Adam Culp (@AdamCulp), organizer of the SunshinePHP Developer Conference and South Florida PHP Users Group (SoFloPHP) where he speaks regularly, is a Zend Certified PHP 5.3 Engineer consulting for Zend Technologies. Adam is passionate about developing with PHP and enjoys helping others write good code, implement standards, refactor efficiently, and incorporate unit and functional tests into their projects. When he is not coding or contributing to various developer communities, he can be found hiking around the United States National Parks, teaching judo, or long distance running.
Jeff Carouth is a web application developer honing his programming and skiing skills at Liftopia. He is an active member of the PHP community, speaker, and co-organizer of BCSPHP. He believes quality code, testing, and automation are necessary ingredients in a recipe for a successful software project. When not hacking away at code he is a father and husband, beer and Scotch enthusiast, and an amateur photographer. Follow Jeff on Twitter as jcarouth or read his blog at http://carouth.com
Beth Tucker Long is the Editor-In-Chief of php[architect] magazine (http://www.phparch.com), co-organizer of Madison PHP (http://www.madisonphp.com), and she also teaches PHP courses and freelances. You can find her on Twitter (@e3betht) or on her blog (http://www.alittleofboth.com). She runs Treeline Design - http://www.treelinedesign.com, a web development company, and Playlist Event Music - http://www.playlisteventmusic.com, a DJ company, along with her husband, Chris.
Jacob Mather is a software engineer with over ten years of experience building dynamic content for the web. He is co-organizer of the San Francisco PHP User Group, and blogs at http://jmather.com/
Eli has been building Web Applications for over 18 years and fell in love with PHP the day that PHP 4 was released. Since then he's been a strong advocate for PHP and used it in every project he's work on. He is currently the Managing Editor and Conference Chair for php[architect] and Founding Partner & CTO of musketeers.me. He is also an avid writer (blogs, articles and books), and has spoken at numerous conferences.
Matt has been working with PHP professionally for the last 7 years and recently has been focusing on testing and test driven development. When not writing code, Matt enjoys running, playing drums and guitar and spending time with his super awesome children.
Patrick has been into web technologies since the "bad old days" when animated GIFs were required on all sites and the BLINK tag still had some supporters. He suffered through several years of procedural programming in PHP4 before discovering the glories of OOP in PHP5. Patrick is a Team Leader and Senior Software Engineer at OpticsPlanet, Inc. in Northbrook, IL, and regularly works with Zend Framework, Doctrine 2, Symfony 2, and several less fun technologies. After hours, he's the founder and organizer of the Lake / Kenosha County PHP Users Group.
Paul is an internationally recognized PHP expert who has worked as everything from junior developer to VP of Engineering in all kinds of organizations (corporate, military, non-profit, educational, medical, and others). Paul's latest open-source project is the Aura project for PHP. Among his other accomplishments, Paul is the lead developer of the Solar Framework, and the creator of the Savant template system. He has authored a series of authoritative benchmarks on dynamic framework performance, and was a founding contributor to the Zend Framework (the DB, DB_Table, and View components). In a previous career, Paul was an intelligence operations specialist for the US Air Force, and enjoys putting .308 holes in targets at 400 yards.
Brian Fenton has been a PHP developer for 7 years in the Midwest and the Bay Area, currently at Intel. He focuses on code craftsmanship and design principles. Blog at www.brianfenton.us, Twitter at @brianfenton. When he's not busy being a dad, he enjoys food, beer, gaming, and learning.
Omni Adams has been a professional web developer for over a decade, primarily using PHP and MySQL. He currently plies his trade as a developer at Mashery. When not playing hockey or brewing beer, he barks at coworkers about their lack of unit tests and automates all of the boring things in his job.
Jason Lotito is an Application Architect at MeetMe.com, the leading social discovery platform for meeting new people. There, he’s worked on both the front-end designing single-page web applications using Backbone.js and a variety of other tools, as well as backend systems such as Jackd, a PHP-based consumer system for RabbitMQ. He manages the bi-monthly company hackathon HACKD, and helps plan Node, the company’s internal yearly developer conference and retreat. Outside of this, he’s an active speaker at his local developer user groups, as well as an avid participant in hackathons and Startup Weekends. Prior to MeetMe, Jason worked for 10 years in the credit card processing industry. He’s happy to be away from PCI compliance and dealing with banks.
Evan Coury is a core contributor and long-time user of Zend Framework who is perhaps most well known in the community for authoring the all-new ZF2 module system. He is currently a professional software architect and independent consultant. In addition to consulting and his open source contributions, Evan is also the owner of Roave, a PHP and Zend Framework consulting and development company which employs some of the most talented developers in the PHP community.
Derick Rethans is a PHP internals expert, author of Xdebug and an OpenStreetMap and mapping enthusiast.
He has contributed in a number of ways to the PHP project, including the Xdebug debugging tool, and various extensions and additions. 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. He is now working at MongoDB to work on the PHP driver for MongoDB.
Josh is a UX manager, front-end dev, design lead, WordPress themer, and conference speaker. He works with VistaComm building awesome websites for their largest clients and at kidblog.org as a front-end developer, re-imagining what a education-centric social network and blogging platform can do for teachers and students.
Nate Abele first took an interest in programming at age 11, so you can obviously tell how cool he is. In the course of his career, he has mostly eschewed working for large companies, in favor of the culture found in small, independent businesses & startups. Nate has been employed by one of the most well-known and well-respected PHP consultancies in the world, and has worked on projects of all shapes and sizes. In other, more esoteric periods of work history, Nate has also worked with a humble 'productivity' software vendor in the greater Seattle area, and a small fruit vendor outside San José.
However, Nate is probably best known for his contributions to Open Source, including helping to create one of the most well-known and widely-used web frameworks for PHP. The 5 years' experience working on a large, high-adoption project has helped to inform and guide his current crop of Open Source projects (he accidentally co-founded the Lithium PHP framework (http://lithify.me), and is a member of the AngularUI team), writing, teaching, and consulting (http://unionofrad.com/).
When not staring at glowing rectangles of various sizes, Nate enjoys eating delicious food, playing guitar, snowboarding, and writing about himself in the third person.
Glen Campbell is the manager of the Rackspace Developer Relations Group and the lead developer for the php-opencloud library and the little-known Siteframe website framework. His computing experience started in the 1970's programming the COSMAC ELF and changing tubes in an IBM magnetic ledger card reader. He worked on the OpenStack Compute project, including the integration of Rackspace's Next Generation Cloud Servers product, and has presented at various conferences since the early 1990's. Formerly a manager and senior architect at Yahoo!, he has experience in building and deploying extremely large websites that sustain massive traffic loads. Prior to his involvement with the Internet, he was an IT architect and consultant for numerous data management projects. He lives in San Antonio, Texas, and is sometimes mistaken for a country and western singer.
Beau Simensen has been working with PHP since 2002. Professionally, he offers consulting services through his company Dragonfly Development. Beau is a proponent of writing framework agnostic code and hopes to help projects embrace a life not completely tied to any framework's ecosystem.
Many moons ago, at the tender age of 14, Cal touched his first computer. (We’re using the term “computer” loosely here, it was a TRS-80 Model 1) Since then his life has never been the same. He graduated from TRS-80s to Commodores and eventually to IBM PC’s.
For the past 13 years Cal has worked with PHP and MySQL on Linux, OSX, and Windows. He has built a variety of projects ranging in size from simple web pages to multi-million dollar web applications. When not banging his head on his monitor, attempting a blood sacrifice to get a particular piece of code working, he enjoys building and managing development teams using his widely imitated but never patented management style of “management by wandering around”.
These days, when not working with PHP, Cal can be found working on a variety of projects like CoderFaire. He speaks at conferences around the world on topics ranging from technical talks to motivational talks for developers. If you happen to meet him at a conference, don’t be afraid to buy him a shot of Bourbon.
Cal is based in Nashville TN where he is happily married to wife 1.29, the lovely and talented Kathy. Together they have 2 wonderful kids who were both smart enough not to pursue a job in IT.
Maxwell Vandervelde has been creating websites since 2001 and hasn’t stopped obsessing about them since. Starting his development career at Parametric Technology Corporation, Maxwell worked as a part of a tools and integration team where he learned the development tools used for managing massive application development. Joining The Nerdery in 2012 as a Developer, Maxwell has spoken multiple times at the Minnesota PHP User Group and is skilled in PHP, Zend, Symfony2 and Java/Android.
"In our industry, 20 years is a long time. But I can't help but think I'm just scratching the surface."
Aaron Saray has been absolutely enthralled with programming for more than 2 decades. He's programmed and scripted in many languages along the way, but gravitates towards Open Source technology. Aaron has given more than 15 PHP-centric conference talks, co-founded the Milwaukee PHP Users Group, and authored the WROX book Professional PHP Design Patterns as well as a monthly column in PHP Architect Magazine. His true passion is mentoring programmers and encouraging team development, which just happens to be a great fit for his current role as Development Manager of a team specializing in PHP, Javascript and HTML5.
Jason Rhodes leads the web team at Johns Hopkins University, where they make sites, apps, and APIs using a combination of PHP, JavaScript, trigonometry, and coffee. You can follow Jason's ramblings about code, pop culture, oxford commas, and Orioles' baseball on the Twitters under the clever pseudonym of @rhodesjason.
Eryn O'Neil is a web developer (LAMP, naturally) and technical lead at Clockwork Active Media in Minneapolis, MN, where she's worked on everything from e-commerce to online promotions to building a CMS. Her philosophy? Simple: Write software that's easy to maintain and even easier to use. Based in Saint Paul, MN, Eryn spends most of her free time swing and blues dancing, rock climbing, and wishing it weren't snowing.
Jeremy Mikola is a software engineer at MongoDB's NYC office. As a member of the driver and evangelism team, he helps develop the PHP driver and contributes to various OSS projects, such as Doctrine ODM, Symfony2 and Zend Framework. Previously, Jeremy helped build great things with Symfony2, MongoDB, and a handful of other interesting technologies at OpenSky and Exercise.com. Jeremy lives in Hoboken, NJ and is known to enjoy a good sandwich.