Speakers
Nate Abele
While many categories or activities could be used to define Nate, the best way to describe him is to simply say that Nate is. After spending 4 years developing CakePHP into the most popular PHP framework, he set out with a few other CakePHP alumni to create the next generation web framework: Lithium. While not beautifying APIs, Nate is often found snowboarding, playing guitar, being a beach bum, or writing about himself in the third person.
Rob Allen Big Room Internet
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 the company's content management framework and future technologies.
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
Wade Arnold
Wade Arnold is the CEO of T8DESIGN, a rich media and application firm. He is responsible for strategic planning, product development, and creating an exciting and rewarding corporate environment. Arnold has an active dialog with Adobe and actively participates in prerelease beta development of Flash, Flex, and AIR. Arnold is passionately involved in open source Flash/Flex development and aligns T8DESIGN behind these initiatives. Arnold is the lead developer of AMFPHP and open source implementation of Flash Remoting. In 2008, Arnold co-authored “The Essential Guide to Open Source Flash Development.” Arnold has a degree in Computer Science emphasizing intelligent systems and an MBA from the University of Iowa.
Gaylord Aulke Zend Technologies
Gaylord Aulke works since 2006 for Zend as director professional services in Germany.
He currently leads a big software development project that involves partners and brings PHP to the enterprise.
Before he joined Zend, Gaylord was running his own software development company called 100 DAYS.
He has been active in the PHP community for some years promoting "PHP is not Java".
While he has a solid programming background, his current field of interest is agile development methods and project management.
Barry Austin
Barry Austin is an active member of the PHP community in Washington, DC. He has had a coding habit since childhood; over the last twelve years his career has included IT operations, fighting hackers, and software engineering. He currently develops web applications at Interactive Strategies and he occasionally blogs at http://doboard.com.
Scott Baker Digg
Scott Baker is the Vice President of Operations at Digg, the popular social media site that harnesses the collective wisdom of the world’s online audience to prioritize the overwhelming amount of content available on the Web. He is responsible for managing Digg's technology infrastructure, including overseeing the network equipment and datacenters that run Digg, which now gets nearly 40 million visitors a month.
Prior to joining Digg in March, 2006, Baker worked as Manager of Internet Services for Apple’s Global Network Services group. He managed Apple’s customer-facing networks, including Mac.com and the iTunes Music Store. He also held various networking and IT positions at The Boston Consulting Group, Intraspect and ION, as well as Director of Network Services for Playboy Enterprises/playboy.com.
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.
Douglas Butler Atlassian
Douglas is a sales engineer focused on Atlassian's developer tools, including Bamboo for continuous integration, and JIRA Studio, a hosted suite of tools for agile development teams.
Tony Cairns IBM
Tony Cairns is a senior programmer for IBM in Rochester, Minnesota. Tony’s career includes many positions ranging from management to technical. He is currently a member of the IBM i PASE/PHP team and adjunct member of the Apache / Web Services team.
Mark Chaimungkalanont Atlassian
Mark is the lead developer for Bamboo, Atlassian's continuous integration server.
Chris Cornutt Atmos Energy
Chris has been involved with PHP and its community for about eight years now, most of that running his site, PHPDeveloper.org - a site devoted to bringing the most up-to-date, informative news and community happenings to the forefront and, more recently, Joind.in, a community conference feedback service. He’s a Zend Certified Engineer and works as a web site administrator at a large natural gas utility in Dallas, TX.
Daniel Cousineau Texas A&M University Department of Student Affairs
I have been a PHP developer since 2003. My professional resume can be
found at http://www.linkedin.com/in/dcousineau and my blog can be
found at http://www.toosweettobesour.com/
I'm an avid member of the local developer and designer community,
having helped organize local BarCamp's, MiniBarCamps, and PHPUG's; and
participating heavily in refreshBCS events and Agile user groups. I
also hang out on #phpc and had the privilege of getting to know the
"core" PHP community at ZendCon '08.
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.
Marcel Esser CROSCON
Marcel Esser is a senior developer at CROSCON and lives in the Washington, D.C. area. His favorite topics are scaling and integration. He’s been working with CROSCON for about 2 years, working on one of the flagship products – a highly scalable multimedia content management system deployed by Tommy Hilfiger, Volkswagen, and others. Most recently, he has been working on a project management product called MyCourt, and developing CROSCON’s next generation application development framework.
Cal Evans Ibuildings
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 9 years Cal has worked with PHP and MySQL on Linux OSX, and when necessary, 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”.
Cal is currently based in Nashville, TN. He works with Blue Parabola helping other developers learn new tips and tricks.
Cal is happily married to wife 1.26, the lovely and talented Kathy. Together they have 2 kids who were smart enough not to pursue careers in IT.
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.
Eric Farrar Sybase iAnywhere
As a Product Manager for SQL Anywhere, Eric focuses on database integration with the latest web technologies. Prior to joining Sybase, Eric was an application developer at Applied Tooling Systems Inc, Morgan Stanley, and Platform Solutions Inc. Eric Farrar holds a Bachelor of Applied Sciences degree in Computer Engineering from the University in Waterloo in Waterloo, Canada.
Roy Ganor Zend Technologies
Roy Ganor is the Project Lead of the PHP Development Tools (PDT) and Ajax Tools Framework (ATF) open-source projects at Eclipse and is leading the Development Tools team at Zend Technologies. Roy is Java Sun and PHP Zend certified, has extensive Java experience in the areas of computer language analysis and systems integration. He brings together concrete experiences from various projects of various sizes with a practical approach to design and testing.
Sara Golemon Yahoo!
Sara Golemon is the WebSearch Frontend Architect for Yahoo! Inc., and a core member of the PHP development team since 2002. She is the author of "Extending and Embedding PHP" by SAMS Publishing, as well as the "PHP Extension Writing" series on devzone.zend.com.
Andi Gutmans Zend Technologies Inc.
Andi Gutmans co-founded Zend Technologies and has been instrumental in making Zend into the company it is today. In addition to building key partnerships with IBM, Microsoft, Oracle, and Adobe, and contributing to major customer & sales engagements, in 2006 he led the company’s largest round of funding to date. Gutmans’ leadership of the company’s open source project Zend Framework has included galvanizing the PHP and enterprise communities around the benefits of standardization and has broadened the professionalism and market reach of PHP and of Zend solutions worldwide.
Gutmans has also been a lead contributor to PHP since 1997, when he and Zeev Suraski developed the foundation for PHP 3 and later co-founded Zend Technologies together. PHP 3 was a turning point for the language, which today powers over 20 million websites including Facebook and Yahoo! and enjoys a following of over 5 million developers.
Gutmans was named one of Computerworld’s “40 innovative IT people to watch, under the age of 40.” He is also recognized from the widely circulated technical publications he has authored and is a frequent speaker on business and technology issues at global conferences. Gutmans is a member of the PHP Group, the Apache Software Foundation, and the Eclipse Foundation, as well as serving on the board of Zend Technologies. Gutmans holds a bachelor's in computer science from the Technion, Israel Institute of Technology.
Sam Hennessy Zend Technologies
Sam Hennessy works for Zend Technologies as a Professional Services Consultant. This means Sam gets to travel around the country working with PHP shops big and small. Sam also works as an instructor for Zend’s training courses. Originally from England Sam now lives in Las Vegas.
You can find Sam online via: http://www.google.com/profiles/sam.hennessy
Peter Higgins Joost
Peter Higgins (aka 'dante') is the Project Lead of the Dojo Toolkit and UI Architect at Joost. Peter maintains several Dojo-based Open Source projects in addition to the Toolkit itself, and is continually working with various JavaScript communities to bring unity and stability the the DHTML/Ajax landscape.
Mike Ho Quasidea Development
When he is not skiing in Lake Tahoe or playing cards with friends from church, Mike Ho is working at Quasidea Development, an idea incubator. He has over 10 years of software development and IT consulting experience, with a client list that includes NASA, Stanford University, Microsoft and Lockheed Martin. His past work includes working on the original Microsoft ASP.NET Starter Kits, and currently he is the lead developer of the Qcodo Development Framework for PHP. He holds a B.A. in Computer Science from Northwestern University... Go Cats!
Kevin Hoyt Adobe Systems
Kevin Hoyt is a Platform Evangelist with Adobe Systems, Inc. Passionate about engaging user experiences, you'll most often find him meeting with customers, speaking at conferences, presenting online seminars, or just enjoying the chance to share ideas and brainstorm with other developers. When not on the road, Kevin enjoys spending time with his family, photography and general aviation
Majed Itani SugarCRM
Majed Itani is a Software Architect at SugarCRM. He is responsible for ensuring the design and the stability of the product as well as providing both a vision and a path for the product going forward. Prior to joining SugarCRM Majed has worked at companies such as Apple Computer, Adobe, Ariba, and Quinstreet. He holds a degree in Mathematics with an emphasis in Computer Science from the University of California at Berkeley.
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.
Ivo is also the CTO of Ibuildings, one of the larger PHP services companies in Europe.
Christopher Jones Oracle
Christopher has worked for Oracle in both the US and Australia making the Oracle database better for PHP and liaising closely with the PHP community. He is a lead maintainer of the OCI8 extension. He is the
author of several technical articles on PHP and Oracle, and he co-released The Underground PHP and Oracle Manual (free from http://otn.oracle.com/php ). Christopher has presented at conferences
including the International PHP Conferences, the O'Reilly Open Source Convention, and previous ZendCons. He also presents Oracle-PHP tutorials and PHPFests worldwide. Christopher's blog is at http://blogs.oracle.com/opal/.
Olivier Lépine Quatrain Technologies
Olivier Lépine is Co-founder and CEO of Quatrain Technologies and Quatrain Studio, two companies active in software development and communication.
Olivier first met PHP in 1999 and has been using it in all his projects since.
Strongly attached to entrepreneurship and web technologies, Olivier Lépine has been working for 13 years with very different types of customers: from solo entrepreneurs and small startups to large cities and corporate companies for which he builds, maintains and hosts critical applications and websites.
He is currently focused on developing the t41 toolkit, an ensemble of Zend Framework-based components aimed at facilitating development and deployment of PHP Applications.
Olivier holds a Communication Master's Degree from the University of Avignon where he lives with his wife, two children and Tingle the cat.
He also enjoys flying, cooking, reading, modern art, music and TV series.
Stas Malyshev Zend Technologies
Stanislav Malyshev is a programmer and software architect working for Zend Technologies since its foundation in 1999. He played major role in development of a number of Zend products, including Platform, Guard and Studio. Currently he is a member of Zend's Advanced Technology group, working on collaboration projects and Zend product strategy.
He is also a contributor for the PHP project since 2000, and actively participated in development of the PHP 5.
Stanislav has wide expertise in developing web applications and network programming in a variety of environments and operation systems.
Stanislav holds a B.Sc. in computer science from Hebrew University in Jerusalem and M.Sc. in management from Polytechnic University, NY (Israel branch).
Currently lives in San Jose, California.
Jeff Moore Mashery
Jeff Moore worked on ERP systems for most of the 90s, but switched to PHP and web development in 2000. He has written a column for php|architect magazine and sometimes posts to his blog at http://www.procata.com/blog. He currently works for Mashery, the web services infrastructure company.
ZendCon Panelists
Wil Sinclair (Cloud Strategist, Zend),
Doug Tidwell (Cyber Evangelist, IBM),
Vijay Rajagopalan (Principal Architect for Interoperability Strategy, Microsoft),
Thorsten von Eicken (CTO & Founder, RightScale),
Stephen O'Grady (Principal Analyst, Redmonk),
Dave Nielsen (Co-Founder, CloudCamp)
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. Recently, Mike has joined Zend as a Solutions Consultant working with the i5 sales team and spreading the news about Zend solutions in the IBM midrange arena.
Mike lives in suburban Chicago with his wife, five kids, a dog, three cats, a leopard spotted gecko, Russian tortoise, two rabbits, half a dozen fish and dwarf hamster.
Jim Plush Panasonic
Jim is a technical PHP lead in the Avionics division of Panasonic. He has 15 years of software development experience including time with Panasonic and McAfee as a technical lead, he is currently Zend and MySQL 5 certified and author of the MyBic PHP/AJAX framework. Jim has recently written touch screen php applications for use in in-flight entertainment systems and is currently working on unifying all B2B automation/applications under a single Zend Framework platform for the entire Avionics Division.
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.
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
Rob Richards Mashery
Rob Richards is a Sr. Architect at Mashery, the leading provider of on-demand API management solutions.
With a focus on XML and web services, he has authored an maintains a number of the XML extensions within PHP as well as a contributor to libxml2 and libxslt from the Gnome project. Rob also occasionally writes articles for various publications on the use of XML and web services and also authored the book Pro PHP XML and Web Services. In his spare time, Rob also likes to work on identity related technologies, such as the openinfocard project and information card libraries.
Kirrily Robert
Kirrily Robert has been involved in open source software since 1993,
as a Linux user, LAMP developer, and community leader and advocate.
She has worked in the tech industry in Australia, Canada, and the US,
and has presented at many conferences internationally.
Kirrily currently resides in San Francisco, where she works for
Metaweb Technologies as Community Director for Freebase.com, an open
database of the world's information. She has also been working on
several projects related to women in Open Source and other geek
communities. In 2008 she launched the Geek Feminism Wiki, and more
recently she has been contributing to and writing about two large open
source projects with majority female developers: the Dreamwidth
journalling platform and the Organization for Transformative Works:
"Archive Of Our Own."
Her interests include free culture in all its diverse forms, and the
use of technology for social justice.
Petra Ruehl Deutsche Telekom
Petra Rühl has been Senior Manager / VP Product Development at Deutsche Telekom AG, Products & Innovation since June 2007, responsible for international product and platform development in the areas of online storage & sharing, hosting services and e-Commerce.
She has been working in International Technology Management for Deutsche Telekom Group since 2003 and was previously Senior Manager & Chief of Staff to the CIO of Deutsche Telekom, T-Com and the CTO of T-Online International AG.
On the upswing of the New Economy and worldwide e-Commerce start-up activities, Petra joined Bertelsmann in 2000 and worked as Manager International IT Projects for Bertelsmann Direct Group and Bertelsmann Online / BOL with assignments in Europe, Japan and the US. She held similar project management positions at BMW AG and the Bertelsmann Music Group previous to that.
Petra graduated from University of Munich (LMU) with a Master degree in Computer Science and Biology.
Akhil Sahil VMware
Dr. Akhil Sahai is a Sr. product Manager at VMware. He is responsible for product management of vCloud Software with focus on Applications. He has over 15 years of International work experience spanning the areas of web services management, Network/Systems Management and Utility Computing. He has a Ph.D from INRIA-IRISA France and an MBA from Wharton. He was one of the initial members of the Hewlett Packard E-speak project, one of the pioneering projects in the area of next generation web services. He has published 75 refereed papers, chaired and been in program committee of premier management conferences, written a book on web services management and has 20 patents filed (with 3 granted).
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, Technical Consultant for Zend Technologies, is well versed in a wide variety of technologies pertinent to both small and large scale application deployments. He has developed production software using a wide variety of languages including PHP, Java (standalone and web-based applications), Javascript, HTML, SQL, Perl, Visual Basic, ASP and occasionally C. His software development experience is accompanied with extensive experience as a system administrator on platforms including Linux, Solaris and Windows on scales of a single server up to several hundred servers on installations that range from a few to millions of users. Working for Zend Technologies, known as the go-to place for PHP expertise, Kevin travels around the country providing PHP-based services for a variety of customers. He is also a proven instructor for many of Zend’s courses and is deeply involved in training development as well as speaking at conferences on a variety of subjects pertaining to 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/
Wil Sinclair Makara
Wil Sinclair, a self-confessed former Cloud Zealot, is Makara's Cloud Evangelist extraordinaire. When not thinking about the cloud, he works on technologies that facilitate and encourage cloud adoption in the PHP community. His Simple Cloud API enables "cloud native" applications that can be deployed on all major clouds. He brings 10 years of experience in the software industry at companies from the smallest of startups to large multinationals such as Oracle and Amazon. Most recently he served as project lead on the leading PHP framework: Zend Framework.
Elizabeth Marie Smith OmniTI
Elizabeth has been using PHP since time immemorial (PHP 4 beta), but has used PHP 5 for so long now that she’s forgotten how she ever got by without SPL and a real object model.
Elizabeth is a certifiable (yes, we mean men in white coats are going to put her in a straight jacket) Windows geek; She enjoys doing very perverse things to Windows using PHP.
She works at OmniTI writing code even though she went to college for an English degree. If you see her in person, ask how she wound up with a career in computers.
Elizabeth is a charter member of PHPWomen.org and wants to make sure other women have the same opportunity to see how much fun programming can be. She is active in several PHP projects, including PHP-GTK and the Cairo PECL extension.
Dmitriy Soroka Varien
A highly experienced PHP architect, Dmitriy is an integral part of the Magento core team. As its' lead architect, Dmitry is responsible for most of Magento's architectural decision leading back to the project founding in 2007. When not coding PHP, Dmitriy loves sleeping (not that that ever happens).
Joe Stagner Microsoft
Joe is an Opinionated Misfit Geek and Senior Program Manager on the Microsoft Web Tools and Platform. While his team is based in Redmond WA, he lives in New England USA. He joined Microsoft in 2001 after starting, building, and selling a .COM firm in New York City. He began as a strategic advisor to independent software venders (ISV), moved to a position as a Developer Technology Expert and Technical Evangelist, and after three years moved to the Web Tools and Platform Team and has been doing PHP on Windows fornearly a decade.
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.
Helgi Thormar Thorbjoernsson echolibre
Helgi is a board member in PEAR, developer, QA member and the maintainer of the PEAR installer.
Helgi works for echolibre where he is head of research and development as well as lead developer.
Doug Tidwell IBM
Doug Tidwell is a Cyber Evangelist for IBM. (No one really knows what that job title means, he just thought it sounded cool.) He spends his time helping people use new technology to solve business problems, encouraging them to use standards-based, cross-platform tools. He also write articles, tutorials, sample code, and tools for developerWorks at IBM.
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.
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.
Aaron Wormus HedgeCo Networks
Aaron Wormus has worked as the Technical Lead and Managing Director of Internet Strategies at HedgeCo Networks since 2004. As an experienced Internet developer, Aaron leads the development of the HedgeCo Websites platform & Hedge Fund Calculator which services over 400 hedge fund clients.
Prior to working with HedgeCo Networks, Aaron worked as a freelance consultant implementing back-end systems for clients ranging from telecommunications companies to mining companies and Silicon Valley software distributors. As an author, Aaron contributes to technical books and has had his articles published in 5 European languages.
When not working, Aaron is either taking pictures, swimming, blogging about the street he works on, or organizing a local technical meetup.
Andrei Zmievski Analog
Andrei Zmievski has been developing and tinkering with web-accessible software for more than a decade. He is a well-known personality in the PHP community, where his accomplishments include being a long-time core developer and member of the PHP Group, the author of PHP-GTK, a co-author of Smarty, and the architect and lead developer of the Unicode and internationalization (i18n) support in PHP 6.
Andrei enjoys learning new things and sharing what he has learned. He is a frequent speaker at web conferences around the world such as OSCON and International PHP Conference, a co-author of the PHP Developer\\\'s Cookbook, and is also a well-read blogger at zmievski.org, where he writes about PHP and other topics.
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.
