Tippingpoint/3Com. Ralph has been using PHP as a primary application stack for nearly 11 years and is a proponent of pushing the PHP stack further into the enterprise arena. He contributes writings to both Zend's DevZone and his personal website ralphschindler.com. Ralph splits his time between his home in Austin, Texas and his native city of New Orleans, Louisiana in an attempt to contribute to as many user groups as possible. When he is not promoting ZF and PHP, he can be found enjoying great food and wine, as well as hiking around Austin's greener areas with his wife, Jenny, and chocolate labrador, Belle.
Kevin Schroeder Zend Technologies
Kevin Schroeder is the Technology Evangelist at Zend. He has developed production software using a wide variety of languages and has experience as a system administrator on several different platforms on scales of up to several hundred servers. He has spoken at several conferences and has written two books; “The IBM i Programmer’s Guide to PHP” and the upcoming “You want to do WHAT with PHP?”.
Alan Seiden Strategic Business Systems
Alan Seiden helps companies implement PHP- and Zend Framework-based solutions, especially on IBM i. He is senior developer and consultant at Strategic Business Systems, Inc., a New Jersey-based partner of IBM and Zend.
An early adopter of PHP-based web applications on the IBM i, Alan was a charter member of IBM/COMMON’s PHP Advisory Board and served as a consultant for the IBM manual PHP: Zend Core for i5/OS.
In 2009, Alan’s work was honored with the IBM/COMMON Power Systems Innovation Award for “Best Web Application,” for Allied Beverage Group’s e-commerce site, developed with the team at Strategic Business Systems, using PHP and Zend Framework on IBM i.
He has spoken at many conferences and meetings, including Northeast System i User Groups, New York PHP, Long Island System User Group, Chicago OMNI, and ZendCon, delivering what one participant called "an upbeat message about what we can accomplish."
More: http://www.alanseiden.com/about/
Asher Snyder NOLOH
Asher is the driving personality behind NOLOH. A "technological polymath," he has extensive experience working with a vast number of different programming languages and development methodologies from the desktop to the Internet, to maintaining servers and designing, implementing advanced databases.
In 2005 he enlisted the aid of his friends to help look into many of the frustrations associated with developing rich web sites and RIAs. This led to the creation of the NOLOH PHP Framework.
When not working or presenting on NOLOH, Asher gives back to the open-source community on github, as well as contributing his time to the causes he believes in.
Zeev Suraski Zend Technologies
Zeev Suraski was a lead contributor to PHP starting in 1997, when he and Andi Gutmans developed the foundation for PHP 3. Zeev co-founded Zend Technologies in 1999 together with Andi Gutmans. He serves as CTO and leads the company's research & development teams. Zeev serves on the board of Zend Technologies and is a member of the PHP Group and the Apache Software Foundation.
Travis Swicegood
Travis Swicegood is a professional programmer; consultant with a focus on web applications, performance, and stability; and author of Pragmatic Version Control using Git. He\'s one of the developers on SimpleTest; the lead developer of PHPT and Argil; a TDD advocate — sometimes called a zealot — and lurker on many a PHP project mailing list when not learning other programming languages for fun, exploring his surroundings on bike, or tasting his latest kitchen and home-brew creations.
Ligaya Turmelle MySQL/Oracle
Ligaya Turmelle is a full time Goddess, Part-time MySQL DBA, occasional PHP programmer, and obsessive world traveler. She currently lives in Yulee, Florida with her husband, daughter and their 2 Belgian Malinois. Actively involved with the PHP Community as a founding Principle of phpwomen.org, administrator at codewalkers.com, PHP blogger and long-time busy body of #phpc on freenode, she hopes to one day actually meet all the people she talks to. Now for all the letters - ZCE (4&5), CMDBA, CMDEV and MySQL Core.
Michelangelo van Dam In2IT
Michelangelo van Dam has been working with PHP since 2001 and has been caught by the fever ever since. Besides being a professional PHP web application developer and consultant for enterprises and large companies, he is also co-founder of the PHP user group PHPBenelux and a valued member of the international PHP community, elePHPant shepherd and a true PHP evangelist.
Alvaro Videla The NetCircle
Alvaro Videla works as Lead Developer for TheNetCircle.com, a Shanghai based company that builds Germany's biggest dating website. Having worked with queue systems for several years, he integrated RabbitMQ with the company's PHP symfony projects. He's a technology advocate, having published articles in the php|architect magazine and given conferences about PHP, RabbitMQ and Erlang both in Europe and China.
Jonathan Wage Sensio Labs
Jonathan Wage has been working with various web technologies for nearly 10 years building software on the internet. He formerly was the lead developer and application architect at centre{source}. Today you will find him with Sensio Labs, the creators of the symfony MVC framework. His primary responsibilities are training other developers as well as working on the symfony and Doctrine open source projects. He is a core contributor to symfony and the lead of the Doctrine project.
Matthew Weier O'Phinney Zend Technologies
Matthew is Project Lead for Zend Framework, and has been contributing to the project since before the initial preview release. He is an advocate for Open Source Software and regularly blogs and speaks on PHP best practice topics. You'll find him most often in Vermont where he resides with his wife, daughter, son, and aging Basset Hound.
Christian Wenz Arrabiata Solutions GmbH
Christian Wenz is author, trainer, and consultant for web technologies. He wrote or co-wrote over six dozen books, frequently contributes to renowned IT magazines and speaks at developer conferences and user groups around the world.
Eli White HiiDef
Eli has worked in/on/around the internet for longer than he should be counting, with the last decade spent exclusively with PHP. He is currently the Lead Developer of Goodsie for HiiDef and has worked a number of varied jobs in the past, including
Zend, TravelPod/Tripadvisor, Digg and for the Hubble Space Telescope Program. He is co-author of the book PHP 5 in Practice and has presented at numerous
conferences.
Dustin Whittle Yahoo! / Symfony
Dustin Whittle is a Developer Evangelist for Yahoo's Open Strategy. When he is not advocating Yahoo's Open Stack, he helps develop it through his work on the Yahoo! Developer Network and Yahoo! Application Platform. Prior to his work helping create an open Yahoo!, he has contributed to Yahoo! Answers and Delicious. When not focused on Yahoo!, he is an active open source contributor for the symfony project and is a regular speaker at technical conferences around the world.
David Zuelke Bitextender GmbH
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.
More speakers will follow soon!
